Economic Labels kill off meaningful Questions - Step out of the Wizard's Circle of 'Common Good'
Preview cross-posted at CORRESPONDENCE THEORY
Earlier in the year I began re-engaging on xTwitter again, and it quickly brought back to mind a couple of the frustrations I had with xTwitter from the start. Of course a big frustration for me being a blogger in the xTwitterverse, is limiting my comments and replies to 264 characters, or even a thread, or two, or three of them. I initially had some sympathy for those I was commenting back & forth with - honest, anonymous, and troll - who were trying to find a label to fit what I was saying, into a political & economic framework they'd recognize (I've had the same problem for decades). But then it became apparent that the issue had less to do with my squeezing an accurate description into a limited number of characters, than with something more fundamental to the economic positions that most people see their world through.
Thankfully my own labeling issue was recently resolved with the help of an online friend (read on and you'll see how), but my problem had always been with finding a label that adequately accommodated the essentials of the philosophy that underlies our political and judicial systems, which are what an economy is able to develop from, without getting entangled in positions operating just under the surface, that are ultimately incompatible with those essentials (Hi GOP!).
But their problem, is only with who or what can take the shiny surface objects that command their attention (GDP, Inflation, Interest Rates... etc.,), and juggle them as needed to make their economic numbers add up. In their minds, those are just givens that require no depth or visible means of support to be explained, or consequences to be concerned with - so long as what or who they support can make them 'add up', they're satisfied that the 'common good' is being served.
Part of what makes this situation possible, is that the standard labels we have, of Liberal, Leftist, Conservative, Neo-Liberal, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Progressive, have all lost whatever meaning they may once have had, and serve mostly as a convenient means of associating an assortment of hot-button positions, under the handy heading of a recognized label (or two).
The problem isn't just that the standard labels simply don't fit - though they don't - but that because they revolve around positions, rather than the reasons for having them, these labels that people accept, serve less to inform, than to subtract from what others are able to know about each other, and their world. So when someone adopts one of these labels which communicate little more than a list of positions associated with them, it's like taping a 'kick me' note to their back, and then they're surprised as people begin kicking them for wearing that label, even as everyone else, is kicking everyone else, as we all make our way kicking & screaming down the halls of social media.
Many of these label people know extensive details about how the pieces and parts of these economic systems fit together. But what I find with just a little questioning, is that it seems that what it is that they know of their systems, is known to them in the way that a student knows the info they've spent the weekend cramming to pass a test on - they know the answers to the questions they expect, and neither know nor care about any deeper implications that actions taken on what 'they know' might have - and it's irrelevant to them. If pressed on such concerns, they'll sidestep and reference other positions and labels, which they ultimately expect the artful use of force and power will fix, in ways that a thought for those depths they ignore, would have taught them that force and power cannot accomplish.
One tell-tale sign that you're dealing with a label person in a discussion over what they associate with labels like 'Leftist', 'Libertarian', or 'Conservative', is that they become frustrated if the discussion leads to your pointing out how their position involves what they associate with other labels, and then they blame you for being 'inconsistent' and confusing how they expect their labels to fit together. And rather than reconsidering their premises to resolve that inconsistency, they typically resort to appealing to authorities & their lofty ends, to nudge their numbers and answers back into place, by explaining away what cause it is that they presume to be orbiting around which effects.
Sorry, but when you've adopted labels which have the reasons you give for them, orbiting around the positions that leads to them, inconsistency is what you'll experience, and when that's the case, getting your numbers to agree, isn't going to make anything meaningfully add up.
What the labelers are involved in doing, though far less innocently, is what the old astronomer Ptolemy found the need to resort to from time to time, which was to fabricate an epicycle (a fudge factor) to toss into his calculations, so as to explain Mars' path through the night sky as it orbited around the earth (or so he thought). Of course you can do that if you'd like, but you should understand that your pointing out how 'accurately' your numbers track your favorite shiny objects (GDP, Inflation, etc.,), isn't something that's going to persuade me to believe that your positions are correct, any more than the 'accuracy' of Ptolemy's numbers could persuade me into believing that Mars, let alone the Sun, are revolving around the earth. It's not me who's being inconsistent here, it's you.
Consistency requires acknowledging both that John Locke & Adam Smith were admirable pioneers in the understanding of liberty, and not hesitating to acknowledge that both also had flaws & errors in their theories. John Locke expressed truly revolutionary ideas on individual rights in a polity, and yet his sometimes nominalist notions of human understanding and education, helped set the stage for disastrous 'advances' in skepticism and idealism. Adam Smith was a true pioneer in political economy (he didn't use the term 'Economics' as is done today, or 'Capitalism'), and while I very much appreciate his idea of 'Natural Liberty' as being the true 'Wealth of Nations', whose fruits increase as the state refrains from interfering in their people's efforts to earn a living, that shouldn't keep anyone from pointing out what he got wrong, not least of which was his advising Lord North that the best way to fix Britain's finances, would be to impose taxes on the colonies (Whoops!).
When they turn their labelmaker on you, the question you should ask is do you really want to engage in a manner of thinking that gets triggered by daring to notice that it's possible to have the right answers for the wrong reasons, and vice versa? Giving credit where credit is due, and pointing out where it isn't, is what advances our understanding of the world and our place in it; doing so is admirable; chiding & rebuking what has been misidentified, made misleading and/or corrupting to our ability to gain that understanding, is warranted, and failing to do either, fails your discussion, and who and what is being discussed.
The larger issue to be developed in this post - which I'm making into a single extended post, instead of a series of separate posts - is that this narrative habit of putting positions over reasons, and adopting labels in place of actual understanding, isn't simply a flaw, it's the visible feature, of a deliberate strategy, for using an answer to kill off uncomfortable questions.
When it becomes difficult for someone to admit that someone else got something wrong, there's a good chance that they're more involved in contriving new epicycles of their own to throw upon your discussion, and not to increase its accuracy and value, but to further whatever narrative it is that they've associated with that particular label. Worse still, failing to pay equal attention to both the good and bad deeds of notable figures, too easily leads us into the fallacies of arguing either from authority, or ad hominem, or both, and leads us progressively away from an objectively valuable understanding of the issues at hand.
Difficult questions get you further than easy answers
Seeking after easy answers, rather than giving due consideration to difficult questions, is a strategy that's has been made into a habit of thinking (for instance, by such means as training students for 12+ years to anxiously scan textbooks & worksheets for answers to be memorized for getting 'good grades'), which routinely results in our reducing what meaning another person's comment might have, to a static, inert, material 'answer' that, just as an epicycle, is sure to suppress worthwhile questions, and raise distracting reactions that help divert our conversations into the thoughtless flowcharted paths of ideological thinking (AKA: 'Critical Thinking', but that'll have to wait for my next series of posts).
What I hope to do here, is help people to kick the habit of looking no further than the labels that've been assigned to issues or persons - or you - which I think is best begun by peeling up the edges of those positions they favor, with a few well placed questions. Of course, as doing so begins revealing those reasons that underlie the positions they're promoting, that's when the 'people of the label' begin cranking up their label-makers, as did my x-Twitterer friends, as they began verbally taping their 'not humble', 'passive aggressive', 'ignorant', 'arrogant', labels to my back. The labels themselves aren't the issue - they tend to fall off fairly quickly - it's the habit of labeling itself, whether in accepting or assigning them, which encourages a pattern of thinking that reflects something other than reality, it misleads people into ideas that jeopardize themselves and the world we inhabit together, which is a habit that's worth breaking.
It's important to see that having answers without questioning your way to them, is useless.
It takes a few well-placed questions - the kinds that a zinger of a label is meant to kill - to get someone to look further than the ready answers they have at hand. Calling me arrogant back when I definitely was arrogant, isn't what got me to recognize that I was arrogant (and oh, yes indeedy I was). What worked on me, was when the questions a friend asked me about the statements of knowledgeable authorities that I'd been repeating & defending as if they were unquestionably true, led me to recognize that... they just weren't so. And worse for those labels that I'd taken pride in wearing, once I began following those questions that he'd raised, it didn't take long to realize that those authorities I was turning to next, for help in defending the first ones with, weren't any better.
xTwitter'rs tell me:
"...You're not humble- based on a previous conversation my understanding of the nature of reality exceeds your own....",
"... You describe your opinion as humble and display passive-aggressive behaviour...."
That unpleasant experience of discovering that it was possible that 'what I know just isn't so', was acutely embarrassing, and yes humbling too. But discovering that an uncomfortably well-placed question can lead you into gaining a better understanding of what is real and true - and what isn't - which no amount of memorizing the most authoritative 'answers' ever could, was incredibly valuable to me, and is what led me, decades ago now, to become a 'Blogodidact'. That experience prodded me to go back to Homer and begin reading my way forward in time through the original sources myself, pointedly questioning (not doubting, mind you, questioning) what had been said and done by those who had actually said and done it, and then asking the same questions of my own conclusions and reasons for thinking them, so that 'I' wouldn't again become the biggest barrier to my gaining a better understanding of what is real and true.
"...You're not humble- based on a previous conversation my understanding of the nature of reality exceeds your own....",
"... You describe your opinion as humble and display passive-aggressive behaviour...."
I don't claim that experience made me humble, but it absolutely seared an unpleasant awareness into me of the dangers of arrogantly assuming that any position of mine is unquestionable - and that answers that go unquestioned are more likely to be meaningless, than meaningful - and since that unpleasant moment I've welcomed any questions that I may not have considered - that, IMHO, is 'The Way'.
Granted, when I state 'In My Humble Opinion' (IMHO), I'm keenly aware that it's not exactly a sign of humility to offer someone a conflicting assessment of what they think is real & true. But it is a continuation of that process of actively questioning answers - theirs and mine - which is what I committed myself to way back when, in hopes of being shown a perspective I hadn't considered a matter from, and raising questions I might not have thought to ask. That's gold.
That's also why I don't enter into 'comment battles' with either label guns blazing, or by being either passive aggressive (or aggressively passive), but by asking questions. It's only after the other person demonstrates that they're being deliberately obtuse, evasive, and/or deceptive in their answers, that my slow boil (mistake that for passivity if you like) will give way to whatever cheerfully aggressive barbs or dismissals seems to me to be warranted within the context of the discussion [see the message above my blog's comment box]. I don't do so because I believe I have the 'right answer!', but because they've shown me that their answers have little or no connection with the questions that we should both be asking.
Since for the labeler, the point of 'the label' is to be 'an answer that kills the question' in you, when you realize that you're being given an answer that you're not meant to understand, you need to remember to ask those questions that lead to understanding:
, which are the very things that such 'answers' are typically asserted to distract you from considering.
- What is it (Metaphysics),
- How do you know it (an epistemology of Causality and Logic),
- Is it appropriate (Ethics)
What I hope you'll come to see from peeling back these labels, is that they serve more to obscure, than to clarify your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The issues we'll find with such labels, both the narrow personal ones my xTweeting friends were taping to my back, and with the larger and 'more inclusive' labels such as 'neo-liberal' and 'libertarian' (egads!), is not just that they don't apply to me, but that the reasoning for them are so wide of the mark, that they pass beyond honest ignorance, and into the contrived pretenses & pretexts for positions which no legitimate reasoning can support.
Once you see that, I think you'll agree that the political and economic labeling process not only shouldn't be applied to you, me, or anyone else, but that its real purpose has less to do with simply winning arguments, than with capturing minds on both sides of the supposed argument, and that's something that's worth seeing and being able to recognize.
The Questionable Label of 'Libertarian'
Preview cross-posted at CORRESPONDENCE THEORY (updated)
Now sure, I can see how a couple of my tweets could lead someone to think I sound "Libertarian", as with noting that von Mises & Hayek were correct in what they had to say about many technical aspects of an economy - especially as regards inflation. But as I'd quickly replied to not only deny that I was, but also followed it up by noting that where those two strayed from the narrower technicalities of their economic fields - as with Mises philosophical trainwreck of 'On Human Action' - their ideas become muddled and even harmful to liberty, and that their fellow traveler, Murray Rothbard, was, IMHO, an absolute crank and an overt threat to liberty (what any criticism rests upon is what 'liberty' is defined as, which should involve a lot of questions, which, IMHO, libertarians too often assume, rather than ask, and are usually inadequately answered. We'll touch on those questions down below).
xTwitter'rs tell me:
"...You advocate for a limited government that refrains, entirely, from intervening in the economy. The state is primarily concerned with "protecting individual rights", limited to ensuring personal and property security etc. This aligns with libertarianism..."
At that point, if they were looking to identify what I was thinking, rather than trying to contain it, you'd think they might question the appropriateness of their labels, but nope.
"...You advocate for a limited government that refrains, entirely, from intervening in the economy. The state is primarily concerned with "protecting individual rights", limited to ensuring personal and property security etc. This aligns with libertarianism..."
Their intentions became doubly questionable for anyone who looks just a bit further into the reasons for my positions - which my xTweeter's claimed to have done - which will reveal numerous passages from posts that I've blogged over the last 15 years (such as this series of posts), to the effect that:
Those are just some of many problems I have with 'Libertarianism', and trying to label me as a Libertarian is not only something that just won't stick, but any libertarian who bothered looking past their label's positions, and into the reasons for them that've led me to not trust our Liberty with 'Libertarians', would leave most of them looking my way and saying 'Nope, he's not with us!'.
- the futility of treating liberty as utility,
- that treating 'choice' as a principled decision is juvenile,
- that voting libertarian in a general election is generally unprincipled,
- that Intellectual Property is the root of all Property and Copyright Law strengthens individual rights and property rights and results in a boon to inventor and society alike (in principle, if not always in practice),
It doesn't take many questions to find that the answers given are too shallow to support what they claim to explain. Take the aggressively casual truism that libertarian's state as an unquestionably self-evident presumption, that 'taxation is theft!' (what's your reaction to that statement? Hold that thought), and if you do question it, you're typically labeled as a statist. And as that sounds a lot like an answer that's intended to kill off our questions... let's ask a few:
And so given the very real values that good government (with 'good' being a rare and essential qualifier) provides - without which a Free Market could not exist - it would seem that there's at least a case to be made against the statement that taxation as such, is theft. And isn't there a question about what label best fits those who'd seek to partake of the benefits that good govt enables, while evading or refusing to fund the means of sustaining them?
- Q: What is Theft? A: Taking what you have no permission or right to.
- Q: What is Taxation? A: The usual means of funding govt.
- Q: What defines theft, protects against it, and provides the means of punishing those who steal? A: Govt is the public's means of defining the laws that apply to all, the means of enforcing and adjudicating them, as well as the means of defending the nation's borders, etc.,
I'm not arguing for either an answer or against 'Libertarianism' here, but only to point out that there are questions that should be considered before asserting that the 'science is settled!' on what has been labeled as the answer.
Yes, there are unjust forms of taxation (income tax comes to mind, property tax too), and yes you could easily have a govt staffed with thieves - but that problem has more to do with the form of govt, the people who formed it, and those they staffed it with, than with the means of funding what it cannot exist without. Taxes aren't the problem, what they're used for, is. Taxation is a means (what other means there may or may not be, is a question worth pursuing) to an end, but it's the nature of that end, that warrants more of your attention, than does the standard means of getting there.
Those questions, and what becomes understood through pursuing them, is what will be developed as we go in this post, but what I want to point out at this point, is that whether muttered in stompy-footed exasperation, or stated as an actual position, the least important aspect of the libertarian truism that 'taxation is theft!', is whether or not the statement itself is true or false. Not only does focusing on such positions minimize the very real evil that is likely to have prompted the sentiment in the first place, but by diverting our attention from the greater issues facing us, such answers effectively abort a number of questions that libertarians, and other political and economic labels and labelers, are exceedingly uncomfortable with raising.
I think that's worth noticing.
Almost the last person of consequence to take notice and identify what those greater issues facing us are, was Calvin Coolidge, who did so up through the early 1920s. By beginning from the perspective of what the purpose of Government is - to preserve and defend the liberty of its people - he wasn't diverted by the less consequential aspects of how government obtains its funding, and so was focused instead upon what government was doing with its citizen's money, and why. And with that perspective in mind, it follows that the only actions that government can legitimately use its citizens tax dollars for, is to serve its central purpose, and that any other actions it takes, would necessarily be working against that purpose, and its citizens.
What that perspective also readily reveals, is that when the citizenry feel that taxation has become a burden to them, it's most likely because their government has betrayed its purpose by doing what it should not do, which means that, as Coolidge clarified in his speech back in 1924, your government is transforming itself into an instrument of tyranny:
"...A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude. One of the first signs of the breaking down of free government is a disregard by the taxing power of the right of the people to their own property. It makes little difference whether such a condition is brought about through the will of a dictator, through the power of a military force, or through the pressure of an organized minority. The result is the same. Unless the people can enjoy that reasonable security in the possession of their property, which is guaranteed by the Constitution, against unreasonable taxation, freedom is at an end. The common man is restrained and hampered in his ability to secure food and clothing and shelter. His wages are decreased; his hours of labor are lengthened....", which is a far more consequential issue than theft.
Now you tell me, when I asked you to check your reaction to the 'taxation is theft!' statement above, was that the kind of issue that entered your mind... or was your attention focused on the lesser issue of theft?
See what I mean?
There are similar issues with most other political/economic labels as well, such as the other Big Two Political labels, Liberal and Conservative, beginning with the labels themselves:
- If what was actually meant by 'Liberal' still meant those who value individual rights/property rights, the Rule of Law, and upholding liberty for the individual within society, I'd label myself as that myself. But as those are no longer thought of or practiced as being anything fundamental to the positions that a modern 'Liberal' holds (advocating for 'hate speech' laws as our current leftists do, torpedo's that notion), their label doesn't even begin to identify with what I understand my positions to be. At. All. SoOooo... nope there as well.
- Similarly with 'Conservative' - while I very much value conserving those principles that the West in general, and America in particular, are founded upon, as the 'Conservative' label today embraces other positions that are antithetical to those foundational principles (*saving* Social Security, *reforming* education, *improving* the economy), leaves me as a big nope on that label too.
Whether or not anyone agrees with my thinking is not the issue here, the point is to notice that when a person's thinking does not agree with the labels being applied to them - we should ask ourselves why those labels are being applied. And if the labeler shifts into affixing another label, based upon another position that's been taken, while pointedly looking no further into the reasons given for those positions... that's a case of using an 'answer' to abort your questions. And that problem goes far deeper than any particular label itself, and reveals much about us that most people today would rather leave unexamined.
Although I picked on Libertarians here, each of our popular political & economic labels today have their own easy and often trite answers that are on a par with 'taxation is theft', all of which serve to abort the far more important questions that we should all be asking, asking often, and pursuing deeply - which is what we'll be getting into in this post.
On the bright side, if you can manage to not let their answers kill your questions, their misapplied labels will fall away of their own dead weight. The most effective way to get to that point, the Western way of getting to that point, is by reviving the underlying questions that the labeler's easy answers most want to kill:
, and turn them back on the label, the labeler, and the systemic thinking that both serve.
- What is meant by the label (Metaphysics)?
- How well does it apply (an epistemology of Causality and Logic)?
- Is it appropriate (Ethics)?
The Wastefulness of *Economics* requires labels
No doubt there are a number of other labels from systems of 'economic thinking' leaping up for your attention right about now - 'Capitalist', 'Socialist', 'Marxist', 'Communist', 'Fascist', etc., - which we're all expected to get into the game and favor or oppose, but... is there a value in that for you?
