Javier Milei at the WEF: Speech Transcript

Because I couldn't find the full transcript anywhere:

"Good afternoon. Thank you very much.

Today, I'm here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West, are coopted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others and others motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of Freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism.

We're here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world, rather they are the root cause. Do believe me. No one, better place than us Argentines to testify to these two points.

When we adopted the model of Freedom back in 1860, in 35 years we became a leading world power. And when we embraced collectivism over the course of the last 100 years, we saw how our citizens started to become systematically impoverished and we dropped to spot number 140 globally.

But before having the discussion it would first be important for us to take a look at the data that demonstrate why free enterprise capitalism is not just the only possible system to end world poverty, but also that it's the only morally desirable system to achieve this. If we look at the history of economic progress we can see how between the year 0 and the year 1800 approximately, world per capita GDP practically remained constant throughout the whole reference period. If you look at a graph of the evolution of economic growth throughout the history of humanity, you would see a hockey stick graph. An exponential function that remained constant for 90% of the time and which was exponentially triggered starting in the 19th century. The only exception to this history of stagnation was in the late 15th century with the discovery of the American continent, but for this exception, throughout the whole period between the year zero and the year 1800, global per capita GDP stagnated.

Now, it's not just that capitalism brought about an explosion in wealth, from the moment it was adopted as an economic system, but also if you look at the data what you will see is that growth, continues to accelerate throughout the whole period. And throughout the whole period between the year zero and the year 1800, the per capita GDP growth rate remained stable at around 0.02% annually. So almost no growth.

Starting in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution, the, compound annual growth rate was .66% and um at that rate, in order to double per capita GDP you would need some 107 years. Now if you look at the period between the year 1900 and the year 1950, the growth rate accelerated to 1.66% a year. So you no longer need 107 years to double per capita GDP but 66. And if you take the period between 1950 and the year 2000 you will see that the growth rate was 2.1%. Again, the CAGR, which would mean then in only 33 years we could double the world's per capita GDP.

This trend, far from stopping, remains well alive today. If we take the period between the year 2000 and 2023, the growth rate again accelerated to 3% a year. Which means that we could double, uh world per capita GDP in just 23 years. That said, when you look at per capita GDP since the year 1800 and until today, what you will see is that after the Industrial Revolution, global per capita GDP multiplied by over 15 times. Which meant a boom in growth that lifted 90% of the global population out of poverty. 

We should remember that by the year 1800, about 95% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty and that figure dropped to 5% by the year 2020 prior to the pandemic. The conclusion is obvious. Far from being the cause of our problems, free trade capitalism as an economic system is the only instrument we have to end hunger, poverty and extreme poverty across our planet. 

The empirical evidence is unquestionable. Therefore, since there is no doubt that free enterprise capitalism is superior in productive terms, the leftwing doxer has attacked capitalism alleging matters of morality, saying, uh that's what the detectors claim, that it's unjust. They say that capitalism is evil because it's individualistic and that collectivism is good because it's altruistic.

Of course, with the money of others. So they therefore advocate for social justice. But this concept which in the developed world became fashionable in recent times, in my country has been a constant in political discourse for over 80 years. The problem is that social justice is not just. And it doesn't contribute either to the general wellbeing. Quite on the contrary, it's an intrinsically unfair idea because it's violent. It's unjust because the state is financed through tax, and taxes are collected coercively. Or can anyone of us say that they voluntarily pay taxes, which means that the state is financed through coercion. And that the higher the tax burden the higher the coercion, and the lower the freedom.

Those who promote social justice, they advocate, start with the idea that the, uh whole economy is a pie that can be shared differently. But that pie is not a given. It's wealth that is generated in what Israel Kirzner for instance calls a market discovery process. If the goods or services offered by a business are not wanted, the uh business will fail unless it adapts to what the market is demanding. If they make a good quality product at an attractive price, they will do well and produce more. So the market is a discovery process in which the capitalist will find the right path as they move forward but if the state punishes capitalists when they're successful and gets in the way of the discovery process they will destroy their incentives and the consequence is that they will produce less, the pie will be smaller, and this will harm society as a whole.

Collectivism, by inhibiting these discovery processes and hindering the appropriation of discoveries, ends up binding the hands of entrepreneurs and prevents them from uh offering better goods and services at a better price. So how come that um Academia International Organizations, economic theory and uh politics demonize an economic system that has not only lifted out of extreme poverty 90% of the world's population but has continued to do this faster and faster?

And this is morally superior and just. Thanks to free trade capitalism um it is um to be seen that the world is now um living its best moment. Never in all of mankind's or humanity's history has there been a time of more prosperity than today. This is a true for all, the world of today has more freedom, is rich, is more peaceful and prosperous.

And this is particularly true for countries that have more freedom and have economic freedom and respect the uh property rights of individuals because countries that have more freedom are 12 times richer than those that are repressed. And the lowest decile in terms of distribution in free countries are better off than 90% of the population of repressed countries. And poverty is 25 times lower and uh extreme poverty is 50 times lower. And citizens in free countries live 25% longer than citizens in repressed countries.

Now what is it that we mean when we talk about libertarianism? And let me quote the words of the greatest authority on Freedom in Argentina, Alberto Benegas Lynch, Jr., who says that libertarianism is the unrestricted respect for the life project of others based on the principle of non-aggression, in defense of the right to life, liberty and property. Its fundamental institutions being private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, the division of labor and social cooperation, as part of which success is achieved only by serving others with goods of better quality or at a better price. 

In other words, capitalists, successful businesspeople are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately a successful entrepreneur is a hero. And this is the model that we are advocating for the Argentina of the future. A model based on the fundamental principles of libertarianism. The defense of life, of freedom, and of property.

Now, if free enterprise capitalism and economic freedom have proven to be extraordinary instruments to end poverty in the world and we are now at the best time in the history of humanity, it is worth asking why, I say, that the West is in danger. And I say this precisely because in those of our countries that should defend the values of the free market, private property and the other institutions of libertarianism, sectors of the political and economic establishment, some due to mistakes in their theoretical framework and others due to a greed for power, are undermining the foundations of libertarianism, opening up the doors to socialism and potentially condemning us to poverty, misery and stagnation.

It should never be forgotten that socialism is always and everywhere an impoverishing phenomenon that has failed in all countries where it's been tried out. It's been a failure economically, socially, culturally, and it also murdered over a 100 million human beings. The essential problem the West today is not just that we need to come to grips with those who even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the overwhelming empirical evidence continue to advocate for impoverishing socialism but there's also our own leaders, thinkers and academics who relying on a misguided theoretical framework, undermine the fundamentals of the system that has given us the greatest expansion of wealth and prosperity in our history.

The theoretical framework to which I refer is that of neoclassical economic theory which designs a set of instruments that unwillingly or without meaning to, ends up, um serving the intervention by the state, socialism and social degradation. The problem with neoclassicals is that the model they fell in love with does not map reality so they put down their mistakes to supposed market failures rather than reviewing the premises of the model. On the pretext of a supposed market failure, regulutions (sic) are introduced which only create distortions in the price system, um prevent economic calculus and therefore also prevent saving, investment and growth.

This problem lies mainly in the fact that not even, supposedly libertarian economists understand what the market is, because if they did understand, it would quickly be seen that it's impossible for there to be something along the line of market failures. The market is not a mere, graph describing a curve of supply and demand. The market is a mechanism of social cooperation where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore, based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There. Are. No. Market Failures. If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be a market failure is if there is coercion. And the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence. Consequently, if someone considers that there is a market failure, I would suggest that they check to see if the state is intervention involved and if they find that that's not the case, I would suggest that they check again, because obviously there's a mistake. Market failures do not exist.

An example of these so-called market failures described by the neoclassicals are the concentrated structures of the economy. However, without increasing returns to scale functions, whose counterpart are the uh concentrated structures of the economy, we couldn't possibly explain economic growth since the year 1800 until today. Isn't this interesting? Since the the year 1800 onwards, with population multiplying by eight or nine times per capita GDP grow by over 15 times so there are growing returns, which took extreme poverty from 95% to 5%.

