21
Jun
2016
Murphy vs. Vox Day on Free Trade
I don’t regret anything I said in this debate, but I don’t think we had time to really tackle some of Vox’s more fundamental worries. I can understand why a Vox Day fan would not have changed his mind after listening to this.
Anyway, I know you guys are always gentle with me in the comments…
Great discussion Bob. You are the master of reductio ad absurdum argument. I bow and avert my eyes.
Vox was great too. I’m sure I’m less certain about my own position now.
I’m glad Vox mentioned Ian Fletcher, since his argument about the flaws of free trade seem to be the most developed. Bob you did a good job of arguing, but I think you let Vox get by with a few subjective value judgments which didn’t stand alone as an argument. Also, Vox seemed to avoid the argument of “ok, but what should replace free trade?” The point being, despite the valid discussion which show free trade =/= utopia, an alternative is never offered. Vox admits that politicians would likely not do a great job, even a worse job. Outside the parameters of this debate, Fletcher has pushed for a fixed tariff on all exchanged goods with all nations to avoid the process becoming political. Of course this then assumes abstractly that more than 50% of free trade is harmful, and that the arbitrary fixed tariff (say 10%, 20%…etc.) will make that harmful free trade less harmful on net, which is impossible to isolate and measure empirically as is all economic empirical study.
On a side note, as soon as I heard the inheritance analogy as it applies to free goods I was itching for you to discuss how the accumulation of capital goods is the back-bone of increasing prosperity and how the analogy is flawed…so thanks for saying basically exactly that.
But Bob never answered the issue of what would replace the revenue taken from tariffs. Bob actually argued that he shouldn’t need to answer that, because each question should be looked at in isolation.
Since the resolution used the word “always” Day only needed to demonstrate that situations do potentially exist for why free trade can make a country worse off.
“Since the resolution used the word “always” Day only needed to demonstrate that situations do potentially exist for why free trade can make a country worse off.”
Which Vox Day cannot logically do for the reasons he, himself, offered: Combining prices that all individuals would be willing to pay for all goods gives you an illogical market.
Vox intended to show that the Resolution fails because the wealth of a nation cannot logically be determined, and Murphy was arguing that free trade makes nations wealthier.
Fair enough.
But then, for the same reason, it would be impossible to give an example of a country having been made worse by free trade.
(I think a charitable interpretation of Murphy’s Resolution is that free trade to a nation is Pareto Positive – those who benefit do not do so at the expense of anyone else, since no one is entitled to the wealth or patronage of others.)
If the “resolution” is demonstrated to be nonsensical then it cannot be true so the argument in the negative must win by default.
Which is why I raised the issue of “charitable interpretation”.
Murphy has talked about Methodolotical Individualism, before, so he already knows that, as stated, the Resolution fails – it follows logically from Methodological Individualism.
At any rate, the issue was whether Vox could disprove the Resolution with an appeal to a mere single instance of free trade making a nation worse off – not whether the Resolution holds or fails for other reasons.
The answer is no, he cannot logically do so.
Day didn’t make much effort to hammer the difficulty of creating an aggregate. However, in order to allow such questions to be answered at all, some sort of aggregate must be created, and in this case both sides of the debate just picked metrics they happened to like (none of which have a deep logical basis to them).
Personally I see that as fundamental, but perhaps my approach to the same debate would have been less entertaining.
I might go a step further and make the claim that if we want to talk about things like government policy, or what type of property rights are better, or even whether we prefer a bigger government or a smaller government… none of those questions are answerable without making some assumptions regarding an aggregate metric to decide what actually is a better economy, and what is worse. I could say that I personally prefer smaller government, and I might find a handful of people to agree with me, but that’s not a debate winning metric.
Allow me to draw a parallel to biology. We have some sort of evolutionary process (forget about with or without intelligent design since we have no reliable way to measure God) but can you decide that one particular output of that evolutionary process (for example “humans”) is better or worse than another output of the same process (let’s say “mole crickets” just to pick something) ?
What metric would you use to decide in an absolute sense which of the creatures on Earth is better than the others? If you cannot decide that, then how can you say that the Greek economy is better or worse than the German economy? See where I’m going with this…
“If you cannot decide that, then how can you say that the Greek economy is better or worse than the German economy? See where I’m going with this…”
That’s *my* point, though.
