The runtime complexity of modelling an economy is non-trivial, and a ‘band-aid’ reactionary approach to fixing issues in a system as complicated as the free market with an instrument as blunt as law is catastrophic in the long run (I subscribe to the Austrian school).
I’m against central planning, because computers fast enough to actually do it well don’t exist—and, if they ever do, a centrally planned society should be able to function perfectly well under capitalism. It should turn a profit, and people should join it voluntarily. No coercion involved.
And since the runtime complexity of the human body is non-trivial, we should give up on medicine and methods as blunt as surgery and drugs ? Sorry, but complexity is not an excuse to let Azathoth rule alone and not try to improve things. Or we would have given up on science and medicine since long.
As for coercion, capitalism relies on it too : coercion to enforce private property, even when it means, for example, expelling a family from its house and sending it to the street because they can’t pay the mortgage. If you reject coercion, you reject private property which is enforced by coercion. If you accept some amount of coercion to defend private property, why not some amount of coercion to ensure people have a roof and food ?
The human body is subject to a number of reductionist approximations which allow us to work with it predicatively. These approximations and models are extremely well supported experimentally. So far, the only such approximations that apply to the economy are the Keynesian ideas, and those produce results that are intuitively nonsense, and have no experimental backing. Modifying the economy without causing more harm than good is much, much harder than it is in medicine right now. We are not surgeons here. We are plague doctors with masks, and leeches.
Capitalism (more specifically, classical liberalism or Minarchist Libertarianism) does accept a minimal level of governmental coercion, as the loss of freedom associated with anarchy is even greater, and because you must draw lines between the rights of individuals, and property and contract is a reasonable place to draw it. You’ll note that property rights are fairly straightforward. They’re easy to enforce, they’re inexpensive, and they’re intuitive. Once you start cobbling on new laws in a patchwork attempt to fix current problems, though, it all goes to hell in a handbasket rather quickly. Adding new laws is costly.
Because I’m not a strawman capitalist, I’m not going to claim that all poor people are lazy, or even that all poor people on welfare are lazy. However, I am going to say that there is a tendency for welfare to be abused by the lazy. It’s like a magnetic cooling system. High energy particles escape, so after a while, all of the particles left in the trap are the cold, low-energy ones. Same basic principle applies.
Additionally, the government is fantastically bad at spending money. Orders of magnitude worst than essentially any private organization. I’ve seen the way they buy chairs. It’s terrifying. In general, putting them in charge of any significant sum of money is an excellent way to ensure that much of it will wind up being expended as economic waste heat.
The human body is subject to a number of reductionist approximations which allow us to work with it predicatively. These approximations and models are extremely well supported experimentally. So far, the only such approximations that apply to the economy are the Keynesian ideas, and those produce results that are intuitively nonsense, and have no experimental backing. Modifying the economy without causing more harm than good is much, much harder than it is in medicine right now. We are not surgeons here. We are plague doctors with masks, and leeches.
And yet we’ve gotten past leeches, and developed medicines that work. Don’t you think we should try some economic models to see if they work? Who cares if Keynesian ideas don’t make intuitive sense? You just explained why that the economy is too complicated to understand intuitively. The evidence isn’t very good (for or against), because it’s never been properly tested.
property rights are fairly straightforward.
No they aren’t. How do people come to own property in the first place? (are the descendants of native Americans due reparations? Who has the land rights to Israel / Palestine?) How much do polluters have to pay for the damage they’re doing to everyone else’s property? Do I have the right to sell myself into slavery? What ideas can be patented (copyrighted) and when do those patents (copyrights) expire? Unfortunately, to try to sort out who owns what, is to mire yourself in as twisted and complicated a political issue as any.
Additionally, the government is fantastically bad at spending money. Orders of magnitude worst than essentially any private organization. I’ve seen the way they buy chairs. It’s terrifying. In general, putting them in charge of any significant sum of money is an excellent way to ensure that much of it will wind up being expended as economic waste heat.
Be specific. How does the government buy chairs?
Also, overpaying for something doesn’t make the extra money simply disappear as “economic waste heat.” The people who sold those chairs can spend the extra money again. The actual cost is bad information being fed to the market, which can result in workers making too much of one thing, when everyone would have been better off if they’d made something else. And it’s not as if private consumers always spend their money perfectly in accordance with their values either. If anything qualifies as “economic waste heat”, it’s the tobacco industry.