However, the presence of growing returns um involves concentrated structures what we would call a monopoly. How come then that something that has generated so much wellbeing, for the neoclassical theory, is a market failure? Neoclassical economists think outside of the box. When the model fails, you shouldn't get angry with reality but rather with a model and change it. The dilemma faced by the neoclassical model is that they say they wish to perfect the functioning of the market by attacking what they consider to be failures but in so doing they don't just open up the doors to socialism but also go against economic growth. An example, regulating monopolies. Destroying their profits and destroying growing returns, automatically would destroy economic growth. In other words, whenever you want to correct a supposed market failure inexorably, as a result of not knowing what the market is or as a result of having fallen in love with a failed model, you are opening up the doors to socialism and condemning people to poverty.

However, faced with the theoretical demonstration that state intervention is harmful, and the empirical evidence that it has failed couldn't have been otherwise, the solution to be proposed by collectivists is not greater freedom but rather greater regulation which creates a downward spiral of, um the spiral of regulations until we're all poorer and the life of all of us depends on a bureaucrat sitting in a luxury uh office.

Given the dismal failure of collectivist models and the undeniable advances in the Free World, socialists were forced to change their agenda. They left behind the class struggle based on the economic system, and replaced this with other supposed social conflicts which are just as harmful to life as a community and to economic growth. The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between man and woman. Libertarianism already provides for equality of these sexes, the cornerstone of our creed says that all humans are created equal, that we all have the same unalienable rights granted by the Creator including life, freedom and ownership. All that this radical feminism agenda has led to is greater state intervention to hinder the economic process, giving a job to bureaucrats who have not contributed anything to society. Examples, um, ministries of, of women or international organizations devoted to promoting this agenda.

Another conflict presented by socialists is that of humans against nature, claiming that we human beings damage the planet which should be protected at all costs, even, going as far as advocating for population control mechanisms or the bloody um abortion agenda. Unfortunately, these harmful ideas have taken a strong hold in our society. Neo-Marxists have managed to co-opt the common sense of the Western world and this they have achieved by appropriating the uh media, culture, universities and also international organizations. The latter case is the most serious one probably, because these are institutions that have enormous influence on political and economic decisions of the countries that make up the multilateral organizations. 

Fortunately, there's more and more of us who are daring to make our voices heard. Because we see that if we don't truly and decisively fight against these ideas the only possible fate is for us to have increasing levels of state regulation, socialism, poverty and less freedom and therefore uh will be um having worse standards of living. 

The West has unfortunately already started to go along this path. I know to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism, but it's only ridiculous if you only limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it's an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition, in my view, should be updated in the light of current circumstances. Today states don't need to directly control the means of production, to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct the, so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.

This is how we come to the point where by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally accepted political offers in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be openly Communist, Fascist, Nazis, Socialists, Social Democrats, National Socialists, Democrat Christians or Christian Democrats, Neo-Keynesians, uh, Progressive, Populist, Nationalist or Globalist. At bottom there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. They all defend a model contrary to that one which led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history. 

We have come here today to invite the rest of the countries in the Western World to get back on the path of prosperity, economic freedom, limited government, government and um unlimited respect for private property, are essential elements uh for economic growth, and the impoverishment produced by collectivism is no fantasy, nor is it an inescapable fate. But it's a reality that we Argentines know very well. We have lived through this, we have been through this, because as I said earlier ever since we decided to abandon the model of Freedom that had made us rich we have been caught up in the downward spiral as part of which we are poorer and poorer day by day. 

So this is something we have lived through and we are here to warn you, about what can happen if the countries in the Western world that became rich through the model of Freedom stay on this path of servitude. The case of Argentina is an empirical demonstration that no matter how rich you may be or how much you may have in terms of natural resources or, how skilled your population may be, or educated or how many bars of gold you may have in the central bank. If measures are adopted that hinder the free functioning of markets, free competition, free price systems, if you hinder trade, if you attack private property, the only possible fate is poverty.

Therefore, in concluding, I would like to leave a message for all business people here and for those who are not here in person but are following from around the world. Do not be intimidated. Intimidated either by the political caste or by parasites who live off the state. Do not surrender to political class that only wants to stay power and retain its privileges. You are social benefactors. You're heroes. You're the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we've ever seen. Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral. If you make money, it's because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general wellbeing. Do not surrender to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution, the state is the problem itself. You are the true protagonists of this story. And rest assured that as from today Argentina is your staunch, unconditional ally.

Thank you very much and long live Freedom, damnit.

L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department

Also for those who mock "free" healthcare, claiming that nothing is free, some of whom even claim that that means healthcare workers will be slaves and forced to work for free:

L.P.D.: Libertarian Police Department | The New Yorker

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”

The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”

“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”

“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”

I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.

“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.

“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”

It didn’t seem like they did.

“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”

Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.

I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.

“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.

Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.

“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.

I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”

He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.

“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.

“Because I was afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”

I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.

“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”

He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.

Samuelson on the limits of Libertarianism

Love That Corporation - The New York Times
December 26, 1970

"Last Christmas I wrote a column on economics and love. Under the mistaken preconception that these, like oil and water, cannot mix, several people applauded either my innovation or my recantation.

Illustrative of this widespread misconception is the following typical query:

“Professor Samuelson, is it really a finding of economics that corporations should solely maximize, their profits, disregarding any special obligation to the public interest or to the humanitarian needs of their workers and consumers?”

I was glad to be able to reply, “Yes, Virginia, a large corporation these days not only may engage in social responsibility, it had damn well better try to do so.”...

It is true that Henry Ford II cannot operate today like Henry Ford, his grandfather. But neither can he operate like St. Francis of Assisi. The several hundred large corporations react to, and set, an evolving code of social conduct. So long as anyone does not depart too markedly from the ruling norm, it will not be penalized out of existence by market competition.

Thus, if International Harvester attempted by itself to solve the problem of general inflation, or even inflation, in farm equipment prices—or if its board set out, by wage and price policy, to rectify the inequitable distribution of incomes in the United States —after a very few years International Harvester would be eliminated from the roster of Galbraithian giants. The elimination process would be a bit slower, but none the less inexorable, if Allis-Chalmers, Deere, Caterpillar, Dodge Trucks, and General Motors joined it in this unilateral crusade for social justice.

To advance the good cause, one must not expect too much of altruism. It is nonsense to look to General Motors, or even the Big Three, for voluntary solution of the problem of air pollution. It's only good sense to impose by the force of law—by regulation and taxation—an obligation for the auto makers to produce exhaust systems that lessen pollution of the environment.

Corporations, I am afraid, are persons, born like the rest of us imperfect and subject to sin. Thus the small man is no better than the General Electric board. When I drove into a Los Angeles service station recently, I noted that the lead‐free gas pump was neglected. I soon found out why. Good people, men who love their wives and never fail to contribute to the collection plate; are not willing to pay more for gasoline which, if they alone use it will only imperceptibly purify the atmosphere for the rest of the community...

I quote a final example from the recent book by William F. Buckley Jr. Lapsing for once into good sense, Buckley is arguing that coercive limitations can in ‘such good causes as quarantine against plague add to total welfare and the algebraic total of human freedom:

“I asked Professor [Milton] Friedman, ‘Is it your position that, assuming the community decided to license the whores, it would be wrong to insist that they check in at regular intervals for health certificates? Yes, he thought that would be wrong. After all, if the customer contracts a venereal disease, the prostitute having warranted that she was clean, he has available a tort action against her.”

In response to a number of letters using this reductio ad absurdum as a reason for indicting economics, my reply is simply to demur. There is nothing in economics that leads to such a conclusion. Economics cannot tell us what to believe; it can help us to sort out the costs and benefits of various arrangements, as those costs and benefits are defined by the ethical value systems that we bring to economics.

Using civil suits to penalize undesired behavior after it takes place is indeed often a better social device than expensive and unpleasant inspection prior to behavior. But I cannot imagine a worse case to illustrate this purely tactical precept.