It’s a nonsensical question, so there’s no point in asking it.
The useful issue, which I think Murphy ultimately intended to address, is the issue of whether free trade is Pareto Positive for a nation.
Americans could lose a bunch of jobs and, because they were never entitled to those jobs, free trade would still be Pareto Positive.
30. The Scab
https://mises.org/library/30-scab
Unless the argument is nonsensical precisely because the opposite argument is true.
“But Bob never answered the issue of what would replace the revenue taken from tariffs. Bob actually argued that he shouldn’t need to answer that, because each question should be looked at in isolation.”
That’s not how that discussion went down. Vox argued that a tariff was better than the income tax. Murphy agreed but pointed out that it doesn’t show that free trade negatively impacts people on net. He said that Obamacare being better than fully socialised healthcare doesn’t prove that obamacare is a good thing, as an example of why that way of reasoning is incorrect.
That would appear to be an attempt to isolate the issues. That’s how I interpret it at any rate.
Sure, but if you take it as a given that people will insist on health care, then you need to compare different approaches to health care; rather than compare Obamacare with a vacuum.
In the case of Obamacare it might be reasonable to compare it to a fully private system on one side or a fully public system on the other side, but at least either way you compare it with something that might plausibly do the same job.
In the case of government revenue, there’s no government on Earth that will decide to simply abandon revenue collection. We can suggest whatever, but it is pointless considering options that have no historic equivalent, and no plausible path to achieve them in future. I should point out that all through the 19th Century growth of the USA there were tariffs and also a relatively high expense and risk of international shipping… yet it didn’t prevent trade.
Let me put that a different way. All other things being equal, if a government collects X in tariffs and Y in other tax, then Bob wants to compare this with a hypothetical government that just decides to forget about the tariff and only collect Y in other tax, then this is effectively merely an argument for smaller government (i.e. X + Y > Y).
If you want to argue for smaller government then fine, just compare with a government that reduces tax all around and spends less in proportion. It no longer has anything to do with International trade vs domestic trade.
“Sure, but if you take it as a given that people will insist on health care, then you need to compare different approaches to health care; rather than compare Obamacare with a vacuum.”
The debate wasn’t about whether tariffs are better than income taxes. If it had been then they both would’ve agreed. It seems you wanted a completely different debate topic.
“In the case of Obamacare it might be reasonable to compare it to a fully private system on one side or a fully public system on the other side, but at least either way you compare it with something that might plausibly do the same job.”
Um, they were debating on whether or not it would be beneficial on net to have a fully private system for trade or not. I’m really confused as to what you were expecting. It seems like you wanted them to debate what kind of taxation they prefer excluding no taxation and without reducing current taxation levels.
But you should’ve gotten what you wanted anyways. They both agree tariffs are better than income tax. So need to hash that one out.
“In the case of government revenue, there’s no government on Earth that will decide to simply abandon revenue collection. We can suggest whatever, but it is pointless considering options that have no historic equivalent, and no plausible path to achieve them in future. I should point out that all through the 19th Century growth of the USA there were tariffs and also a relatively high expense and risk of international shipping… yet it didn’t prevent trade.”
So, you think any debate on the merits of free trade are pointless, and the only thing worthy of debate is what sort of government managed trade is best. Well, that’s fine, but Murphy and Vox obviously disagree and decided to discuss it anyways.
“But Bob never answered the issue of what would replace the revenue taken from tariffs”
Obviously Bob’s answer is is no tariffs, and allow people to spend their own money as they see fit.
Tax revenues lost by tariff reductions do not have to be replaced with other sources of money going to the government.
Yeah, his whole complaint seems to boil down to him not thinking debates over free trade are worthwhile since governments aren’t going to get rid of taxes. I’m just not sold on the idea that we shouldn’t debate ideas that governments won’t follow.
Why is “free trade” divorced from the idea of free exchange? If I can’t freely exchange with someone else of my own choosing, why not? And who determines this? And when does free exchange become bad? If it is not bad to freely exchange from neighbor to neighbor, county to county, state to state…it is suddenly not good nation to nation? Reverse this. So we’d all be better off with trade barriers between states, counties and neighborhoods?
