Bob Murphy Show Twin Spin
In ep 76 I interview Justin Clark on the “Baltic Strategy” for Texas nationhood, and in ep 77 I interview Rob Bradley on his contributions to energy economics, getting his PhD under Rothbard, and why Enron was the first postmodern corporation. Here’s the video too for Rob:
You Didn’t Build That (God Did)
There’s nothing wrong with the logic of libertarian property rights (homesteading etc.). The problem only comes in if you assume empirically at the outset that the Earth was unowned when the first human stumbled upon it.
Because if the opening Genesis account were true, for example, then God is obviously the owner of everything. Again, for me to point this out doesn’t refute The Ethics of Liberty in terms of its framework, it just shows that most practicing Rothbardians have been incorrectly applying some of its theorems.
This is also related (somewhat) to some of the difficult events in the Old Testament when “God was mean” as opposed to Jesus when “God was nice.” (Of course I am not endorsing these sentiments, but I’m sure the reader gets what I mean and how people think like that, when the first encounter Scripture.)
When God (working through Moses) rescued the children of Israel out of slavery, He led them through the desert for 40 years. His presence in Israel was manifest in the form of a column of smoke during the day and a pillar of fire at night.
Then when He would deliver them into the Promised Land, they not only won military victories that the recently-liberated slaves had no business winning, but the Israelites also took possession of entire cities. It would be like showing up at a really nicely furnished Airbnb except you are there permanently (so long as you follow the landLORD’s rules).
This was a stark reminder to the Israelites that everything they had was ultimately from God; they couldn’t point to some of their possessions as due to their own merit.
I realize a Randian reading this would pull back in horror, but no, recognition of such facts actually gives you immense peace and wisdom. It’s not that happy people are grateful, it’s that grateful people are happy.
BMS ep 75: Bretigne Shaffer on California’s Mandatory Vaccinations
Oh boy, I’m getting into risque territory with this one. Here is the podcast link (with notes) and here is the video:
Potpourri
==> Peter Klein interviewed in South Africa.
==> I respond to Noah Smith on Friedman’s “plucking model.”
==> At first I thought this was a parody, but AOC actually urged workers to be sure they got paid for an extra hour for Daylight Saving. However, in context, I actually don’t think she said anything dumb.
==> My interview on the Theocracy podcast, talking about my conversion from atheism and reconciling the Bible with standard libertarianism.
==> I don’t like all these “cancel old stuff that is now evil” examples, but I actually agreed with this critique of Friends.
Potpourri
==> My interview with Titus Gebel on his proposal for free private cities.
==> Carlos and I discuss the 2017 tax reform’s impact on charitable giving.
==> This YouTube video using “optimal stopping theory” to guide you in dating wasn’t what I was expecting. In the search models we studied in grad school, you would decide on your reservation wage and keep going on interviews until you got an offer at least that high. In contrast, the video describes a strategy where you don’t pick a reservation level of desirability in your partner, but instead decide on how much time you will sample, and then you switch to saying, “Now, from this point forward, I will marry the person who is the best I’ve yet dated.”
God as Hero or Villain?
I have tried expressing my views on how the “unfair” system described in the Bible is actually incredibly just, but I got the sense that it didn’t “take” last time. Let me try to explain it again.
Suppose that when you die, you see the full impact of all of your choices throughout your life, and how much harm they caused on others. If you focus just on that, you feel absolutely horrible–not because God is burning you with fire, but because of your own value system. So all the warnings of hell in the Bible were actually warning you that God had given you His sense of justice, in the form of your own conscience–that’s what’s burning you.
Then you say, “OK Murphy you’ve just pushed the question back a step. Why would a loving, good God give us this ‘gift’ that would sear us to our core when we recognize our sins?”
And the answer would be, “Well, He warned humanity upfront before He gave it to them, that they should avoid the knowledge of good and evil. Because if they acquired the ability to tell good from evil, it would end up killing them. However, humanity ignored that warning and said, ‘We want to know the difference between good and evil,’ and so God abided by their choice and gave them a conscience so that His Law is written on every human heart.”
Now I’m not saying the above is bulletproof, but that sounds a lot more reasonable than the prima facie account of the Garden of Eden. Yet notice that it doesn’t contradictthe Bible account.