What is that value?
No, I'm not asking for the arguments for why one of those labels is better than the others - though I'm pretty familiar with each of their arguments for those, that's not what I'm trying to bring to your attention here. Also keep in mind that I'm not in favor of any form of anarchic, minarchic, syndicalist, etc., system, I'm simply asking you to consider what value there is for you, in a system that seeks to manage 'an economy'?
Again, I'm not looking for your opinion on the various labels within the system of 'Economics', neither am I trying to dismiss the many valid principles of economics ('good money drives out bad', 'no free lunch', 'inflation is a tax', 'quantity theory of money', 'uniformity of profit', and the more technical ones too...), what I'm drawing a bead on is the 'Economic System', as a system.
When you peak beneath the surface of their arguments, what you begin to notice is that these labels that we are expected to pick and wear, are less about conveying an understanding of either the terms themselves or of the individuals being labeled by them, than with drawing us all into positions within the system where we can be more easily manipulated in a much larger game that's being played (think MLB, rather than the Dodgers or Yankees). In that larger game, each label adds to the contradictory turbulence that's generated within the whole (think Dodgers vs Yankees), and does so within the 'unquestionably' legitimate category of the modern's most favored label of all: Economics.
So to see what that larger game is, let's start with the usual basic answer given for what 'Economics' is, from a site that's appropriate to the subject, Wikipedia (yes, that's snark), which says:
"Economics (/ˌɛkəˈnɒmɪks, ˌiːkə-/) is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services."Which is true enough - especially as it identifies 'Economics' as a Social Science, which is a field that was devised and defined by utilitarians and positivists who believed that 'experts' should be given the 'might to make right', as the basis of their 'scientifically' measuring 'social actions' through a lens which excludes philosophy & morality (what they meant by 'science', is very likely not what you mean by Science), and focuses instead on particular quantitative details of narratives that are especially suited to support their perspectives on how to 'fix' Society. Meaning: You, me, and everyone we know.
If you were to overlook both the source and lens of 'Economics', you might conclude from Wiki's sentence that its meaning is similar to how 'economics' is identified by some of the better economists, such as Thomas Sowell, who define the subject as:
"Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.", but that sense is more reflective of the limited purposes and scope of the field of Political Economy (which we'll get to below) which preceded 'Economics', and which became focused upon studying and identifying what conditions and circumstances most promote or interfere with individuals' ability to produce value, from the bottom up, and the intended and unintended consequences of political efforts to aid politically useful aspects of that process, from the top down.
The wiki meaning, OTOH, embodies the top-down 'systems view', in which the unstated presumptive ends of 'Economics' institutional purpose, is, as expressed here as 'Applied Economics' from Investopedia, beginning somewhat vaguely as:
"Applied economics is the application of economic theory to determine the likely outcomes associated with various possible courses of action in the real world....", and more revealingly in its conclusion, that:
"...As a result, applied economics can inform a "to-do" list identifying steps that can be taken to increase the probability of positive outcomes in real-world events."
Things xTwitter'rs tell me:
"..."You aren't adressing the fundamental tension between individual rights & public welfare because you're being ideological. I don't know who is informing your economic theory but it is flawed..."
, which is justified as being for the 'Comon Good'.
"..."You aren't adressing the fundamental tension between individual rights & public welfare because you're being ideological. I don't know who is informing your economic theory but it is flawed..."
Maybe it's just me, but I notice that whatever the "... probability of positive outcomes..." it is that they're betting on, the reality of playing the odds with their 'to-do list', is that at least some of us living here in the real-world are going to suffer the negative 'outcomes' from those actions they take, and those imposing these 'economic policies' will offer no further concerns or assurances to those of us living in 'their economy', than to say: 'may the odds be ever in your favor'.
Just sayin'.
So then, considering that there's a 100% probability that the economic policies implemented by those in positions to impose them upon us, will follow from the advice given to them by some economists - never all economists, of course, because 'economics' is less a science than a means of playing dice in our lives with - on how best to manage 'their' economy. And since it's true that they will implement their policies, despite the fact that neither of those parties - state or economist - have first-hand knowledge of those conditions affecting your day-to-day decisions on how best to 'manage scarce resources', and despite the fact that they are not the ones who will bear the brunt of the scarcity of resources you may encounter as a result of the unintended (?) consequences of those failed policies that they imposed (do you remember when store shelves used to be well stocked?), and despite the fact that they will bear nothing more than token political responsibility for those policies at some point long after the effects of them have been felt by you in your life...the question I'm asking you, is, where is the value in that system, for you?
Adam Smith was a pioneer, rough around the edges, got some things wrong, but the essence of the concept he first brought to light for all to see, which is a concept that has unfortunately become alien to us today, is that the 'Natural Liberty' he described did not involve creating or managing 'an economic system' of government policies (he did not propose 'Capitalism' as a system, Marx did that). What he observed instead, was that by eliminating those governmental policies that interfered with the individuals' ability to manage their own scarce resources, would enable them to better earn a living for themselves, and is what ultimately serves to increase 'The Wealth of Nations'.
Whatever else he may have gotten wrong, what he got right was that the society which values 'Natural Liberty', is one that respects what you value, and enables you to be productive for yourself, and for those you engage with, and for your entire community, which encourages people to seek after living lives that are worth living.
A system which looks at what you value, as a means to sustain its 'economy' for the 'common good', is one that is fundamentally wasteful towards what you value, and towards you yourself, because you and what you value, are not what that system values, which is reflected in the lives of those living within that 'their economy'.
What I want to show for you, and me, and everyone we know, is that 'Economic Systems' are inherently wasteful - some moreso than others - but they are all inherently wasteful to all but those favored few which the system itself must cater to, and no, that's not (necessarily) the 'richest 1%', and no, it's not 'the jooos!' either. Who is it the system caters to? For now, let's just call them 'they', and we'll gradually see who 'they' are, as we go along.
Once you begin to consider our 'economic system' from that perspective, you begin to realize that the nature of those 'economic policies' that 'they' are managing 'their economy' with (no matter which 'they' currently makes up 'their'), have the very real potential to become as 100% relevant to your life right here & now, as those living in our Founders' generation felt the exceedingly real and very unintended consequences which followed from Adam Smith's advice to Lord North, that to solve the revenue issues of Britain's mercantile system, he only needed to raise taxes on the colonies.
One of the least bad economists that there has been, Henry Hazlitt, wrote a famous little book entitled "Economics in One Lesson" (which I highly recommend), whose one lesson he stated could be summarized in one sentence, as:
"The whole argument of this book may be summed up in the statement that in studying the effects of any given economic proposal we must trace not merely the immediate results but the results in the long run, not merely the primary consequences but the secondary consequences, and not merely the effects on some special group but the effects on everyone.", and while that is very true... it is not the whole truth, and taking that as a complete answer, diverts us from the much more fundamental questions that should be asked first, and when we fail to ask them, we're subtly led into making every one of the fallacies that his book exposes so well, and make no mistake, 'they' encourage it.
Obviously I've poked at quite a bit here involving these labels, positions, and systems, and we'll dig into every bit of it, but before doing so, let's first look at one of the better efforts that people recently began to identify with, 'Classical Liberalism', in order to escape from the existing systems, and why it is that it can't fully succeed in that.
The wishful thinking of the 'Classical Liberal' label
So now with that in mind, let's move onto a label which many in my no-label-to-call-home position tend to gravitate towards, as I once did, with thinking that 'Classical Liberal' is the right fit.
At first glance it does seem to be a very nice fit, at least in the sense of what most people imagine that 'Classical Liberalism' refers to, as being all about respecting sound science, valuing individual rights, property rights, liberty, free markets, and appreciating our Founders' era as the culmination of the greatest period of actual societal progress in a thousand years, as noted by people like James Lindsay, and @ClassicLibera12 (but in a good way). That period, after all, succeeded in binding governmental power down with the constraints of constitutional law, for the purpose of upholding & preserving justice and liberty for every individual, and their putting those ideas into practice is what enabled the prosperous fruits of political economy (see Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say, Frederic Bastiat) to be enjoyed by all, and made the life-saving and enhancing scientific and technological progress we enjoy today possible.
What's not to like in something so admirable, right?
Well... just the fact that it's not true that 'Classical Liberalism' refers specifically to that.
What? Nope. 'Classical Liberalism' refers to those ideas generated across a period of time that extends roughly from the early 1600s to the mid 1800s, and spans thinkers as poles apart as Hobbes and Locke, Descartes and Thomas Reid, Rousseau and our Founding Fathers, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and produced such radically contradictory ideas as range from Natural Law (which our constitution was derived from), to Positivist Law (which the administrative state depends upon).
So you tell me, if that's the case - and it is - how does identifying as a 'Classical Liberal' actually identify only the popular sense of it that I agree with, or even identify any one aspect of it?
"But Van, 'Classical Liberalism' just refers to the culmination of that period of thought!", and I initially assumed that to be the case as well, but that period we value was not the culminating point of the 'Classical Liberal' period. Following the close of our Founders' era, there was still at least a half-century more to go in the span of time which the term refers to, and those ideas and doctrines which seek to undo and repeal the real progress that was made during our Founders' era, came to prominence during that closing period and that is what those who revile what we revere, cite as being the culmination of 'Classical Liberal' thinking, and it's from that standpoint that they roll their eyes at what we value, as being naive and undeveloped. And so, worse than the term not identifying anything clearly, by promoting the label of 'Classical Liberalism', we assist our opposition in misidentifying, misleading, and subverting, the very ideas which those of us with no-label-to-call-home, value most.
A quick look at the timeline of what we're considering here, is in order. The period typically referred to, opened up with Sir Francis Bacon ('knowledge is power', or so his secretary Hobbes tells us), and began to hit its stride as the Science of Issac Newton lit up popular imagination and the political philosophy of John Locke's Two Discourses on Civil Government which put that spirit into words. Not long afterwards the Scottish Enlightenment (which itself spans such irreconcilable philosophical poles as David Hume & Thomas Reid), ushered in Adam Smith's Political Economy, and culminated politically with our Founders' Era in the last quarter of the 1700s, which brought the Free Market to its high point with the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s.
That period which began immediately after our Founders era and carried 'Classical Liberalism' forward roughly from the1820s to its close in the 1850s, while benefitting from the prosperous effects of a nearly Free Market that were clearly seen by all, began undermining the ideas that had made that prosperity possible, through a new set of ideas in philosophy & academia, whose implications went mostly unseen by the public. Behind the scenes of the financial pages, the intellectual current was being turned against the tide of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West, by drawing heavily upon the thinking of Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Comte, etc., and the period became dominated by the 'classical economists' such as J.S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. As they promoted the philosophically corrosive schools of German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Hegel), it saw the advent of the 'Social Sciences', and the 'new' (old authoritarianism rebranded) theories of Positivist law, that were the anti-thesis to the Natural Law that our Constitution was derived from.
It was with that altered telos, new direction, and with those 'new' ideas in hand, that the latter 'Classical Liberals' progressively transformed the reality based liberalism and SCSR (Scottish Common Sense Realism) of our Founder's era, into an idealistic form of illiberalism, which actively sought to disrupt that earlier framework of philosophy, education, and political economy, which had made the real progress of our Founders' era possible. Worse still, those involved, who reviled the ideals that we value, were promoting these new ideas by using the same terms that were common to both periods (you've heard the phrase "They shared their vocabulary, but not their dictionary", which when done intentionally, is now called Semantic Deception), so that words that were spelled the same - words like Liberty, Education, Progress - were being used to convey very different meanings & purposes between those 'in the know', which gave cover to the regressive movements which they desired, and which they called 'progress!'.
Perhaps the most consequential product of the latter period of 'Classical Liberalism', was the new field of 'Economics', which was the lovechild of proponents of Positivist Law and the Social Sciences, through their shared fondness for Marxism and Fabian Socialism. Those latter day 'Classical Liberals', and especially the 'Classical Economists', aggressively promoted the rise of their new field, and by as early as 1900 it had rapidly risen to eclipse all serious references and concerns for the Political Economy of our Founders' era and enabled them to usher modern Socialism & Communism onto the world stage, as the respectable and welcomed heir to 'Classical Liberalism'.
Do you see my problem with the label? To expect that a term which applies to such a wide span of time, and which contains such a contradictory range of ideas, to bring to mind only that particular subset of ideas and positions which were reflected in the founding of America, is counting on far too many questions not being asked, by people who are often unable or even piously unwilling to identify what is real and true, in the name of what they think of as being 'Classical Liberalism'
What results from that is worse than being only a distraction, as it enables far worse to go forward under cover of the same heading, and I suspect that academics, the press, politicians, and crony-capitalists alike, secretly rub their hands in glee, whenever we profess ourselves to be 'Classical Liberals'.
One Classical Liberal that took liberties with Life, Liberty, and Happiness - J.S. Mill
If any of that surprises you, you may be even more surprised to learn that the many quotable lines of the popular essay 'On Liberty', that was written by the shining star of the 'Classical Liberals', J.S. Mill, was an early example of liberally employing words that were commonly used in our Founders' era, in ways that shared little more in common with them than their spelling.
Those differences in meaning become less surprising once you note that J.S. Mill was not only a Utilitarian, whose founder, Jeremy Bentham, had infamously expressed the Utilitarian view that 'rights are nonsense upon stilts', but that J.S. Mill was raised and educated as an experiment in applied Utilitarianism (which is presumed to have led to his youthful nervous breakdown) by Mill's father, who was a friend and admirer of Jeremy Bentham.
"But Van! Now you're labeling!"No, I'm not labeling him, I'm identifying his ideas, with the difference being that where the one shields, the other reveals, and the latter is done by refusing to allow the trite answers we're given, to abort those questions that are so important for us to consider, whenever we're presented with an unquestionable answer, such as J.S. Mill being a meaningful proponent of 'Liberty!', as it was widely understood in our Founders' era.
In growing up and developing his own understanding of Utilitarianism, Mill found it necessary to alter or repurpose the meanings of a number of common words from how they had been understood, to suit his beliefs as a materialist Utilitarian - a few of which that come to mind are 'Life', 'Liberty', and 'Happiness'. One view he didn't much change from Bentham's views though, was that of 'Rights', which presents a problem for those who're reading our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, and J.S. Mill's thoughts on Liberty.
The term 'Ideology' was coined in 1793 by Destutte deTracy, a Scottish born French noblemen, military man, philosophe (and possibly Freemason, and certainly influenced radicals like the Carbonari), as the name for what he intended to be a new 'science of ideas', as an empirical & very 'Science!ish' method of thinking that would pointedly avoid (reject) the use of metaphysical concepts & ethical judgement (which, BTW, has a lot in common with Utilitarianism) in order to make our thinking 'more efficient'. For different reasons, both Napoleon & Marx hated it (while embracing key aspects of it), while Thomas Jefferson admired some aspects of it enough to personally translate & publish it in America, and it became exceedingly influential in his time.
Unfortunately the consequence of ignoring metaphysics & ethics in our thinking, is that the words and terms being used 'more efficiently', soon lose their depth, as their subsurface meanings become more assumed than actually understood, they are transformed from conveying substantial meaning, to becoming shallow labels that are loosely associated with multiple and often conflicting positions, most of which are not very well thought out. And so one practical problem with Ideological thinking, is that it leads people into believing that they're in agreement with each other because they're using the same words, without realizing that they aren't in agreement on what they mean by them. That shallow sense of apparent agreement is a big part of what often propels an ideology to a rapid growth in popularity, until, that is, its followers attempt to put those ideas into practice, and begin discovering that they disagree on what it is that they actually mean by the words & terms they're using. And because they begin from seemingly similar positions, rather than from a shared understanding, that leads to 'purity tests' and '_ In Name Only' labels (for instance, ask a few lefties what they mean by 'liberal', or conservatives what they mean by 'conservative'), which displays the other trait that Ideologies are well known for, their highly fractious nature.
It's up to each of us to decline to be distracted from asking those metaphysical and ethical questions that we should all be asking, as it's only from doing so that we can become able to see firsthand how easily our apparent agreement with a label's positions, can mislead and divert us from the reasons behind the various positions that've become associated with them, much like how J.S. Mill, for instance, can appear to be supportive of a subject, such as a Free Market, when the two are essentially incompatible.
Those who read Mill's ideas today, without being in the habit of asking those questions, are unlikely to realize that what they assume his words to mean, are unlikely to be what J.S. Mill had in mind when writing them, and so whether or not Mill meant to engage in verbal embezzlement or semantic deception, his alternate meanings have been gradually smuggled into popular assumptions & practices, which have become more and more confused and even destructive, without most people ever even realizing it. Such people are often filled with a zeal for their 'new!' ideas, and believing that their support for something - a Free Market for instance - would be helped by supporting what seems like just another name for seemingly similar positions - 'Free Trade!' for instance - actively voice their 'principled!' opposition on 'economic' grounds to political tactics like tariffs, declaring their support for engaging in 'Free Trade!' with the likes of the Communist Party of Red China, which is eager to subvert and destroy every aspect of what such trade and liberty depend upon. The shallow use of words progressively turns their well meaning efforts into contributing to destroying the very thing that they'd originally supported - which is how we came to wave goodby to what had once been a beacon of judicial, political, and economic liberty: Hong-Kong.
Mill was very big about writing extensively about his 'principles!' of this, and 'principles!' of that, and of course we hear a great many fans of Mill's 'On Liberty' today, shouting about what they will and won't do because of their 'principles!', but what do they understand that term to mean? In our Founders' era, 'Principles' had been generally defined as:
" ...one of the fundamental tenets or doctrines of a system, a law or truth on which others are founded" comes the sense of "a right rule of conduct" (1530s).", and were understood and used to convey wise and ethical truths, and standards of behavior as with principles of freedom of speech, and principles of an objective Rule of Law, and principles of virtuous and ethical conduct.
What Mill meant by Principles, OTOH, was not moral concepts of what is good, right, and true - as a utilitarian empiricist, he would not entertain such thoughts - but he instead intended them as quantitative 'measures' of behaviors in various scenarios to determine the degree of usefulness of something:
"I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. "IOW, what Mill meant by 'principles', had less to do with philosophic principles of behavior, than with devising formulas for generating rules derived from 'scientific' measurements, and tweaking the ingredients and measures as needed to maximize its utility.
However encouraging that might sound at first, the problem is that what he meant by 'Science!', had more to do with the new 'Social Sciences', than with legitimate experimental sciences like chemistry, where rules & principles were derived from exactingly quantitative measures of factual physical characteristics, as observed under controlled experimental conditions, and based upon measurable consequences, were revised as needed by further observations.
One problem with equating one 'science' with the other, is that such quantitative measurements of physical attributes, cannot be made of qualitative concepts of human traits and interactions - you can't put issues of Trust, Virtue, Friendship, etc., on a ruler to measure them by, or hold either despair or joy up against a scale to weigh them with.
The IEP (The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) described Mill's approach, this way:
"...suggesting that basic principles of logic and mathematics are generalizations from experience rather than known a priori. The principle of utility—that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”—was the centerpiece of Mill’s ethical philosophy..."And so when J.S. Mill speaks of 'Principles', he doesn't mean 'a priori' fundamental truths for guiding our judgement of Right & Wrong, Good & Evil, etc., but something more like weighted averages of popular responses that've been associated with one 'factor' or another. So when Mill's 'social scientist' claimed to have 'measured' something, that 'measurement' was typically the intensity of the measurer's own feelings about an action, combined with their opinion of what brought it about (very much like today's 'lived experiences'), which were then artfully assembled along with numerous other such observations, into a statistical format to be presented and treated as if it were no different than the objectively measured ingredients and outcomes of repeatable laboratory experiments, as performed upon material substances.