And yes, standard of living is much higher now than in the 70s, the supposed height of wages. I can work less hours and get more bang for the buck now.
The dumping issue is an interesting topic. In the documentary Poverty Inc., people were lamenting the fact that the dumping of agricultural products and shoes in poor countries were destroying local industry. They were pleading for it to stop as it turned local populations into dependency wards. It seems to be do-goodism gone amok. One could argue, “well they got more stuff now and the locals can pursue other lines of work” but it seems to ignore the fact that it is precisely these industries and the capital accumulation that come from them that is the real building block of progress.
The real issue with the problem of the “dumping” in poor countries is that it is what these people could produce without capital accumulation. These things could be resolved another way as well – donations provide nicer shoes, while capital investment enters into the country to create jobs and allow for capital accumulation, as was done in Southeast Asia.
The problem with the really poor countries is that investing in them is very tentative due to corrupt governments and the like, while helping by giving people who make cheap shoes without much capital nicer shoes is easy.
“… but it seems to ignore the fact that it is precisely these industries and the capital accumulation that come from them that is the real building block of progress.”
No, it is the building block for businesses who want to tell other people who they can trade with, or give to.
No business is entitled to patronage. If consumers don’t want a business’s goods anymore because dumping has provided all the consumers need, then that business *should* shut down.
To say otherwise is to make a claim on another person’s wealth; That certain businesses are *entitled* to customers.
The problem isn’t dumping, the problem is their government won’t get out of the way of the poor as they acquire wealth for themselves, including capital.
Vox started out strong, but his case unraveled as he went along.
His five arguments were so… stunning:
1. A few empirical arguments which were nothing more than a correlation ≠ causation fallacy.
2. Citing someone who cited someone who has a fascinating theory that someday maybe we can talk about for an hour.
3. Labor mobility is 3.2% within the U.S., so extrapolated globally free trade means half of American children will have to leave the country by time they turn 35.
4. Tariffs are better than income tax, woohoo!
5. Logically, free movement of goods means free movement of people should be allowed, therefore let’s park another correlation ≠ causation fallacy right here and call it a day.
But wait, there’s more: Getting things for free has negative side effects, so I guess the logical conclusion of his argument is don’t shop for a lower price, and close your windows!
Let’s be fair, this was hardly a debate, because one side really brought nothing to the table to begin with.
Yeah Matthew, RE #2: It was like, “there’s this guy who has such an epic and complex theory which I don’t completely understand but will totally destroy the free trade argument.”
Even worse, #2 seemed to make a complex series of math-based assumptions that Austrian economics rejects.
I pretty much agree. Murphy beat Vox Day soundly. My mostly dim view of Vox remains. But Murphy should have read more Engels:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/
4 is an interesting one not just because it’s a non sequitur, but because it takes some historical ignorance not to know the very important distinction between a protective tariff and a revenue tariff. Historically, pre-income tax, much of federal government revenue was collected by tariffs. But these were not all protective tariffs.
If you reject correlation entirely then because every empirical observation is going to start by observing correlation… you might as well say you completely reject empiricism. Some Austrian economists do reject empiricism, and Mises pointed out the danger of trying to treat social science like physics, but that still leaves a lot of people (like myself) who think that rejecting empiricism leaves you with no connection to the real world.
Now of course, there’s more to empiricism than merely correlation, but what humans are good at is recognizing patterns. Hmmm, every time I walk into this tree my nose starts to hurt, I wonder if these things could be in any way connected?
The next step beyond recognizing a pattern is to come up with a theory (hopefully a simple theory) that links the correlation to a narrative explaining what is going on; and the third step after that is to apply the same theory to other new situations and see if it continues to hold. Vox Day did offer a theory: he pointed out that humans require meaningful tasks to give a purpose to their world, and that he could show examples of people sitting on government handouts who are obviously not better off.
Vox Day also (very briefly) outlined how this theory continues to hold in other cases such as robots replacing human jobs, which has caused hardship in at least some cases, and threatens to cause bigger problems in the future (OK, we don’t know what will happen in future, but I doubt Vox is the only person worried about this potential direction).