Thus, in principle, a veneral disease could be of irreversible type. Second, the courts would undoubtedly come to apply the doctrine of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, to transactions such as these—what does it mean for a prostitute to warrant that she is “clean”? Finally, what are the assets against which the victorious plaintiff can levy? The mind boggles.

Hard cases are said to make bad law. Paradoxes cannot be counted on to define good economics—not on Christmas or any other day of the year."

Links - 15th July 2020 (2) (Vaccines and the Market)

Goldman asks: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?' - "Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering “gene therapy” treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled “The Genome Revolution.”“The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. “While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.”"
Naturally, there're naive people (e.g. libertarians) who claim that the profit motive means that the private sector will be motivated to solve all problems

Big pharma failing to invest in new antibiotics, says WHO - "Big pharma continues to walk away from investment in new antibiotics and there are alarmingly few useful new drugs in the pipeline to deal with the worsening crisis of antibiotic resistance, according to the World Health Organization... There have been only eight new antibacterial agents approved since 1 July 2017, but overall, says the report, “they have limited clinical benefits”. There has been one important success story: pretomanid has been approved for patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis. But it was developed not by a pharmaceutical company but by the not-for-profit TB Alliance... The big pharmaceutical companies are not investing in antibiotic research because there is not a lucrative market for them. A novel drug needs to be kept for cases of dire necessity, not sold widely. Overuse will mean resistance to it inevitably develops and although the world badly needs the drugs, new classes of antibiotic are difficult to find."

Vaccines Are Profitable, So What? - The Atlantic - "While the main fixation of anti-vaccine groups is an old, discredited study linking vaccination to autism, another is a conspiracy theory circulated online that both doctors and pharmaceutical companies stand to profit financially from vaccination—which supposedly leads to perverse incentives in advocating for the public to vaccinate.But that argument is historically unfounded. Not only do pediatricians and doctors often lose money on vaccine administration, it wasn't too long ago that the vaccine industry was struggling with slim profit margins and shortages. The Economist wrote that "for decades vaccines were a neglected corner of the drugs business, with old technology, little investment and abysmal profit margins. Many firms sold their vaccine divisions to concentrate on more profitable drugs." In fact, vaccines were so unprofitable that some companies stopped making them altogether. In 1967, there were 26 vaccine manufactures. That number dropped to 17 by 1980. Ten years ago, the financial incentives to produce vaccines were so weak that there was growing concern that pharmaceutical companies were abandoning the vaccine business for selling more-profitable daily drug treatments. Compared with drugs that require daily doses, vaccines are only administered once a year or a lifetime. The pharmaceutical company Wyeth (which has since been acquired by Pfizer) reported that they stopped making the flu vaccine because the margins were so low. “Historically vaccines were produced at a relatively low price and sold with a low profit margin. They were add-ons to other products—mostly drugs—that pharmaceutical manufacturers were producing," explains Neal Halsey, professor of pediatric infectious diseases and international health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "The people working in vaccines described themselves as the stepchild of others, and they had to fight hard for the resources to develop new vaccines.”... profit margins are hard to know, as R&D (which can take up to 15 years), manufacturing, trials to test efficacy, and distribution costs for specific vaccines and drug products are not public... Pharmaceutical companies need incentives to keep producing vaccines, because regardless of profits the economic and social benefits of vaccination are huge—in lives and the billions of dollars saved."
Conflicts of interest apparently aren't a problem in certain scenarios

Why can’t we cure the common cold? - "researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to investigate one of the best-known ways of catching a cold. They infected volunteers with a cold virus and instructed them to kiss healthy test subjects on the mouth for at least one minute. (The instruction for participants was to use whichever technique was “most natural”.) Sixteen healthy volunteers were kissed by people with colds. The result: just one confirmed infection. The most common beliefs about how to treat the disease have turned out to be false. Dubious efficacy has done little to deter humankind from formulating remedies... Today, “winter remedy” sales in the UK reach £300m each year, though most over-the-counter products have not actually been proven to work. Some contain paracetamol, an effective analgesic, but the dosage is often sub-optimal. Taking vitamin C in regular doses does little to ward off disease. Hot toddies, medicated tissues and immune system “boosts” of echinacea or ginger are ineffective. Antibiotics do nothing for colds. The only failsafe means of avoiding a cold is to live in complete isolation from the rest of humanity. Although modern science has changed the way medicine is practised in almost every field, it has so far failed to produce any radically new treatments for colds. The difficulty is that while all colds feel much the same, from a biological perspective the only common feature of the various viruses that cause colds is that they have adapted to enter and damage the cells that line the respiratory tract. Otherwise, they belong to quite different categories of organisms, each with a distinct way of infecting our cells. This makes a catch-all treatment extremely tricky to formulate... An early experiment at the CCU involved a group of volunteers being made to take a bath and then to stand dripping wet and shivering in a corridor for 30 minutes. After they were allowed to get dressed, they had to wear wet socks for several hours. Despite a drop in body temperature, the group did not get any more colds than a control group of volunteers who had been kept cosy... viruses were behind 85% of asthma attacks in children; about half of those were rhinoviruses. Previously, most studies had detected viruses in fewer than 20% of asthma attacks. Johnston went on to find that rhinovirus also exacerbates symptoms in 95% of cases of smoker’s cough (formally known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD)... For doctors, vaccines are preferable to drugs because they shield the host from invasive organisms before they cause any damage. For pharmaceutical companies, vaccines are significantly less attractive. Not only do they take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, even if that process is successful – which it often isn’t – it can still be hard to make much money. Vaccines are usually injections administered on a single occasion, while drugs are taken for prolonged periods. And people don’t want to pay much for vaccines. “Everybody wants vaccines for pennies rather than pounds because you get them when you’re healthy,” Almond said. “Nobody wants to pay anything when they’re healthy. It’s like car insurance, right? But when you’re sick you will empty your wallet, whatever it takes.”... At this point in time, perhaps the biggest barrier to us curing the common cold is commercial. Researchers at universities can only go so far; the most generous grants from bodies such as the UK Medical Research Council are around £2m. It falls to pharmaceutical companies to carry out development beyond the initial proof of concept. “You’re looking at 10-15 years’ work, minimum, with teams of people, and you’re going to spend $1bn (£760m) at least,” Almond told me.Successes have been rare, and there have been spectacular flops... After the $1bn or so spent on development, there are also manufacturing and distribution costs to consider. There needs to be a return on the initial investment. “You sure as hell can’t do it if there’s not a market at the end, you’re wasting the company’s money, and if you do that too often, you’ll bankrupt the company,” Almond says. “There isn’t a conspiracy out there that says, ‘Let’s not do vaccines so people can get ill and we charge them a lot’, nothing like that. It genuinely isn’t easy.”"

Libertarians in Pandemics

B: Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism? - UnHerd

A: Why would it? Multiple governments and super-government agencies have absolutely dropped the ball, meanwhile private entities were the first to start implementing quarantine tactics weeks in advance of the government.

I think my case is stronger than ever.

Me: Doomsday cults see their predictions fail but cultists double down

Why would cognitive dissonance differ here?

A: The only thing I predicted incorrectly was the severity of the virus. I never doubted it would be mishandled at every level.

Me: Libertarians are powerless against irresponsible spring breakers

US students party on spring break despite coronavirus - BBC News

A: I seem to believe that they went on spring break despite the government issuing quarantine orders. What would you prefer? We start lining up college kids and executing them with a shot to the back of the head?

Me: "defying recommendations from the federal government and Center for Disease Control (CDC) over the coronavirus outbreak"

Recommendations aren't orders

Besides which you seem to be unaware that governments have many ways of enforcing rules besides execution by shooting squad

You don't seriously believe that if you exceed the speed limit by 10kmph, you're going to get shot?

A: If get a ticket and I refuse to pay it, men with guns come to my house and try to take me away and if I refuse to go with them, they almost certainly will shoot me. So yes, they are willing to shoot me over a speeding ticket aren't they?