Armed with that, as a chemist might tweak an ingredient here or there in his laboratory, Mill, in reference to various scenarios from trade to personal relationships, advised mitigating or deviating from his 'principles' as needed in his laboratory of society - your life and mine - to vary those 'outcomes' he sought to support or suppress, in reforming society closer to his heart's desire (read him, it's obvious).
What necessarily follows from following Mill's idea of 'principles!', is routinely being led into advocating for what would have been recognized in our Founders' era as being unprincipled behavior.
What also comes as a surprise to most casual fans of 'On Liberty', is that what Mill typically wanted, and vocally endorsed, was to use the power of the state to 'manage the economy' which transforms 'economics' into a euphemism for state involvement and control over any or all of the day-to-day decisions and actions of those in society, in every aspect of their lives. Key to his means of doing so, was the liberal use of those 'principles' and other words & terms that he'd repurposed through his Utilitarian philosophy, to convey very different meanings and purposes than had been understood or intended by them, just a short while earlier in our Founders' era.
One fine example of that has to do with his attitude towards 'Life'.
Whether J.S. Mill thought human life was a value in and of itself, or just another material commodity whose value was to be measured by its usefulness to the economy (hello: 'Utilitarian!'), is something he made clear towards the end of his essay 'On Liberty', where he wrote of his concerns over the common people being permitted to have too many children all willy-nilly and unregulated like.
Mill, making very clear what the meaning of "I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions" actually is, expressed his desire for the state to intervene by writing laws to restrict how many babies people should(!) be allowed to have, so as to prevent an excess population from negatively impacting the economy by reducing workers' wages:
"... in a country either over-peopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a very small number,[Pg 206] with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their competition, is a serious offence against all who live by the remuneration of their labour..."Just think, Classical Liberal J.S. Mill was a century ahead of Communist China's 'One Child Policy' - can't ya just smell the liberty!?
Speaking of which, 'Liberty' is another word that reveals real differences between what was understood during our founding era, and what J.S. Mill meant by it a half century later. Liberty had been defined as,
"state of being free from arbitrary, despotic, or autocratic rule or control", and so they understood that liberty was what resulted from living in a moral and law abiding community that respected the rights and property of each citizen.
J.S. Mill upended that understanding with his very different Utilitarian belief that liberty is little more than,
"...freedom from restraint...", which you should note is less a concept, than a physical condition that neither requires nor presumes qualities of character or responsibility. Say hello to Rousseau's 'noble savage'.
Mill of course goes on to say many very fine sound things about this liberty, that:
"This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness; demanding liberty of conscience, in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of[Pg 23] each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to unite, for any purpose not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.", which does sound very fine indeed (though more resembling lists of ingredients, than guiding principles), until, that is, you recall to mind what Mill meant by 'principles', and what he said all such 'principles' are subordinate to:
"...I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense... ", and the question that ought to bring to mind, is what that might mean if your life & liberty aren't thought to be of use to 'Those who know best', like Mill? Say hello to Rousseau's ideal Legislator, who believed, like Mill, that the state 'ought' to have the power to enforce the 'General Will' and 'force them to be free', as being the ideal of 'Liberty'.
If you think I exaggerate, I have to ask if (or when) you've actually read 'On Liberty', or anything else that Mill has written? Because Mill's use of the word 'Principle' is based upon his positions, rather than their being derived from a conceptual understanding of what is real, good, and true, he finds that he has to justify his preferred positions over and over again with words to the effect of: "Yes, our principles do say that something is evil, but... sometimes circumstances demand that society engage in a lil' bit of evil, for the common good... because success is what matters...", as Mill does here with what he considers to be the fundamental determiner of liberty, 'restraint':
"...all restraint, quâ restraint, is an evil: but the restraints in question affect only that part of conduct which society is competent to restrain, and are wrong solely because they do not really produce the results which it is desired to produce by them...."The fact is that Utilitarianism entails the idea that the ends justify the means ('principles', doncha know), and his philosophy transforms 'principles' into a veritable blank check for authorizing society to trample over the lives and choices of individuals, for the greater good.
The problem with looking to J.S. Mill for advice on liberty, is that as a Utilitarian, he sees Liberty as nothing more than 'the absence of restraint' (an opinion shared by Vladimir Lenin, BTW), and with that materialistic conception of 'Liberty' in mind, he finds that the next step that anyone must make is, as Mill did, that:
"...All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs;..."IOW Mill's idea of what he calls 'liberty', begins with how force 'should' be imposed, either in forcibly restraining others so you can do whatever you want, or by submitting to some restraints so as to strike a bargain to 'allow' each other to do some of what each desires - not because it's right and good, but because it's useful in satisfying your desires, AKA: Utilitarianism.
In a nice irony for today's Libertarians who wave copies of Mill's 'On Liberty' about and claim to be all about liberty and 'Free Trade!', Mill thought that:
"...the principle of individual liberty is not involved in the doctrine of Free Trade...", for you see, in Mill's idea of 'Liberty!', "...trade is a social act...", which means that 'those who know best' - experts like J.S. Mill - should be the ones who determine what rules would be most useful for society. You can almost hear a piratic "These Principles be more like suggestions, argh".
SoOooo much liberty.
The fact is that in J.S. Mill's effort to 'define principles of Liberty', there are no principles as were recognized in our Founders' era, to be found, no principles of individual rights nor any principled basis for liberty to justify defending the individual against tyranny, and in place of principles, Mill presents only varying technical formulas for dealing with the various complexities of issues of the moment, from moment to moment, in which Those Who Know Best must be empowered to pick and choose which particulars must be sacrificed (meaning you, and your concerns), so as to serve what they decide to be the 'greater good', in that particular scenario.
It's not surprising that his idea of 'liberty', led him to lament:
"...When we compare the strange respect of mankind for liberty, with their strange want of respect for it, we might imagine that a man had an indispensable[Pg 207] right to do harm to others, and no right at all to please himself without giving pain to any one..."Mill's idea of Liberty did not begin with what a good life is, and how best to live it, or even with what is real and true, but with either how 'best' you can get away with doing some of what you most desire to do to yourself and others, or with stopping others from doing what they most desire to do to themselves or to you.
What's a shame, is that his own low opinion of both man and liberty didn't cause him to question his understanding of either, or how he came to them. As a result, that conception of Liberty that J.S. Mill had in mind, is, IMHO, one that is unfit for a life worth living, let alone for '... the pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'.
And if you expected something different with his notions of Happiness, sorry, but no.
As was understood in our Founders' era, Happiness was defined in Dr. Johnson's dictionary:.
"...that estate whereby we attain, so far as possibly may be attained, the full possession of that which simply for itself is to be desired, and containeth in it after an eminent sort the contentation of our desires, the highest degree of all our perfection.", or as put by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, the motive force behind SCSR (Scottish Common Sense Realism) put it:
"...The happy man, therefore, -is not he whose happiness is his only care, but he who, with perfect resignation, leaves the care of his happiness to Him who made him, while he pursues with ardour the road of his duty. This gives an elevation to his mind, which is real happiness. Instead of care, and fear, and anxiety, and disappointment, it brings joy and triumph. It gives a relish to every good we enjoy, and brings good out of evil...", so that 'Happiness' was understood in our Founders' era, to be what could result from steadily adhering to a moral and virtuous compass, so as to live a life well lived.
But 'Happiness' meant something very different to J.S. Mill, as he put it in his essay on 'Utilitarianism', 'happiness' was concerned with the pleasing conditions and sensations of the immediate moment, in that:
"...By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain, by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure."IOW: an amoral 'if it feels good, do it!' is what he advocated for which some at the time referred to as 'social hedonism' or 'the maximizing of pleasure over pain', as being the measure of the 'Greater Good'.
How significantly & consequentially Mill's interpretations of these words differed in all of their aspects, from what they were understood to mean in our Founders' era, is perhaps most starkly demonstrated by the actions of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The delegates well understood what might follow from signing a declaration against King & Country, and yet they adhered to their principles. With a principled understanding of what the words of the Declaration meant, and what they understood was right and good to do - which in their minds were not separable and could not be overridden by the 'utility' of the moment - they signed it,
"...with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our fortunes, and our sacred Honor...", and did so in an exceedingly meaningful service to liberty and happiness for themselves and for their community.
"But Van, we don't look to Mill for philosophy, but for sustaining a market economy!"Right. About that. That brings us to another word that our Founders' understood to be rather central to both markets and economy: Property, which was best expressed by James Madison, here, as with:
"...He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.In his Principles of Political Economy, vol 1., in his chapter on Property, Mill begins by noting that private property isn't as bad of a thing if it's earned by direct labor, but after much discussion of the noble ideals of various aspects of socialism and communism, he declares that he disapproves of the right to private property when it's not produced by direct labor. He wasn't just talking about inheritance, but about the property of investors, and of business owners, owning and profiting from their business, while the pitiful 'workers':
In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights...."
"...For example (it may be said) the operatives in a manufactory create, by their labour and skill, the whole produce; yet, instead of its belonging to them, the law gives them only their stipulated hire, and transfers the produce to some one who has merely supplied the funds, without perhaps contributing anything to the work itself, even in the form of superintendence...."Mill then scolds that such a set of conditions:
"...does not promote, but conflicts with, the ends which render private property legitimate....", and he ends his chapter on Property after haven spoken throughout of his favorable feelings towards the French Socialist Fourier, whose Fourierism he thinks strikes an admirable balance between Socialism, Communism, and Private Property, to note in his closing paragraph:
"...It is for experience to determine how far or how soon any one or more of the possible systems of community of property will be fitted to substitute itself for the "organization of industry" based on private ownership of land and capital..."If that's not clear enough for you, in book 2, under "2. The case for Communism against private property presented", while noting there could be problems with communism, still though,
"If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism, would be but as dust in the balance."And as frosting on the poop-brownie, J.S. Mill:
Add to that the fact that J.S. Mill was always in sympathy with those socialist ideals that he only later in life openly declared himself to be in support of, is what, IMHO, puts both his ideas, and his notions of 'Economics', in the category of what I term to be Pro-Regressive - that which is for leading us back to a more primitive social & political framework as existed prior to our Founders' era, so as to enable 'those who know best' to wield the power to do with 'the people' as they deemed to be best, for whichever 'good' ('Greater', 'Common', 'The Nation', etc. ) will seem easiest to sell to the public at the time.
- championed the spread of 'useful' aspects of German Idealism,
- was a sympathetic friend and fan of August Comte, who founded Positivism with the intention of creating a secular and *scientifically* socialist religion of the state as a replacement for Christianity.
- used German Idealism to bolster his support for central banking and to oppose any limiting of a central banks' ability to print money
- supported education reform aligned with a "National Education to imitate the “spirit of the Prussian government,";
- led the squashing of Thomas Reid's Scottish Common Sense Realism (SCSR - which arguably had as much or more influence on our Founders' thinking than even John Locke);
It's not too much to say that the sad state of Britain today, which in recent decades has gone from abandoning Hong Kong abroad, to jailing people at home for their comments and memes, is the fruition of J.S. Mill's thoughts 'On Liberty', having been put into practice.
My concern with using "Classical Liberalism" as the go-to label for positions on principles of life, liberty, and happiness, is that too many of those who identify as 'Classical Liberals' today - especially those doing so in a pious openness to 'other' ideas - do so without regard for which sense of the term they are embodying (James Madison or J.S. Mill? Thomas Reid or David Hume?), seemingly unaware that equating J.S. Mill's ideas on liberty and property, with James Madison's brilliant and incredibly brief essay on Property, is like comparing vomit to a gourmet dinner, or worse, to recommend mixing them.
But what 'those who know best' seem to understand best, is that the utility of dialectally laundering how those principles that were understood by Thomas Reid's SCSR and America's Founding Fathers during their period, with those of the latter period in which J.S. Mill has the status of being the leading light of 'Classical Liberalism', transforms the term into a conceptual 'skin suit' for giving aid & comfort to rationalizing morality and reality away.
That is what Mill intended to, do and that is what Marx repurposed the term 'Capitalism' to serve as - that being a label that is easily derided ('Capital' ='Money'='the root of all evil'='heartless & greedy rich people'), so as to portray 'Capitalism' and Capitalists as an assortment of low-minded people and positions who're divorced from principle (just ignore the fact that both Mill & Marx had no use for Principles).
THAT is what should be kept in mind the next time you see any of J.S. Mill's catchy quotes from 'On Liberty'.
So now, having pushed the more obvious labels aside, we're almost in a position to dig into the 'Economic System' itself, but to get the clearest perspective on that, and to be able to identify whatever 'flaws in my economic theory' I might have, we need to take a closer look at what their system took the place of, and why, which is: Political Economy.
Political Economy is not just an old label for 'Economics'
Political Economy, like Classical Liberalism, is not a conceptually tidy term, and though I'm using it here to refer to that small slice of time leading into our Founders' era, and culminating with Jean Baptiste Say, deTocqueville, and Frederic Bastiat, you should understand that it is typically applied to those whose ideas were very much opposed to theirs, including J.S. Mill, who wrote a great deal about it. The origins of Political Economy lay in the somewhat seedy doings of the French royals & Physiocrats, as well as some devilry from the always vile Jean Jacques Rousseau, as Jean Baptiste Say said
"...the sect of "Economists" of the last century, throughout all their writings, and J. J. Rousseau, in the article "Political Economy" in the Encyclopedie, lie under the same imputation."Rousseau used Political Economy as a means to develop and justify his idea of a 'General Will', which held that it was necessary for the state to have the power & authority to 'shape' and improve society for the 'greater good',
"...Heavy taxes should be laid on servants in livery, on equipages, rich furniture, fine clothes, on spacious courts and gardens, on public entertainments of all kinds, on useless professions, such as dancers, singers, players, and in a word, on all that multiplicity of objects of luxury, amusement and idleness, which strike the eyes of all, and can the less be hidden, as their whole purpose is to be seen, without which they would be useless. We need be under no apprehension of the produce of these taxes being arbitrary, because they are laid on things not absolutely necessary....", which is a sentiment that tyrants from Robespierre to Marx and beyond, have appreciated the utility of, ever since.
However, leading into the Founders' era, people like Richard Cantillon, and later Adam Smith, began seeing that history for what it was. Adam Smith regarded such matters derisively as a form of 'state craft', which was very much opposed to the 'Science of Wealth' or 'Natural Liberty', that he had begun to discover the need of:
"...the expression ‘political economy’ consistently refers to those systems of economic policy and analysis which are being opposed and criticized.", and yet Smith was eventually able to describe political economy on his own terms, as:
"Political economy, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign. [WN IV. Intro. 1]"From my POV, that's still a bit problematic in the powers it implicitly concedes to government, but then those pioneers who lead the way to a new discovery, should be forgiven, rather than canceled, for not discovering every danger that lurked behind the real benefits of what they had discovered.
Footnote from Say's 'Treatise on Political Economy':
"From οικος a house, and νομος a law; economy, the law which regulates the household. Household, according to the Greeks, comprehending all the goods in possession of the family; and political, from πόλις, civitas, extending its application to society or the nation at large.
Political economy is the best expression that can be used to designate the science discussed in the following treatise, which is not the investigation of natural wealth, or that which nature supplies us with gratuitously and without limitation, but of social wealth exclusively, which is founded on exchange and the recognition of the right of property both social regulations."
Others soon came along to improve on that pioneering vision, such as Jean Baptiste Say, who Thomas Jefferson praised as being clearer, and much briefer than Adam Smith, and was himself followed by one who succeeded better than most others in marking out the best paths & vistas upon the maps of what Smith & Say had blazed, which was Frederic Bastiat.
"From οικος a house, and νομος a law; economy, the law which regulates the household. Household, according to the Greeks, comprehending all the goods in possession of the family; and political, from πόλις, civitas, extending its application to society or the nation at large.
Political economy is the best expression that can be used to designate the science discussed in the following treatise, which is not the investigation of natural wealth, or that which nature supplies us with gratuitously and without limitation, but of social wealth exclusively, which is founded on exchange and the recognition of the right of property both social regulations."
Bastiat later observed that the approach and understanding that was consistent with Smith's ideal of 'Natural Liberty', was as distinct from the Socialist and later 'Economic' views, as astronomy is from astrology, or chemistry is from alchemy, in that:
"...What separates, radically and profoundly, the two schools is their difference of methods. The one school, like the astrologer and the alchemist, proceeds on hypothesis; the other, like the astronomer and the chemist, proceeds on observation...."Bastiat understood that just as two astronomers could observe the same fact and disagree for a time about its cause or meaning, yet because they were both aiming at understanding what is real and true, once the matter became better understood, their views would eventually come to an harmonious agreement as to what is valid and true. This was very much in line with what Thomas Reid had said earlier:
"...While the parties agree in the first principles on which their arguments are grounded, there is room for reasoning; but when one denies what to the other appears too evident to need or to admit of proof, reasoning seems to be at an end; an appeal is made to common sense, and each party is left to enjoy his own opinion....", but as Bastiat noted:
"... between the astronomer, who observes, and the astrologer, who imagines, the gulf is impassable...."As Bastiat saw it, like the Astronomer, the job of Political Economy was less to advise actions for governments to take, than to make observations that enabled facts and principles to guide people and governments away from acting upon those ideas and practices that lead to confusion and waste, and to provide them instead with the knowledge that would lead their society towards prosperity and harmony. But like the astrologers & alchemists, those who promote Socialism/'Economics' (and yes, they belong together) see their job as being to use their influence to urge policies that imposed upon people's lives which they justified on the basis of their dire or wonderous predictions for the future, no matter what facts or principles need to be ignored or denied in doing so (or concern for what the future actually holds).
Our task here & now, is to select between those interested in understanding reality and pursuing happiness, and those interested in pushing economic narratives in pursuit of power, by examining the systems they support, starting with those of the Pre-Classical Economists (Ooh! so close to finding a usable label!) which 'economics' supplanted.
Here's a few basic questions that should be actively considered before affixing any labels:
- What is an economy?
- How do you measure the state of an economy?
- What's involved in making adjustments to an economy, and at what cost?
- Are such actions justifiable?
Seems rather large, doesn't it?
Unfortunately if that gives you the impression that such key 'economic indicators' as the Federal Reserve's Interest Rate, GDP (Gross Domestic Product), CPI (Consumer Price Index), Unemployment Rate, etc., were actually objective indicators of the state of those 'economic realities', which enable 'those who know best' to divine our economic course into the future, instead of the arbitrary listings of politically motivated 'indicators', I'm sorry to say that you've been misled.
Yet they'll tell you very authoritatively that the advice of 'those who know best' is sufficient to guide society in making those adjustments (adjustments which 'those who know best' are in wild disagreement over) based upon 'recognized indicators', which they insist are necessary and sufficient to best 'manage' the course of our lives, in their society.
"...I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.The innumerable decisions, motivations, and judgements that go into making up an 'economy' (AKA: what you and everyone you know does, and why), is something that no one could ever even adequately identify, let alone 'manage'. I'd say that 'Folly and presumption' is an apt characterization for how 'Economists' gin up their formulations for the various measures and 'distribution curves' they claim to guide the actions that must be taken to 'guide' our economy, to say nothing of the truly dangerous nature which he noted was inherent in even attempting such a project, as even that necessitates infringing upon, and outright violating the individual/property rights of *some* (all) members of the community, in order to separate them by means of percentages, from everyone else in the community, by some such label as 'the wealthy'.