I’m disappointed that Vox didn’t use Michael Matheson Miller and “Poverty, Inc” as an example, because I think that fits his theory very well. Admittedly, time was very short, hopefully revisit some of those key points next time.
“… but that still leaves a lot of people (like myself) who think that rejecting empiricism leaves you with no connection to the real world.”
Unless using empiricism to prove that point would result in circular reasoning.
(My position is that you need empiricism to get certain kinds of knowledge, but then once you have that, certain truths logically obtain given that knowledge.
(And once you have truths that are logically obtained, you can know that even some of the empirical truths learned had to be true before you learned them.
(But for that to be true would require that a priorism be a valid method of assessment for some cases, since you hadn’t experienced that truth, yet.)
That’s not even remotely true, and I doubt you can find anyone advocating such a thing.
Any empirical discovery can be instantly disproved by simply running an experiment that demonstrates contradictory results. This has happened on various occasions. No one is claiming any ultimate “logically obtained” absolute truths.
“Any empirical discovery can be instantly disproved by simply running an experiment that demonstrates contradictory results.”
Is that a logically obtained absolute truth?
Because if it’s an empirical discovery, you’re in the unfortunate position of having to prove that it applies to “any” empirical discovery using only empirical discoveries.
No, it’s merely a formalized description of how empiricism works. Some people might argue that there’s no better way to extract essential rule-based information from a physical system, but there’s no proof of that, only proof that so far to date, no one has demonstrated a better way.
Errr, why?
If you look at the kind of output empiricism has delivered so far (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine) I would say it has a pretty good track record in terms of deliverables, and that can be demonstrated without needing proof that it applies to any future discovery. The technique of empiricism has been demonstrated to work by empirical methods. It is a self consistent worldview… but not a worldview equivalent to logical proof.
We could argue that what worked in the past is entirely likely to continue to work in the future, but that would be correlation or something… the type of thing a real logical man would reject.
I mean by all means you can personally reject it if you like… be my guest.
I should point out that at any time empiricism could easily be replaced by something newer and better, just like any other technology can get replaced (who still uses cassette tapes?) but I would hazard a guess that if the “Scientific Method” does get replaced, it will be with a refined and adjusted version of itself. It is known for example that empiricism works better in some contexts than others. Macroeconomics imposes practical difficulties when attempting to construct a control experiment (basically it’s impossible to do said experiment) so you are left with statistical fakery which gives highly arguable results. That’s presuming that macroeconomics means anything at all, and if you insist on logical proof for everything then the only solid answer is, “no it does not.” But regardless, many people thing macroeconomics is worth studying.
“No, it’s merely a formalized description of how empiricism works.”
You said: “Any empirical discovery can be instantly disproved by …”
That’s a claim, not a description.
[“Any empirical discovery can be instantly disproved by simply running an experiment that demonstrates contradictory results.”]
True, but I think guest’s point was more along the lines of empiricism shining light on previously unexplored apriori reasoning. In other words, even though a certain cause-effect was not previously theoretically postulated, upon empirical study this cause-effect is newly identified as a theoretical possibility for the first time.
Agreed regarding empiricism _in general_. However the first step in your process of forming and testing a theory is extremely difficult, if not often impossible, in econ…hence why, as you know, many especially in the Austrian school basically just skip it and jumped to your “next step.” Vox tried to make very broad empirical claims that certainly have too much noise to be meaningful. Stagnation in real wage growth over the last 40 years due to free trade? There is such an indescribably massive group of other factors which can impact aggregate real wage growth in different geographies, differing levels of skill, and over time. Singling out free trade empirically is…suspicious, at the least.
If you reject correlation entirely then because every empirical observation is going to start by observing correlation… you might as well say you completely reject empiricism. Some Austrian economists do reject empiricism, and Mises pointed out the danger of trying to treat social science like physics, but that still leaves a lot of people (like myself) who think that rejecting empiricism leaves you with no connection to the real world.
I didn’t do that; I just reject logical fallacies. Vox Day literally pointed out a couple of correlations as proof for his side without taking anything else at all into account. It was shockingly sloppy case against free trade.
