1. Right-libertarians sometimes accuse left-libertarians of misrepresenting right-libertarians’ relation to corporatism. “They say we support government favouritism toward big business,” they complain, “yet no libertarian supports any such thing.”

To answer this, I need to invoke the de re / de dicto distinction.

Suppose I’m reading Ozma of Oz, and I think, “hey, this guy Baum is a good author.” Assume I don’t know that Baum also wrote a novel (a lousy one, in fact, though that doesn’t matter for the example) called The Master Key. Would it be true or false to say, “Roderick thinks the author of The Master Key is a good author”?

Well, it’s ambiguous. I don’t have a thought of the form “The author of The Master Key is a good author,” since I’m not aware of any such book. But I do think of Baum that he’s a good author; and since Baum is the author of The Master Key, I thereby think of the author of The Master Key that he’s a good author. So the philosopher’s way of marking the distinction is to say that I believe de re (“of the thing”), but not de dicto (“of what is said”), that the author of The Master Key is a good author.

Or again, suppose I want to marry Griselda. And suppose Griselda is, unbeknownst to me, a pathological liar. Then is it true or false that I want to marry a pathological liar? Well, in one sense it’s true and in another sense it’s false. I don’t have such a desire de dicto; I don’t form any thought expressible as “I want to marry a pathological liar.” But I do have such a desire de re, since there’s a pathological liar that I want to marry.

So when left-libertarians accuse (some) right-libertarians of supporting corporatism, this is to be understood in a de re sense, not in a de dicto sense. Thus the claim is that right-libertarians are supporting certain policies/institutions/phenomena that are in fact instances of corporatism; we are not claiming that right-libertarians are deliberately supporting them qua instances of corporatism – and so pointing out that they’re not is not relevant as a reply to the original point.

2. The left-libertarian call for worker empowerment can itself be construed as a (left-wing) form of corporatism.

Lew Rockwell recently wrote:

[S]yndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.

not a left-libertarian

Lew doesn’t draw the inference that left-libertarians are corporatists, but he illuminates a way in which that inference might be drawn. After all, we too favour economic control by producers, right? So why doesn’t that make our position akin to corporatism?

I think there’s a perilous ambiguity here. In one way, “economic control” can mean ownership; in that sense, we left-libertarians do favour economic control by producers.

But in that sense capitalists (taking that term in the Rothbardian sense) do not favour economic control by consumers; they favour economic control by producers too, even if capitalist employers loom larger in their conception of “producers” than in ours.

When Lew says that capitalism favours consumer control, he’s not talking about ownership; he means that consumer preferences determine production decisions through the price system – which is true enough (although I think that way of putting it makes producers seem too passive – what about advertising? entrepreneurial experimentation?) but that’s just as true when the producers are workers’ co-ops. So there’s no one sense of producer control which is both advocated by left-libertarians and akin to corporatism.

(These issues are closely related to those I’ve discussed under the name of the “POOTMOP” problem, here and here, as well as to the different ways that the libertarian and authoritarian wings of the French industriel movement understood the concept of producer control, discussed here.)

3. There is a tendency among right-libertarians to treat racism and sexism as equivalent to hostility toward persons of a different race or gender. Thus where such hostility is absent, racism and sexism are presumed to be absent also – with the upshot that left-libertarians are seen as exaggerating the amount of racism and sexism around.

For example, Walter Block argues that because heterosexual male employers are attracted to women, they are more likely to be prejudiced in their favour rather than against them.

But racism and sexism are found in more forms than simply that of hostility (not that there isn’t plenty of that form around too – and we all know, too well, that being a heterosexual male is not exactly an obstacle to hostility against women). A white male employer who feels no hostility toward women or minorities may still be inclined to pay them less or deny them positions of authority if he holds, say, prejudicial expectations about their likely capacities.

But what if these expectations are rationally justified? The problem is that they generally aren’t. And the arguments on behalf of such expectations are so shockingly sloppy (as, e.g., Anne Fausto-Sterling shows), and the historical track record of such arguments is so wretched, that an employer’s indulgence in such expectations is overwhelmingly likely to be the result of an irrational bias, most often one unconsciously absorbed from the culture. In such cases we will say that the empoyer’s decision is shaped by racism or sexism – but in saying that, we are not (necessarily) saying that the employer is an evil, hate-filled person. After all, by analogy: most people are statists, but that doesn’t mean that most people are filled with hatred for individual liberty.

Walter says in the same piece that the persistence of unjustified racist or sexist prejudices is unlikely, since “as we know from our study of business cycles, any such conglomeration of error cannot long endure without continued statist interference with markets.” Now of course we have “continued statist interference with markets,” so for anything Walter says here we could still have plenty of prejudice in the real world. But in any case I question the implied (and un-Austrian!) assumption that the market always gets us to equilibrium in the long run. There’s a difference between saying that the market has a tendency to equilibrium and saying that the market eventually reaches equilibrium. After all, everything on earth has a tendency to move toward the center of the earth, but that doesn’t mean that everything eventually gets to the center of the earth. Culture matters; it’s not just an epiphenomenon of the price system.