What is the species of domestic industry which his capital can employ, He can judge of this much better than the statesman. and of which the produce is likely to be of the greatest value, every individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would no-where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it....."
That my friends, which is what it is that 'economics' seeks to do, is a key 'tell' of the 'Economic' mindset, in that it's naturally inclined towards using power to divide people on inherently collectivist lines of favored and unfavored groupings, for purposes of its own.
A possibly apocryphal quip from Harry Truman “Give me a one-handed economist. All my economists say ‘on the one hand...’, then ‘but on the other...’”, expresses the frustration of seeking economic advice of more objective value than an opinion.
IOW: Economics presumes that it's appropriate to use political power to experiment with the lives and livelihoods of those living in 'their economy', for the good of the economy, rather than for those it is made up of.
Bringing those issues up, however, is likely to get you and me labeled as being either overly individualistic (which you're intended to associate with the heads & tails 'lone wolf' imagery that J.S. Mill & Dewey both peddled) and with being too concerned with property, and Individual Rights, or in some other way at odds with the common good, such as my xTwitter friends admonished me.
xTwitter'rs tell me:Note the term that one of my xTwitterers' used, 'Rentiers'. That is a favorite label of the economically minded, which this reference provides a few different common dictionary definitions of:
"...competing rights claims require Law that has the Common Good as an end..."
"..."Just laws" depend upon consideration of the public welfare and not simply of individual rights in discerning ..."
"...Imo rentiers have to be eliminated through policy so that productive investment, circulation and stability is promoted..."
, meaning that the term encompasses everyone from those who bought a property to fix up and rent out, or is retired and living on investment income from their 401k, all the way on up to the wealthy, all of whom depend upon the same individual right in property, which the economically minded believe should [should?] be 'eliminated'.
- "A person who lives on income from property or investments.
- One who has a fixed income, as from lands, stocks, or the like.
- An individual who receives an income, usually interest, rent, dividends, or capital gains, from his or her assets and investments.
- someone whose income is from property rents or bond interest and other investments
Have you noticed that 'Economic Thinkers' often use the word 'Common', and then in the next breath single out demographics such as 'rentiers' from the common populace, for uncommon treatment?
And sorry, but if you think that 'they only mean millionaires!', the fact remains that utilizing the law to violate the rights of one person, means abandoning the principle of respecting everyone's rights under the law. Sure, you might not feel the effects of such efforts immediately, but what's common to all with their enactment, is that everyone has been immediately deprived of the full support of the Law in regards to that right (and others), and as happened with the income tax, your tax bracket too will eventually feel the particular effects of its impositions.
"But Van, we don't mean targeting either rich or poor individuals, but only corporations and Big Businesses!"
See 'Wickard v Filburn' for one famous instance out of thousands that confirm this, where SCOTUS decided that a single family farmer raising a small crop for his family's use only, was 'Akshually' an interstate-commerce violation of the FDR administration's 'New Deal' laws.
, and again, no,
although that's how such actions are usually sold, they're implementation says otherwise, no matter what words are said or conveniently left unsaid. Our own history says otherwise as well, loudly, over and over and over again - almost as if an important lesson of history has been deliberately left untaught, so that we'll continue repeating the same mistake over and over again, which we will continue doing, so long as we evade paying attention to the lessons that history is trying to teach us.
And yet 'economic thinkers' persist in justifying their 'Economic actions' as being *objective* measures for improving the 'common good' - so what is this notion of a 'Common Good' that they they speak of? One of those xTweeting with me answered gamely:
xTwitter'rs tell me:Ah. Ok then. Human Flourishing and *Liberty* (using which definition?). Right. Well then. Somehow their use of those words makes me wonder about what they think is meant by them.
"The common good represents the conditions that allow individuals within a society to flourish"
, and then muddying the waters,
"The Common Good with respect to political economy is simply the necessary conditions of liberty."
, or do they mean to use familiar terms like flourishing, *Liberty*, and the *Common Good* as understood by the Founders' sense of those terms, to entice popular support for the very different meanings that became associated with those words a half century and more after our Founders' era, by 'Classical Liberals' and the 'social science' of 'Economics'? The sense of 'common' which most comes to mind from that, is that of common thieves.
- Do they mean that understanding of 'Liberty' which Western history and literature led America and its laws to be established upon during our Founders' era, in order for America to flourish?
- Do they mean something similar to the flourishing that people like Adam Smith understood would follow from refounding Political Economy upon natural liberty (The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776)?
The Common Good, Property, Liberty - united they stand, divided we fall
Interestingly enough, despite my xTweeters assertions that 'the common good' justifies unjustly taking from those who successfully earn wealth in order to somehow enhance 'liberty for all', our Founders made it very clear that their understanding of Liberty and their understanding of a Republic, were tightly bound up with upholding and defending every individual citizen's property rights.
I put a few quotations together to clarify the importance of this in a post several years ago, especially for those whose thoughts tend to run along the lines of "It's only property!", to show them the actual meaning of what it is that they're thinking of as being for 'the common good'. These quotations come from three different Founding Fathers of two very different systems, John Adams, James Madison & Karl Marx:
"Property must be secured, or liberty cannot exist."
John Adams, 'Discourses on Davila', following his 'A Defense of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States of America'
"...Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own...."
James Madison, 'Property', 29 Mar. 1792
"In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."The point being that the one principle that the Founders of both America and of modern Communism understood and agreed upon, was that private property was indispensable to securing your individual rights under a government of limited powers, and that when private property is abolished, the doors are thrown wide open to a government of total and unlimited power over its people.
Karl Marx, 'Communist Manifesto'
Ben Franklin had further expressed that understanding as early as 1772, in one of his 'Silence Dogood' essays,, and America could not have been born if there hadn't been a sizable number of people who understood this as well,
"Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.In that brief passage, Franklin expressed a conceptual integration of the ideas of freedom of speech, property, wisdom, and liberty, which shows Property to be infinitely more than merely a claim to a material possession, and which "...where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own..." is a marvelous illustration of having Property IN speech (read Madison's essay!), and in the very spirit of his life.
"This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own."
Now with that in mind, how do you suppose an 'Economic' proposal to deprive 'rentiers' (AKA: people) of that property which is rightfully theirs, could somehow fit in with an understanding of both liberty and the concept of the 'common good', which our laws are based upon, and are in service to?
Here are just a few questions that such answers deter people from asking:
Why, I wonder, does thinking of such questions remind me of the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help"?
- Where does what they propose to distribute, re-distribute, or 'more fairly' distribute, come from?
- Where does the authority and power which they advise the taking of 'it' with, come from?
- How do they decide who 'it' should be distributed to?
- And who it should not go to? In what way is this 'more fair' distribution, fair?
- What, beyond their assertion that it would be 'good' to give them that power to 'help you' with, could that be either 'helpful', 'fair', or 'good'?
To see what these two senses of 'good' are, is not difficult to do, though the traditional sense may require more than one web search to find (or looking in an old printed dictionary), with the result being that the older definition will be something along the lines of: "Morally excellent, Virtuous, Righteous, Pious", and the newer sense will be some variant of 'pleasant', 'useful' and 'acceptable'.
The traditional view reflects a frame of mind that takes the existence of reality and the importance of conforming to what is real and true, and right & wrong, seriously. That's an understanding that presumes that what is good is worthwhile and valuable because it is good, whether or not it also produces other immediately measurable material results.
The newer sense entails a quantitative approach that aims at calculating a cost/benefit ratio of overall 'greater good'ness, as justification for incurring whatever 'negatives' that other groups (rentiers, citizens, biological women, etc.,) might experience, so that 'good' is measured as what outweighs, and so justifies, doing 'bad' to some (rentiers, people, etc.), to balance the scales.
Only when 'good' is used in the quantitative (collective) sense, can 'Economic Thinking' function fully in its role as the 'practical' hand of social engineering, which requires 'economic thinkers' (and all who think through it) to use the moderns' form of 'epistemology' to justify ignoring, subverting, and excluding, traditional concerns of metaphysics, causality, and ethics, from our conscious consideration.
Consequently what 'economic thinkers' mean by the word 'good' cannot be understood to reflect the quality of Good, and what they mean by a 'common good' can be neither common, nor good, but only a quantitative concern for what is useful (to their economy).
Only after that's done, can they engage in the necessarily arbitrary and utilitarian calculations of n amounts of pleasure, divided amongst x quantities of people, without fear of some traditionalist raising questions about what's right and wrong, or infringing upon individual rights, etc., which are of course the goods we all can and should have in common, which 'Economic Thinking' is designed to put safely out of the common mind.
Using the 'Common Good' to harm the good of all
When its pointed out that what 'economic thinkers' mean by the 'Common Good', is bestowing privileges & benefits to some, at the expense of others, for the 'good' of the economy, their response is not to make a new effort in thinking from first principles to determine whether or not they've gone astray (from what?), but to diminish and discard everything that makes such thinking possible (metaphysics, causality, ethics, etc.), so as to carry on with their calculations without any inconvenient 'interference' from morality & virtue.
No doubt some of my xTweeters would reply "Well, that's just like your opinion, man", but sorry, no, it's the thinking of those who've brought about calamitous disasters of modern times by thinking as they do. For example, as I've noted often (such as here, and here, and here) the opinion of the 'common good' and 'greater good' that 'economic thinking' holds, is what was expressed by this Supreme Court Justice in 1837, that:
"While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and wellbeing of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation."Does that meaningfully differ from what my xTweeters espouse? It's very much worth noting that this wording comes from Justice Joseph Taney in his ruling opinion for the Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge (1837), and on hearing that opinion for the case he'd just lost, the famed senator and constitutional lawyer Daniel Webster, observed that:
"That's the death of property rights.", which was an assessment that was shared by one of the deans of American jurisprudence, Chancellor Kent, who soon afterwards wrote in The New York Review:
"...A gathering gloom is cast over the future. We seem to have sunk suddenly below the horizon, to have lost the light of the sun..."The reason why these two remaining Founders felt such a sense of gloom at the time of the actual culmination of the 'Classical Liberal' era, was because they understood that once the 'common good' was able to be used to justify infringing upon the individual rights of ANYone, then that principled understanding of Individual Rights and Property that America had been founded upon and protected by, would be stripped away, which would leave no one with any more claim to their actions and possessions than what force they could physically muster to cling to them, while simultaneously reducing their 'rights' to only those privileges that 'those who know best' might deem useful to grant to them, in service to their idea of the 'common good'.
To act against Property Rights is to support slavery and oppose individual rights, which is what made it the core of Democrat policy before & after our Civil War.
And for those who'd say 'Come on now Van! The Civil War changed all of that!', I must sadly point out that while the outcome of the Civil War removed the possibility of men being labeled as actual slaves under our Constitution, the ideas that Justice Taney was expressing have dominated our colleges since the early 1800s. Those Pro-Regressive ideals easily survived our Civil War, and they handily fought off their last substantive opposition from 'The Right' back in Calvin Coolidge's administration. Those same ideals were also seen to be very much alive & thriving in FDR's administration, as with the infamous Gold Clause Cases which outlawed 'the privilege' of owning Gold in 1938. At the conclusion of those cases, a sentiment was again expressed that was very similar to that of a century earlier, when after the court's opinion was read that FDR's actions had prevailed, Supreme Court Justice McReynolds, gloomily stated that:
"...this is Nero at his worst. The Constitution is gone..."And no, you can't say 'well we're still here, so obviously they must've been wrong!', as what we are left with here today, is little or nothing like the world that Daniel Webster warned was fading away.
Consider that at Daniel Webster's time, there was as yet:
The sentiment of 'the common good' that Daniel Webster warned of and that Justice McReynolds saw realized, has progressively spiraled around into utilitarian & 'economic thinking' gaining ever more power over individual rights & property rights each time it's been employed over the last century and a half, which has been particularly apparent in just the last couple decades with George W. Bush's "..."I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system...", and in the rights-busting legislation of Obamacare, pushed through for the benefit of '"30% of Americans are not covered by healthcare, what about them! Are they just out of luck?! Would you leave them to die on the sidewalk?!"', both of which very clearly demonstrate something else that Webster had warned us of:
- No State Mandated Compulsory Education (and America had the highest literacy rate in the West)
- No Federal Dept of Education (created by Republicans in 1863, and re-elevated by Carter in the 1970s)
- No Civil Service Act entrenching a federal bureaucracy into continuous power
- No Federal Regulatory Agencies
- No Income Tax
- No FED
- No FBI, FDA, SEC, or any of the other hundreds of agencies that make up the Administrative State
- ...etc., etc., etc.,
" It may be very possible that good intentions do really sometimes exist when constitutional restraints are disregarded. There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters."One question we should ask ourselves now is what 'Good' - common, greater, or otherwise - could be served by the abridgement (and so the abandonment) of that principle of Property which our Founders understood to be so fundamental to the understanding of Individual Rights, which our American system of liberty was founded upon? They fully understood that granting and permitting the exercise of such powers over those principles and rights would mean throwing open the doors to a government of total and unlimited power over its people - in what world can that be thought of as being for the 'common good', or can somehow aid in maintaining 'a more perfect union' in any meaningful way?
Given the obvious interest that these 'economic experts' have in labeling (and mislabeling) others, it seems only fair that when their revisionist efforts are used to retrofit our understanding, that it warrants our identifying and turning the label maker back upon them... but with what labels?:
Whichever of those above you might think fits best, each contains technical differences in their positions that contradict the reasoning for them (by design) so that the labeled can easily deny the label. IMHO they are better described, than labeled, as being Pro-Regressive. Ignore the inconsistencies that the reversal of orbit and orbited creates, and note what they consistently believe in common, that they have the expertise to redefine the common meaning of the 'Common Good', into meaning something that cannot be common to all.
- , as neo-liberals?
- , as neo-Americans?
- , as old-fashioned Marxists?
- , as neo-Marxists?
Another fitting term to describe how the Pro-Regressives goes about routinely generating answers to kill off uncomfortable questions before they spread, is what an online friend, @ClassicalLiberal12 (but in a good way 😎), devised for such arbiters of political correctness: The Umpires of Reasonable Discourse (TURD).
An exceedingly important point that we'll see develop throughout this post, is that what we're looking at here is not simply an 'economic' matter, or a debatable matter of political policies and preferences, but a manner of thinking that implicitly defines what you are able to view as being real and true, and of the highest ethical importance concerning what you recognize as being Good - which I mean that in the sense of Right & Wrong, Good and Evil - and reducing that to mere technicalities and political positions, is a means of reducing you, and surreptitiously depriving you, of your humanity.
Whatever the case may be, any 'thinker' proposing to 'manage' or 'know' what they can have no realistic means of even compiling, let alone adequately identifying, is not actually engaged in thinking (as an effort to understand what is real and true), they're simply using positions as pretexts for rationalizing a justification for a particular ideological use of political power. Such actions are necessarily arbitrary and require the breaching of fundamental principles, heedless of any unforeseen consequences that will follow from them, and they take them on the basis of their intentions & aspirations for what they've decided is *best* for your and everyone else's life.
While such behavior tends to leave me either cursing quietly or momentarily speechless, Bastiat managed a more measured response, in his 'Conflict of Principles':
"Now, what astonishes and confounds me is that a publicist, a statesman, who sincerely holds an economical doctrine that runs so violently counter to other principles that are incontestable, should be able to enjoy one moment of calm or peace of mind."This is an issue that should not be passed by without considering it carefully, as doing so practically ensures that it will be imposed by default. Look at the questions their answers are meant to kill:
To adequately address those questions, we'll need to interrupt this post in order to take a short(ish) diversion into pre-modern philosophy's understanding of metaphysics, causality, and ethics, in order to realize that 'Economics' wasn't simply advanced to replace Political Economy with a new name, but to replace reality itself.
- How should the Market [which is what?] be 'corrected '?
- What knowledge & understanding do they claim to possess that is superior to that which our nation was founded upon, and which these theories are derived from, and so justifies their employing them upon us?
- As agreed upon & decided by who?
- By popular vote?
- By law?
- By the decisions of TURD's?
- Upon what criteria and authority do they give their 'ok' to such power?
- And what has happened to their habits of thought, that they are able to leave such questions unasked and unanswered?
Dazzling us with what's partly seen while abandoning the full reality of what's left unseen
Wait... what?! Replaced reality? Ok, I realize that may sound a wee bit extravagant, but humor me for a moment, after all, haven't we already seen an example of this occurring with how the popular understanding of the 'Common Good' has developed? The first thing we need to realize, is that in order to make what people mentally understand to be real and true, seem to disappear, is, as every magician knows, a fairly simple trick. And that while performing that trick may require the magician to use some physical aids, such as smoke and mirrors, and an attractive assistant, the most important part, the part where the real heavy lifting occurs to make even something as large as the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear before the eyes of his dazzled audience, is what takes place upon that stage between the audiences ears, through the willing assistance they give to the magician's theatrical distractions and mis-directions.
What we need to do to catch them in the act of pulling the joker from their sleeve, is to calmly work our way down through their stated positions, and the implications of them, into the results that they count on slipping past you unseen. Recognizing their reasons for them, and consequences of them, is what must be seen and understood by us, before we can understand what it is that's being passed off to us as 'economic thinking', so that we can get back to the reality they've made disappear from our awareness.
The most visible part of their stagecraft comes from the wand waving of the magician, that's Semantic Deception, and you need only look to terms such as 'racist', 'peaceful protest', 'woman' 'gender', and others recent verbal victims, to see how effective this pro-regressive magic trick has been upon those who don't pay attention to what's been done with the words we recognize by sound, but miss the new meanings that's being slipped into our minds unquestioned and unseen.
The physical 'smoke & mirrors' portion of the trick involves the 'rigorous' use of physical textbooks, tests, diplomas ("you sir, would you verify for the audience that this is just a hat"), and sets the stage of what's visible to the eye, and the performance begins as the flourishing movements and sleight of hand, together with the attractive assistant's attention getting outfits (from climate change to sex, greed, murder, Russian disinformation, and News at 11), enables their semantic deceptions to transfer the latest narrative into unquestionable beliefs, that gradually, progressively, become the popular assumptions of their evolving cultural baseline.
For 'reality' to be made to disappear, requires only taking those words we use for considering what is real and true, and utilizing the active participation of our schools and media to redirect our attention away from what those words used to refer to, into a new use and meaning, and in no time flat: viola`!, while the spelling of the words themselves remain the same, We The People's default ability to access the reality which those words had originally referred to - Liberty, Happiness, Property - has disappeared from popular understanding - it's been 'unburdened by what has been'.
With that in mind, I want to refer you to an essay of Frederic Bastiat's that was the inspiration for Henry Hazlitt's book "Economics in One Lesson", called "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen", and I encourage you to try and take notice of both what is unavoidably seen when discussing the 'economic' headlines of the day, and what is pointedly not seen in most discussions of them.