And you seem to have missed my point. This isn't exactly a libertarian wonderland. They went on government's watch. I don't know how you can say that's a failure of the small government crowd.

C: I think this thread makes you the one who is right. Well spotted.

D: God, I hope so. Quicker than Ayn Rand rushing to her mailbox to get her Social Security check.


The original article is pretty good (which is why libertarians ignore its points):

Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

"What does it say about human nature that despite repeated urging and warning, despite a bombardment of information, people continued to congregate and mix in ways that put them and others at non-trivial risk of a potentially fatal disease?

And what, in turn, will the necessity to ban such congregations mean for our future understanding of the way the state should view and treat people as they go about their economic lives?...

Free marketeers, explicitly or otherwise, tend to rest their argument for unfettered market interactions on the idea that these are dealings between rational actors. In markets, as in life, people left to make their own decisions will, in aggregate, make spending choices that benefit themselves, thus allowing markets to price and allocate resources in the most efficient way.

This is the ‘rational agent’ theory of economic behaviour and it’s one of the most fundamental ideas of our age. It’s the basis for most economics teaching and the foundation of most ideas of market operation, regulation and consumer law (even if there are quite a few people who argue, quite persuasively, that it’s wrong).

Now let’s go back to the people, in London and elsewhere, who last week continued to crowd into pubs and gyms.

Why did they do it? Why was it necessary for Boris Johnson, instinctively liberal, to order the pubs to close? You only need to take such measures if people are either not nice or not rational. Neither explanation bodes well for libertarianism or free markets.

How rational were the choices made by those pub-goers or the folk crowded into parks and markets? Were they coolly assessing the pleasure they would derive from a few drinks or a stroll with friends, and assigning it a value that outweighed the risk they and others would face resulting from their choice?

If so, I think that raises a significant problem for libertarian views of human nature as benign. People who think their enjoyment of a pint of lager justifies risking the lives of others do not measure up to that nice idea that, left to our own devices, we generally do the right thing.

Or here’s another explanation for pub-going in a time of coronavirus. Maybe the people who continued to mingle were being neither good nor bad but merely inaccurately estimating the consequences and costs of their actions. Here we get to those other economists, the behavioural ones, who argue that we make our allocative choices not on the basis of neat, orderly mental spreadsheets weighing cost and benefit, but because of messy, complicated human frailty.

The decision to keep going to the pub during a pandemic looks a lot like an illustration of what Daniel Kahneman called the availability heuristic, the tendency of people to over-state the probability of familiar things they can easily imagine, and underestimate the chance of hard-to-concieve things happening.

How many of us can easily conjure up a simple mental picture of an invisible virus spreading exponentially through a population of tens of millions, and be clear in our minds about who we might be harming by popping down the local for one last pint or a walk in the park? I don’t think the Londoners who continued to go out drinking or strolling were callous. I think they just couldn’t easily conceive the potential consequences or the probability of those consequences.

The choice to go on going out was, in other words, hard to describe as rational, even in the narrow terms of rational choice theory. And if people aren’t rational about a situation that risks tens of thousands of lives and deep damage to our society and economy, how much weight should we put on the idea of rational actors in future?

Arguably, this shouldn’t even be a debatable point. There’s a good case to be made that the 2007/8 financial crisis should have put more of a dent in the idea of rational economic actors.

When no less a figure than Alan Greenspan admitted that markets did not work the way he had believed they did and that he had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders” then policymakers the world over should have shown more scepticism about ‘rationality’."


While obsessed with simplistic economic claims, libertarians don't just want government non-interference in markets

This can be applied to other contexts too, e.g. mandating seatbelts

Has Alan Greenspan been disowned by libertarians yet for not blaming the 2008 financial crisis on government regulation?

Morality in the 21st Century: Michael Sandel

BBC Radio 4 - Morality in the 21st Century, Episode 15: Michael Sandel

"‘I think that we've lost the ability to reason together in public about big moral questions. And by moral questions, I mean, what makes for a just society, how to live a good life, what we owe one another as citizens. These are the big questions that people care about. That animate passions and moral and spiritual disagreement.

And yet our public life seems to leave little space for public discussion of these questions. There's a kind of emptiness, a moral hollowness in the terms of public discourse. And I think this goes a long way toward explaining the mounting frustration that citizens in democracies throughout the world have toward politics’

‘You mean that they're looking for or they're listening for moral ideals, and they're just not hearing them.’

‘They're listening for them and not hearing them. But also, I think there's a yearning, a great yearning, for democratic citizens to be able to bring their moral and even spiritual convictions to bear in debating big questions about justice, equality and inequality, the nature of rights. And yet so much of what passes for public discourse these days consists either of narrow technocratic, managerial talk, which inspires no one.

Or where passion does enter, we have shouting matches. In which politicians and citizens shout at one another on cable television and talk radio and the floors of Parliament without really listening. And I think this is why people have so tuned away from established political parties and, and politicians.

It's happened at the same time over the past several decades, when markets and market thinking have come to dominate increasing swaths of, of social and civic life. And I think there's a connection between moral hollowing out of public discourse and the increasing reliance on market thinking and market values to decide important public questions…

The great danger of this is it encourages us to think of ourselves more as consumers than as citizens. And when we think of ourselves as consumers, we bring to politics, our interests, our preferences, and the question how best can we advance them. But to think of ourselves as citizens, is to seek opportunities to deliberate with our fellow citizens about how to shape the collective destiny.

And when we can't do that, when our civic identities become withered and impoverished and have little scope for exercise, we feel disempowered and we are disempowered, which I think explains much of the backlash we're seeing in the protest against established politics and and political parties'...

‘When you started writing about these things, way back now, actually, in almost I think your first book about liberalism, and the limits of justice, your main worry was what you call the unsituated self. You felt that politics didn't make enough room for the reality in most people's lives, of families, communities, traditions, and so on and so forth. That what you call constitutive attachments. But aren't we seeing today, an opposite kind of danger, which has got the name of identity politics? Too much groupishness and not enough abstract individuals?’

‘Well, that is one way, Jonathan of diagnosing what afflicts us today. To, that instead of being atomized or abstract, reasoning selves, we identify too closely or too insistently with the particular groups or tribes, or identities that claim us. But I would describe our predicament in a slightly different way.

I think the most damaging or deadening aspects of what often goes into the name identity politics reflects a reaction against the demand, that we separate ourselves. From communities and tradition and family and loyalties and solidarities. I think part of the difficulty we have today is that our self understandings, especially in the last several decades, have so been made over in the image of what I've called the unencumbered self, that we are hungry for a public life of larger meaning. We are seeking ways of giving collective and public expression to shared histories and cultures and communities’


One example of how libertarianism hollows out public life

Observations - 13th March 2019

Amused that Visa, Mastercard & JCB charge a certain merchant 4% but American Express only does 1.5%

Apparently River Valley high made students who were dating break up
(Friend from RV: "I don't know about "make" but I heard during my time the disciplinary mistress had called up the parents of two of my ex-classmates
(I was in a different sec 3 class by then) who were dating, to check if the parents knew and approved of their relationship. And both sides were aware and ok with it so no further action was taken, I believe.
my memory is fuzzy and it could be that the disciplinary mistress did try to break them up but ended up with calling parents to rally support for ending the relationship)"

"Star Wars and Star Trek universes collide and stormtroopers are facing a bunch of red shirts. They start firing at each other immmediately, and as usual stormtroopers can't hit anything, but the red shirts collapse and die anyway."

Intrigued by a virtue ethics argument against animal cruelty (that animal cruelty is not wrong because of animal suffering but because cruelty makes you a bad person). But then that would also apply to violent video games and BDSM

"Dad reports that CNY songs are a Northern thing as he doesn't recall any Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese, or Hakka songs from his childhood in the 30s and 40s."

If child porn makes people abuse children, do snuff films make people murder?

"Telling someone they can't be sad because others have it worse is like saying someone can't be happy because others have it better."