If you accept some amount of coercion to defend private property, why not some amount of coercion to ensure people have a roof and food ?
We have this in America and I think most other wealthy countries. We spend many tens of billions of dollars on food assistance for the poor, and a substantial amount on housing assistance. It’s not even all that controversial, politically.
(The food part works much better than the housing—public housing projects in the US are notorious for sometimes being badly run to the point of being unsafe.)
The runtime complexity of modelling an economy is non-trivial, and a ‘band-aid’ reactionary approach to fixing issues in a system as complicated as the free market with an instrument as blunt as law is catastrophic in the long run (I subscribe to the Austrian school).
I’m against central planning, because computers fast enough to actually do it well don’t exist—and, if they ever do, a centrally planned society should be able to function perfectly well under capitalism. It should turn a profit, and people should join it voluntarily. No coercion involved.
And since the runtime complexity of the human body is non-trivial, we should give up on medicine and methods as blunt as surgery and drugs ? Sorry, but complexity is not an excuse to let Azathoth rule alone and not try to improve things. Or we would have given up on science and medicine since long.
As for coercion, capitalism relies on it too : coercion to enforce private property, even when it means, for example, expelling a family from its house and sending it to the street because they can’t pay the mortgage. If you reject coercion, you reject private property which is enforced by coercion. If you accept some amount of coercion to defend private property, why not some amount of coercion to ensure people have a roof and food ?
The human body is subject to a number of reductionist approximations which allow us to work with it predicatively. These approximations and models are extremely well supported experimentally. So far, the only such approximations that apply to the economy are the Keynesian ideas, and those produce results that are intuitively nonsense, and have no experimental backing. Modifying the economy without causing more harm than good is much, much harder than it is in medicine right now. We are not surgeons here. We are plague doctors with masks, and leeches.
Capitalism (more specifically, classical liberalism or Minarchist Libertarianism) does accept a minimal level of governmental coercion, as the loss of freedom associated with anarchy is even greater, and because you must draw lines between the rights of individuals, and property and contract is a reasonable place to draw it. You’ll note that property rights are fairly straightforward. They’re easy to enforce, they’re inexpensive, and they’re intuitive. Once you start cobbling on new laws in a patchwork attempt to fix current problems, though, it all goes to hell in a handbasket rather quickly. Adding new laws is costly.
Because I’m not a strawman capitalist, I’m not going to claim that all poor people are lazy, or even that all poor people on welfare are lazy. However, I am going to say that there is a tendency for welfare to be abused by the lazy. It’s like a magnetic cooling system. High energy particles escape, so after a while, all of the particles left in the trap are the cold, low-energy ones. Same basic principle applies.
Additionally, the government is fantastically bad at spending money. Orders of magnitude worst than essentially any private organization. I’ve seen the way they buy chairs. It’s terrifying. In general, putting them in charge of any significant sum of money is an excellent way to ensure that much of it will wind up being expended as economic waste heat.
And yet we’ve gotten past leeches, and developed medicines that work. Don’t you think we should try some economic models to see if they work? Who cares if Keynesian ideas don’t make intuitive sense? You just explained why that the economy is too complicated to understand intuitively. The evidence isn’t very good (for or against), because it’s never been properly tested.
No they aren’t. How do people come to own property in the first place? (are the descendants of native Americans due reparations? Who has the land rights to Israel / Palestine?) How much do polluters have to pay for the damage they’re doing to everyone else’s property? Do I have the right to sell myself into slavery? What ideas can be patented (copyrighted) and when do those patents (copyrights) expire? Unfortunately, to try to sort out who owns what, is to mire yourself in as twisted and complicated a political issue as any.
Be specific. How does the government buy chairs?
Also, overpaying for something doesn’t make the extra money simply disappear as “economic waste heat.” The people who sold those chairs can spend the extra money again. The actual cost is bad information being fed to the market, which can result in workers making too much of one thing, when everyone would have been better off if they’d made something else. And it’s not as if private consumers always spend their money perfectly in accordance with their values either. If anything qualifies as “economic waste heat”, it’s the tobacco industry.
We have this in America and I think most other wealthy countries. We spend many tens of billions of dollars on food assistance for the poor, and a substantial amount on housing assistance. It’s not even all that controversial, politically.
(The food part works much better than the housing—public housing projects in the US are notorious for sometimes being badly run to the point of being unsafe.)