“that still leaves a lot of people (like myself) who think that rejecting empiricism leaves you with no connection to the real world.”
Tel, Austrians do not reject empiricism per se. They reject it in the sphere of human action in particular.
To say that without empiricism there is a loss of connection to the real world, presumes that the only possible connection an individual can understand themselves as having with the real world is one where their own actions are determined by constant causal operative factors, for example “If I stub my toe with 2 Newtons of force, then I will be compelled by physical laws to rub my foot for exactly 20 seconds.”. But that is nonsense.
We do not have to rely solely on a (non-existent) set of constants that determine our knowledge and actions, listed by way of observing our past actions.
We can do better. We can use introspection to understand that our place in the world, our connection with matter, is NOT determined by constants. That we can learn and evolve and adapt over time, in a more or less continuous manner, whereby our choices leave behind us a UNIQUE, heterogeneous history that does not reveal any deterministic constants that force and compel us to learn and act in certain ways.
The way you connect yourself to the real world is not by denying your own self and believing that the only reality is that which does not learn or act. Monism contradicts itself if it is treated as a universal method. In order for you to know your place in the world, and you are no less real than your surroundings, is by recognizing at the minimum that you are categorically different from your non-acting surroundings, that the assumption you make of constancy when dealing with your surroundings., does not and cannot hold true for your own knowledge and actions.
The reason that you weren’t able to directly deal with his arguments is that he was wasn’t making clear economic arguments but instead referring to pseudo theories he couldn’t adequately describe or back up. His preferred stance was to fall back on film flam about how trade and what we would think of as economic progress corrupts the moral fabric of the nation in the long run. Tom himself might he done a better job of beating him up on this line of argument, but you did fine. You were playing it straight, and you kept the debate focused on consistency and core economic logic.
Day referred to a fairly well known problem regarding giving out free stuff and how it can make people worse off. In the given time frame there was no opportunity to start describing this from first principles.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/more-welfare-more-poverty
I note that Murphy immediately recognized what Day was talking about, and I think Tom probably did also, given that the issue has come up on the Tom Woods Show more than once.
What does Bob think of International aid? The main argument that I thought was good from Vox was that getting free stuff, while subjectively good, may be harmful to peoples’ character over the long-term. Many free market people say as much about international aid, but why wouldn’t that critique carry to some parts of free trade?
Let’s remember the “free stuff” thing is a reductio ad absurdum used to demonstrate that cheaper stuff improves out standard of living. Thus, if Vox’s point is relevant, he is saying that buying something at a lower price harms people’s character over the long term. Now that is absurd.
The problem with international aid is the coercion and resulting corruption and inefficiency. Free market advocates have no problem with voluntary giving, which on the whole is a very helpful thing.
So if we reductio ad absurdum in the other direction, then as prices rise, people’s lives & morals improve. In fact, if we raised prices to the point that trade is no longer possible we’ll have the happiest, most moral people ever therefore we should just get rid of trade.
What happened, Vox used to be a lot more disciplined thinker than this.
On Tom Woods’ site, UnhappyConservative said:
“My plan to reach a better society is to use force against those who stand in the way. What is yours?”
Question: On what basis does he oppose *any* government tyrannies, such as Communist genocides? After all, they were just trying to reach what they thought was a better society by using force against those who stood in the way.
Looks like this guy’s position is might makes right.
And he calls us the “cucks”.
“Question: On what basis does he oppose *any* government tyrannies”
What a silly objection. It’s not like we magically forgot that strong governments are extremely dangerous. Dispelling the need for strong government is part of the plan. But for that plan to work, the political system must be structured to safeguard the nation. Libertarianism is at best utterly unconcerned with nations, and in general views them as obstacles to be destroyed.
“Looks like this guy’s position is might makes right.”
Backwards. Being right is useless without the might to back it up.
Oh my god, guys. These are my peeps!
I’m pretty sure I’m the only one here that can reach the Vox Populi commenters.
😀
They’re talking about Cultural Marxism and Soros, yada, yada, yada.
It’s on!
My fellow Conservatives: You too can learn how not to be tricked into becoming a Socialist without even knowing it.
Your views are Socialist, guys! You’re making similar cases for your preferred society that they do.
