A Straw Man Stuffed With Igorance.

Extreme Austrian Apriorism as the No True Scotsman Fallacy
By Jason Brennan

Brennan: “What do you think of behavioral economics that purports to show people often act irrationally in the market?”

Austrian Dude: “That doesn’t pose a problem for economics. Economics is a priori.”

Brennan: “But doesn’t it show that people don’t often act in the way your theory describes?”

Austrian Dude: “No. You see, there’s a difference between behavior and action. Action is defined as….[insert a summary of Mises's Human Action here]

Here is the missing summary:


“Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary.”
-Mises

In short, extreme apriorism ends up being a version of the No True Scotsman Fallacy.

"The ultimate end of action is always the satisfaction of some desires of the acting man."
-Mises

I think the author of this post has a serious misunderstanding of this axiom. He also has a serious misunderstanding of the term “value free.”

Austrians don't have a view as to the objective rationality of a Human Action, only that the action taken by a human being satisfies some psychological goal. If a person is aiming to buy a tool to drive a nail is enticed by a good deal on a screwdriver and purchases that instead of a hammer, he has merely demonstrated that he values getting a bargain buying a tool more than his original goal of driving a nail. This is the "value free" nature of praxelogy, to observe human behavior and deduce the motivation.

To say this is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy is turning the facts on their head. The straw man here is "there’s a difference between behavior and action." The reality is that an Austrian would say there is no objective way to judge an action as "rational" but it is subjectively rationalized by the actor. In that light, all actions are rational. What we are actually saying is that you can't tell if a person is a Scotsman by how he acts because each individual Scotsman is capable of acting like every other human being in the world!!!

Instead, it leaves open, as an empirical question, whether actual human beings in the real world are better described by your a priori theory of human action or by behavioral economics. If your theory doesn’t account for actual human behavior very well, then it’s impotent to defend real life markets, and you shouldn’t advocate libertarianism in the real world on the basis of your Austrian economics.”

Judge for yourself, not only markets, but just about anything:

For example, let us have two men, A and B who are both faced with the choice of a lashing if they don't betray their conscience. A would rather take the lashing than betray his conscience. B betrays his conscience to avoid the lashing. We can say that praxelogically A held his own conscience at a higher value than his own body. B held avoiding physical pain in a higher value than betraying his own conscience. This observation is value free. We neither condemn A as foolish for taking a lashing or B as foolish for avoiding the lashing. However, it is as logical to conclude that such torturous methods as these are tantamount to cyanide for a civilized society being the use of brute force against an innocent persons free will.

The same would be true if we gave person A and B each $5 to go in a restaurant to order whatever they wished within that budget. Person A orders comfort food with little nutritional value and person B orders food with maximum nutritional value. We can conclude that person A was aiming at eating food that tasted good and person B was aiming at food that was good for his body. There is no objective way to judge which person made the correct choice. Both choices were correct as they both satisfied the ends the diners sought. We know A valued taste more than nutrition, but there is no objective way to compare the amount he valued taste over nutrition with B's value of nutrition over taste.

Free markets are based on voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. The state is the agency of coercion for social control. Civilization is marked by a society that can function spontaneously with the minimum amount of force and coercion. Therefore, if the end result to be attained is a maximum of civilized behavior, then the least amount of forceful intrusion into consensual exchange would seem the logical ideal to achieve this end. This is why Austrians tend to be Libertarian.

To enter the realm of ethics, allowing individuals to create their own meaning, follow their own goals, pursue their own happiness, and experience their own failures would seem to be the most just. This leads to a society where one can have what is one's own without infringing on what belongs to someone else, be it success or failure.

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PS I guess Brennan has redacted his original post, but I found a copy of the original here.

Nice start to the finish, but.....

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
Global Research
October 28, 2013

The CIA should be abolished, its leadership dismissed and its relevant members tried for crimes against humanity.

Should have ended it right there, but oh, no.....

Our intelligence community should be rebuilt from the ground up, with the goal of collecting and analyzing information.

 Back to where we started in the first place.... Why not back a little further to here: "The culture we lost — Secretary of State Henry Stimson refuses to endorse a code-breaking operation, saying, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”?"  That would be ideal.....


As for covert action, there are two moral options. The first one is to eliminate covert action completely.

Is there really any other option?  Wait for it, wait for it.....


But this gives jitters to people worried about the Adolf Hitlers of the world.

Ok, so what do we get if we pander to Godwin's law?.....