And of course, comme l’on dit, “we are market forces.”

People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.

Apparently the quote is a fake, and Krugman is irritated that people would attribute “stupid or outrageous” remarks to him without verifying their authenticity.

Certainly the people circulating this quote should have checked their sources more carefully. All the same, there’s a reason people assumed it was genuine. After all, Krugman is the guy who, the day after the 9/11 attacks, quite genuinely wrote:

Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack – like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression [sic] – could even do some economic good. … Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings. … rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending.

For quotes from other members of the glaziers’ lobby, see here.

Benkemoune’s thesis is that Dunoyer and Molinari were among the few 19th-century French liberal theorists to take seriously Sismondi’s argument that governmental regulation is needed because informational problems pose an insuperable obstacle to the market’s ability to equilibrate. While most liberals in the Say tradition dismissed Sismondi by insisting that markets would equilibrate just fine were it not for government intervention, Dunoyer and Molinari agreed with Sismondi that there are genuine informational problems (including, for Dunoyer, a business cycle) inherent in even the freest market, but rejected Sismondi’s proposed legislative solution.

Instead, Dunoyer and Molinari argued that: a) the informational problems were in large part remediable by non-governmental means, whether education or institutional innovation (the latter including, for Molinari, informational networks such as his idea of labour-exchanges); b) to the extent that such problems are not remediable, they can be expected to be fairly mild in a genuinely free market; c) any attempted governmental solutions would face even greater informational problems.

Benkemoune also includes some discussion of Dunoyer’s and Molinari’s relationship to the Austrian school.

In related news, Annelien de Dijn’s recent book French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society? includes a fair bit of discussion of Dunoyer and the Censeur group. (Amazon offers the book at a hefty price, but it’s not hard to find the entire text for free online if you poke about a bit.)

It’s nice to see the industriels getting more scholarly attention.

The Benefits and Hazards of Dialectical Libertarianism (2.2, Spring 2001)

Keeping Context In Context: The Limits of Dialectics (3.2, Spring 2002)

Praxeology: Who Needs It (6.2, Spring 2005)

Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? (7.1, Fall 2005)

A Beauty Contest For Dichotomies: Browne’s Terminological Revolutions (8.1, Fall 2006)

Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues: Aristotle versus Seddon (10.1, Fall 2008)

Most of those were my side of debates with other people, so you should probably go read their side too. Plus lots of other good stuff. Here.

When your government is a free and fair democratically-elected-in-regular-elections government, then it’s not some scary thing outside of you. It is you. It is, in fact, that we, by being together in communal space, we say: okay, look, there are these community assets, air, water, land, national defense. And we know that individually we always have short time horizons. Not malicious or bad or evil – we can only see so far, only see our own good; so we come together in government – freely elected, not all governments – that say: look, we will protect our common good, our inner child that can’t speak for itself. Our job as a government is to protect that, and so government regulations, particularly federal government regulations, are precisely the interest groups that these sorts of common interests are to have.

So let me get this straight. We’re a bunch of self-centered, short-sighted individuals. And government isn’t something different from us; it’s just us. And yet government decisions are not similarly self-centered and short-sighted. Gee, I wish she’d explain what the mechanism is.

I take your view to be as follows: that genuine knowledge includes a) awareness of our own subjective mental states, and b) the grasp of a priori conceptual truths like mathematics and praxeology, but not c) sensory perception and the judgments based thereon – and that the reason for this is that it’s possible for (c) to be mistaken while it’s not possible for (a) and (b) to be so, and that while it may be appropriate to believe things that could possibly be wrong, we shouldn’t claim to know them. And part of your reason for this latter claim is that treating beliefs that might be wrong as cases of knowledge is equivalent to deciding what knowledge is by randomly throwing darts at a dartboard.

So here are some of my objections (some of these I talked about yesterday, others not):

1. This is not how the word is used in ordinary language. In ordinary language, we regularly apply the word to fallible beliefs; and since use determines meaning, what we ordinarily mean by knowledge seems to be something that does not fit your criteria. So in effect you’re proposing to change the meaning of the word “knowledge, ” or you’re introducing some special philosophical sense of knowledge different from the ordinary one (call it Knowledge-with-a-capital-K). And then the question is why we should care about Knowledge-with-a-capital-K, as opposed to (what I’m tempted to call) real knowledge.

2. I suspect the attractiveness of Knowledge-with-a-capital-K depends in part on a couple of fallacies. One turns on the ambiguity of “if I know something, then I can’t be wrong about it. ” That’s true if it’s read as “NEC:(If I know that p, then I am not wrong about whether p)”; but there’s a tendency to shift illicitly from this claim to the stronger claim “If I know that p, then NEC:(I am not wrong about whether p).” But the latter claim doesn’t follow. (This is called a confusion of necessitas consequentiæ and necessitas consequentis.) The other fallacy is that of sliding from “If it’s infallible, then it’s certain” to “if it’s certain, then it’s infallible.” (That’s called affirming the consequent.)

