Magnus

Wouldn't it be more ethical and effective to abolish the "stealing" that enables the accumulation of "excessive" wealth (thus leaving the "exceptions" who actually earned it through exceptional performance free to continue), rather than wait until it has been accumulated and abolish the transfer of it to one's children?

I think conservative societies are culturally stifling and oppressive. The more interesting works of art are often found in the underground counterculture, which the overt culture either suppresses or ignores. Then again, they typically have very little garbage in the streets, the trains run on time, and the uniforms are usually quite well-designed.

"Paying for tax cuts" is a phrase that represents the very pinnacle of the art of propaganda. It takes the core meaning of "pay" or "cost" or "give" and flips it around 180 degrees. A master stroke, really. Do you people have any idea what it costs me not to steal your electronics while you're at work? How are we going to pay for me not-robbing you on the street? You conservatives just want to give people everything they already own! Jerks!

I started studying Austrian economics in the early days of the Internet, in the late 90s. I'd recently graduated from law school and started working in offices. I hated my work so much that I spent a lot of time downloading articles and reading them to break the intense boredom. I'm just an amateur, of course, but I must have spent double or triple the amount of time reading economics online as I had studying any topic in 4 years of college. By 2006-07, I was able to predict the popping of the real estate bubble. And it wasn't just theoretical -- some co-workers of mine were encouraging me invest with them in commercial real estate in South Florida. Some rich big wigs were throwing an unreal amount of money at high rise office buildings and mixed use condos, and my friends wanted to follow their lead. I told them they were crazy and to save their money. My friends became extremely dismissive and even angry at me for refusing and for being pessimistic about the market. But by late 2007 and early 2008, the bubble popped, the projects failed, and to this day they stand half-built. I can see what critics mean when they say that Austrian economics "rejects empiricism." But that critique is ultimately false. The Austrian position is that economic systems are too COMPLEX to isolate causes so easily. There are multiple causes to multiple effects. Controlled experimentation is impossible. Complex systems theory reaches the same conclusion as the Austrians -- mechanistic explanations fail to trace causation, and a full measurement of the initial conditions that great affect the outcome is impossible. Not just difficult. Impossible. In my experience, most people have a lot of trouble understanding the limitations of knowledge posed by computational complexity. It's not that Austrians reject empiricism. They do, however, appreciate the limits on calculation that arise from the immense combinatorial complexity of a planet of 7 billion people, all interacting with each other. They reject attempts at explaining complex economic phenomena with extremely simplistic empirical data. This inherent, systemic complexity is the same reason why it's impossible to predict the weather more than 2-3 days ahead. In the case of economic daily life, the "initial conditions" that cannot be measured include billions of consumers' preferences. No one knows what consumers will buy, not even consumers themselves. You can ask them, but the only meaningful measure of what consumers ACTUALLY prefer is what they ACTUALLY do when they face the moment of truth and have to choose one way to spend their finite time, money and other resources. Also, those choices are dependent on conditions in each person's life that change constantly. It's non-Austrian economics that's anti-empirical. In 15 years of reading these arguments, I haven't seen a single example of any economic effect or condition that Austrian Econ failed to explain. And every Keynesian "improvement" to the economy includes some empirical harm that its proponents invariably ignore or try to deny. I realize, however, that my anecdotal experience proves nothing. After all, empiricism demonstrates its own limits.

I guess meant that, in my experience, I have a certain range of thought and opinion and behavior that changes constantly, depending on what I am reading or doing or thinking about, and some parts that change more slowly. Some days I'm contemplative and genial, and some I'm prone to being confrontational. An identity (as I understand it) is a shorthand way of summarizing a person's typical thought patterns and behavior. The parts that change daily or hourly in response to external situations are difficult to summarize in a meaningful way. The parts of a person that change very little or only very slowly would be more meaningfully encapsulated in a short assessment of personality. A model of reality can never fully represent reality. The map is not the territory. All models ignore some portion of the original data. But a good model condenses the vast body of unwieldy data into something manageable. Jung, for example, believed that there were three dimensions of personality that mattered most. They could vary at certain times and under various conditions, but he believed these three factors were generally stable over long periods or even a lifetime. Prevailing psychological theory today posits that there are five core traits, similar in some ways to Jung's three. Other personality factors exist, of course, but are less influential across time, or over a broad range of ordinary situations. So they say. I just mean that when one attempts to generalize, it only makes sense to focus on the data points that best cohere into a discernible pattern. Otherwise, personality is random--a structure we impose on the collection of moments of our lives rather than arising naturally from them.