"When I was in school I came across an old science textbook from the 80s. I read in it that the scientific consensus was we were going to run out of oil by the year 2000. Lol."

I thought the UK's conditions to retain permanent residence were lax - visiting the country every 2 years. But New Zealand's PR never expires even if you haven't visited the country in forever

"The more you try to justify yourself to people like that, the more it acknowledges that they have the right to question you. It shows you think they get to be your inquisitor, and once you grant someone that sort of power over you, they just push more and more." - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality / Eliezer Yudkowsky

"I think a loss of 'neighborliness' is mostly a good thing. Having a society with excessive cohesion is repressive."
Ahh libertarians. Then again, this explains a lot about their fetish for market fundamentalism

Ironic that Adaware, which is supposed to be "the Internet's security and privacy leader", hijacks my browser and makes itself my default search engine and changes my new tab page - just like malware


How do you distinguish a genuine call for discussion or explanation from an invitation to virtue signal?

"Their favourite thing to do is post images of people holding tiki torches at Charlottesville, not actually doing anything wrong, while saying Antifa is justified."

"The message sent by recalling someone for one too lenient sentence while no judges ever get recalled for handing out 30 year sentences like Halloween candy is apparently something California voters refused to consider" - @notwokieleaks on Twitter on the Aaron Persky (Brock Turner judge) recall

Why were so many people were so upset about Trump's "Gag Order" on the EPA when many other democracies don't allow government employees to communicate directly with the public about their work? (Ireland, Australia, Canada)

"I like the annoy feminists by saying I make it a point not to explain anything to women just in case kenna mansplaining
Reality can explain things to them better when shit goes wrong"
"There was a meme going around, where a feminist asked a guy to explain what is mansplaining"

Libertarianism and the Public Good

A: I agree and support free water movement in all F&B:
Mandate that businesses serve free water

B: Translated: Let's force businesses to act against their judgement/self-interest because I want free water

A: self-interest without consideration of the greater common good may destroy the very environment that keep us healthy if not alive.

B: If something acts against a restaurant owner's individual good - how can it be said to be for the "common/public" good? Unless you're saying that the restaurant owner is not part of the "common/public"?

A: individual benefit must not outweigh or compromise the common good.

B: That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that individual benefit makes up the common good. The common good is nothing except for the collection of individual goods. If you deny one individual good - then it ceases to be for the common good.

Me: So we shouldn't ban smoking in hospitals. Even if 100 patients die it's bad to deny a smoker's rights

B: I’m sure private hospitals ban smoking too. See - I’m for private regulation, not public regulation.

Me: So private hospitals can ban smoking but not public ones?

B: At least where the “right to ban” is concerned. Because public ones are funded by all taxpayers (smoking ones included) - they have to serve them all equally. Private ones don’t have such moral obligations.

My stance applies equally for public schools - that because they take taxpayers monies, they should teach all ideas equally (both for and against the government). Private schools don't have such moral obligations either.

Me: Creationism?

B: If they are a private school, sure. Public schools, they are morally obligated to teach creationism and non-creationism, because there are both creationists and non-creationists funding them.

Me: There're flat earther taxpayers too. Time to expand the curriculum!


Ridiculous as this may seem, there're strong parallels with the stance that "if the government gives an organisation $1, that means the government endorses everything it does"

Observations - 7th May 2018

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today." - Thomas Sowell

***

If the courts in Singapore knew that the right legal ruling would cause racial riots, how would they rule? National Propaganda always talks about the Maria Hertogh riots, but they never say what should've been done. Probably because there would've been no good outcome

If so many laws in Singapore have an exemption for the government doesn't that mean that the government is above the law? Rule of law means that the government is constrained by the law, after all

One big problem with the National Myth of NS is that it's played like a trump card that no one can ever argue with. Given the breathless rhetoric, it's almost like serving NS is as good as dying for your country. And when it conflicts with other narratives (like importing foreigners to augment/replace the shrinking population)...


Why are libertarians so in love with markets and property rights, excluding other forms of human interaction and organisation?

If, as leftists tell us, free trade agreements are anti democratic aren't international law and international organisations anti-democratic? Down with the UN!


What happens if someone with a guide dog wants to enter a space occupied by someone with a dog allergy?

Meritocracy and social immobility are only contradictory if one assumes merit is randomly distributed in the population

"The thread could be about chocolate chip cookies and you'd find a way to bring Trump into the discussion. 😁"

"Most US police departments only require a high school diploma. Pretty scary."
Why is elitism okay in certain situations?

[On Crazy Rich Asians] "In any case, it’s a fiction? Surely, it perpetuates certain stereotypes but hey i dont watch harry potter and believe there are some magical beings flying the skies of UK."

"a Hollywood reproduction of a Hollywood storyline... with Asian faces... Hollywood studios and a Hollywood distribution company. Plus Kevin Kwan and Jon Chu are only slightly more Asian than I am (and I have no Asian heritage AFAIK)! As they say in the movie ... Asian on the outside, White on the inside."
The bar for "diversity" gets ever higher

Quite sure that those who demand that the media must portray "reality" would protest and complain about racism if the majority of drug addicts in Singapore media were Malay

"Adolf Hitler was a failed liberal arts student who blamed everything on ethnicities he deemed privileged."

"there was a discussion thread on the Holocaust
and some black person said fuck Jews, black people are dying
long story short, someone came out and said "Jews never asked for anything special cos they went thru the Holocaust. They just carried on. BLack people are often asking for handouts because of something that happened hundreds of years ago to their ANCESTOR"

"a liberal acquaintance was challenging me to prove that liberals were less tolerant of dissenting views than conservatives, i posted him the studies which showed liberals were 3 times more likely to unfriend.
he unfriended me."


"What Trump has done since election:
- Made nothing but positive statements;
- Said gay marriage is established law
- Won't repeal Obamacare but may improve it
- Refuses to accept presidential salary;
-Told his supporters that are causing issue to stop;

What Hilary's supporters have done since his election:
- Rioted;
- Attempted to change politics via mob rule;
- Disowned their children"


‘’Women make up more than half of the world’s population and potential. It is neither just nor practical for their voices to go unheard… Women need a seat at the table. And when that isn’t available, then you know what? They need to create their own table.’’
"Said Meghan markle...... Marrying into royalty.... Rather than making her own table"

"What boys [will be] boys really means: "guys rough house and are kind of gross"
What feminist say boys [will be] boys means: "Men believe rape is ok especially if they were wearing something revealing""

Left vs Right

"Foremost is the conservative skepticism about the ideal of progress itself. Ever since the first modern conservative, Edmund Burke, suggested that humans were too flawed to think up schemes for improving their condition and were better off sticking with traditions and institutions that kept them from the abyss, a major stream of conservative thought has been skeptical about the best—laid plans of mice and men. The reactionary fringe of conservatism, recently disinterred by Trumpists and the European far right (chapter 23), believes that Western civilization has careened out of control since some halcyon century, having abandoned the moral clarity of traditional Christendom for a decadent secular fleshpot that, if left on its current course, will soon implode from terrorism, crime, and anomie.

Well, that’s wrong. Life before the Enlightenment was darkened by starvation, plagues, superstitions, maternal and infant mortality, marauding knight—warlords, sadistic torture—executions, slavery, witch hunts, and genocidal crusades, conquests, and wars of religion? Good riddance. The arcs in figures 5-1 through 18-4 show that as ingenuity and sympathy have been applied to the human condition, life has gotten longer, healthier, richer, safer, happier, freer, smarter, deeper, and more interesting. Problems remain, but problems are inevitable.