So a second option is that we can place covert action under extensive and true democratic oversight. For example, a bipartisan Congressional Committee of 40 members could review and veto all aspects of CIA operations upon a majority or super-majority vote. 

Yeah, watch them rubber stamp it all, or worse yet, the minority leak it...lol


Which of these two options is best may be the subject of debate, but one thing is clear: like dictatorship, like monarchy, unaccountable covert operations should die like the dinosaurs they are.

Why can't aggression die like the vampire it is? Oh yeah, the lower classes have paid for all of this aggression!!!

The best option is to have a citizen's army for DEFENSE (D.E.F.E.N.S.E. -- the action of defending from or resisting attack. Not being the aggressor...) with a skeleton of officers under the direction of the President as offered by The Constitution......


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Agenda of Conservative Values Hidden in Plain Sight?

The secret conservative message of the “Duck Dynasty” beards

The bushy beards on "Duck Dynasty" are part of a long history of using facial hair to signify "traditional" values

Salon

Oh, the horror!!! 

Maybe you’re like me and you don’t have cable TV. Good for you. Tell yourself, like I do, that this makes you inherently intellectually superior to the millions of glow-box zombified American scarecrows who have nothing better to do with their lives than exist in an immobilized state guarding the TV from the nefarious corvids of real life. Or, you could be honest and, like me, admit that you can’t afford cable. But whether or not you have cable, there’s no way to escape the current American cultural juggernaut that is A&E’s “reality-based” show “Duck Dynasty.”

So basically, if this guy had his own cable service, he wouldn't have to watch cable at his buddy's house and be exposed to Duck Dynasty....

The 19th century was a period of vast changes during which the modern world as we know it was formed. Indeed, many of the cultural, political, and economic tropes that we acknowledge today were first articulated and solidified in the 19th century, and this includes beards and their relationship to manhood.

Does this imply that Karl Marx had a severe sexual bias? Since the solid logic of the Austrians hasn't been enough to demolish his economic ideas in the minds of the masses, could this be the new emotional appeal? "Well, I don't like Marxism because Marx was a sexist bigot, just look at his beard...."
Perhaps Abe Lincoln invaded the South to prove his manhood in a way his beard never could?

As Gold McBride writes, with vast social, political and economic change, women began to take a more active role in public life. This led to widespread male anxiety about gender roles, which in turn fueled the development of the idea of “separate spheres” of influence ... These distinctions included the realm of truly epic beard growth. Thus, in the 19th century, beards came to define a concept of manhood in a way that was unmistakably visual to better distinguish men from increasingly public women in an era when, Gold McBride observes, “traditional markers of masculinity were no longer stable or certain.”

I guess that applies to all those liberal hippies of the 1960's also? "Far from championing equality, hippie males in the 1960's sought to maintain their male dominance by growing epic beards. John Lennon, far from being the peaceful, loving person he was portrayed to be, was actually hell bent on creating a patriarchal society, as evidenced by his beard."

 culture is a process, and in the post-Civil War South, Southern culture was “an ongoing cycle of interaction” during which some Southerners constantly shaped, reshaped, and reformed Southern cultural identity to adapt older traditions to the demands of modern life.  

Is he lamenting that Southern culture is "an ongoing cycle of interaction" that is not centrally dictated by a group of elite 'betters?'

The show is consumed by a large segment of the American public that is fed up with what they perceive as the modern world’s assault on traditional values and religion.

Maybe they are mostly fed up with the loss of interaction and empowerment?

Just look at the hirsute Robertsons’ favorite things: they do manly activities like hunting, fishing, shooting guns and praising God.

That is really a veiled sexist comment. I know women that hunt, fish, shoot guns, and praise God as well as any man can.....Is he suggesting that the Robertsons dress in drag and watch Lifetime maybe?

 Hell, their entire business is built around the idea that men hunt to bring home food and take care of the family.

Is this a veiled attack on Lakota culture?

As Thomas DiLorenzo points out here, it is surprising "that Salon did not mention that Muslims associated with al Qaeda also have a beard culture associated with their traditional values."

I am sure Butler Shaffer isn't suggesting the author of the original Salon article is an anti-semite, is he?

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Bait and Switch?

WND EXCLUSIVE
Billy Graham sounds alarm for 2nd Coming
Famed evangelist sees signs 'converging now for the 1st time'

Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the United Nations General Assembly “biblical prophecies are being realized.”