I'm not sure I ever fully understood the concept of identity in the first place. I understand it in a superficial, intellectual way -- that it consists of some set of beliefs, traits, behaviors, etc. And that the ones that are the most stable and deeply held are part of one's identity (as opposed to more transient or malleable ones). But I've never been able to put my finger on exactly what identity consists of, or how one meaningfully distinguishes between these core beliefs/traits and the more marginal, malleable ones. I'm very different from the way I acted just 10 years ago , and even more radically different than 20 or 30 years ago. I can describe my personality (or those of others) according to various metrics (Jungian, Big Five , archetypal patterns, etc.). But I've also seen these traits change wildly over time and in response to different situations. I have a theory that all Western fiction is ultimately an exercise in identity change -- i.e., character transformation. All of the story patterns and plots and tropes are organized around this idea called "identity" and how it's expressed and changeable. I believe I understand identity in the context of writing fiction, since characters are just simplistic versions of people. But when it comes to real people, especially anyone with any substantial depth or intelligence or social awareness, I have never felt that identity is something I understand at all. Then again, my weak sense of identity could itself be part of my identity. In which case, I wouldn't be able to see it because of the paradox.

It's more than bias. It's a well-funded, well-orchestrated propaganda campaign being implemented at a very high level, on a par with the PR campaigns for various wars, and the enactment of central banking legislation. These "climate science" report organizations are sort of like professional wrestling--they're not just rigged, they're scripted. You just don't see people who point that sort of thing out get much air-time in the media.

In an interview with the Weekly Standard, MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen said that global warming is occurring, and that mankind is contributing to it, but concludes that the degree of change is probably very small. The problem isn't the science. It's the fact that all vestiges of scientific uncertainty are typically filtered out of the "policy recommendation" section of the scientific reports. http://m.weeklystandard.com/articles/what-catastrophe_773268.html But that's not the part that caught my attention. The startling part is his honesty in explaining the root cause of the distortion: "If Lindzen is right about this and global warming is nothing to worry about, why do so many climate scientists, many with résumés just as impressive as his, preach imminent doom? He says it mostly comes down to the money—to the incentive structure of academic research funded by government grants. Almost all funding for climate research comes from the government, which, he says, makes scientists essentially vassals of the state. And generating fear, Lindzen contends, is now the best way to ensure that policymakers keep the spigot open." Not even the right wing Weekly Standard is usually willing to print comments like "vassals of the state." Right wingers are more likely to accuse academia of being overwhelmingly liberal, a veritable Commie breeding ground, which they are. But you don't usually see the right wing willing to print such a non-partisan anti-statist opinion so prominently.

Even though I'm 45, I'm retroactively entitled to the kind of work I wanted to do when I was 22--work that didn't blow. But instead of tutoring or community farming (which blows), I'm entitled to a career of being a coffee house philosopher by day and the bass player in a funky jazz fusion band by night, preferably in a cool college town with lots of women who are attracted to part-time government-sponsored musician/philosophers. And I'll need a car. And an apartment. And some cool furniture. And some upgrades to my music gear. That would be nice. But I'm willing to "work" for all of this, but not in some crappy job for some rich 1% asshole who wants to pay me to do things that blow.

Chronic morbidity and mortality are highly correlated with obesity, inactivity and substance abuse (alcohol, tobacco and drugs). Once you suffer from one of those self-inflicted problems, I don't imagine there's much room left in the chain of causation for the destruction of one's overall health to be reversed by something like a multivitamin. But the studies seemed to focus only on heart disease and dementia, which would be highly correlated to one's level of exercise (physical and mental, respectively).

If there's anything that perfectly captures the absurdity of the modern political world, it's the image of a schizophrenic fake sign language "interpreter" standing next to the imperator mundi as he gives a speech at Nelson Mandela's funeral. I think this about the funniest thing I've ever seen!

I hate Christmas. I want to enjoy it, but I don't. I live in Florida, so I can't ascribe it to Seasonal Affective Disorder. I'm not even bothered by the religiosity, even though I'm a stone atheist. (I just don't argue with them. One of the few benefits of having my particular parents was their total lack of religion. They weren't philosophical about it. Just indifferent to religion.) The reason I hate it is because my childhood Christmas experiences were almost entirely negative. Shame, pressure, expectation, disappointment. My mother was a modern artist. She didn't cook. Minimal maternalism. But my sisters always wanted the Norman Rockwell life, which expressed itself as a shallow materialism, especially around the holidays. The result was a constant tension between feeling obligated to have a Winter Wonderland preppy New England-y time filled with egg nog and garland and sweaters and Bing Crosby tunes, and reality which was usually grocery store coffee cake and a lot of hurt feelings. And, as the FDR community would fully understand, I'm in a marriage where Christmas is filled with pressure and unmet expectations, followed by an annual divorce announcement from my wife every December 26th. It's awful.