This blew my mind when I found this out.
I realize that a lot of libertarians come from the Left, and this is very frustrating – but some of us have always been Right Wingers.
So please don’t write us all off. Thank you.
When you say some libertarians are on the Left and other are on the Rght, do you mean in terms of personal moral views on social issues, or are you referring to the left-libertarian/right-libertarian divide?
I’m guessing that they’re the same thing.
For example, you have Left libertarians correctly understanding the concept of blowback, but completely missing the fact that there would be Muslim terrorists even if America *didn’t* meddle in their affairs, because that’s what Islam teaches.
This is why Conservatives see libertarians as naive, and they don’t want to be left vulnerable to attacks when Ron Paul would have brought all the troops home.
Of course, if Conservatives stopped criticizing the libertarian position that everybody should be able to open carry everywhere and to own and drive tanks, it would be more difficult to carry out massive-casualty attacks, because everybody would be armed.
Another Left libertarian position is that efforts to end America’s wars should be the main focus for reducing the size of government.
I forgot what article it was, but it was on Mises dot org, where this single Austrian actually got it, that the real focus should be on economic theory, combatting socialist ideals.
Conservatives understand this, which is why they won’t give up their “sacred cow” of military funding without first a huge reduction in welfare benefits.
They want those advocating a reduction in military spending to prove that they’re not just socialists trying to undermine what they believe to be the generally laissez faire goals of the Constitution.
Conservatives view libertarians as mostly Left leaning, and they rightly fear Lefty, destructive policies. That’s why they absolutely were not going to vote for Ron Paul.
They saw him as naive and dangerous.
And because they didn’t understand the nuances of libertarianism, they pissed away their freedoms even more.
There are left-libertarians and then there are “low tax liberals” or, what I prefer to call Cultural Democrats.
There are people who seriously believe that it is morally repugnant for the state to use force for anything beyond the protection of life, liberty, and property, and then there are people who are basically leftists, they just believe the government doesn’t work all that well.
Left-libertarians may be naïve about some things, but at least they’re libertarians. The Cultural Democrats aren’t even that.
My personal take is that there are a lot of reasons why we want to shrink the size of the current State. This would include theoretical reasons, pragmatic reasons and at least a few personal moral reasons.
I also argue that very few techniques have been found that can shrink a State even a little bit. Reagan talked about it, but he couldn’t do it. Most of the others are not even going as far as talking about it.
Thus we have a lot of incentive to do the job, and no tools to get it done. This is a higher priority than figuring out what to do afterwards.
Shrinking the State is good (up to a point), but that will never ever happen as long as multiple nations are vying for control of it.
It will also never happen as long as women have a say, but that’s Alt Right 2.0.
“I’m guessing that they’re the same thing.” OK, so you’re just talking about differences on social issues, religion, and foreign affairs. You’re not talking about the more fundamental divide that people often refer to with the labels left-libertarian and right-libertarian, namely the anarcho-capitalist vs. anarcho-communists debate. The people you call left-libertarians presumably still believe in private property and the like, so in that fundamental divide they’re still on the “right-libertarian” side of things.
LLINO
Vox’s argument #2 is the Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu argument. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%E2%80%93Debreu_theorem
While this is likely an effective argument against neoclassical equilibrium theory, Austrian theory holds for a few reasons:
1. Austrians treat demand curves as a limit to possible transactions. Below (or rather to the left of) the curve, transactions are possible. Unique solutions are not assumed. This limiting curve is necessarily monotonic decreasing.
2. Austrians treat demand curves as instantaneous, applicable to a single good. SMD relys on second order effects like income effects or tradeoffs between multiple goods. Otherwise it is impossible to add monotonically decreasing individual demand curves to get something that is not monotonically decreasing.
3. SMD makes the same mistake as neoclassicals with “Giffen Goods”. Salerno and Klein have written about this (AERC 2012? Need to find the link). SMD is a historical curve, not a causal one.
It would be worthwhile for Austrians to consider second order effects and more clearly explain the rules for adjusting demand curves due to income effects, tradeoffs between multiple goods, etc. and show how Austrian analysis is preserved. I haven’t seen an Austrian argument that thoroughly addresses the SMD critique.
