Yeah, because it's missing OTHER information- future prediction, which is gained through a market in means of (future) production. I don't know why he's bothering to make the omnisicient about the present, blind about the future case in the way he is, but I think that's all he's making.

This is a pretty big head scratcher. Republicans did some stuff, ergo Democrats are like basically indistinguishable from libertarians?



That's pretty much exactly what I said. Republicans and democrats are in practice the same. One group says a few things that fools a few people who take everything politicians say at face value. But the actions are the same. Showing me that republicans are big spenders isn't showing me anything I'm unaware of.

I'm not really sure how you can say in your first paragraph that

libertarians .. democrats ..............................................repu blicans

and then in your very next say that republicans are "slightly" different than democrats. Pick one or the other.

Yeah, they're really going to the mat for ending the drug war. Obama is on the record as opposing gay marriage. He also has continued Bush's policy of expanding government's power to spy on US citizens. But yeah, I mean, they TALK about personal freedoms a lot, so it's basically the same thing right?

Given the amount of hate there is between democrats and republicans maybe its a good thing they are almost the same thing otherwise you guys would probably be on a civil war right now.

I'm like 90% sure that no top democrats or republicans actually hate each other as they both realize it's part of the game and that each side is just pandering to their base.

All the guys calling the shots are in bed with the corporations, Im talking about the masses.

Maybe like 10% (and even that seems big to me) of the population pays enough attention and is passionate enough about politics to hate another person for their views when confronted with the opposing side, now sports? Mother****ers be crazy bout sports.

FYP

Republicans and democrats marry each other all the time. Even that mutant James Carville found Republican love.

not a mutant imo

I am constantly amazed at the cognitive dissonance it requires for a person to assume the things a politician says to get elected are their values whereas their actual, erm, actions while in power are handwaved away as some variant of relativism. If you knew what he knew while he was knowing it you would understand that this is not a betrayal of his lolvalues - read campaign promises- but instead shows what a Real American Leader looks like when he is makin them hard choices. Ya know like Change We Can Beleive In censoring 194 emails the subject of which were Open Government Iniative, etc. ad infinitum.

It has all the logic of a battered women pleading to her family; but ya'll don't understand, he SEZ he loves me!

Just hit the mute button on the teevee when them politicians lips get a smacking, and things will become much clearer.

THIS ^^^^

I remember some discussion of anti-intellectualism here before, a bit of searching suggests that it might have stemmed from a discussion of this Hoppe speech.

(Actually, it wasn't much of a discussion, but it was here.)

And if we restrict ourselves to the political parties which participate in major elections in the US, then it's pretty clear that only one prides itself on being anti-intellectual.

yeah the other one is also anti-intellectual but at least they dont make a fuss out of it.

No, this really doesn't make any sense either. Sure central planners can't predict the future, neither can any participants in a free market. There are essentially theorems that tell you central planning can be at least as successful as free markets in principle.

As he put it, it does- he's only arguing a hypothetical, that if allocation is based solely on present demand and manufacturing capabilities, then there's no way to know (for a not great example) that printers should have been working on Easter cards or Christmas cards 2 weeks ago because there was ~0 consumer demand for either one at the time. I can't see how that statement is wrong.

As far as efficiency predicting the future in principle, sure- the central planners could luckbox and do exactly what the market agents would have done, or equivalently you could postulate that they have just as much knowledge as the entrepreneurs do. Hell, sometimes they might randomly do better. But when you have a system where people are iteratively and repeatedly rewarded for predicting the future well and punished for predicting it badly, and one where the rewards/punishments are disjointed and microscopic, it stands to reason that selecting for the people who are best at something, then letting them do it the next time, will produce a better outcome that time. It doesn't HAVE to produce a better outcome, but if you were a betting man, which way would you go?

It's one step removed from arguing that evolution without natural selection (raising a bunch of things in a lab and making sure each individual has 3 kids, etc) will adapt to a new environment as well as evolution with natural selection (by actually living there and having to survive generation after generation). There's no reason that any generational change with natural selection can't be maladaptive. There's no reason that the lab animals can't turn out better adapted. But I know which way I'd bet.. although we are out of the realm of calculability here.

This sort of comes down to the anti-intellectual vs intellectual thing again. You can't write a paper in which you say something is impossible... but have your level of rigor be "which side would you bet on?" I could writing a paper "proving" every Millennium Prize Problems to the same level Rothbard has proved central planning is impossible. Granted I (or in some cases somebody competent in the field) could write a paper convincing an intelligent person what the correct answers to the Millennium Problems almost certainly are, in the absence of a proof. Something that Rothbard also has failed at.


Lolz... totality bizarre example as I think almost everybody agrees that genetic engineering will and has already provide great advances that natural selection alone likely would not done. There are problems, like creating life that is highly resistant to nuclear phenomenon that natural selection has not even begun to address in 4 billion years that could be solved in the lab without just killing things for billions and billions of years.

You're continually misquoting his position of "impossible" and taking statements out of context. Please quote a portion of his argument in context that's "simply wrong". Maybe I missed it, but what you've said hasn't been it.