I have been able to find no reliable information on the body count of his pre-arrest bombings. Was it really zero? It's buried under a mountain of propaganda thicker than the JFK assassination. (Hint: He was murdered by a pro-Cuba Communist!) But, in a sense, only one thing matters -- Mandela was the head of a State. That alone makes him a member of the criminal class. And as Head of State, he helped run the region's economy into the dirt. It was certainly no libertarian paradise before him, but he did worsen it. How many people died and suffered because of his acts as President?

I shouldn't be too surprised. The Catholic Church is an organization predicated on population control. When they're not busy trying to control people's genitals, they change targets and aim for our wallets. They're masters at it. The whole advertising industry is just now catching up to the propaganda techniques that religions invented 5,000 years ago.

That's not correct. The prosecution is required to disprove the claim of self-defense. Although self-defense is an affirmative defense, a defendant does not have to prove the truth of it. He only needs to assert a self-defense claim that is plausible -- i.e., a claim that is not refuted by conclusive evidence, or otherwise impossible or patently frivolous. Zimmerman clearly made a plausible assertion of self-defense, even if that scenario was not proven. His self-defense claim is clearly plausible, at least, since it was supported by his own statements to the police (which were extensive -- he gave statements repeatedly, in the station and during two crime-scene walk-throughs with the police, all of which was done without an attorney), plus the corroborating forensics and the other witnesses. Once a defendant asserts a plausible claim of self-defense, the burden then falls on the State to disprove that claim, and rule it out. The Guilty Hypothesis, as it is called, must be the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. One of the cases to read as a starting point on this area of Florida law is Montijo v. State, 61 So. 3d 424 (Fla. 5th DCA 2011). It's not an unusual rule in Anglo-American criminal law. So, no, I'm not assuming that everything Zimmerman said is true. But the evidence does not prove that his claim of self-defense is untrue. Under that standard, I have to conclude that he's not proven to be guilty. Also, charging him with manslaughter would not solve the problem of the lack of evidence to rebut the self-defense claim. Self-defense is a complete defense to all crimes against the person. And, really, it has to be. Self-defense is the first right. It's the origin from which all others are derived. There's no possible way that a valid rule of ethics could be written that requires a person to allow someone to attack him. Using force in self-defense is not merely "wrong but excusable if you can convince the authorities you had to." It's perfectly right, just and proper. It's the wrongfulness of the prompting attack that makes defensive force necessary. It's as completely ethical as tying your shoelaces.

Then he cannot be considered guilty. "Guilt" is justification for violence -- it authorizes the extraction of restitution from someone, or locking them away as a preventative measure against future expected aggression. Guilt must be proven. There cannot be any reasonably plausible scenarios of the event in question, derived from evidence, whereby the accused is not guilty. The guilty scenario must be the only one that can be derived by reason from the evidence. You have already concluded that "no one knows" who the aggressor was. Following a person at such a distance that you lose sight of him is not grounds for defensive violence. It's certainly suspicious, but not in itself a justification for using violence several minutes later. Since "no one knows," then one of the reasonable scenarios, based on the limited evidence available, is that TM was the aggressor. Thus, GZ is not conclusively guilty.

All goods most certainly have come into possession that way -- from the ground, to someone, and passed in an unbroken line of voluntary transfers to you and me. Other than being the first user of an unowned object, the other way to acquire property rights is by voluntary trade with the prior owner. That's how most of us get most of our stuff. As to your larger point, the State's claim of ownership is illegitimate. As an initial matter, the organization of that entity was not voluntary. Their magnanimous decision to give me a (meaningless) vote in their operation doesn't change the fact that I never agreed to join. Second, they never traded with owners to acquire their property. Stealing doesn't transfer title. But in general, I agree with your basic premise. We do already live in a state of anarchy, but not because the State owns it all. It's because the State is an illusion. Anarchy is always here. The State is illegitimate. They're just an especially prominent gang. They don't run things. They just pretend to. Society is mostly self-run. The Statists' main gift is not violence but propaganda -- taking credit for other people's work, and blaming others for the problems that the State causes. Anarchism doesn't have to be argued into existence. It's the essential, unavoidable nature of all human societies. The presence of a well-organized armed gang in our midst doesn't change that. They only limit the sphere of anarchic interactions slightly. Even prison society is mostly anarchic.