The left, too, has missed the boat in its contempt for the market and its romance with Marxism. Industrial capitalism launched the Great Escape from universal poverty in the 19th century and is rescuing the rest of humankind in a Great Convergence in the 21st. Over the same time span, communism brought the world terror-famines, purges, gulags, genocides, Chernobyl, megadeath revolutionary wars, and North Korea—style poverty before collapsing everywhere else of its own internal contradictions. Yet in a recent survey 18 percent of social science professors identified themselves as Marxist, and the words capitalist and free market still stick in the throats of most intellectuals. Partly this is because their brains autocorrect these terms to unbridled, unregulated, unfettered, or untrammeled free markets, perpetuating a false dichotomy: a free market can coexist with regulations on safety, labor, and the environment, just as a free country can coexist with criminal laws. And a free market can coexist with high levels of spending on health, education, and welfare (chapter 9)—indeed, some of the countries with the greatest amount of social spending also have the greatest amount of economic freedom.

To be fair to the left, the libertarian right has embraced the same false dichotomy and seems all too willing to play the left‘s W straw man. Right—wing libertarians (in their 21st—century Republican Party version) have converted the observation that too much regulation can be harmful (by over—empowering bureaucrats, costing more to society than it delivers in benefits, or protecting incumbents against competition rather than consumers against harm) into the dogma that less regulation is always better than more regulation. They have converted the observation that too much social spending can be harmful (by creating perverse incentives against work and undermining the norms and institutions of civil society) into the dogma that any amount of social spending is too much. And they have translated the observation that tax rates can be too high into a hysterical rhetoric of “liberty” in which raising the marginal tax rate for income above $400,000 from 35 to 39.6 percent means turning the country over to jackbooted storm troopers. Often the refusal to seek the optimum level of government is justified by an appeal to Friedrich Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom that regulation and welfare lay out a slippery slope along which a country will slide into penury and tyranny.

The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism. The totalitarian governments of the 20th century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs.And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness. As we saw, no developed country runs on right—wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major —isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile—high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals. A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well—being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. It is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. As Pat Paulsen noted, ‘‘If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles.”"

--- Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress / Steven Pinker

Observations - 7th March 2018

The most profound form of US exceptionalism is not thinking that the US is best at everything, but that it works on a different logic from the rest of the world (besides gun laws, also:
- Requiring photo ID to vote is racist and anti-democratic, even though many first world liberal democracies like Canada and Australia do
- If the government censors speech in any way that is a slippery slope leading to the state controlling everything you say
- Military parades are only done by totalitarian dictatorships - like France and Canada)
Addendum: If you abolish tipping, service staff will starve
If someone resists arrest and the police officer is forced to subdue him, he is an hero (sic) and a victim of police brutality
Imperial units are superior to metric because ???
Keywords: American Exceptionalism

Snappy soundbites and protest slogans drive polarisation as positions get simplified and collapsed. Then you need to choose one side or the other to avoid being slammed by both. Also one can have ideals while realising the need to work within reality - thus seeming contradictory


"Civil wars take two or more relatively evenly matched sides. Fat blokes with rifles (whether or not semi-automatic) no match for a half decent military"

"If you install an alarm system, it makes it more likely that a burglar will attack the home of a neighbour. That would make it a negative externality."

The failure of strata mall owners to coordinate and modernise debunks anarchist/libertarian fantasies of self organisation and mutual aid in the absence of government

"Luck is probability taken personally"

Note to self: When Pocket/Read It Later has the "component returned failure code", "ns_error_malformed_uri" error, logging in and out will clear it

"All employers worth their salt in Denmark actually provide private insurance for employees because the public health care here is notoriously inefficient in spite of being allocated a fuckton of tax money. The Danish state is a leech."

Was polled on my sentiments on various aspects of life, apparently for gahmen. Surveyor said I had a very unique personality

Shame from being held up to other people's standards of machismo is temporary
Death is forever

If someone owes you money, maybe sending him 1 cent a month so it will appear on his bank account and annoy him will guilt him into paying

I can understand non-disclosure agreements. But not non-disclosure agreements that don't allow you to acknowledge their own existence

"Many people are judgemental, yet sensitive. A very bad combination."


The best reason to keep your Facebook private - so you lessen the chances of being reported by idiots and getting zucced

Amused that people imagine that lobbyists from big tech companies push for net neutrality out of the goodness of their hearts. Cui bono?

I miss the days when Google Doodles were rare. And thus actually meant something.


I actually prefer the taste of Coke Zero to Coke

People who are dogmatic about food are even more annoying than religious fundamentalists - because food doesn't have the anti-religious stigma that pervades secular society

I'm sure the first person to put tomatoes on what later became pizza got shouted down as ruining Italian food

Indian guy told me I was the first Chinese person he'd seen eating with his hands. Strike one for racial harmony?

What do you do with a libertarian?

A: If you're one of those Singaporeans who criticises the PAP for not providing social welfare benefits but at the same time criticise the recently suggested higher tax rates, you most definitely fit into the definition of a hypocrite. That is unless of course you subscribe to an economic theory of how wealth can be created out of thin air - in that case, please share.

Students for Liberty - Singapore - Posts

Dislike tax increases? Then learn about this thing called “libertarianism”

B: Many libertarians nowadays appear to be former liberals that are fed up with the current arc of overbearing progressivism, but haven’t shed idealistic notions about human nature yet.

C: "Former liberals" could have just read economics.

A: You sound like you have no idea what you are talking about. The whole idea of free markets (and libertarianism in general) is built on the basis that human nature IS flawed, that's why we need trial & error discovery processes through markets, instead of holding the truly idealistic notion that benevolent government politicians work in bureaucracy and interest group-free environments of politics. Read a classical liberal book, please.

B: Classical liberals aren’t really what liberals are when we talk about them nowadays, are they?

Me: Those who understand economics won't be libertarians

Because they'll know about things like risk pooling, positive externalities from education, hyperbolic discounting, the power of compound interest, public goods and the tragedy of the Commons etc

B: Maybe they focus more on the error side of trail and error.

C: Trail and error happens in the market place, not in government policies if you must know.

A: ?? It's precisely because libertarians know about the tragedy of the commons that allows them to have such a strong stance on property rights. Also, positive externalities from education? You mean positive POLITICAL externalities from education, my friend. Why do you suppose most of our citizens grow up believing in the great deeds of our leader? ;)

Me: The market place doesn't have the data to review past trials

Not sure why only libertarians believe in property rights. I believe pretty much everyone believes in property rights. There are very few communists nowadays

D: Alamak, knowledge does not exist in a single consolidated entity, Gabriel. You think governments have the data to review all past trials meh? Government is not more omniscient than you and me la bro. I strongly suggest you to read I, Pencil by Leonard Read:

Read, I, Pencil | Library of Economics and Liberty

And hor, if people believe in property rights, then they will be like the American Founding Fathers what - that time Britain want to tax them they already revolt liao. People nowadays don't even know what "property rights" really mean, how to say that they "believe in it"? Like a bit weird right

Me: Positive externalities

Positive externalities from education is quite an established view in economics

Not sure what the pencil supply chain has to do with data collection and consolidation

No one ever said government was omniscient but most people know governments have more data than virtually all private entities

Big Data and Analytics in Government

And the American revolution is???

A: "Those who understand economics won't be libertarians
Because they'll know about things like risk pooling, positive externalities from education, hyperbolic discounting, the power of compound interest, public goods and the tragedy of the Commons etc"

Almost every single concept you mentioned stems from the neoclassical school of economics, which is the favourite target dummy by economists (both Left and Right) from across the discipline. You throw terms like Tragedy of the commons around but I bet dollars to doughnuts you haven't read a single word of Ostromnian research on common resource pool governance where Hardin's concept has been proven both theoretically and empirically false. Nope, those who have little to no background in economics tend to be the most vociferous critics of markets.

Me: You don't have to think markets are a bad idea to think libertarianism is naive

You might as well say only fascists are against communism

Not sure what tossing around the big words is supposed to mean

If you have a point please make it instead of trying to confuse people

A: Yep you've made my point. The fact that you consider these "big words" just speaks volumes about your ignorance on economics. You're like the uni student that sits through 1 econs class then carries those 101 beliefs with them through their whole life. It's just amusing how you're so steadfast in your anti-libertarian views. And here I thought you New Atheists love to preach on and on about "rationality"

Me: Actually I have a first class honours degree in economics

Which is more than I suspect most of you can say about yourselves

A: That doesn't mean anything. Most mainstream econ degrees are applied quantitative mathematics in the positivist vein. They neglect theory, and they neglect the critques of the foundations that this school of economics is built on. So of course if you're holed up in your neoclassical assumptions, then Akerlof and Stiglitz's market failure theories is your biblical truth. If you're educated in economics, then formulate an argument on why free markets are "naive", stop throwing broad sweeping statements around.