What is seen and cannot be missed, is of course the endless details that are hurled into our attention in tedious debates over whether this or that policy, ranging from Minimum Wage laws, to Tax Cuts, to Controlling Inflation, will cause this or that 'economic indicator' to rise or fall by a whole or fraction of a percentage point, and how that may or may not cause still other indicators of GDP, CPI, etc., to rise or fall. Those indicators will prompt discussions & debates over whether 'the FED should raise the discount rate', or to impose or repeal a ' Capital Gains rate hike', and heated discussions over still more economic policies and whether or not 'they' 'should increase monetary supply', etc., and eventually, those in government will follow which advice suits them best and take action to implement some or all of the recommended 'economic policies'.
Did you catch the sleight of hand being performed just beneath the surface of all such policy debates? Here's a few questions to help reveal the trick:
Less obviously, but no more surprising, is the fact that all such 'economic policies' enacted by government are imposed upon us through the force of law, and you & I would be punished and/or imprisoned for ignoring or violating them.
Now did you notice the card being slipped up the sleeve?
What mostly goes unseen, is that this means that our Rule of Law has been made to serve the interests of 'the economy', before the interests of those living within the economy.
And the Pro-Regressive magicians take a bow.
Also unseen and pointedly unconsidered, is what principle of Law is compatible with the government of We The People, showing such favoritism to some, while at the same time penalizing others, not as a rightful response to unlawful actions of some individuals, but towards those 'singled out' by their collective employment and financial status & standing. What remains unseen, is what standard of law supports such actions - the traditional standards that Thomas Jefferson found "...in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c..." to justify the Declaration of Independence, are incompatible with whatever these new standards of law that 'economic thinkers' have in mind are - so what standard is it that is now being used to determine whether our laws are to be viewed as being either good laws, or bad laws?
Also kept unseen is what 'Justice' must be twisted into meaning, so as to turn the force of law upon society, on the basis of calculated probabilities, rather than as 'just deserts' for individual actions.
What should be seen, is that this means that the very ideal of 'Justice' not only cannot involve impartiality, it must direct an expressed partiality towards those favored by those in power, and - 'Poof!' - Lady Justice's blindfold and our Founders' ideal of Justice for all, are made to disappear.
What else goes mostly unseen when engaging with the 'economically minded' over any of these questions of the economic 'common good', is that their justifications for the extensive intrusions of governmental and extra-governmental forces as being necessary for enforcing 'economic' policies into our lives (hi there FED), is that this not only stealthily presupposes extensive revisions to have already been made to our fundamental concepts of Justice and Law, but to our metaphysical, causal, logical, and ethical understandings of what we think 'Good' is, and means.
Such changes as these aren't typically discussed out in the open, but behind committee doors, and are then slipped into popular understanding as foregone conclusions (answers which abort your questions) through academia (hi there textbooks & testing!), often by pragmatically muddying the waters to make them appear shallow and 'safe enough' to be swept aside and left unseen (hi there modern 'epistemology').
Whose expectations are our elected representatives and appointed officials serving, by putting ideas like these into practice? It's certainly not in order to uphold our rights or to correct actual wrongs done to the public in common, but instead to further the expectations of the 'T.U.R.D.'s' preferred economic indicators. Those indicators are used by them, for them to justify the creation of numerous & vaguely defined institutions & agencies, which we're told simply must be given the power to operate within our lives, administering daily doses of power being injected into and over every decision we might make, concerning every aspect of our lives & property. The affects that these indicator-serving actions have upon our day to day lives, is central to what's caused the ills and unrest that beset us today.
Our having conceded these fundamentally moral, legal, and political concerns and actions, to being 'economic concerns', has in a very real sense replaced - or at least overpowered - those decisions that should in reality be ours to make in our own lives. In everything from pasteurized milk, to medicines, and indicators of how educated you are or aren't, 'economic concerns' are used to replace an active part of your life, with someone else's decision for how you 'should' be living it. Putting the matter more starkly, our willingly engaging in 'economic thinking' has effectively transformed our understanding of the key phrase of our Declaration of Independence, from being 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness', to that of 'life, *liberty*, and maintaining the 'T.U.R.D.'s' 'GDP'' (Gross Domestic Product).
And all of this we're told by our T.U.R.D.'s, is fully justified by the necessity of improving 'the economy' for the greater good.
Do you see how significant a portion of the reality of being an American, has been made to disappear by this sleight of hand?
There are a great many things that we no longer give much serious thought to in our day to day lives, because 'economics' has become so central to the thinking that we order our lives around, even in less than obvious ways, as with the reason that most people give when asked why they send their kids to school:
Those actions which 'Economic Thinking' advises, have entailed substantial alterations to our understanding of the nature and purpose of education, and of law, and of justice - and more importantly, to our own standing in regards to them - which has been accomplished with ease by way of our loosely accepting and affirming that 'something must be done to improve the economy'.
These are just some of the most obvious surface indications of how far reaching these mundane and tedious 'economic' policies of 'the dismal science' have gone, and how effectively our understanding of reality has been so easily altered and shifted out of our conscious attention and control, by means of 'economic thinking'.
But wait! There's more!
Have you noticed that if you attempt to question the wisdom of imposing 'economic policies' in place of questions of what is real and true and right and wrong, your concerns are going to be addressed by them from within the frame of 'economic thinking'? Meaning that concerns such as those I've raised concerning the primacy of metaphysical & ethical principles, over that of economic utility, will be reframed as if they were expressions of one or another economic thinker or school, such as Hazlitt, von Mises, Hayek, etc., or just plain ignorance of economics, which installs 'Economic Thinking' as the standard? And then of course if they do respond to my points any further, they will do so from within the frame of whichever economic school of thought, such as Marx, Keynes, Stiglitz, etc., it is that they support.
Coincidentally (not) in service to the 'progressive' goal of getting 'good grades' to develop our workforce of 'human capital', our schooling has drilled into us the habit of scanning through meaningless worksheets and textbooks for the 'correct answer' to True/False & 'Fill in the blank' questions that we don't understand or care about, and which probably weren't worth asking in the first place ('What were the six causes of the Civil War?'), and so having been accustomed to such shallow thinking, most students are trained into never developing the habit of integrating what they learn, into the rest of what they know (get in the habit of noticing that Truth integrates your understanding all the way up & down, while lies disintegrate and stop it).
Generations of graduates who've been trained to seek answers rather than to pursue understanding, have become accustomed to accepting the several small daily wrongs that are part & parcel of 'economically minded' policies, each of which requires introducing thinly veiled forces into our communities, with the power to override anyone's claim to their own decisions or property, which will be justified with some version of:
Slow down bro - thinking about rights, government, justice, law, politics, can't start with rights, government, justice, law, politics
Here we need to pause once again so that we don't allow ourselves to get ahead of ourselves. Despite what 'Civics Class' might lead you to think, rights, government, justice, law, politics, are not where we should start thinking about rights, government, justice, law, or politics from. Such matters are neither stumbled upon fully formed like rocks in a field, nor dreamt up by whim, they develop out of more fundamental observations and questions, and if we fail to consider them in that way, there's no limit to what will remain unseen to us, as we're led to focus on what is too conveniently seen.
Because 'Rights' are consequences, not causes, 'Rights' cannot be the starting point for thinking about 'Rights', reality and how we inhabit it is. Identifying what is and what that requires of us, comes first (or should), and leads into identifying those First Principles of what is, what follows, and what should be, which can then provide a foundation for, and meaningful guidance to, your thinking.
Common Sense will tell you that if you're going to climb the stairs to the top of a multi-story building, there's no means of a shortcut for you to somehow take a single step that will extend from the foot of the stairs, to a step that's mid-way up and around the flight of stairs to the third floor - you know you have to enter the stairwell at its start on the ground floor or basement level, and climb up to that point - it's just common sense. Likewise, as government involves "...the greatest of all reflections on human nature...", you shouldn't attempt to start making decisions about "rights, government, justice, law, or politics", without first starting with what you do and do not understand of reality, and the nature of what being human is and requires.
If you skip that and pretend it doesn't matter, how are you going to know that any of your positions are realistic? Get out of the habit you learned through twelve years of schooling to seek after answers without understanding the questions that led to them, and don't be so trusting of those who encourage you to continue doing so.
Accepting 'answers' without having established their basis in what is real and true, seeking after and defending 'acceptable answers', without giving consideration to the questions they claim to be an answer to, or whether they were even valid to ask in the first place, is the hallmark of ideological thinking (which, BTW, began with 'Economic Thinking'). Recognize that the shallow flowchart-logic habit of thinking - a *praxis* if you will - is only concerned with 'the right position' that you must be either for, or against, to gain some mark of approval from them, and not with whether it is true or false, and so right or wrong.
These ideas with no visible means of support - where are they leading you to?
Not only have people forgotten that the ground floor of whatever they might undertake to do, buy, or sell, begins with their judgement of what they can see is real and true, but their willingness to begin considering consequential ideas, on the basis of what those same theories and theorists promise, is stepping into a matrix of circularity that should bring P.T. Barnum's phrase to mind:
Most of all, what I hope to bring to your attention here, is that the 'Social Science' of 'economic thinking', is inviting you to step into a practice of thinking that is less about theories and thought experiments, than with deadening your ability to recognize the warning signs of your departure from what is real and true, steps which dis-integrate what you can see is real, from what you know is true. The fact is that most of our popular political/economic labels today are rooted in the same disjointed and baselessly self-important terms and fields, and are not something we should be willing to treat as legitimate, let alone conform to.
It's as if they don't see it, and think that you can't see it - which as we'll see, is less 'as if' and more 'that's exactly it'.
This routine expectation that people will be willing to perform philosophical parkour to reach their upper floor 'entrance', while pretending that the ground floor doesn't even exist or would somehow matter if it did, is common to discussions of 'Economics', and 'Social Studies' too. An example of which would be those introductory lessons that begin with talk of the 'Social Contract', which, with apologies to Locke (and sneers & jeers for Hobbes & Rousseau), simply won't do as a starting point. Why? Because that is making the parkour leap from the sidewalk to the 3rd floor window, so as to evade coming into contact with the foundational contexts which make up the entire 1st & 2nd floors (not to mention the basement) that are necessary to support that 'Social Contract'.
Do I exaggerate? If you ask a few of the questions which you are expected to leap over with their philosophical parkour, you may notice what narratives it inserts as premises without your having considered them, and which leaves such 'answers' at best, meaningless and misleading. To see what I mean, let's take a look at the two words of the 'Social Contract':
Contrary to everything that's been taught for generations, you need to insist on starting from the ground floor of reality, with what you can see is real and true, and then work your way up through the relevant concepts and arguments they present. Should they ever present a theory that at least appears to conform to reality, those could be worth exploring further, but when they won't acknowledge that they're clearly proposing to build new additions upon an unsupportable foundation of error and/or deceit, then it's very likely that they're trying to fool you into accepting a narrative position in place of your understanding the actual issues, so as to obscure your view of reality.
When you see that's the case don't waste time arguing with them, simply 'shake the dust off your feet', and continue on your way.
Also keep in mind that as you begin looking into the development of ideas, and their effects across history in this way, you're going to begin running into opposition to some theory or position of someone that you've been accustomed to regard as an authority on the matter. When that happens it's good to keep a quip of Aristotle's in mind:
Resist being led into subjects awash with enthusiasts who're focused on sweeping you along with their narrative of 'What is Seen', and look for what they are quick to leave unseen in their positions, and therefore be unlikely to enter into your thinking at all. When you notice what is not there that should be, that warrants your taking a judicious 'pause for the cause' to at least consider how they ever managed to leave it out of, what we should've been taught should be kept in mind.
IS that so - It all depends upon what the meaning of 'Is', is
Where we should begin is of course where the beginning of the subject is, because if you haven't given some thought to what the meaning of the word IS, is, then what it is will assuredly be taken from you by those who recognize that you haven't yet grasped it, and seeing the power they can gain by using that to their advantage, they'll do so before you've even noticed that it's gone (welcome to the last thirty years (at least)). The sorts of things that should be on people's daily radar, but usually flies well under it, are the most routine points that're used, misused, neglected, or violated, in the standard practices that you very likely do not connect with 'economic thinking', such as what is meant by an 'Idea', or a 'Concept'.
Modernity has developed some very dangerous 'ideas' about ideas (Thomas Reid's comments on this are both revealing, and humorous, and to those used to the 'modern' mode of thinking, unexpected - in one he uses the sense of smell to swiftly reduce idealism to rubbish), that are essential to the semantic deceptions used in general today, and by economics in particular. They do so by using those words that you, classical philosophy, and modern misosophy share (especially in the case of words such as 'value', 'is', 'truth', 'good', 'choice') only in the spelling of, so as to more easily lead you astray. This is due to a kind of verbal-magic trick being performed on and about you with that, and if you can become aware of even some of what is and has been concealed by deliberate mislabeling, the affect upon you is like catching sight of the magician slipping a card from his sleeve - it frees you from the illusion that he'd magically made it appear.
That is what traditional philosophy always practiced, so as to identify, clarify, and determine whether or not you were justified in believing that what you've understood to be real and true, was or wasn't so, which is the means of keeping you free of the webs of sophistry that TURDS seek to wrap about your understanding.
Although the moderns' advertised that their new field of 'epistemology' exists (ahem) to help you to 'justify belief' - that's not quite the same thing. One problem with their claim, is that it is founded upon the basis of Kant's assertion that we cannot know reality as it is (which is just the tip of that philosophical iceberg), which is what modernists and post-modernists depend upon in subverting and replacing what traditional philosophy sought to have people understand.
Let's begin at the actual beginning, by flagging a few key points from Metaphysics,
And for the unwise guys who might say:
With the outrageous obviousness aside, there are some importantly obvious points to make:
Equally self-evident, is that whether by accident, error, or carelessness, we can be wrong. We can make mistakes.
When we fail to conform to reality, we experience some degree of failure and confusion in whatever it is we might've been trying to achieve.
Which, believe it or not, is a good thing.
Why?
Because it tells us at least three very important facts:
They hates it. Truly they do.
What this means for the rest of us, is that we can perceive the world around us, and by virtue of our knowing firsthand that we are capable of making errors, we also know that we're capable of perceiving and judging what is true (if not, an 'error' would be an unknown concept to us), and we do that best by methodically reasoning between our perceptions and judgement, towards a better understanding of what is real and true. It's important that we choose to direct our attention - sensorially and mentally - towards what is actually relevant to a matter, no matter how inconvenient that might be to our feelings and preferences.
But what do we know of how we're able to perceive the world, and abstract ideas from it?
Using the tools available to him at the time, Aristotle used the image of how a signet ring is impressed into wax, as an analogy for how reality is impressed into our minds by means of our sensory perceptions, which we then use in forming our thoughts and memories. From Part 12 of De Anima:
To hit the highlights of what I went over here, the Three Acts of the Mind is a central function in how our mind operates:
As Reid notes:
For instance, staying close to the direct level of experience, in any human society across the ages, if you were to play a musical instrument to anyone with adequate hearing, they would report hearing its sound, and whether or not they recognized the instrument or even considered the sound pleasing, it would be self-evident to them that what they heard had come from that instrument. It would be equally true in all of those instances that those who'd consciously developed their habits of listening, and by paying attention to what they're hearing they could develop the ability to further identify that sound they'd heard as being the note 'C' or 'C#', or a combination of notes that make up the chord 'C# minor', and whether the instrument playing it was in or out of tune. To those who'd developed that ability, those identifications would be 'self-evident' to them, and anyone else who later developed that ability would as well.
Those actions of the mind of apprehending, judging, and reasoning which we've just looked at in regards to touch, and hearing, are equally active with the input of the other senses of sight and smell. The same applies in regards to the far more intricate issues involving our knowledge, thoughts, and habits of mind, and as the legal example of Reid's just noted, 'anyone' within a society should be able to identify what would commonly be considered to be foolish thinking & behavior, and so remark with words to the effect of:
To the degree that the sense of such conclusions seem obvious to people, the conclusion is drawing upon a common understanding that is so fundamental to their thinking, that the response is close to coming without conscious thought, it is self-evident, though if you were to ask them to go on and explain their conclusion in detail (a favorite 'gotcha' of 'on the street' reporting), it would likely take a few moments of conscious consideration of what it is that they know, to explain it if you could - try explaining how you know a note is C#. The more basic the reasons, the more the sense of it has been absorbed into their 'common sense', and so the more likely they haven't had to consciously consider the details of it in ages - to see what I mean, try giving an off the cuff explanation for why Fall follows Summer, or why there are four seasons.
OTOH, someone such as a logician who has consciously developed their habits of mind and knowledge in the practice of logical reasoning, and so often has occasion to actively consider the subject, would likely be able to identify the particular errors and fallacies responsible for that same common sense conclusion, and the details of which would seem as 'self-evident' to them, as identifying the notes 'C' or 'C#' would've seemed to the musician. And yet someone else of equal intelligence from outside of that community, might not be able to 'make sense' of the statement at all - at first - though once familiarized with the context, they too would be likely to come to the same conclusion.
The operations of the Three Acts of the Mind are common to all people, everywhere and every when, but what contents of the mind are common to people within a community, and so able to be recognized as 'Common Sense', depends upon the knowledge and behavior that is commonly understood in that community, and what people choose to focus on.
Developing what is recognized as a societal baseline of knowledge and expected norms of observation, identification, and judgement - and behavior in accordance with that - is a large part of what education aims at. It's with that baseline in mind, that I invite you to consider the nature of an 'educational system' that willfully fails to provide its students with what should be common sense in their society.
What should also be commonly understood, and can be simply by being attentive to the operations of the mind, is that because our perceptions do reliably inform us about reality, we're able to recognize that we're capable of making mistakes in identifying what it is we perceive ('I thought that round green object was an apple, but it was a tennis ball'), and in judging what actions we should take ('It's for hitting, not biting'), and in reasoning our way to being aware that what we are able to perceive, may not be all that there is to perceive or conceive (such as that while green is a shade we're able to perceive, others such as infrared light, are not within our field of vision, yet remarkably we are able to discover that), and what should be done about it.
An important point to make here, is that our sense perceptions (technically this refers to sensation, percept, and perception, but unless you want another several pages, 'perception' will have to do) are never wrong.
But Van! We do make mistakes, you just cited an example of mistaking an apple for a tennis ball!
Hold on now, read what I said again. Through our senses we perceive that range of reality which they are attuned to (we don't perceive all ranges of color, but we do perceive those within the range our eyes are attuned to, yes, even those who're color blind still perceive the range they're capable of) as it is. What we tend to think of as errors of perception, comes from our making errors in identifying what it is we are perceiving. The perceptions themselves (yes, including the oddities of vision, and delusions and hallucinations are matters of the mind, not of perception), are of reality as it is, and if that were not the case, we could know nothing at all.
It also matters, as I've been noting, what and how you pay attention, do you attend to that particular issue of importance within the context which makes it important, or do you allow your focus to fixate on that one point and forget about the context it has importance within? If you're not getting the distinction, there's the famous 'monkey business' video of people asked to concentrate on a basketball being passed amongst them, that you should take a moment to watch.
But because we are able to perceive the world around us, and because we are able to make mistakes in judgement, it is especially consequential that we be attuned to the nature of what we identify, and what contextually follows from that, which is the nature of causality - cause and effect. Understanding how it is that the nature of matter, and of our own thinking, are integrated and follow a process, a telos, where one thing follows from another, is important to have a grasp of.
In observing the reality we are able to observe of the world around and within us, Aristotle proposed his theory of 'The Four Causes' (gone into in more detail here), which observes the nature of how effects are preceded by causes, which logic and reason follow from (and would not be possible without), and how best to use those insights to abstract ideas from reality and so develop our experiences into knowledge of the world to a far greater degree than sense perception alone could ever have provided us, and which we can gain wisdom from. The Four Causes are, in brief:
In short, an attention to causation, enables you to have a more thorough understanding of what truly does matter to you, in your life, both immediately, and long range.