Paper notes printed by fractional reserve central bankers, and deemed by the State to be the only valid currency, is a deeply perverted form of money. But that does not mean that there can never be an ethical form of free market money. It doesn't mean that all money is bad and must be abolished. It means that central banking, legal tender laws, fractional reserves and other Statist aspects of today's money are deeply wrong and harmful. I wish the RBE crowd would take a little bit of time and care to understand what money is and how the current Statist banking scam actually works. If they did, some of them might not gravitate toward fantasy nonsense like the Benevolent Commie Computer of Infinite Abundance, and would instead focus on the real, practical causes of the pervasive monetary distortions we actually live with.

Have you considered the possibility that Statism is the root cause of an extremely large number of complex social problems? That the problem goes beyond merely that Statist Faction A's agenda is better or worse than Statist Faction B's agenda, but that a pervasive blindness to the deleterious effects of all forms of Statism might be the single most important contributor to human misery, suffering, poverty and lost economic opportunity? If that is true, would it not be a gross dereliction of our obligation to help humanity, as intelligent, thoughtful people, if we failed to explain the root, systemic causes that most people do not understand?

I believe it's due to a chronic lack of long-term economic opportunities. Building long-term wealth (in the form of businesses, educations, houses, etc.) is difficult, and the skills to do these things must be learned. It takes practice and transmission of insights to younger generations. To do that, you need intact families, and stable groups of families. The government's treatment of the poor has generally been various forms of containment and regulation, and in the process has destroyed the family. Schools are no better than prisons. They grow up in projects, so their neighborhoods have no businesses in them other than liquor stores and drug dealers. Drug laws create a black market, so it ends up being dominated by self-help gun violence. The residents of these hellholes have naturally oriented their lives to maximize their only reliable sources of income -- welfare benefits. Every government agency promotes a society of single mothers, no fathers, drugs and crime. Where are these people supposed to learn the skills of hard work in entry-level positions, career advancement and financial planning? They learn instead to survive on a day-to-day basis.

It's a matter of property. State-owned property is as poorly managed as state-owned schools are. If everyone drove state-issued cars, how would people treat them? On a microeconomic level, the cost of dropping garbage is lower than finding a trash can, and the resulting cost of littering is borne primarily by the state, not the litterer. As a matter of Hayekian information theory, the State has no way of knowing what to spend on its property-management factors because (in the short term) it earns no more revenue by having clean property, and loses none by leaving it trashed. If a Starbucks location were left trashed, it would lose money in an hour. But if Starbucks paid to have one trash-cleaning employee per table, it would be wasteful. The State can't calculate how to decide where to put trash cans, or how many trash collectors to hire, or how to manage them. As a matter of broad cultural and multigenerational trends, living in a state-designated ghetto tends to make people extremely short-sighted and self-interested, which drops their time horizons down to "right now" and makes their main concern "What's in it for me?"

The standard rules of aggression and defense always apply, unless people make an agreement to change them. For example, what happens in a boxing ring or on a football field is an unusual level of aggression and violence, which everyone playing agrees to accept. They do not accept unlimited violence by playing the sport, but they accept a certain measure of it, beyond what exists in normal life. On a road or in any other private place, the main change to the ordinary rules of Non-Aggression is the right to eject trespassers. The basic way it works is that if you revoke someone's permission to be on your property, of someone you initially allowed or invited in, you have to give a clear warning to let him know he will be considered a trespasser if he doesn't leave. Do you remember the "Don't tase me, bro!" incident? A student at a public university Q&A asked John Kerry some tough questions, and he asked them in an agitated way. Security was called. They surrounded him while he finished his rambling questions. When he finished asking his question, the campus police immediately grabbed him and electrocuted him. That incident was a straightforward attack. The campus police did have the right to eject him for speaking out of turn, asking his question in an agitated way, or otherwise breaking the rules of the Q&A. But in order to eject someone from the premises, you have to warn him first. If he doesn't leave, you can ethically use whatever force is necessary to effect the ejection, and if he resists the ejection, you can defend yourself, because he is the attacker at that point, because the force used in the ejection is not an attack. It's defense of property at that point. But in the absence of either (a) an agreement to submit to enhanced violence (like sports), or (b) revoking an invitation and instructing a person to leave or be treated as a trespasser, we all have the right not to be attacked, regardless of whose property we're occupying.