Bachmann is small fry compared to Natanyahu in power and influence, yet nobody becries Obama and McCain wanting to attack Syria and Iran for him...guess the media just threw Bachmann under the bus as a distraction for the real centers of power.....

Bachmann has no plans to run for re-election, but the other war mongers are a different story....

In the late nineteenth century an American movement had the end of the world set at a specific date, and we all survived with no harm done...if these people are of God then it will happen, if not, they will come to nothing and be forgotten.,,,

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Current Reading List

As a result of reading Albert Jay Nock's The Freeman Book, available as a pdf from The Ludwig Von Mises Institute I just re-read the last chapter of Kapital by Marx and am not in the middle of Democracy Vs. Socialism by Max Hirch...Hirch gives a nice demolition of Socialism as it stood at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, as well as a concise overview of the Austrian Theory of Subjective Value....

Below is an except from The Freeman Book with some required reading for consideration.....


He might perhaps best see what sort of thing the radical has to offer in this line, by beginning with the last chapter, which is all he need ever read, of Marx’s “Kapital”; then reading carefully the “Grossgrundeigentum und Soziale Frage” of Franz Oppenheimer, the same author’s “Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie,” and then the “Protection or Free Trade” of Henry George. This lay-out of provender will give him most plentifully what he says he wants, “something solid for both the friends and the enemies of the new regime to set their teeth in.” It is something indeed so solid that those who hitherto have undertaken to bite it have simply broken their teeth. Henry George, in a preface to the fourth edition of “Progress and Poverty,” a book which sets forth the same “detailed plan of reconstruction which meets every test of reason,” says what could be said of very few books, “I have yet to see an objection not answered in advance in the book itself.”
Perhaps our correspondent, at the end of this exercise, will see that radicals have been quite forward to “accept the obligations of careful, methodical and constructive thought.” They have assumed no monopoly of those obligations or of the ability to discharge them; they desire the production and exchange of thought to be quite as free as the production and exchange of goods. But they have done well enough, possibly, not quite to deserve the implication that they habitually shirk those obligations. It seems unfortunate, perhaps a little unfair, that our correspondent should disparage the “apostles of the new order,” without knowing at least a little of the best that those apostles can do. He would, for example, find a great deal of careful, methodical and constructive thought applied to the most modern conditions and our very latest problems, in the solid treatise called “Democracy versus Socialism,” by the Australian economist, Max Hirsch; and if he can summon energy to chew his way through seven chapters of the most highly concentrated and most highly nutritious pemmican ever put before mankind, he will find it in Franz Oppenheimer’s little volume, hardly more than a pamphlet, called “The State.” It is solid food-value, if one can worry it down, but it is very, very rough.

--The Freeman Book pg 106 To Whom it May Concern 

An answer to a letter asking for a logical explanation of radicalism....

Where are they gonna back all of it up?

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally

Washington Post

Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Is a key feature of the illness known as paranoia an obsession with finding connections that are not there?


The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying, “You need the haystack to find the needle.”

Even with that metaphor standing on its head, isn't it still folly?

The picture can also be misleading, creating false “associations” with ex-spouses or people with whom an account holder has had no contact in many years. 


The same way a suspicious spouse might make everything into evidence of an affair?


The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points “all over the world,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program. “None of those are on U.S. territory.”

So the NSA has to have the despotic power they are supposedly saving us from?


When information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus,” the official added, “the assumption is you’re not a U.S. person.”

Now the presumption of guilt stands on its head......


A senior U.S. intelligence official said the privacy of Americans is protected, despite mass collection, because “we have checks and balances built into our tools.”

NSA analysts, he said, may not search within the contacts database or distribute information from it unless they can “make the case that something in there is a valid foreign intelligence target in and of itself.”

And since it is a secret if that is happening, or even how that works, we just have to take his word on it.....


Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in August that the committee has less information about, and conducts less oversight of, intelligence gathering that relies solely on presidential authority. She said she planned to ask for more briefings on those programs.

Don't feel bad that you don't know what is going on, no one in DC really does either.....


The volume of NSA contacts collection is so high that it has occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories, forcing the agency to halt its intake with “emergency detasking” orders.

Now it begins to sound like the show Hoarders.....


Spam has proven to be a significant problem for the NSA — clogging databases with information that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”

All that money and they don't have spam filters? Or just too pathological to miss out on anything?


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Who Needs Love When Benifits Are on the Line.....