Me: Here we go

The Tragedy of the Commons: How Elinor Ostrom Solved One of Life's Greatest Dilemmas - Evonomics

"groups are capable of avoiding the tragedy of the commons without requiring top-down regulation, at least if certain conditions are met (Ostrom 1990, 2010). She summarized the conditions in the form of eight core design principles: 1) Clearly defined boundaries; 2) Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs; 3) Collective choice arrangements; 4) Monitoring; 5) Graduated sanctions; 6) Fast and fair conflict resolution; 7) Local autonomy; 😎 Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance)."

This is very different from "Hardin's concept has been proven both theoretically and empirically false"

So much so that you are grossly misrepresenting Ostrom's research

Shame on you

A: Did you even understand the article? The author is saying that Ostrom's research DISPROVES the commonly-held notion that the commons will automatically lead to a tragedy, given that certain conditions are present. This is exactly what in line with what I said, that Hardin's concept is false. Goodness gracious.

And in case you haven't realised, the findings of the scholars working in this tradition actually imply an anti-statist position.

E: Don't call the burn unit. Call the farm. We're gonna need a whole pig to replace the skin on this one.

F: Yea Gabriel was my NUS batch mate. I can attest to his expertise in economics.

I would like to suggest that people don't try to claim expertise and dress down others here unless you possess real expertise. There are a lot of real experts here who don't act all-knowing.

B: Libertarianism is rational?

The proponents often seen to be somewhat religious in their belief of it.

A: "unless you possess real expertise". Nice argument from authority. Fallacies 101. I would like to suggest you don't try to judge others by their accolades and certificates but to actually address their arguments (which in that case would require you to actually possess some knowledge of the argument at hand).

E: eh fist you say Gab must not have an Econs background. Then when he explains he has, you say it is irrelevant. Which is it?

Me: You're behaving like a creationist who finds something Darwin said that was wrong and proclaims that this means evolution is a scam

While Hardin was pessimistic about the possibility of the Commons not being ruined without intervention, the concept has been used by many since Hardin, and given that 8 conditions must apply for the Commons to be self-regulating it is hardly proof that the tragedy of the Commons has been proven empirically false

Furthermore Hardin does not say government is the only solution:

"Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed."

And might I note that it's hilarious how you first go on about how economics proves you are right, then mock me for not knowing economics, and end up by proclaiming that mainstream economics is rubbish (ironically econs 101 and most libertarian arguments rely on neoclassical assumptions)

Make up your mind, won't you?

G: I'm not an economist... But i would love to suggest that someone here not keep deflecting and changing the argument.

But then again, this is definitely entertaining like the last time the liberty boys posted here

B: That's why it's a niche market, possibly for people who want to have some kind of modern religion to feel more advanced than others.

Me: Actually even for libertarians these people are fringe. For example most libertarians believe the government needs to provide public goods like roads (D: "are you saying that without the government, these things won’t exist? Private parks and roads do exist, you know.")

As Slate notes (What Is Austrian Economics? And Why Is Ron Paul Keep Obsessed With It?),

"“Austrians” in Paul’s sense refers to something narrower, specifically the thought of Ludwig Von Mises and his student Murray Rothbard. It is a form of capitalism that is even more libertarian and anarchic than that espoused by many libertarians. Rothbard‘s followers, most prominently longtime Paul associate and founder of the Mises Institute Lew Rockwell, have been waging a decades-long war against the Koch brothers and the more mainstream form of libertarianism the Kochs represent."

(the article also mentions several of Austrian Economics's failures in explaining several economic phenomena)

Although these jokers name drop the Nobel Prize Winner Friedrich Hayek, I will add that even Hayek disavowed some libertarian concepts (for example he accepted government spending on certain causes as an articulation of society's ideals)

Wikipedia gives a good summary:

Austrian School - Wikipedia

"After the 1940s, Austrian economics can be divided into two schools of economic thought, and the school "split" to some degree in the late 20th century. One camp of Austrians, exemplified by Mises, regards neoclassical methodology to be irredeemably flawed; the other camp, exemplified by Friedrich Hayek, accepts a large part of neoclassical methodology and is more accepting of government intervention in the economy"

So these people are even misrepresenting the Austrian School of economics

B: The whole right to personal nuclear weapons thing is somewhat of a giveaway for being fringe.


Keywords: economics useful nobel, mainstream economics

Libertarians say the darndest things

On the Las Vegas mass shooting:

Melissa Chen - There is simply no other country on earth that...

Davin Chee: What happens when guns are banned is not merely "the bad guys get guns" -- what happens when guns are banned is that the government retains their right to have guns, and their citizens are left completely hapless against any form of tyranny.

Bans are not magic, and there's is no magic bullet to solve this problem.

Joshua Insel: Try using a gun against tanks and drones.

Me: There is no magic bullet, but fewer bullets sure will help


NRA: "We need more guns!"
"We need even more guns!"
"More guns!"
"Why does this keep happening?"

Davin Chee: Anyway, I'm afraid that many here are missing the point - I'm not advocating for MORE guns - who is?

I'm saying that citizens having the right to properly arm themselves (which may or may not result in more guns) would lead to better outcomes to all. It's the right to self-defense I'm concerned about, not the amount of guns per se.

Brenan Nierman: That is a stupid argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would entitle every citizen to an atomic bomb or, at the very least, a tank.
What happened to Original Intent?
Then anyone who wanted a flintlock could have one.

Jackson Piper: No amount of American citizens possessing any arsenal of weapons is going to make the American public an effective fighting force in the event that the government becomes totalitarian. The idea that citizen militias could fend of the government is ludicrous, and has been for quite some time - in fact, despite the mythologizing of the militias in the American Revolution, it was the regular army and the aid provided by France that won the war for us, not Johnny Tremain.

Chris Tunstall: What is it with gun nuts and their paranoia about the government coming to get them?

Davin Chee: Brenan Nierman I'm of the opinion that any citizen should have the right to own an atomic bomb/tank assuming that it does not pose a threat to anyone else's property except theirs. Possessing a gun is one thing - possessing a gun and pointing it at your neighbour's house; that's another.

Besides, why the double standard? Why is government allowed to own weapons of mass destruction but private citizens aren't? Is the government somehow beyond the law?

Me: If I take $100 from your wallet and threaten to lock you in a room if you say no, it's extortion

If the government takes $100 from your wallet and threatens to lock you in a room if you say no, it's taxation

This is only a double standard to a libertarian

Brenan Nierman: I think we dealt with that back in high school when we studied what the role of government is.
It’s kind of different from a private citizen.

J Leighton Leach: You said that the Second is an anti-tyranny mechanism, which is inane.

Apart from insinuating that the engineers of the Constitution actually intentionally included a self-destruct button into their painstakingly crafted system of government, you've implied that a loose-knit, paunchy army of Jasons and Travises could remotely expect to outfight the United States Armed forces, or even their local SWATs, or even a flock of drones.

Davin Chee: Gabriel Seah I don't get what you're trying to say. Both are morally abhorrent.

Brenan Nierman Right, and they're different because of magic. I get it! :P Only private citizens have to be accountable to the law. Government, which sets these laws, doesn't have to be.

Zubin Madon: Govts have been toppled in many countries by mass movements without using automatic weapons. That's the silliest excuse to allow guns. Countries with strict gun control have minuscule amounts of gun-related deaths compared to the US. That's a very plain fact. It's amazing how gun nuts can't see that.