Stef's podcasts speak for themselves, but my understanding is that he does not recommend blaming parents. He recommends two things -- (1) ethical principles are valid only when capable of being applied universally (and therefore to parents), and (2) we should maintain only positive, ethical and voluntary relationships in our adult lives. If you were raised by unethical, abusive parents (I was), the path to a healthy adult life begins with identifying and living by valid ethical principles. Children will conform themselves to all manner of irrational, indefensible ethics in order to excuse their parents. It's what we do to survive. But as adults, we need reason and rational ethics in order to lead full lives. That means jettisoning the excuses and rationalizations that we learned in order to cover for and excuse bad parenting. Second, he does not recommend attacking parents. He recommends going back to them again and again sharing your real-time feelings with them. Healthy parents will be interested in your emotional life, and will want to hear the truth, will apologize for past wrongs, and not manipulate you into distorting your ethics in order to let them off the hook. They will relate to you as an adult, and be a positive contribution to your life. A lot of people don't have that kind of relationship with their parents. A lot of people are stuck in old childhood patterns, perpetually reliving the same old dysfunctions. Stef's recommendation is to improve bad relationships. He says to "make them great or make them gone." He says to go back again and again, for as long as it takes to either forge a positive relationship or convince yourself that it's futile. Your gut feelings will tell you if you are succeeding, failing, or will never succeed.

OK, got it. Thanks. Now I know what you're referring to. I watched the video, and I have given it some thought. I picked out three main elements from his comments: 1. He was emotionally abused as a young person, particularly in the form of brutal discouragement, which drained his sense of motivation; 2. The discouragement he experienced was intended (and successful) at damaging his self-concept and fostering a pattern of chronic self-abuse and social submissiveness; and 3. His remedy for this abuse was to pursue the difficult goal of developing an aesthetic physique, His Problem: "All the haters in my life" "People told me I couldn't succeed" "Making fun of me" His Solution: "Make something of myself" "Stopped getting drunk" "better myself" "inspire and motivate each other" "become driven" "get respect" "I changed" "surround yourself with the right people" I am completely sympathetic to the pain he must have felt. It sounds like the abuse he experienced was intense, pervasive, repetitive, and profoundly damaging. Is there anything wrong in all this? Yes -- it's in the abuse he experienced. It was plainly hideous. But I submit that he responded the way he did not because he was abused, but because he had internalized the abuse he experienced. He believed the attacks, and adopted them as his own, and so engaged in self-attack. This, I believe, was the reason he gave for his social submissiveness, and was also the root cause of his pattern of "getting drunk," which is a means of self-obliteration. I cannot agree that he really expressed a philosophy. He expressed a personal history of discouragement and motivational undermining, and set about reacting and responding to it for many years after it. His behavior from that point seems to have been organized around reacting to that abuse, which by puberty had really transformed into self-abuse. Is there anything ethically wrong in spending that much effort on your physique? No. The problem I see is psychological, not ethical. It appears he was avoiding the root of the problem, which is not that he was abused, but that he had internalized the abuse. Once you do that, it's very hard to escape it, because you carry the abuser around inside your head. He constantly felt the need to "better himself" because he truly believed that he needed to, i.e., that he was "lesser," that he was "nothing." A better solution, I submit, is not to spend your life "proving the haters wrong," but in eliminating the haters from your life. He touched on this briefly at one point, and when he did, it sounded like the most mature, well-formed part of his thinking and his message -- surround yourself with positive people. I couldn't agree with that point any more than I do. The key, however, is to understand that the worst abusers are the ones we let inside our heads and then carry with us. If someone who was unimportant to me came up and told me that I was a murderer and a robber and a war criminal, it would not affect me emotionally. I would not feel the need to prove this hater wrong, much less do so for years and years. It would be virtually impossible for me to internalize that attack because I firmly know it's not true. People don't get angry or emotional about attacks that are known to be untrue. I'd know without a doubt that he was delusional, or at best mistaken about my identity. If I were to take issue with Aziz and his message, I would say that no one actually needs to "prove the haters wrong." For one thing, the development of a well-proportioned physique doesn't actually refute any of the attacks he experienced, and more importantly, they never really needed to be refuted in the first place. I'm all in favor of leading a self-directed life full of motivation and surrounded by positive people, but the people who spew hateful, negative, discouraging messages at you, in an effort to browbeat you into a state of social submission, are already wrong, and their attacks can be disregarded in their entirety like the rantings of the crazy guy in my hypothetical who accused me of war crimes.

What was his philosophy?