When Life Partners Should Marry to Benefit from Social Security

PBS

Jo Anne De Varges -- Racine, Wisc.: Like many boomers, my "life" partner and I chose not to get married, preferring to keep our finances separate. Twenty years in, at ages 61 and 60, we are wondering if we should reconsider tying the knot due to Social Security benefits.

There is a good case in all of this for the government to treat the married and unmarried equally, of course every slave is begging for the approval from their betters in the form of a license.....

I guess next from PBS, a guide to successful gold digging for young women..... 

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The Guys We Back Don't Always Engage in Car Bombings, But When They Do.....

In Syria, four of seven kidnapped Red Cross, Red Crescent aid workers are released

Washington Post

The use of car bombings in the conflict has increased, but most have been carried out against regime targets, usually by jihadi fighters among the rebels.

It is good to know that the Rebels Washington wants to back usually don't engage in terrorism

He was quoted as saying that one abandoned site was in rebel-held territory and that in other cases, routes went through opposition-controlled areas, preventing access because rebels have not promised cooperation.

I wonder why they don't want to cooperate, and why the policy of "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" isn't applied to them the same way it is to US citizen.....


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Freedom, It's Not Just for Silicon Valley Anymore....

Silicon Valley stays quiet as Washington implodes

Computer World

The valley may vote overwhelmingly Democratic in elections, but it has a very strong libertarian streak -- it doesn't want Washington interfering with its business and start-up culture.

Too late for that, if we are to believe Edward Snowden......

Rogers argued that the politics of Washington are antithetical to Silicon Valley's core values. "The very way it works, Washington undermines the free minds and free markets that are the cornerstone of Silicon Valley's success,"

Those are the universal precursors to any human being's success.....

"The metric that differentiates Silicon Valley from Washington does not fall along conventional political lines: Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal, right versus left," Rogers said.

"It falls between freedom and control.

Again, this is the ageless human struggle....even the early sociologist Karl Marx recognized that......

Rogers has been one of but a few Silicon Valley business leaders to speak critically about the country's broad political direction. Former Intel chairman and CEO Andy Grove has been another vocal leader.

They must have been left out of the Surveillance Complex dole.....

The benefit of speaking up is questionable. Said one tech lobbyist on background: "Is rational pressure and discussion going to make irrational people act rationally?" 

This guy is a lobbyist and he has such a naive grasp of politricks as this?

pg. 2

The tech industry doesn't like dealing with Washington, but spends mightily for the privilege. The industry's lobbying spending grew from $40 million in 1998, when Rodgers gave his speech, to $133 million last year, according the Center for Responsive Politics.

So we now collectively pay $133 million in protection money when we buy technology just to keep the goon squad out of the labs?


It appears there is actually a secessionist movement in Silicon Valley according to this. Must be tired of passing all that over head on to us....

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Thank God the USDA and FDA Weren't There To Make Sure He Ate Right.....

Man recalls eating squirrels to survive alone in California forest

L. A. Times

"I knew my dad would do what he needed to do to survive, even if it meant eating squirrels or the occasional bug,” Penaflor’s son, Jeremy, told the Ukiah paper.

And here is the value in taking your kids camping and teaching them to hunt and fish....teaching them how to grow plants and garden is also a plus.....


As Penaflor spoke to KTVU outside, he was at times emotional when he recalled his story of survival.

"Three squirrels are dead because of me," he said.

Oh, the horror!!!  Have we really conditioned people to be so alienated from nature that they can no longer partake in it......


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If It Were Only That.....

Kansas spent $913K to defend anti-abortion laws
USA Today


"It's a travesty that Kansans are spending $913,000 on things that don't benefit the state in any way," Brownlie said.

Kansas has a budget of about 13 billion dollars. This is 0.007%. Compared to other government waste, by my accounting Kansas still has a stellar record.....


"It's a free country, and there's a right to sue on anything," Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, the most influential anti-abortion group at the Statehouse. "But, then, to try to blame us for the money involved in defending the lawsuits is ridiculous."

I guess Mary Kay Culp doesn't understand law well enough to understand that the plaintiff is the active party....

"a plaintiff is referred to as a pursuer and a defendant as a defender." (wikipedia)



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Now we know where our minds are.....

Top Stories

1. Boston Red Sox
2. St. Louis Cardinals
3. United States Senate
4. New England Patriots
5. Adrian Peterson
6. Odisha
7. The Walking Dead
8. Iran
9. Denver Broncos
10. New York Jets

These were the top stories at 5:30pm CDST according to Google....guess the NSA gets to catch up on sports talk after the long weekend.....