Brenan Nierman: When private citizens elect the government and give it certain powers, this is normally what one expects.
If a guy flying under the radar can do this with an automatic — which in your universe you’d think him perfectly fine in having one or seventeen — just think what he’d do with an atomic bomb!
And if he’s some religious nutcase who thinks his pathetic deity will reward him for killing all the Jews and infidels he can, hey! In your universe, that’s just too bad!
Politics and statecraft are about real people, grown up people, making decisions that are, often, compromises at best with the rigid ideologies that read so well in books.
I advise a deep immersion in THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO, Aristotle’s POLITICS, Locke’s SECOND TREATISE, Hobbes’s LEVIATHAN, Rousseau’s THE SOCIAL CONTRACT and the writings of Jefferson and Lincoln.
And then read Ayn Rand and see how she measures up against the big boys.
Here’s a clue: she doesn’t.

The Size of the State and Declining Equality

Podcasts | History Extra: Anglo-Saxon treasures, and did Britain invent freedom? (27th March 2014)

Rob Attar: Have there been any occasions in history where this level of freedom has actually had any detrimental effects. For example, in making it harder to govern people or reducing equality, perhaps?

Daniel Hannan (on "How We Invented Freedom and Why it Matters"): Y'know, it's a really fascinating question, that. In terms of making it harder to govern people, no. I think the answer to insurrection or violence or civil unrest is more liberty, it's not more control. If you give people more responsibility they behave more responsibly.

But the question of equality is a really fascinating one. This is something that I'd like to get into in more depth, it was something that I came across when researching the book and I haven't really properly had time to explore, but if you look at the really fundamental elemental indicators of human equality.

So, you know: age, longevity, infant mortality, literacy, calorie intake, height - we have been becoming a more equal society suddenly since the calamity of the Norman Conquest. That approximation, that growing equality only stopped within the last 60 years in the West, and on one or two measures it's gone into reverse. Now those 60 years, we can argue about why that happened - there are all sorts of different theories out there. Y'know, some people say it has to do with women having entered the workforce, and we find our spouses through work now and this has created a superclass - I'm not a sociologist, I don't know.

But one thing that I absolutely can say, because it's empirically obvious, is that slowing of the equalisation has happened when the government has been bigger than ever: when the tax take and the control of the economy by the state has been at its largest.

So it's not just a question of saying state-enforced equality carries a high price in terms of overall prosperity or overall freedom - the bigger the State is, the less equal society has been. That's the, the extraordinary paradox over the late 20th century. So absolutely I don't think there is a price. I think if you have competition, there is a automatic regulator that tends to level people up.

Ayn Rand vs Lord of the Rings

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

- Kung Fu Monkey: Ephemera 2009 (7) / John Rogers

Somalia: Libertarian Paradise

the 24 types of Libertarian

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." - Lewis Carroll

***

Libertarian Reluctantly Calls Fire Department | The Onion

CHEYENNE, WY—After attempting to contain a living-room blaze started by a cigarette, card-carrying Libertarian Trent Jacobs reluctantly called the Cheyenne Fire Department Monday. "Although the community would do better to rely on an efficient, free-market fire-fighting service, the fact is that expensive, unnecessary public fire departments do exist," Jacobs said. "Also, my house was burning down." Jacobs did not offer to pay firefighters for their service.

Libertarianism Is Marxism of the Right

"Because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before...

If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism...

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it... A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice... But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.

Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it... this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it... Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill...

If all we want is limited freedom, then mere liberalism will do, or even better, a Burkean conservatism that reveres traditional liberties...

Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians...

Libertarian naïveté extends to politics. They often confuse the absence of government impingement upon freedom with freedom as such. But without a sufficiently strong state, individual freedom falls prey to other more powerful individuals. A weak state and a freedom-respecting state are not the same thing, as shown by many a chaotic Third-World tyranny."


A better article in the thread:

"For a great many people, Ayn Rand is a glowing light in a dark abyss, an intellectual beacon that draws them into a circle of rational illumination.

She has a certain fascination for me, too, but the gravitation is different. It is the appalling spell cast by a train wreck: the grotesque allure of crumpled metal, pools of fuel and oil, shattered ties, wrenched rails -- the shining products of the human mind, smashed by some great error...

Read Atlas Shrugged, and you see humanity with an odd double vision.

There are "the men of the mind" -- the innovative, the productive, the strivers, those rigorous with themselves and all others: the Francisco d'Anconias, the Hank Reardens, the John Galts.

And there are their opposite numbers -- the "looters," the "mystics," the spiritual and literal thugs, the moist weaklings, the death-worshipers...

Here is half of the problem with Rand's view of human nature: Are most of us really the dull-witted drones or outright leeches who inhabit so much of Atlas Shrugged?...

Rand had a record of thoroughgoing disdain for those who didn't measure up to her intellectual standards.

"When anyone compliments me," she says in Barbara Branden's biography, "my first question is: What's my estimate of the source of the compliments? Is it a mind I respect? When it's a mind that understands what I've done, then it's an enormous pleasure. Anything less than that -- no. I don't really want anything but the response of top minds."

In the wake of reviewers' eviscerating response to Atlas Shrugged, Rand felt "like an adult sentenced to live in a world of children"...

Atlas Shrugged is a hymn to the human spirit... Hymns, of course, are sung to gods, and gods need to be … well, close to perfect if not actually there...

"Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality."

Forgive, in fact, is one of Rand's F-words. "It is against the sin of forgiveness that I wanted to warn you," Francisco d'Anconia tells Rearden. In the world of Atlas Shrugged, justice is still a virtue, but mercy is a vice -- it lets the rotters off...

"My personal life," Rand wrote in an afterword to Atlas Shrugged, "is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: 'And I mean it.' "

It seems that she did. Disagree with her on even the smallest matters, and you might find yourself cut off at the knees...

It has often been said that one should not judge a philosophy by its adherents' behavior. But if Ayn Rand was her own best argument for the powers of reason, the perfectablity of man, the virtues of selfishness and the disposability of forgiveness -- as she almost certainly would have said herself -- where does that leave her case?"


Comments in the thread:

"They also believe in the abolition of programs like Social Security as well as the idea of having a social safety net. And some even want to do away with public education, which would lead society back to the day of when education was a privledge for the wealthy. Privitizing education would also be bad for the economy. Because the more educated people are, the better off the country in regards to scientfic research, computer technology, engineering jobs, electronics, innovative ideas and you would have more qualified people to fill these jobs."

"Looking back at the past during the days of JP Morgan, John D Rockefeller and that bunch those men held a lot of power. Prior to government regulation there was no minimum wage no FDA, to regulate consumer goods, people worked long hours with bad conditions, and child labor was also legal. Could a strong labor union counter act that? It could always be possible. But with no regulations protecting the right of a labor unionto exist, the employer could always fire the workers with the a snap of a finger."

"In a pure free market system those who become wealthy would be at an advantage because they are able to increase their wealth more easily and therefore, there would be large inequities in wealth distribution"

"For me, Ayn Rand's influence was positive in that it helped me break free from mindless conventionality and arbitrary authoritarian influences in my life.

But it left me very naive about how the world works. Few leaders of big business are like either her heros or villians in Atlas Shrugged. Most are somewhere in between. Very few are self-made, more come from privileged backgrounds. Read biographies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Hughes and learn that their feet are made of clay compared to Howard Rourke and John Galt.

For a first generation college student, trying to emulate her heros was a decidedly uncomfortable Procrustean bed. I fell short most of time. It left me with more contempt than joy of living. It took nearly a decade to acquire some self-acceptance.

Rational self-interest doesn't prevent the tragedy of the commons. Adam Smith's invisible hand can't be depended on to keep us from depleting the planet's resources faster than these resources can be replenished. We need a sense of community that transcends self interest. We need to accept ourselves as individuals and care for each other in community to sustain our future."


Also:

Ayn Rand’s Literature of Capitalism - "Mr. Greenspan wrote a letter to The New York Times to counter a critic’s comment that “the book was written out of hate.”... ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness... undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should'... Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50... “She wasn’t a nice person, ” said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. “But what a gift she’s given us.”