Sounds like a job for Bob Murphy.
Perhaps i’m too unsophisticated, but i found most of Vox’s arguments to be weak and highly unconvincing. The one point that Vox made that interested me was in regards to Market Demand, which i would like to look into, but he made the same mistake himself when he spoke of a nation-state acting as an agent, rather than a construct of the individuals who run it.
I’ve missed Mr. Day my entire life.
About Rod Dreher: This useless, limp-wristed excuse for a purported conservative “opinion leader”, this hapless, low-testosterone shadow of a man, is more concerned about ******* ETIQUETTE, than he is about the single most important right in the Bill of Rights.
“Dear God, they’re sitting on the floor! Heavens to Betsy, whatever shall we do?”
If you want to understand the key difference between the Alt Right and the Conservative movement, all you need to do is look at Rod Dreher. If he strikes you as a strong and principled Christian man standing up for what is right and true and important, then you are most definitely a Conservative.
If he strikes you as missing the point so badly that he would have done far better to put on a dress, smear some lipstick on his face, and record a video reading from Amy Vanderbilt’s COMPLETE BOOK OF ETIQUETTE, you just might be Alt Right.
**********
Of course, these are Democrats in general, once we limit the discussion to the SJW subset you can be certain that far more than a paltry 34.4 percent of them are suffering from depression or some other mental health issue. These people are not sane or healthy, they are quite literally sick in mind, body, and soul.
**********
[I]f N.K. Jeminsin’s Hugo-nominated “The Fifth Season” is inspiring SJWs to off themselves, maybe there is something to this award-winning Pink SF sewage after all!
I suppose one could make the case that a particular population which can make excellent cars for 10% more than a competitor’s cars, wishes to keep making those cars for the purpose of keeping the population employed in that field and because otherwise, the population will sink into drug-taking and sloth. That would nicely fit into Rothbard’s “psychic profit” category.
From “In Defense of ‘Extreme Apriorism” By Murray N. Rothbard:
The fourth–and by far the least fundamental–postulate for a theory of the market is the one which Professors Hutchison and Machlup consider crucial–that firms always aim at maximization of their money profits. As will become clearer when I treat the Fundamental Axiom below, this assumption is by no means a necessary part of economic theory. From our Axiom is derived this absolute truth: that every firm aims always at maximizing its PSYCHIC profit. This may or may not involve maximizing its MONEY profit. Often it may not, and no praxeologist would deny this fact. When an entrepreneur deliberately accepts lower money profits in order to give a good job to a ne’er-do-well nephew, the praxeologist is not confounded. The entrepreneur simply has chosen to take a certain cut in monetary profit in order to satisfy his consumption–satisfaction of seeing his nephew well provided. The assumption that firms aim at maximizing their money profits is simply a convenience of analysis; it permits the elaboration of a framework of catallactics (economics of the market) which could not otherwise be developed. The praxeologist always has in mind the proviso that where this subsidiary postulate does not apply–as in the case of the ne’er-do-well–his deduced theories will not be applicable. He simply believes that enough entrepreneurs follow monetary aims enough of the time to make his theory highly useful in explaining the real market. p. 4
But how is this anti-free trade regime going to be enforced? A large population of car buyers that agrees with supporting these more expensive manufacturers could simply VOLUNTARILY purchase all of their cars from them and refuse to buy the less expensive cars. If more than 50% of the population did this, that would probably be enough to keep the more expensive firm in business. But if less than 50% of the population would do this, what is the basis of a 50%+ electoral vote supporting the state and its violence machine from prohibiting the purchase of the cheaper cars?
Didn’t Mr. Day himself indicate that he was unclear regarding how “anti-free trade” might be enforced by a state? I submit that ANY grant to the state of a power to intervene in the market to control OUTCOMES must always be an unlimited grant of power. Any possible limitations on those powers will certainly not be provided by present-day U.S. courts because (according to them) whether an intervention is wise or good is solely up to the voters and the legislature.
Finally, in terms of alleged “empirical” analysis, how do we know that the current state of the U.S. economy is not mostly the result of funny money distortions, crony legislation, licensing requirements, the dumbing down by government schools, the drug war and real war etc…?