And you should especially note that modern philosophy dismisses and ignores the Efficient and the Final causes from all consideration (and Thomas Aquinas' addition of the Exemplary Cause, which guides the intellect), and focuses only on the 1st two causes - as they must, because the pretenses of their theories would be unstainable otherwise (teaching college students to hate Israel for 'occupying' land, is infinitely easier to accomplish by pointing only to the first two causes of borders and guards, while ignoring the efficient and final causes of history and justice, and the contradictions those would expose in the rest of what they're taught on the issue).
How this all fits together, and whether or not we're aware of it, is something that we shouldn't breeze past too quickly, so let's pause and take note: We perceive reality and are able to identify it, and in abstracting from our experiences and considerations, we're able to assemble and associate those perceptions and observations into considerable amounts of interrelated and integrated knowledge, that knowledge branches out fractal-like from any one particular aspect of what we experience, and from which, properly understood, is able to provide us with a wisdom which can enhance and guide our experience in life, and the quality of it.
A brief illustration of that follows from beginning with the senses alone, that we perceive from some distance over there, a round, no... wait... a spherical object, green in color, and moving to pick it up, it feels smooth to the touch, solid, has some weight to it - ooh, it smells tart, tastes sweet & juicy. With that data as a starting point, we are able - by choice coupled with action - to methodically reason and investigate the substance of the apple. It's within our power to develop a knowledge of the apple itself and the tree it came from, and of the soil, fertilizer, and climate that it grows best in. Investigating the structure of the skin and meat of the apple can lead us into an understanding of the structure of the cells and chemistry that it's made of when alive, and how its materials decompose back into the soil, afterwards. From all of that we can develop habits of understanding and behavior in regards to what we come to understand to be real and true, that extend from beyond that of growing and eating an apple, to the wisdom to apply the principles which that understanding was developed through, to every other aspect of our lives.
By conforming our thoughts to what is real and true, perceptually and conceptually, we're able to achieve a greater understanding of our world than could ever be grasped by sense perception alone; this is true materially, ranging from the biology of cells to the infrared spectrum, and from the very small level of sub-atomic particles to the beyond vast nature of the structure of distant galaxies. Likewise immaterially as well, in regards to how observing and understanding yourself and those around you will find common ground in the moral principles and virtuous behavior that form into habits of character that benefit ourselves and those in society with us, which aid us in guiding our future thoughts and actions.
The unifying nature of that, is what we saw Bastiat noting in his Economic Harmonies, and it shows in what Reid had earlier observed as well:
IOW, the very practical fruits of attending to metaphysics, causality, and ethics, is an improved ability to engage in an organized pursuit of happiness, which is the most reliable method for achieving some level of success in living lives worth living, and does so in a way that you can be thankful for whatever prosperity you do achieve, which is an approach that epitomizes the culture of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West.
Any claims and assertions against that will, and are possibly even intended to, reduce the scope and quality of your life, and your ability to live it well.
For those who doubt the consequences of lacking that, there's sadly no shortage of object lessons to be learned from 'stars' who've tragically ended their lives by their own hand or habits, after having achieved the trappings of 'success' without having first learned what a successful life is, and how to support and sustain it.
Mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you disappear from your life
As David Hume demonstrated by his inability to identify a 'self' when he looked into his own mind, mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you disappear from your own life. Those engaged in that mystification, 'gnowingly' or not, are in opposition to the understanding that we can know reality as it is, which is the idea promoted by the nominalists, rationalists, skeptics/empiricists, and idealists, whose ideas about 'ideas' take varying approaches to having you believe that thinking not only doesn't make reality clearer to us, but misleads and separates us from it, trapping us within our minds in a 'copy world, which distances our understanding from what is actually real and true.
What may come as a shock to fans of sci-fi like the Matrix, is that the real technology trap has nothing to do with machines & computers, it's Ideas and their systematic misuse which are the means of trapping you within an ideology, which excludes you from your own life and ability to live it well.
John Locke for instance, in the act of batting away the rationalism of Descartes, nevertheless advanced a materialistic theory of ideas in his thoughts on education and morals, the error of which has been intensified with every iteration of thinkers who've added to it, particularly in the development (and misuse of) 'Empirical Thinking', which is:
David Hume took that erroneous idea and ran with it, advancing what had been a mere error, into ever increasing falsehoods, as his positions helped in intensifying the effects of the copy theory several times over, and transformed an old fashioned skeptical attitude towards presumptions of what we think we know, into the claim that all we think we know about what occurs in our lives, is nothing more than chance associations of events we have and can have no real comprehension of. With that came the incredibly consequential claim, that Causality is not observing the effects that follow from the nature of that reality which caused them, but is instead nothing more than the unwarranted projection of our expectations onto the world of experience, because of what has only chanced to occur in sequence before, which our minds fabricate as having a causal connections, in order to give us a sense of control or power, which, in Hume's mind, is all a figment of our imaginations.
According to Hume, the only things we can have the confidence to trust and talk about, is empirical evidence taken directly from experience ('taken' how?). But he continues (almost as if he has no regard for causality) if we then reason from those same experiences, we cannot understand there to be any 'real' causal connection between them, other than their being 'contiguous in time'. According to Hume, our believing that we can understand how one experience follows from another - causality - is nothing more than 'a priori' ideas which we deceive ourselves with.
And what are these 'a priori' ideas which Hume derides? Webster's defines 'a priori' as:
According to Hume, the 'reality' is that because we've formed these ideas within our minds, separate from reality, then:
He argues that our concepts are just the contrived word games of definitions that we fabricate to socially construct (anachronistic, but accurate) a narrative:
Quite a lot, actually, as Thomas Reid & Beattie's arguments are every bit as applicable and effective today, as they were when they first made them, and it should be emphasized that it was their arguments and understanding that carried the day over Hume's, and so deeply informed the understanding of our Founders' era.
The only thing keeping their common sense from being understood by us today, is the attention that modernity has diverted away from their arguments. It's worth noting that Hume would've been relegated to an odd philosophical footnote in history, if not for the pernicious rise of German Idealism which Hume woke from its 'dogmatic slumber' (via Kant), and the aid that was given to that by 'Classical Liberals' such as J.S. Mill.
I strongly recommend reading what Thomas Reid had to say, especially as what he says is exceedingly clear, and said with a lively humor, which exposes the folly of Hume's assertions, and makes plain the obvious truth that reality is directly known and knowable to us.
That being said, there are still a few additional points I'd like to add in regards to the key issue that Hume & those following him, rest their cases upon, which is 'a priori', and his putting 'empirical thinking' up on a pedestal to portray it and themselves as being 'strictly logical', proclaiming deductive logic to be the gold standard while turning his nose up at abstractions and inferences, either ignores or evades that fact that all deduction is derived from, and requires, prior inference!
If someone says inductive logic is inference, is not dependable, they're confessing that they don't really know what they 'no!'. All deductive concepts, resulted from what previously had been inferred from something else, which was found to be sound enough to take as self-evident - all deduction implies those instances which that concept was inferred from.
Hume can only declare the primacy of his 'empirical thinking' by evading the fact that logic operates by means of general abstractions, being compared to less abstract particulars, and that neither logic nor science could operate at all, if we 'dispensed with' inferences, abstractions, and systems that adhere to them.
All of that equally escapes his attention when he says:
How could anyone 'do math' uncontaminated by 'a priori' concepts? And if it's so central to 'empirical thinking', how & why does counting, mathematics, not to mention geometry, have to be so studiously learned? How does knowing that '2 + 2 = 4' become Common Sense?! And how to do any of that without the use of either syllogistic reasoning, or any of the other conceptual abstractions involved in either defining or calculating a hypothenuse, or to know and prove their calculations to be correct?
Without those abstractions, neither Hume nor anyone else could acquire the ability to count from 0 (!) to 64, nor to sum up the internal angles of a triangle, without first respecting and applying the exceedingly abstract concepts and systems of numbering, counting, and addition.
What Hume and modernity framed as a consequence of his ideas, turns a blind eye to is the understanding that 'causality' isn't something we simply string together from a sequence of events, Causality is the consequence of identity in action, and interaction with other identities within a given context - materially and immaterially - and that Logic would not and could not exist without it, and without which no 'empirical' observations or calculations could be made at all.
To be a sceptic, to be an empirical thinker (as Hume intends it), to be a person that can sincerely proclaim that
To say even so much as '64', is to make every bit as much use of 'a priori' concepts, as what Hume meant to slight with 'Caesar' or 'or any being never existed', and doing so is evidence of a dis-integrated mind, which is the sadly un-surprising result of a mind that is bereft of the unifying benefits of metaphysics. The conceptual blindness that is a consequence of ignoring, evading, denying, some (and always more) of what is real and true, truly dis-integrates you from the world, and from your own self, as it wipes out the very thing that makes Common Sense possible - our ability to apprehend, to make a judgment, and to reason from that reality.
The lack of connection that such a person's ideas have to what is real and true, leaves them as the prey of, and into themselves becoming, fabulists, conceptual embezzlers, and intellectual amnesiacs, as it involves their thinking in a level of distance from reality that's hardly even up to the level of being called dishonest, because there is so little reality left in their comprehension to be dishonest about. For Hume to have equated the validity of concepts that have been inferred 'a priori', with words arranged to speak of falling pebbles extinguishing the sun, was a demonstration of his having already fallen into a fantasy world of Ideas, where effects are so easily disassociated from their causes, that he'd left himself trapped within an idea of a world without identity, within a mind so stripped of meaning, value, or purpose, that he was unable even to identify that as being 'bad'.
As Josef Pieper noted in his amazing, and amazingly brief essay, 'Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power':
Whether that came as a consequence of his having slipped and fallen into Descartes' notion of an artificial doubt (Descartes' rationalism is distraction, his artificial doubt is the key) as being a 'something' of the mind, or just a lazy and self-flattering cynicism, the consequence of failing to be concerned with the danger inherent in accepting contradictions, is abandoning the basis of common sense. Such a foundation as that is wholly incapable of supporting or adhering to reality, or a system of ethics that reflects it, or of utilizing logic as anything other than a tool for word games, which leaves their own words having, and able to have, no meaning, even to himself and serves only to support schemes for peddling pure sophistry of the kind that Aristotle debunked 2,000 years earlier.
Hume sadly demonstrates the truth of that in his own statements. When reading his thoughts and those who think like him, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that in Hume's ideal of empirical thinking (not the good kind) - you don't really think, you don't choose (free will, in his opinion, being only a sensory illusion). In Hume's idea of Empiricism, there was, 'empirically speaking', no 'You' in you:
In Hume's two-dimensional world of 'facts', we're incapable of coming into 'the fullness of understanding', and can neither comprehend nor justify a difference between a criminal shooting a person to rob them, and a policeman shooting a criminal to prevent him from murdering his intended victim - both deaths are but empirical 'facts', and as their causes are illusory, so must be the pretense that there should be consequences for those actions.
To put the matter more provocatively, by Hume's way of thinking, today's woketivists epitomize his ideal of 'empirical thinking', since, as per David Hume, they've seized upon all abstractions and 'a priori' concepts that enable us to identity and understand what a woman 'really is'. Having seen to it that all such abstractions have all been "committed to the flames", 'their truth' is now unmitigated by 'abstractions' of understanding and delusions of causation, it is the simplest and most 'logical' of things for them to insist that mutilating a person's genitalia and breasts to alter the shallowest of outward appearances of experience, does in 'fact' empirically make a 'man' into a 'woman', and a 'woman' into a 'man', and how could any empirical thinker deny that?!
The people whose minds have been taken by modern thinking don't believe that they're pretending when they say that a man can be a woman. The 'Woke Virus' has so stripped their minds of the ability to engage in common sense realism, that they actually believe that surgically altering appearances, or even donning costumes, can and does transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man. Their seemingly over-the-top reactions to anyone who denies that 'fact' to them, is their frantic and hysterical response to an understanding that legitimately threatens to obliterate their entire worldview and concept of 'self', and so they treat your disbelief as an all-out assault upon what remains of their soul.
That is the endpoint of the supposed 'reasonableness' of Hume's empirical skepticism, and his attacks upon Causality, and it has enabled such perilous cracks to be inserted into the foundations of the house of The West, as to have even stripped it of its roof (the Arts & Humanities), which has left the western world unable to find shelter from the anti-western storms of modernity.
That erosion of the West that Hume's empirical skepticism made to seem clever and 'sciency', was quickly advanced upon by Immanuel Kant, who transformed Hume's radical skepticism into the full blown idealism that has made the Western World so structurally unsound over the course of the last two centuries. Kant, who claimed that Hume had woken him from his 'dogmatic slumbers', was less interested in refuting Hume, than in doubling down on his claims and extended them with his own assertion that aksually our sensory media don't give us impressions of reality, instead they create our reality,
According to Kant, the experience of thinking prevents us from having any real experience of 'the thing itself' of reality.
It's that Kantian system that forms the basis of our modern practice of 'epistemology', and it's that process of 'thinking' that has progressively insinuated itself into every aspect of our lives - philosophy, religion, art, history, education, law, and 'economics' - which has been progressively transforming what had been the solid foundational rock that the House of The West was built upon, into only so much sand.
The radically worse nature of Kant's theory of morality, which is based upon explicitly non-contextual nature of his 'categorical imperative' (which naturally begins not with reality, but from your preferences severed from it), is such that actually claims that it would be immoral to lie to the murderer at your door who's come to kill your daughter, by telling him she's not at home. Kant was called out on that implication of his 'Categorical Imperative', and Kant held to it:
In sum, where in traditional philosophy our minds and our knowledge are the benefits of being human, to the modern idealist, our lives, minds, knowledge, and abilities, are the curse of being human which they want to rid our world of - and that is who the proverbial 'They' are.
It's important to be aware of what they want you to buy into, and to give some active thought to noticing and identifying the evidence of it in what's happening around you, because there are those amongst us who are actively attempting to interfere with and even prevent you from being aware of that. It is important to realize that when given an idea, the mind will fill in the blanks with your expectations, unless you pay attention to how reasonable those assumption are or are not. It's important to be aware of all of this because your lack of clarity enables them to peddle banalities such as 'your truth is not my truth', and considerably more involved versions of that (such as monetary theory, 'price inflation', and income distribution curves), to reshape 'your reality' as they see fit.
Which they can only get away with doing, so long as you're unaware that you can and should know what is real and true.
The good news of course is that Reality hasn't gone anywhere, and neither has your ability to experience and perceive and verify it, the only thing that's been altered is where our attention is habitually directed to, and how & why it has been misdirected, and to break that spell we only need to open our eyes up to the sleight of mind being performed upon us, and be willing to engage with it. As Aristotle said at the opening of his Metaphysics, 'All men by nature desire to know', and to that end our senses provide us with the ability to perceive reality, and it is our mind, memory, judgement, gives us the ability to reason our way to understanding far more about the nature of what we're perceiving, than perception alone ever could.
The nature of human nature is that the three acts of the mind occur naturally, and they do so without separating us from, or encasing us within, a lesser matrix knockoff of the world we live within. Believing otherwise is a philosophical spell which skepticism and idealism teach us to cast upon ourselves. Stop doing that. Stop reinforcing that.
By caring about what is real and true, by consciously observing the causal relationships within the world around and within us, a logical hierarchy naturally emerges in our approach to, and understanding of, what is real and true and of our place within it - that is how our minds work (this one post gives an overview of their relation). And as we gain a more solid footing, and a clearer perspective from which to best identify not only what something is, but in what context it exists, and where it does and does not take precedence over other considerations, we find ourselves displaying the mark of prudent thinking.
The reality is that a common good must be common to all.
So in this metaphysical whirlwind of a tour of how a respect for what is real and true can lead to well ordered and prudent thinking, we've also glimpsed how easily it can be undone. Those who do manage a sound philosophical framework, are better equipped to imagine living in a civil society, and begin conceiving of what would be required for such a society to sustain and maintain itself across time, without it at the same time becoming a powerful threat to them.
Man is a political animal. We naturally want to live in society with others, while at the same time we also want reasonable boundaries of separation between us and them; those who do care about what's real and true and about each other as well, are a people whose thoughts will bring them around to the idea of Individual Rights.
By focusing on the essentials, we can thumbnail how the reality of what is real and true, reveals and defines the concept of Individual Rights. Because it's rooted in the nature of being human (an expanded version of this here, and here), growing out of those actions which the reality of living as a human being requires a person to choose to perform. We must be able to engage in:
That is not only an undeniable truth, it's one that is true here, there, and everywhere there are human beings, and everywhen across time, and it is so because they are human beings first. It's true in the same way, for everyone, regardless of their environment or circumstances.
IOW: The need to take these actions is a central fact of Human Nature, that is expressed through an uncorrupted Common Sense.
What does vary by place and circumstance, is how well people recognize and respect these realities, , and whether we differentiate a sound we all hear as being only noise, or have developed the ability to identify that sound as C or C# Minor, both are done so with respect to what is real and true for all. Yet however that might be reflected in a society, the fact remains that human nature requires people to be able to take those actions that the nature of being human demands of them. To deny and/or deprive someone of the ability to do so, is at the very least, immoral, and it will foolishly deprive them of the 'Wealth of Nations'.
Shorter version: Individual Rights are what results from recognizing the logical consequences of creatures employing their Free Will in a rational respect for reality and the value of each person which was the gift of Judeo-Christian religion, truth and understanding will be recognized as the most vital tools of survival.
As that becomes understood, the reciprocal nature of individual rights becomes self-evident, and for that to be followed, we must apply it as a principle:
That understanding is and must be a common understanding and highest value in a society - an actual Common Good - if that society is expected to be of value to its people.
To repudiate human nature, turns your own nature against yourself and humanity.
To effectively practice that principle requires two other features, because simply understanding that cannot provide the means of sustaining that sentiment in the face of the disagreements - honest and otherwise - that are sure to arise amongst people. Communities first need to establish a reasonable system for justly resolving the disputes and deliberate violations of those rights that may arise between individuals. Doing so requires a clear set of rules of engagement between people, that will be recognized and enforced by the people as a whole, and that is the basis of a Rule of Law, within a system for formulating and implementing them, which is the role of a Judicial System.
To go beyond an authoritarian sense of 'maintaining order', that system needs to have a deserved reputation for ensuring that all parties to a dispute will have the opportunity to make their best case, and have it honestly considered, according to written rules that are clear, reasonable, and applied equally to all without prejudice or preference, so that each party can agree that a judgement was fairly made, even when it goes against them.
While living in society naturally provides us with neighbors, it is only from orderly thinking that is centered around a respect for what is real and true, that the idea that 'good walls build good neighbors' will emerge, which is what the idea of the Rule of Law is meant to embody. The Law enables society's individuals to unite into one body politic, while upholding and defending the Individual Rights of all its members, provides the separation which preserves them as Individuals within that society, and as with 'Good walls make good neighbors', a healthy sense of individualism simultaneously recognizes the separation that individual rights affords them, and at the same time embraces the community which makes that possible.
