Conza

“But the uniqueness and the crucial importance of Mises’s challenge to socialism is that it was totally unrelated to the well-known incentive problem. Mises in effect said: All right, suppose that the socialists have been able to create a mighty army of citizens all eager to do the bidding of their masters, the socialist planners. What exactly would those planners tell this army to do? How would they know what products to order their eager slaves to produce, at what stage of production, how much of the product at each stage, what techniques or raw materials to use in that production and how much of each, and where specifically to locate all this production? How would they know their costs, or what process of production is or is not efficient?

Mises demonstrated that, in any economy more complex than the Crusoe or primitive family level, the socialist planning board would simply not know what to do, or how to answer any of these vital questions. Developing the momentous concept of calculation, Mises pointed out that the planning board could not answer these questions because socialism would lack the indispensable tool that private entrepreneurs use to appraise and calculate: the existence of a market in the means of production, a market that brings about money prices based on genuine profit-seeking exchanges by private owners of these means of production. Since the very essence of socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, the planning board would not be able to plan, or to make any sort of rational economic decisions. Its decisions would necessarily be completely arbitrary and chaotic, and therefore the existence of a socialist planned economy is literally “impossible” (to use a term long ridiculed by Mises’s critics).”

— Murray N. Rothbard, End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited

You have no principles, unless you are a voluntarist.

For example, most supporters of foreign intervention — if not in Iraq, then in Afghanistan or Libya — oppose conscription of citizens to fight, but do not oppose conscription of citizens’ money, through taxation, to fund it. Tax-funded foreign intervention amounts to compromising the property of people at home in the name of protecting the property of people abroad. Some claim that taxation is voluntary, but if it was voluntary how come evaders are jailed? The payment of tax no more proves consent than the payment of a ransom transforms kidnapping into babysitting.

Many claim taxation is justified by the Constitution, yet no one signed it to say they are bound by it, making the supposed contract it represents null and void. Others claim that elections prove consent, yet those who vote for the losing candidate cannot be said to support the policies of the winning candidate. The common analogy with a public company in justification fails, because those who buy shares in a company do so voluntarily, whereas those who do so in the public sector are not given a choice and can never sell their share and keep the proceeds for themselves.

Yet that taxation is justified is maintained by academics, journalists and politicians. They might be sincere, but they are not sincere enough. They might be well-intentioned, but many historic figures they would agree were evil also thought they were doing the right thing, or else they would have acted differently. And perhaps those who defend their good-intentions, instead of their good-results or a logical defence of their position, aren’t as good-intentioned as they unashamedly claim. Perhaps such self-righteous hypocrites deserve a little less respect than they receive.

The last instance of the property-in-value theory we shall discuss are laws prohibiting ‘insider trading.’ The complaint on the part of the advocates of such laws is that the knowledge possessed by someone, when acted upon in a commercial matter, is a violation of the rights of others. Previously we had asserted that ‘no one could act, if everyone owned the value attached to what he regarded as his.’ With insider trading we see a paradigm case of this. The legally established contention here is that a knowledgeable state of mind can convert what would otherwise be a legitimate purchase of stock into an illegitimate one, provided that the information relied upon is not homogeneously spread throughout the population. Since it never is, virtually any commercial activity with regard to stocks and bonds can be deemed unlawful. The situation is indeed worse than that. A rigorous pursuit of the ‘logic’ of insider trading prohibitions could potentially be used to preclude any market transaction.

Did a woman buy an umbrella because she heard a newscast that if would rain tomorrow? Unless everyone turned into the same weather program, and listened as attentively as did she, this would give her an unfair advantage over other people. And what of the person who attended, horrors!, a course on the case and feeding of stocks and bonds? Such studies would surely give the student an ‘inside track’ vis-à-vis those who had not attended the lectures. If the crime of excessive information can be applied to umbrellas and stocks and bonds, it can be applied to anything: to real estate, to amenities, to human capital, to factors of production. Moreover, this doctrine calls into question the acquisition of any knowledge (unless, of course, it is evenly spread throughout the entire world community). Those particularly at risk include doctors, lawyers, economists, college professors, Nobel Prize winners.

          — Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Walter Block

Kant, in the course of his critique of classical empiricism, in particular that of David Hume, developed the idea that all our propositions can be classified in a two-fold way:

1. On the one hand they are either analytic or synthetic,
2. and on the other they are either a priori or a posteriori.

The meaning of these distinctions is, in short, the following. Propositions are analytic when ever the means of formal logic are sufficient in order to find out whether they are true or not; otherwise propositions are synthetic ones. And propositions are a posteriori whenever observations are necessary in order to establish their truth or at least confirm them. If observations are not necessary then propositions are a priori.

The characteristic mark of Kantian philosophy is the claim that true a priori synthetic propositions exist—and it is because Mises subscribes to this claim that he can be called a Kantian. Synthetic a priori propositions are those whose truth-value can be definitely established, even though in order to do so the means of formal logic are not sufficient (while, of course, necessary) and observations are unnecessary.

According to Kant, mathematics and geometry provide examples of true a priori synthetic propositions. Yet he also thinks that a proposition such as the general principle of causality—i.e.,the statement that there are time-invariantly operating causes, and every event is embedded into a network of such causes—is a true synthetic a priori proposition. I cannot go in to great detail here to explain how Kant justifies this view.[12] A few remarks will have to suffice. First, how is the truth of such propositions derived, if formal logic is not sufficient and observations are unnecessary?

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“…Moreover, Rothbard refuted every alternative theory as nonsense, nonoperational, or false. It is nonsense, for instance, to define a monopolist as someone who has control over his price (a “price-searcher”). Every businessman has perfect control over his price (and no control at all over the quantity bought at that price by consumers). Hence, under this definition, no one exists who is not a monopolist. Likewise, is it nonsense to define a monopolist as “the only seller of any given good,” for in an objective sense, every seller of every product is always the only seller of his own unique product (brand). Thus, everyone is a monopolist with a one-hundred-percent market share of one’s own product. Yet, this circumstance does not affect in the slightest that each entrepreneur must compete at all times with every other entrepreneur for consumer spending, regardless how unique or different one’s goods may be.

On the other hand, in a subjective sense, no seller of anything can ever be established definitely as a monopolist. According to this interpretation, the term “given good” means “a good as defined by consumers.” Thus, the determination of whether or not the seller of something is its only seller, or of how large his market-share is, depends on the consumers’ definition of what this good is; that is, on their classification of particular physical objects into various groups of homogeneousgoods. Not only can such classifications continually change, but different consumers can classify the same physical objects differently. Hence, in this sense the term monopolist becomes practically useless and non-operational, and all attempts to measure a product’s market share must be considered futile…”

          — Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Economics, Science and Liberty

I thought I would recommend some of the not so well known but nevertheless  mind-blowing journal articles that should be read by everyone in the movement, especially by those outside it. This is the fifth in a series of many.

This excellent summary geared towards those new to philosophy elucidates what the Austrian School of economic thought actually entails in terms of its methodology, and how the status of its economic propositions differs to those of the mainstream.

True Knowledge from A Priori Theory by Thorsten Polleit

How do we know about the outer world — or reality, for that matter? Where does our knowledge about it come from? The attempt to answer these questions leads to epistemology, the branch of philosophy dealing with the origin, scope, and validity of human knowledge.

In the epistemological debate, there are two archetypal and actually diametrically opposed concepts: empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism claims that sensory experience (observation) is man’s main (or even sole) source of knowledge, while rationalism claims that his knowledge stems from human reason.

Hardly anyone would deny that there is knowledge that comes to us from sensory experience. Take, for instance, the knowledge that water freezes at zero degrees Celsius. It actually takes observation(s) to acquire such knowledge.

However, in the field of science, which formulates knowledge that applies universally, irrespective of time and place, rationalism holds that empirical knowledge gained through sensory experience doesn’t have the same validity as knowledge deduced from reasoning.

Take, for instance, the following two observations… read more.

1. No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority by Lysander Spooner
2. Fallacies of the Public Goods Theory & the Production of Security by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
3. On the Impossibility of Limited Government and the Prospects for a Second American Revolution by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
4. Anatomy of the State by Murray Rothbard
5. Market Anarchism As Constitutionalism by Roderick Long
   
6. Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections by Roderick Long
   
7. The Public Sector, III: Police, Law, and the Courts by Murray Rothbard
   
8. The Production of Security by Gustave de Molinari
9. Chaos Theory by Robert Murphy
10. Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy? by Alfred Cuzán