I encountered a similar pattern when doing my Bible study yesterday. In Luke 8, we read this seemingly strange statement from Jesus:
9 And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, 10 he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’…”
Isn’t that odd? It sounds like Jesus is saying, “Rather than speak in plain English, I am going to deliberately confuse outsiders so they can’t understand my message of salvation.” Why the heck would Jesus do that?
But then when reading Guzik’s commentary, he relayed this very interesting theory:
c. Seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand: By quoting this passage from Isaiah 6:9, Jesus explained that His parables were not illustrations making difficult things clear to all who heard. They were a way of presenting God’s message so those who were spiritually sensitive could understand, but the hardened would merely hear a story without heaping up additional condemnation for rejecting God’s Word.
i. A parable isn’t exactly an illustration. A good teacher can illustrate by stating a truth, and then illustrating the truth through a story or an analogy. But when Jesus used parables, He didn’t start by stating a truth. Instead, the parable was like a doorway. Jesus’ listeners stood at the doorway and heard Him. If they were not interested, they stayed on the outside. But if they were interested, they could walk through the doorway, and think more about the truth behind the parable and what it meant to their life.
ii. “So, that their guilt may not accumulate, the Lord no longer addresses them directly in explicit teachings during the period immediately preceding His crucifixion, but in parables.” (Geldenhuys)
Isn’t that an amazing suggestion? Rather than Jesus disguising His message in parables out of caprice or malice, He’s doing it out of mercy. He knows certain people are going to reject Him no matter what, and so by speaking in parables He sparesthem from explicitly rejecting His point-blank instructions.
Again, you may certainly disagree with the above interpretation, but it makes a lot more sense than the prima facie reading of the text. (And also, I really liked Guzik’s analogy of a doorway. I had always assumed that the parables were ways that Jesus tried to “dumb it down” for the masses, but then His reference to Isaiah 6:9 doesn’t make any sense.)
Murphy Triple Play
==> My article on Bitcoin’s 11th birthday.
==> My IER post on Sweden’s carbon tax. (I have some graphs in here that might surprise you.)
==> Another in my Austria vs. Law & Econ series. This time, I critique Armen Alchian’s arguments about air pollution. An excerpt (and note that I’m not changing the formatting, but the below is a quote from my article):
——
The Manne seminars featured big guns, including Paul Samuelson (so they weren’t all right-wingers) but also those skeptical of typical business regulation, such as Milton Friedman, Harold Demsetz, Martin Feldstein, and Armen Alchian. For our purposes in the present article, I want to focus on this portion of the Vox interview:
Dylan Matthews
You had some really eye-popping examples in the paper about pollution.
Suresh Naidu
Yeah, and it kind of reveals…sometimes when you take economics too literally, it leads you into kind of very sociopathic ways of thinking about things.
We have quotes from Armen Alchian, who said, “Give me a capsule that will magically clean all the air in Los Angeles….Beg me to crush it….I won’t crush the capsule. Because if I do, poor blacks will have to pay $20 a month more for land rental….The black in Watts, already used to living with bad air, loses his discount for doing that.”
And that’s just this idea that if you clean up the pollution, more people will want to live there and that will drive up the housing prices, making the people that are already used to pollution worse off.
I think that’s the kind of reasoning you’ll find in a lot of what the Manne teachers were teaching, as well as, “Here’s why a lot of regulation by the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] might not be the most efficient way of reducing environmental damages…and maybe people don’t value environmental damage that much anyway.”
The above Alchian anecdote is a perfect illustration of what I meant in my earlier article when I said that the Law & Econ scholars sometimes make deliberately “shocking” arguments. They no doubt do this in order to capture the attention of students (or readers in the case of written material), but the strategy backfires if they offend the non-economist while getting the economics wrong. In that case, the shocking (and erroneous) argument only serves to confirm the average Joe’s suspicion that these right-wingers aren’t really principled, but instead are just mouthpieces for big business.
In other words, it’s ironic when the Law & Econ scholar deliberately picks an example where the average person will think, “That can’t be right!” when the average person is correct—in this case, Alchian’s argument isn’t right.
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