Not Blogging Really

Anyone in Australia thinking of the idea of primaries should take a bit of a look at what happens in the US.

This ad is run by Newt Ginrich to destroy the credibility of Mitt Romney.



But Ron Paul goes one better and just attacks Newt and Mitt.



But when you follow these links you find a really monumental pro-Ron Paul piece which argues that a non-interventionist Foreign Policy as proposed by Paul ticks the Libertarian boxes.



It is frightening that Julie Borowski - who describes herself as TokenLibertarianGirl on YouTube - can hold such views so young. But then again anyone in their early to mid twenties who wears pearls like those is a bit doubtful to begin with. I guess Tanya Costello (nee Coleman) was just like her at that age.

Anyhow, she has conveniently told us the libertarian books she recommends. Some of the more serious of these I have read - and they are as dangerous nonsense as Marx's Capital or Hitler's Mein Kampf. Simple prescriptions unbounded by empirical evidence. More fascinating still is that she holds up Bastiat's The Law telling us how politicians use the Law to take away our freedom.

The fascinating part is that this volume is getting close to two hundred years old and describes a slightly different world. However, Bastiat was at his best using a method of rhetoric that outlined the stupidity of some policy proposals - as for example his item on a Negative Railroad.

Should we start a charity to rescue young people from the libertarian fold - like a variety of a cult busting group?


Novae Meridianae Demetae Dexter delenda est

The Work Plan

When I renamed my blog "Anything Goes" before my sudden abandonment of it I wrote a short piece explaining why I chose the title. I did it because too many people in discussion argue from a position of the correctness of their own theoretical position, which is OK so long as both parties adopt the same theory. But increasingly in the area of public discourse this isn't so. There are different theories and they are often "incommensurable" - the same word does not have the same meaning in different theories.

So the adoption of the "Anything Goes" title was meant to mean that there would be blogs about theories rather than just the application of theories. I'm also concious of the fact that "Anything Goes" was the title of a book by the late David Stove that was attacking the "irrationalist" approach to science. I've had the book for a while but have only nibbled at it. I have decided it needs a far more robust response - but not today.

One of the things Stove does in that book is construct his own "strawman" of the general thesis being propounded by his rivals - and this strawman he then attacks. This is a technique that really is the only way of engaging in discussion about theories, but it is not always valid. For example, Stove starts by criticising the irrationalists because they. he claims. do not accept that there is a growth of knowledge, and he attempts to suggest this must be absurd because anyone looking at the last 400 years of science would see more knowledge now than before. I think perhaps Stove has missed a major point here that the "irrationalists" do not dispute this point but do say that the curve of Amount of Knowledge as a function of time is not monotonically increasing everywhere and there are times where it can go down.

But enough of that for now. The purpose of this post is to say I have three projects that I wish to explore here over coming weeks. The first is an assault on what I call "economic libertarianism" - a thesis that the collective action of self-interest cannot be improved upon. The second is a short contribution to what has become known as the History Wars - in which I will try to discuss "What is History" and in the process will rely heavily on a book by that name by E.H.Carr. And finally I wish to launch an assault on what I will call the Quadrant Realist Tradition - a troika of belifs that embraces realism, a correspondence theory of truth and a designation theory of meaning; this belief set is the core of a set of derisory criticisms of a notional left consisting of postmodernists who are painted as describing truth as relative and operating through a collective of manipulative "elites".

So hold on for the ride.

The IPA and Economic Libertarianism

The extreme form of advocation of market capitalism that in the 80s was associated with "economic dries" and in the 90s promoted the title "economic rationalism" is a variant I refer to as "economic libertarianism". David McKnight calls it neo-liberalism, which I think does a discredit to the word "liberal" - which in the US sense is associated with the idea that Government has a valid economic role.

A variant of it can be seen in today's AFR by John Roskam in an article on CSR. I don't have time for the full critique now - suffice to say the article fails to recognise the consequences of the corporation having achieved the status pf "natural person". It also fails to acknowledge that in the real world "the firm" draws on a number of inputs - all of which expect compensation. The shareholders do not deserve to get all the "upside" over and above the return they expected.

The focus on "shareholder value" has resulted in a degree of managing in the short run that makes it easier for management to externalise costs.

But the most telling point is how his two concluding paragraphs are self-contradictory. He first claims that firms need to confront the underlying assumption that without regulation companies will ignore social, environmental and ethical consequences - but then that the second task is to re-establish the principle that the single best contribution a firm can make is to be profitable (i.e. in a choice between profit and the environment, profit must win).

The IPA item can be found here http://www.ipa.org.au/files/news_1081.html