And sometimes you can only "prove" something to the level of what would you bet on.. if one society decides it's going to invest its entire capital building a giant ark because the dictator has done way too much dope and had a vision, and the others don't.. you bet on that society to fail, but maybe a giant flood really does comes along and they win out of dumb blind luck.


You're totally confusing everything here. In a market society, the allocation of means in production is (roughly) the weighted average of what people want stuff allocated towards * the money they have to allocate towards it. If you view this as an iterative process, the people who allocate more successully have more money for the next iteration. And if they keep allocating better, they keep getting more money, and the people who allocate worse get less money. The weighted-allocation average *itself* gets more efficient with time (before a point where massive concentration becomes an issue, but let's call that a different issue for now) because the idiots tend to go broke.

In a centrally planned economy, even if it does the allocation at T0 exactly as the market would have, because it can somehow get acquire the knowledge of all entrepreneurs, it doesn't have that feedback mechanism. It has no selection pressure built in. If it samples the (T0-weighted) average of all entrepreneurs to allocate at T1, it has missed an iteration of improvement because it hasn't updated its weighted average. At best, it can try to update T1 weightings by pretending there was an actual market and seeing who would have won and lost (again, as though acquiring that information without a market is even remotely possible). From an equal start, why would you expect the central economy to keep pace with (or exceed) the allocation efficiency in the market economy in the next few iterations? Could it happen? Sure- a guy who had a bad idea in T0 might totally nail it in T1, so T0 weighting could randomly be better at T1, but why would you expect this to be the more likely outcome?

Sigh..... Or maybe you should READ a paper before arguing about it's content.

That is simply wrong. There was a thread about this in SMP. I would suggest reading that, if you not the actual paper, before you continue. I've sort of reached my limit about talking about why paper X violates theorem Y with people who haven't read paper X and don't understand theorem Y.

Cool story bro. Sometimes you can prove things to a much greater level.


I am telling you what is required to be considered serious as an intellectual or academic. Rothbard certainly fails that standard.


Utter gibberish completely violated by the existence of evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing etc. Not to mention the relevant theoretical results from the 30s. Just stating that a tuna sandwich is the only solution to what to eat for lunch and then rambling on about what is in a tuna sandwich is not a good argument. Lets just leave it at agreeing that stuff like this post is at the intellectual level of Rothbard and be done with it.

most young liberals are probably more liberaltarian than they are liberal.

o rly?

You're the one not reading the paper- actually, worse, reading the paper and thinking it's the argument you want it to be, instead of the one it is, like you did in ridiculous ways to the comment about black-white difference, putting words in his mouth and my mouth with basically every sentence you wrote. If you would quote in context, this would be obvious.

Knowledge of demand and capability of the present alone is not sufficient to allocate for the future. How are you even arguing with me about this? Entrepreneurs/futures markets provide those signals. Without those signals (or, equivalently, a psychic pipeline into all entrepreneurial minds that could create a virtual pseudomarket), you can't allocate like the market would, and unless you have some God Entrepreneur who's better than the market locked in a cage doing the future prediction for you, you'll allocate less well than the market. Again, how are you even arguing with me about this?

Who cares? As if only intellectuals and academics have anything useful to say. It's elitist- and just plain stupid- to dismiss what anybody says solely because they don't have some set of credentials, or because they can't organize an article well, or because they're racist. "He's racist and he writes badly, so everything he says about everything is wrong." LOL.


You're totally missing the point again. The market IS the (evaluation part of the) algorithm, and the entrepreneurs ARE the various agents that are being selected for/against. You're roughly trying to claim that if you have a central planner who predicts the future better than the market would, you can allocate better than the market would. Well, duh.

As to "the theoretical results from the 30s", presuming you mean Lange+, they admitted

1) the elimination of financial markets in socialism renders capital investment arbitrary or political.

2) that this harms consumer welfare

which is exactly what I've been saying. Their counterargument is And somehow people took this seriously. Of course capital investment is arbitrary under capitalism (we're talking about people trying to predict the future after all), and of course SOME income inequality is "illegitimate", but equating the two is laughable- I don't know how anybody believes it unless they're the kind of person who believes all egalitarian tripe unquestioningly. In a capitalist system, while there obviously isn't perfect correlation between wealth and capital allocation acumen, there certainly is SOME, and the system, at least below the point of huge concentration, works so that those who are better at it expect to accumulate more money to allocate in the future.

So you have two kinds of arbitrary. Socialist arbitrary, which is just "arbitrary", and capitalist arbitrary, which is "arbitrary, but done more by people who've proven to be above average at doing it in the past, roughly in proportion to how far they've been above average". And those are supposedly to be taken to be "equally arbitrary" and equal for consumer welfare. LOL.

Is this the thread where we talk about how Max is going to use supercomputers to plan all economic investment? I was wondering where it went

No.

No, I just state that nothing from economics can contradict math and then I give up. Markets are not magic, even if you have a very poor understanding of them etc. It's all been done before.

And you have a poor understanding of the limits of central planning. I dont really care about our computer argument any more. But to say that modern central planning can emulate markets is refuted by pretty much all of mainstream economics. (im grunching this thread so maybe Im misinterpreting this conversation)