It should be equally self-evident that for such a system to be practical, the people of the community must have the manners, morals, understanding, respect and reverence for what is real and true, that is necessary for sustaining it, which is what's behind John Adams comment that:
Our inalienable rights have and can only have real substance, by forming a community of people who have the manners, morals, and knowledge that equips them to understand their importance. Only in such a society that values each person, individually and in society together, can the concept of Liberty begin to arise, or long remain.
The 'lone wolf' image of liberty, is not only hogwash, it is a dialectical attack upon both Individuality and Liberty as such.
The third item required (in addition to law and morality), is one additional component - or rather recognizing its presence in the first two - that's needed in order to tie those abstractions of morality and law into the reality of day-to-day life, and that's the concept of Property, as understood in James Madison's brief essay on it.
The ability to respect another person's property - what they have property in - is what results from the people of a moral and lawful society recognizing and upholding the individual rights of its people. That tripartite awareness strengthens the bonds of trust between them, both protecting and encouraging their ability to make individual decisions within society, which enables them to enjoy living lives worth living.
Those are the blessing of liberty, and that is what enables happiness to become a normal aspiration in society, and a sound respect for law, morality, and property, are indispensable to that.
Liberty is a result of all of its working parts. That is the understanding that formed the bedrock of anglo-American law, which Lord Coke had expressed as :
It's at that level that those actions necessary for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are understood to be inalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence, and why our Bill of Rights forbid our government from making any laws - no matter their intent to aid or protect - that would infringe upon our individual ability to take those actions or to be secure in the property and relations that are the fruits of them (see the bullet points above... or James Madison's veto message).
For that reason I do not agree with a recently popular notion, especially popular amongst libertarians, that our Declaration of Independence would have been improved if Thomas Jefferson had used the phrase 'life, liberty, and property', instead of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. Indeed, if our society, or any other, attempted to begin with (or revert us back to) the denuded notion of 'property' as an empirical factoid denoting physical possession alone (as utilitarians and 'classical liberals' like J.S. Mill would have it), rather than its being that crucial point which integrates the intersection of thought, action, and consequence, without which that society would be unlikely to lead to anything more than a crude and glittery form of barbarism which might blaze brightly, and briefly, but would surely burn itself out soon enough.
Liberty is not simply 'Individualism' (which in its narrow sense views human nature as being just as malleable as collectivism does, but on a smaller scale), and it's damn sure not 'Collectivism', it is what results from recognizing how individuals are able to live together in liberty, as a society which they all share in. Healthy individualism, simultaneously involves recognizing how people being able to act on their judgement, contributes to their community ('The Wealth of Nations'), and recognizes how the individual depends upon the community protecting their ability to do so - just as 'good walls make good neighbors', walls and neighbors give meaning and definition to each other - and in that sense, Liberty, is what results from a philosophical, societal, and religious union, of the proper relationship between individual and community - the one in the many.
The thoughtless savage - whether a Rousseauian savage, or J.S. Mill's savage 'individualist' - due to the paucity of their own conceptual development, never has and never will be able to engage in liberty, for as Edmund Burke said, 'their passions form their fetters'. They can know nothing more than the sparsest freedom of the moment, a moment that's always in peril, for if like Hume, they too cast their abstractions into the fire, then fire and strife becomes their sole destination.
That, all of that, is the basis for that real Good which a legitimate government should exist to uphold and preserve a judicial framework for. That sense of good is what is and should be common to all, and intentionally depriving some people of any part of it, diminishes the good - weakens the fortifications of everyone's castle - and cannot be 'for' a common good, or any 'good' at all.
Nothing can be said to be for the 'common good' or for the 'Greater Good', which begins by undermining, denying, ignoring or eliminating, the fundamental principles which make it possible for what is good, to become the common baseline which that society exists to preserve.
From that realization, should come a redoubled respect for what is real and true, and recognizing how central Truth must be to the enjoyment of liberty, comes additional reverence for it, which puts down sturdy roots for morality and conforming 'the pursuit of happiness' to them. There should also come a redoubled anger towards those who'd push the passive aggressive assault upon what is real and true that is relativism - 'your truth isn't my truth' - you should recognize the violent attack upon all you hold dear, which such sentiments as that undoubtedly are.
That Common Sense view is not only the worldview that our Founders founded America upon, it is the worldview that enabled our Founders to found it. That worldview is what we need to fight to restore our understanding of, so that our society, laws, and governance, can endure - as Franklin said: 'A Republic, madam, if you can keep it!'.
"Letgo of that Republic!' Gimme that...!"
It wasn't long after Ben Franklin said that the Constitutional Convention had delivered:
That alternative understanding is what John Dewey was describing and arguing for throughout his "Liberalism and Social Action" (and most everything else he wrote and 'taught'):
We need to understand that Liberalism (Liberty in practice) became the 'LINO' (Liberal in name only) of the modern Left, by dialectically paralyzing itself through its equivocating use of the 'greater good' in place of what is Good, that turned The Law into a means of depriving some of what is rightfully theirs as a sacrifice to the benefit of a partial 'all', which is in direct contradiction to the American understanding of individual rights, and as contradictions cannot exist, such unprincipled actions ensure only that the more consistently brutal will win out.
'Education', as led by the likes of John Dewey, was the person to person means, and 'Economics' as led by the likes of J.S. Mill, was the 'practical' means, of giving TURDS the influence and authority to use governmental power to impose that 'change' which would progressively drain and undermine the moats and battlements of liberty that had been formed from our understanding of and respect for reality, individual rights, and the Rule of Law, so as to manage our lives 'for the greater good' (of the TURDS).
Similarly for the notion of 'individualism' when portrayed as a 'lone wolf' mindset (as advanced by both J.S. Mill and John Dewey), which is no more valid an alternative to, or in truth much different from, that of 'collectivism'. A coherent society can only be formed by multiple individuals consciously acting in concert with others, on the strength of what they've agreed to establish as the shared concepts, understanding, and recognition of what is real and true. That shared understanding is what makes it possible for them to form a system together, and is what makes living together in liberty possible, for all in that society.
It is important to recognize that a 'diversity' of antithetical principles, is far from being 'our strength', and is much closer to being a recipe for desolation and destruction. Likewise, society must recognize that tolerance should only be extended to those whose actions are tolerable - when those whose Common Sense has been so corrupted as to have made their behavior unfit to live in accordance with even a minimum of such expectations, they cannot and must not be tolerated. An is of behavior, must be recognized as leading to a justifiable ought.
At the risk of belaboring the point, Liberty by its very nature, cannot be whole or complete, until those common societal defenses are formed and maintained as the basis of accepted norms for its judicial system, which is entrusted to render justice in a manner that becomes durable across time, with reliable systems and rules for preserving and defending its people's lives, property, and rights, and resolving whatever disputes might arise over them, within laws that a civil society can prosper within. The effectiveness of those actions is limited by how well or poorly We The People observe and abide by what is real and true, while at the same time so long as they don't forcibly interfere in another's rightful choice or peace of mind, they remain at liberty to choose it.
No function can be legitimate - no matter what 'benefit' it promises - if it originates in the idea of taking actions that violate that liberty which is common to all - there can be no 'good' that can be served by that (or a 'right' to promote it without consequences).
Every additional feature added onto a society's form of government that might be prompted by conditions of either peril or prosperity in times of war or natural disaster, is and can only be legitimate so far as it passes that test, be it courts, legislators, police, military, school, etc. And no, the circumstances and actions required in legitimate emergencies, are not in conflict with a full and proper understanding of what is good for the individual and for the community, so long as that understanding is hierarchical and integrated, rather than the flattened spreadsheets of complicated and dis-integrated and mis-integrated lists that typify utilitarian positions and which are blind to both heighth, breadth, and depth of thought.
King of what goes unseen, is the question of how can those who know best, know best if they don't even know what you know about what's of value to you?! How do T.U.R.D.'s know better than you, your reasons for setting a price for your labor or product, or to decline what another is offering?
And if they don't know your reasons, can they know any better the individual reasonings of those making up entire industries?
Can the words 'being certain' have any meaningful part in such goals, when 'certainty' is used to close off questions? And by what authority do they silence your right to set that price?
Your decision to set a price, is not only your statement of what in your judgment is a fitting value for a product or service, it's also an invitation to others to join in a discussion with you in order to come to an agreement over it. That mutual freedom of thought and action - liberty - is cancelled when you are both forbidden from doing so (see everything from 'minimum wage laws', to limits on stock trades).
How is forbidding you to give and defend your legitimate judgement, not silencing you? In forcing you to conform to the judgement of another - a bureaucrat or regulator no less - can be nothing but the deepest afront to Franklin's "This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together;"?!
The only answers that 'Economics' can offer, are necessarily utilitarian, and at best come down to 'Letting people do what tends to lead to productivity', which unavoidably comes down to ignoring or rejecting that revolutionary understanding which had formed our Founders' understanding of property, liberty, and the Rule of Law. Those concepts which were fundamental to their understanding of how our system would serve the 'Common Good', are being reverted back to the earlier seedy assertions of 'state craft', by disregarding the understanding of Political Economy that Jean Baptiste Say, and Frederich Bastiat (deTocqueville had some fine observations as well) had clarified.
The 'economic thinking' that blithely advocates for the social and governmental power to nudge, impose, force, every individual's actions to comply with what 'experts' have decided from the ignorance of a distance that's blind to what you can see firsthand, is of value, and insist instead that you should do [... Should...?] as they say, in regards to what is of concern to you in your life, is a thoroughly revisionist conception (and corruption) of the 'common good'/'greater good'. I identify that as being Pro-Regressive, as it necessarily entails a process of eliminating the unity of virtue, morality, ethics, and recognition and respect for reality, individual rights, and property, from consideration, so as to reduce matters to a transaction of quantities of usefulness as assessed by those TURDS in power.
To that, and to all other such acts of barbarity, I'm personally a hard 'Hell No!' on. And of course what makes that important, and why it's deliberately left unseen by 'economic thinkers', cannot be explained under the label of 'Economics'.
What is obviously seen in a moral, ethical, and judicial understanding, remains unseen to the economically minded, in that no systems - political, economic, or otherwise - can have a 'liberty' to deny the liberty of an individual who has not (criminally) violated the liberties of others, and no amount of calculated usefulness or efficiency or other diversions into complexity worship, can justify such unjust activities - and yet that is what is implicit in every aspect of 'economic thinking'.
Summing up by returning to the Questions that should precede Hazlitt's 'Economics in One Lesson'
The reason for this *diversion* into abstractions of metaphysics, causality, and ethics, was to highlight the importance of keeping the reality in mind which we've been 'educated' to ignore, which we can do by simply making a routine of asking questions like:
Those who aren't in the habit of conforming their thinking to what is real and true, will have no foundation for opposing the 'economic thinking' which views our judicial system as nothing more than a 'complex' Rule of Rules, and who believe that so long as TURDs (The Umpires of Reasonable Discourse) have the skills to manage its technicalities, there's no 'reason' why they shouldn't manipulate it (us) to do whatever it is they want to get done.
Those who do have that foundation, OTOH, are going to have a visceral response to those 'economic actions' that are proposed to manipulate 'the economy' (society), which are incompatible with the judicial standards and principles that our system was founded upon, and each proposal will, and should be, met with a response:
If and only if the proposed 'economic action' can be shown to neither directly nor indirectly violate the rights and property of the citizenry, should consideration of the proposal be allowed to move on to considering whether government - the force of law which exists to uphold and defend the individual rights and property of its people - can be entrusted to use its (We The People's) power to take the proposed actions, without violating its reason for existing.
Those are the questions and concerns that must be satisfied before moving on to considering the longterm results and primary and secondary consequences of any proposed 'economic action', which was what the focus of Henry Hazlitt's 'Economics in One Lesson' was, and if we fail to keep that order, we will have already surrendered to utility, and the fall into 'economic thinking' that must follow.
If the proposed action survives those tests, then it's a question of whether government - the force of law - should be engaged in that action - because it can, doesn't mean that it should.
Setting weights & measures, yes, that's both necessary and appropriate.
Assigning values to those monetary weights & measures? Ooh... the wisdom of that was questionable, and led to much unnecessary confusion & corruption (see silver & gold exchange rates). Printing currency? Establishing a 'bank' to... No. Stop! Too few questions were either asked or answered, or they use their questions to arrive at answers which are irrelevant to the issue at hand.
We need a lot less thought about what 'good' government can do for us all, and a lot more consideration of what mayhem government can wreak in our lives in the name of the 'common good'. A Thomas Jefferson said:
These are not questions that should be considered lightly, and the fact that they are rarely considered at all, is a direct result of how extensively 'economic thinking' has permeated our society, and why it must be expunged.
Did you notice that the appearance of there being only two options, pushes the reality that there are other choices and questions, out of mind? That's called an Affordance Trap, and it's best not to fall for it.
While I do think that the casino example is representative of our situation, the lack of options is not - we have multiple options, not least of which is to refrain as best you can from participating in, or legitimizing either of the options provided. Also, don't allow the options being offered to distract you from the most important aspect of the scenario, in that the true value being won or lost in that casino's games isn't money, it's your ability to live your own life, which the house is taking from you by limiting what decisions and actions you're allowed to make in your own life. Don't play along with that.
I'm not encouraging or suggesting that we should go all 'mah principles!' and refuse to involve ourselves in the economy, and IMHO I think you should question any 'knowledge' that leads you into taking ignorant actions. Economics has a large number of observations and 'laws' which are undeniably valid and important to be recognized, and there are a large number of good economists who both understand them, and value liberty - Thomas Sowell & Henry Hazlitt come to mind - and who also warn of how economic issues threaten the very basis for a productive economy. Don't delude yourself with those 'principles!' that are principles-in-name-only. Recognize that trade-offs are often the best we can hope for, and that insisting upon an unattainable 'perfect solution' can easily cause us to lose out on an attainable least bad option, which is sure to be quickly filled by one that's much worse.
Nevertheless, the social science known as 'Economics', is a field that was established in order to evade and undermine those philosophic concepts and principles which make our Founders' era understanding of liberty possible, and it does so by focusing attention upon those aspects of our lives and activities which it improperly quantifies, so as to justify the unprincipled use of 'better policies' for imposing power over an entire society.
Beware of the Affordance Trap of 'these are our only choices!', especially as the habit of thinking that's been drilled into us in our schooling, politics, and of course economic thinking, is especially susceptible to that.
Be aware that most of the magician's tricks, count on your unwittingly cooperating with their tricks - following along with the magician's waving wand, watching the pretty assistant, and later repeating their performance of 'GDP is down!' or 'Inflation is up!' - that's not 'economic analysis', that's Praxis, repeating what is ultimately meaningless as if it mattered. The secret to the magician's trick, is that it's not necessary for their theories to be consciously learned and understood, so long as the audience repeats the patterns of action performed for them, people will absorb it through their own routine actions, without ever having consciously noted or accepted the details of whichever theory that particular magic act was performing.
And they're able to count on audience participation in their praxis, because we've all learned in our schooling to scan & cram truly meaningless facts to 'get good grades and get a good job', we've learned by practice the habit of seeking out and accepting the answers of authorities, regardless of whether we've understood their lessons or not. And the dirty little secret behind those grades, is that both the 'good students' who did their work and passed their tests, and those students who didn't do their work and failed most of their tests, both thoroughly learned the praxis of the lessons being taught (someone else has the answer and you don't know it), and both become useful game pieces in the necessary patterns of 'economic theory'.
The 'Economic' choice is a dialectical action that involves you in not thinking of what is real and true, in favor of a fabricated idea of what is seemingly 'useful', which substitutes a narrow 'how' for the 'what'. All 'Economic' ideologies ignore and implicitly deny those more important considerations, in order to advance a narrative that rationalizes the substitution of a 'Greater Good', for 'the pursuit of happiness', and when you fall into the affordance trap of 'Capitalism vs Socialism', what you are thinking of are 'economic issues', 'economic liberty', 'economic justice', etc., and what you are not thinking of, are those metaphysical, ethical, and moral issues, that would interfere with the carefully laid trap of 'economic thinking'.
The nature of what the 'Economic' choice of 'Capitalism vs Socialism' involves you in putting into practice (praxis) - which both sides of the same economic coin are urging you to make - is that by getting you to think of your society as an Economy, you are no longer thinking of it as a society!
'Capitalism', it must be remembered, was not a term that Adam Smith referred to or used in his writings - that was a little discussed technique of finance which Karl Marx seized upon as a label that'd be useful for disparaging Adam Smith's understanding that Natural Liberty was the real 'The Wealth of Nations'. By tarring Liberty with 'Capital'/'Money'/'the root of all evil', Marx succeeded in using 'Economic Thinking' to lure popular opinion away from the Political Economy of our Founders' era, and their understanding that individual rights and liberty were inextricably intertwined with a sound understanding of Property, and that an objective rule of law is and must be dedicated to upholding and defending them.
That understanding, and liberty, made clear that it was vital for a person to have the liberty to act on their own judgement, as that was the key to not only their own wealth and prosperity, and that of the entire nation as well. Modern misosophy, ideology, and that which Marxism concerns itself with, redirected popular understanding towards reframing the narrative's focus upon money and techniques of finance, control, and 'individualism'.
The fact that we don't have an immediate solution to the problems we face, is no reason to not recognize what the problem is, and in fact, simply recognizing the issue for what it is, being aware of the magicians' tricks, is a huge part of the solution, and is the means of breaking out of the praxis of 'economic thinking'.
Recognize that. Become aware of the reality they so desperately need you to not see, and alert others to it as well.
Realizing that, breaks it. There is another way, and it only requires your attention and willingness to consider and pursue questions to objective answers. Help others to see it too.
The truth has consequences. Recognizing that what is true, matters. Those who'd prefer to view you as Human Capital, know that too, and they fear it.
So now, with those cautions and points in mind, we can continue on and return to the post already in progress....
What 'Economics' buys you is Tyranny on a budget
With the awareness that metaphysics, causality, ethics should be the backdrop to your normal frame of mind, and aware that that understanding remains actively involved even when left unseen in discussions concerning an economy, you're now in a position to begin noticing the numerous issues that 'economics' routinely leaves unseen (and excluded), such as what I've been referring to over and again, which repeatedly goes unseen, and left unasked, and is actively evaded in economic schemes, which is the meaning of: 'Should'.
They use the sound of the word 'should', but not its meaning, and as you listen to them sounding hte word out it is important to notice that 'Should' is not an 'economic' term. Is 'Should' something that can be calculated from mathematical equations? [spoiler alert: No]. 'Should' is a term of ethics - what is or could be ethical about distant persons and powers deciding that person X 'should' be deprived of some of their property and rights, and that person Y should receive some of that property? When considering Ethics in a societal context of taking actions that affect the lives of entire populations, its scope is more directly referencing that other subset of Ethics, which is the field of Justice, which 'Economics' is but the ethical stepchild of.
Is Justice something that is found in, contained by, or that somehow should take its cues from, economic indicators, indexes, and curves? Spoiler alert: No.
Despite their heavy use of the word that they spelled as 'should', and 'Justice', 'Economics' operates by dialectically substituting what is 'useful' for what you should do, and the 'greater good' for what is good, in their descriptions of 'what is...'s, and 'need to...'s - they don't refer to what actually is Good, but only to what's most useful to them and to their economy.
The truth is that questions of what 'Should' is and should be, are determined by philosophy, not by 'Economics', which points out the fundamental problem with treating Economics as an authority over the operations of society, and it's worth pointing out again, that Economics doesn't begin with Economics.
'Economics' is not a primary standalone field.
'Economics' is not a secondary field.