3. The difference between a priori and empirical knowledge is not that the first is infallible and the second not. A priori knowledge is fallible too. After all, we can make mistakes in math, for example. I might be wrong in thinking that 32794 + 85649 = 118443; maybe I forgot to carry a 2 or something. The difference lies not in whether it’s fallible or not, but rather in what kinds of evidence are relevant to showing it to be wrong. Objections to empirical claims appeal to empirical evidence; objection to conceptual claims appeal to conceptual evidence.

A related mistake is that of confusing the necessity of the fact stated by a claim with the necessity of our being right about the claim. If it’s really true that 32794 + 85649 = 118443, then it is necessarily true that 32794 + 85649 = 118443; but likewise if it’s really true that F=G(m₁m₂/r²), then it’s also necessarily true that F=G(m₁m₂/r²), even though the former is a conceptual claim and the latter is empirical. But we could be wrong about either one.

4. The principle that we can only know things that can’t possibly be doubted doesn’t seem to pass its own test; that is, it seems possible to doubt (indeed I do doubt) that we can only know things that can’t possibly be doubted – so by its own standards that claim doesn’t count as knowledge.

5. The distinction between what we can know and what it’s appropriate for us to believe for practical purposes seems difficult to maintain. First, if I can’t know that there’s a table in front of me, then I can’t know that I have good practical reason to acts as though there’s a table in front of me either. Second, if a belief isn’t justified, then by definition we shouldn’t believe it; so there doesn’t seem to be room for a class of beliefs that are unjustified but that should be accepted for practical purposes. Third, it’s difficult to accept a belief and yet claim not to know it; “p, but I don’t know whether p” seems Moore-paradoxical.

6. I think your position makes sense-perception impossible. After all, if I look at a table and have a hallucination of a swan, my experience of the swan doesn’t count as my perceiving the table. Yet similarly, if I look at a table while simultaneously having a hallucination of a table, that doesn’t count as my perceiving the table either. But what if my sensory experience of a table is caused by the table; in that case is it now a genuine perception rather than a hallucination? On my view, sure; but I think your view requires you to say otherwise. For if you really think that a belief that’s only probably true is no better off, knowledge-wise, than throwing darts randomly at a dartboard, then I think you also have to say that as long as our experience of a table could be caused by something other than an actual table, then its status is equivalent to that of a hallucination even when, as chance has it, it’s caused by an actual table. And that means that we never make genuine cognitive contact with the world through perceptual experience at all; we’re always merely hallucinating, though some of our hallucinations are accidentally accurate. And as a result, all our knowledge of the world is hypothetical; we can know that if there are 2 + 2 bottles on the table, then there are four bottles on the table, but we cannot know whether there are actually any bottles on the table or indeed anywhere else.

I think what this view advocates then, is a kind of pathological alienation from the world. It means that you’ve never actually seen or touched a physical object; you’ve only theorised about them. Likewise you’ve never actually seen or touched another person; again, you’ve only theorised about them. The attitude your view seeks to inculcate has characteristics of mental illness.

More to the point, I think it’s incoherent. Here’s why. The ability to apply a concept (not exceptionlessly, but at least with reasonable reliability) is part of having the concept; we don’t count as having a concept unless we know how to apply it. After all, the process of acquiring a concept just is the process of learning to recognise and identify instances of it in our environment. But it’s an upshot of your view that we have no such ability to recognise and identify anything in our environment. But that would mean that we’d be unable not just to know but even to conceive of physical objects, or of minds other than our own; we’d be driven to solipsism.

For example, since we can identify agency only in our own case (I would claim we couldn’t even do that – since agency is a general concept its possession requires ability to apply it to more than one case – but never mind that for now), we can never apply the concept of interpersonal exchange, since that requires more than one agent. But that in turn would mean that we can’t even have the concept of interpersonal exchange thus, rendering praxeology impossible. (That’s what I meant in saying that we couldn’t even have praxeology unless our fallible empirical beliefs counted as knowledge.) Since in fact we do have the concept of interpersonal exchange, that shows that our ability to identify such exchanges is genuine even though it’s fallible. (Thus the skeptic’s inference from “you could be wrong in any particular case” to “you could be wrong in all cases simultaneously” doesn’t go through.)

A related point: you seem to accept uncritically the Humean empirical conception of perceptual experience. (Ditto for Hoppe when he says we can only perceive correlations and not causings.) The point of a Kantian approach is not to turn the realm of perception over to Hume but then retreat to a higher conceptual realm; rather it’s to claim that the perceptual realm is already conceptually ordered.

(Notice Ed Stringham as the first person congratulating Keynes after the debate. By the way, in real life Hayek actually did use the phrase “high explosive” as a guide to pronouncing his name.)

In related news, Gary Chartier has decided to boycott air travel in order to protest the irradiate-or-grope screening process; I’ll be reading out his responses (along with Kevin Carson’s commentary) in absentia sua. Doug Den Uyl will also not be attending (though he’s not boycotting anything as far as I know); Doug Rasmussen will read out their joint commentary.

Ludwig Boltzmann

Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville):

First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” (an essay on the spontaneous growth of physical order).

Next, a blast from my statist past: “Financing the Non-Coercive State,” an essay I wrote in (though not for) grad school, in which I decisively refute free-market anarchism!