'Economics' is not even a third level field.
'Economics' claim to the authority to order & reorder society, as an idealized means of social control which the likes of J.S. Mill & Karl Marx both envisioned, is only possible when the traditional branches and roots of philosophy (and reality) are at best ignored... on the way to their being reversed.
Simply recognizing metaphysics (covering the 'which is...?'), leads to an epistemology of causality (what 'follows') and logic (validating the hows') within ethics (covering the 'shoulds'), and emphasizes the fact that 'Economics' is much less than simply a subset of Ethics, as it is necessarily defined by, beholden to, derived from, and subordinate to, those traditional fields of thought. Happily for 'Economics', the moderns' new 'fourth branch of philosophy' which they labeled 'epistemology', enables and requires that traditional respect for reality to be ignored.
IOW, 'Economics', is a third-level subset of the third branch of philosophy, and from that backwater position, its managers have dared to claim the power to determine, dictate, and manage our lives. They've gotten away with evading the ground floors of philosophy by insisting that people perform feats of philosophical parkour to 'engage' with them, because we have allowed it to usurp the authority of those fundamental fields that are the proper avenues for even considering such issues.
Because we've allowed 'those who know best' and the TURDS to tell us that 'Economics', for all intents and purposes, replaces Philosophy (and even Religion) in our day-to-day lives, and to do so openly, it presumes to make decisions upon such matters for us, even as it proposes its various policies and distribution curves which blatantly ignores and even violates the very principles that are fundamental to those fields it's rightly subordinated to.
Because the 'Economic good' cannot recognize what is 'good', it cannot determine what 'should' be done, and accepting that and acting on that, means that you become de-moralized - not in the sense of feeling glum, but in the sense of no longer being able to recognize what is good, right, true. That's not just a problem, that's a description of the 'Ouroboros' (the snake eating its own tail), and it is the means by which 'Economics' buys us a tyrannical reality, on a political and philosophical budget.
Do you begin to see why 'economic thinkers' don't want you thinking about metaphysics, causality, and ethics?
It's as if a newly hired retail store manager suddenly began assuming the power to issue orders setting worldwide policy and practices for the company, based upon his local concerns - and then the entire company management began abiding by it. If you were a stockholder of that company, wouldn't you be asking what's going on here? Shouldn't every stockholder be doing so?!
If this is true (and it is), if 'Economics' is as out of place, empty even, as I'm saying, then how has it been made to become such a real factor in our lives?
My reply to that comes from a phrase that, even keeping in mind the philosophical overview above, will likely be seen as an outrageous claim, and though to the best of my knowledge neither James Lindsay nor Stephen Coughlin have said it in this context, it fits the phrase they've utilized in connection with gnosticism and dialectics, and seems to me to fit exceedingly well here, which is 'stepping into the Wizards Circle'.
It is important for us to notice that 'Economics' begins by excluding metaphysics, causality, ethics. With that accomplished, it swaps out the quality of Good, for those quantities of utilitarian pleasures which then seem especially alluring to those who've accepted its invitation to take the economical and very consequential step into an alternate reality, a 'copy world' of 'transcendental' ideas, that have little to do with what is or can be real and true, but which is so clearly empty and meaningless to those who haven't.
The portentous step that 'Economics' invites us all to unwittingly take, is one of praxis - that of putting into action without conscious thought, your implicit consent to violate the principles that America was founded upon because they were understood to be truly good, and it leads us into doing so in service to the 'greater good' which is a further denial of them. Once that step is taken, that immersive ideal is what will then seem to be real to you, while what actually is real and true, will appear from this new perspective to be as crooked as an arrow does when refracted through water.
That misleading nature is something that I think is more than hinted at, which Niall Ferguson, an historian & economist, partly exposed in his quip on economists' in thrall to, on John Maynard Keynes veiled quip:
The TURD's Pro-Regressive retreat from the West A.D. to the B.C. past through the Wizard's Circle
There's something revealing in what the supreme wizard of the 'New Economics', John Maynard Keynes, said in the last paragraph of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), part of which is an often repeated quote:
Despite the 1,936 years A.D. of expectations that the wisdom to lead society would and should be found in those men of experience who'd lived & learned more than others, Keynes thought that, in 1936, when no 'economist' had been long dead or defunct for more than a few decades, that those 'economists' were who were determining how society is, 'should', and would be, organized and run.
That's a telling reveal of how swiftly and thoroughly the new academic regime, which the Idealists had given birth to shortly after the opening of the 1800s (our colleges today bear almost no resemblance in either form or content, to those our Founding Fathers attended), had been able to utilize its new field of 'Epistemology' to divert society's attention away from the classical Western considerations of "What is" & "What follows", and "What should be done". Instead, those 'ideas of a few years back' were informing the new TURDS that since we kant know reality as it really is, 'they' should rely instead upon 'experts' to tell them what 'works best'.
Naturally, those deemed and certified to have that expertise, came from the new Social Sciences of 'Education', Social Studies', and 'Economics', which expertly traded away that broad understanding which had traditionally marked a person as being educated, for training in a very specific set of skills. These Idealists - subjectivists and empiricists - having traded away History for Social Studies, Philosophy for Economics, as well as transforming the high regard that people had for Logic, into its being perceived as either a tedious verbal parlor trick or the apparently meaningless hieroglyphics of symbolic logic - had implicitly and explicitly discarded the very basis of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture's form of knowledge and understanding. And as an encore, having made the foundations of Western society dissappear before our eyes, they planted their Utopian (no place) flag in its place, and have successfully convinced and compelled We The People, year after year, decade after decade, to send our children to absorb their 'New Ideas!' of nothingness.
The Misosopher King's position atop wAcademia's lofty new heights, was well suited for further convincing people that old fashioned ideas like 'individual rights', 'property', and GOLD fer gawdsakes, were little more than 'barbarous relics' of pre-modern ethnic preferences, which shouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of the modern scientific understanding of 'The Economy'. Naturally, control of such matters should be left in the hands of experts, and for those experts who followed in the footsteps of the latter 'Classical Liberals', and Fabians, all such 'economic' matters, as a matter of course, have been analytically reduced to measures of utility and profit & loss, so as to scientistically calculate (with not a little bit of wand waving) the Greater Good. And of course as they were sure that such modern ideas would need to be managed like sophisticated clockwork, through central banks and specialized departments of experts in the field, for the 'common good' of all who are a part of that economy, the individual could not be permitted to stand in the way of their progress, and so while they assured us that they'd of course 'respect' our 'human rights', in any conflict between individual interests and the Common Good, it was only right that the latter 'should' prevail.
The fundamental values which underlie the systems and macro perspectives of 'Economic Thinking', are what mark it out as being truly Pro-Regressive, as it is those collective sensibilities that are found on the far side of The West's dividing line between the years B.C. and A.D., that modernity most embraces. Now matter how otherwise admirable, it is true that however foundational the ideas and institutions of the West B.C. were, and are, the Greco/Roman without the Judeo/Christian - as expressed by the Greek dramatists, and Plato, and even with Aristotle and Cicero - presumed the individual to be utterly inconsequential in the face of the interests of society. It was only after the Greco/Roman had merged with the Judeo/Christian, that the individual came to be recognized in the West A.D., as a uniquely valuable person, each created in the image of God and recognized as not only having value as an individual, but as being on an equal footing in the eyes of justice with all other persons, no matter their social & political standing.
We forget today how truly revolutionary that view was, and still is, and how completely it is that our *modern* 'economic thinking' rejects and rebels against it.
Those moderns yearning for the B.C. worldview, needed a means of pivoting away from the A.D. understanding of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, in order to pro-regress back to the B.C. view where the individual served the collective. And the needed to do so without anyone noticing that they were being turned away from the foundations of the West, which required progressive efforts across centuries of time:
The philosophical reverses which The West has suffered since then, couldn't have occurred, certainly not in less than a century, if the populace hadn't been simultaneously 'educated' into the cultural and institutional amnesia, which 'Economics' has proven itself so well suited to inducing in us.
It's difficult to overstate the willfully unseen presumptions involved in how that pivot is still being carried out in headlines such as:
The expectations of, and nearly invisible utilization of power that is conferred through the materialistic leviathan of 'Economic Thinking', eager to take whatever actions may be deemed necessary to 'help the common good', has necessarily entailed abandoning our earlier understanding of what was finally coming to be recognized as uncommonly good. Shorn of the foundations of The West, thanks to the 'epistemology' that modernity's misosophers such as Bacon, Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc., established to suppress our regard for reality, 'Economics' has had little or nothing to fear from the wisdom of those classical philosophers who've been safely memory-holed away from popular opinion.
No matter how at odds their various economic ideologies ('Capitalism, 'Marxism', 'Socialism', 'Libertarianism', etc.,) might appear to be with each other on the surface today, they only really have to contend with the 'long dead economists' opinions of 'a few years back', as they all share in the opinion that their views are a more than sufficient replacement for the traditional western understanding of metaphysics, causality, ethics, literature, law, and political reasoning.
With Economics freed by its votaries in and out of Government & wAcademia, it's been free to engage in Social Science experiments (what do you think 'public education' is?) that utilize We The People as an efficient means of generating the data ('privacy?! Ha!) it needs for forming and reforming its ever new & improved theories on how 'best' to drive policies which usurp whatever power (governmental, financial, and social) it claims to need for the benefit of the 'common good'.
Do not forget that the goal of 'economics' (and its fraternal twin in 'Education') is to mold you, your life, and that of your community, into the vision that the TURD's 'who know best' have concluded is best for you. The common thread running through plans like Agenda 21, 'The Great Reset', 'Agenda 2030', is that your life should [Should...?!] serve the 'common good' for the 'greater good', where 'you will own nothing and be happy'. The words roll right off their teleprompters without the interference of pesky traditional concerns over what is or isn't wise and good, which frees 'Economics' to serve those ends the TURDS claim will serve the 'greater good', for which they cheerfully *should all over themselves*, and upon you, without even a second thought.
That is the awesome social and political power that we've gone along with conferring upon 'economic thinking', so that where Political Economy once observed reality in order to understand what would be most just, and therefore most effective and good for all, 'economic thinkers' now read their indexes and curves as technological tea leaves to tell them how they should correct our course into the future, free from the 'wrong' actions of 'old fashioned' thinking. It's almost as if the positions of 'Priest & King' in society, which modernity loves to pat itself on the back for progressing past, were alive and well under the modern guise of 'defunct economists'.
Next time you hear the Economic news that cannot be avoided today, you should think of the magician up there doing his magic act on stage, and remember that he performs no magic there - none! - he only stylishly and theatrically uses his costume, top hat, and wand, and of course his attractive assistant, to distract the audience (of which you are seen as but a small part of) into being convinced that they magically did what you know they didn't do... to thunderous applause.
If you do pay attention, you'll notice there are three components of the economic stagecraft that its magicians use to keep the audience's attention filled with 'Ooh!'s and 'Ah!'s:
But by far the most important point of the magic tricks performed by the 'economics' of 'defunct economists', is that they aren't intended to make a rabbit disappear, they're intended to make an aspect of you disappear, into the collective audience.
If you keep your eyes on the magicians other hand, you might notice that 'economics' incessantly evades metaphysics & ethics, through its wand waving of diversionary references to aggregate market conditions, income brackets, fields of management, labor disputes, information management, so that it can use your income, cost of living, and the rising prices that you experience, to reduce you into references to percentages and anecdotal concerns that are 'too miniscule' to warrant the concern of TURD's who're focused on the 'big picture'. Be careful as the pretty assistant dressed in the tight skirt of NEWS & current events, winks and curtsies at you, or you might miss how your concerns are being efficiently handled as issues of 'micro-economics', whose mountains of carefully gathered data of GDP, CPI, etc., makes your cost of living yield to the societal concerns of the collective, which only they are prepared to manage, and which the individual must yield to, for the 'common good'.
Just keep in mind that there is no magic. Keep in mind that neither reality nor our Common Sense A.D. ability to understand it, have been made to vanish. Keep in mind that their magic consists of nothing more than distractions, and that all such magic tricks require tangible tools to distract you with, which is what we'll turn to next.
The Wizarding World's Tools of Economic Magic: 'LTV'/'Value', 'Consolidation'/'Growth', and 'Rules'/'Law'
So as we turn to what it is that enables such behavior, and what it is that they feel gives them the authority to behave as their hearts desire, we see that it requires detaching you from reality and subduing you to its economic orders, through the manipulation of three key fixtures:
We can look to LTV's origin as coming from a selective reading of John Locke, which was furthered in some ways by Adam Smith's pioneering effort to identify what Value is in the context of political economy, and from that end of history it was an understandable, if crude effort, but from this end of history, it doesn't stand up to thinking past two or three questions deep. Not that proponents of LTV can't make its calculations 'add up' by throwing one new epicycle after another upon it (notice the magicians wand waving of Inflation! Interest Rates!) - that hasn't changed much from Ptolemy's day to ours - but what it cannot stand up to, is a series of non-economic questions, which is why they aren't raised or acknowledged.
The real value that LTV has for the field of 'economics' today, is that it enables the dismissal and even disparagement of the individual's right to put thought and effort into producing value, through its claim that Value is ultimately reduceable to a collective muscular effort of "socially necessary labour time", as Karl Marx termed it. Whether or not most supporters of LTV realize it, Marx clearly saw what value LTV would have for his deliberate assaults upon every aspect of the West, and ever since his efforts it has played an essential role in utilizing all of the dazzling machinery of economic indexes & measurements that 'economic thinkers', from the 'Classical Liberal's on down to today, have used in diverting attention away from the void that LTV injects into popular thinking.
But just as no matter how well Ptolemy's epicycles got his numbers to add up, I'm not going to be buying that either Mars or the Sun are revolving around the Earth, I'm also not going to go along with the pretense that LTV is a legitimate 'economic tool' for monitoring, evaluating, and ultimately justifying the forceful governing of society through.
I'm not opposed to LTV because I'm concerned that its numbers don't add up - though I'd be surprised if their various epicycles didn't have them adding up impressively well - even if their fellow economists of nominally opposing camps (see here and here) routinely counter them - I dismiss it out of hand as an invalid concept, because of the more important reality which it participates in evading.
See if you can catch a glimpse of what I'm referring to here, in this explanation from a socialist supporter of LTV (which, BTW, gives a more accurate summary of Marx's positions than most of his economic opponents or supporters do):
The contextual differences in 'comparative living standards' experienced with, "...a given basket of goods is widely seen to be a particularly useful measure of comparative living standards between countries...", are squeezed out consideration. What's not compared - what is left unseen - are such conditions as how a worker is able to work (by choice or forced, freely hired, or unionized), was that 'given basket of goods' filled by the worker's selections at a market that had some say over what they were offering, or were those the only goods supplied to them and so him, which excludes the most important factor of comparing markets out of the equation?
What that reduces the 'comparison' to, is a purely material measurement of quantities of things 'between countries', which are then calculated for as if they represented only a mere matter of converting dollars to pesos.
That is the wizardry of economics in action.
It's up to us to poke at what we can glimpse is being left out of these claims, to question how it is that one country has more valuable "socially necessary labour time", than the other? Why are there any differences in standards? Does the musculature of the people of one country, differ so much from the muscles of those of the country they're being compared to? What guides those muscles, or is it muscle alone that powers 'a result of mechanization', or of 'Technological innovation'? Where do those 'powers' come from?
I'm not asking those questions to get their answers, but to indicate what they won't acknowledge, or ask, but only explain their way around. Take for instance the LTV practice of FDR's 'workers' programs that paid one set of ditch diggers to dig a trench, and another to then fill it back in, which, after all, was rewarding them for performing a "socially necessary labour time" - the fact that nothing of VALUE was created by that, is ignored, and argued away by various statistically impressive calculations for those ends justifying their means.
You need not doubt that they do have 'answers' of their own - lots of them - but their answers to such questions typically involve or depend upon the massaging of issues of Supply & Demand, Class warfare and considerations of Oppressor/Oppressed dynamics into their calculations. The sheer quantity of such 'answers' enables them to turn a blind eye to any honest (what is necessary for 'honesty'?) consideration of LTV's nature, until what they'll admit is 'seen', has been transformed into an inert 2D material thing that can be safely manipulated into the economic machinery of 'differences in standards'.
If you can avoid being diverted into the usual issues of Supply & Demand and class consciousness, and instead poke around a bit deeper into the philosophic nature of the 'economic' front, you'll soon find one or more equivocations such as those involved in LTV.
A ready example of there being far more than "socially necessary labour time" involved in determining values, is readily at hand in any movie you might choose to watch, decide what you think of it, and then watch the credits roll.
Those several minutes' worth of credits that we now see scrolling by at the end of any big budget movie, comprise those who were determined to be of value by a decision maker (individual or corporate), to provide products & services that were deemed necessary to get the movie made. What is seen in the credits, are what reflect the producers view of what they'd judged to be worth paying for.
How the monetary value of a movie is ultimately determined, is by what is or isn't successfully negotiated between movie goers such as yourself - customers - and what the theater box-offices asked for the privilege of viewing it. The results of all of those negotiations added together, go into determining whether that big budget movie is shown to have the monetary value of a blockbuster success, or of a box-office bomb. And of course there are many movies that bombed at the box-office, that many people have spent uncounted hours watching over and over again because, in their judgement, it adds value to their lives - 'It's a wonderful life!' comes to mind, considered a box office failure when released, has steadily grown in value since then to a great number of people worldwide.
All of that involves 'value' being determined and used in several different contexts - as it should be - and none of those values add up to 'socially necessary labor time'.
What the 'error'/judo-flip lies in, and relies upon, is you not engaging your judgement, so that LTV can maintain the pretense that 'socially necessary labor time' is the 'heart and soul' of Value.
Bastiat clarified the issues involved in this, in these two essays from 150 years ago, from 'of Value':
And if I might venture just a step beyond Bastiat's argument, I'll point out that the root of what is exchanged, grows from a person's thoughts being put into action, first in the formation of Property, and then as a value that is created from the mutually agreed upon actions from all parties to their exchange.
It is thought put into action, that is the determiner of what property you have in the goods or services you produce. What is produced, is produced for the purposes of exchanging it for other goods & services, because in the context of that exchange, you place more value upon what you are exchanging your for - and vice versa for the other party - in order that each might gain what is of greater value to them, and so in the context of that exchange, an objective value is created.
Pay especial attention to what the defenders of 'Economics' mean by rejecting the 'subjective theory of value' - they mean that your judgment of what is objectively prudent to you, is of no 'objective' (by which they mean an object, a thing, a factoid of empirical data) value, it isn't *real*, and so it needn't be considered or respected in the policies they advocate. That same underlying POV and justification is what's behind their enthusiasm for their curves of 'income distribution' and 'human capital', in that your judgement is dialectically rendered as being of no concern, as only material operations matter to them.
Fundamentally they are rejecting the value of your judgement, to your life, in their economy.
'Economic Factors' ranging from minimum wage, to cost of living, interest rates, etc., are used, and revised as needed, to elevate the needs of society as a whole, over the 'anecdotal needs' of any one member of it, and if the smooth running of the 'Greater Good' magic show requires ejecting some members of the audience, well, sorry, but 'Rentier' that you are, that's for the best too.
As you see that for what it is, you'll soon notice that contrary to the ideological pretentions of the Marxist LTV, value is not some material thing that is being taken from one person, and given to another, through some 'systemic' transferring of materials or money from the oppressed to the oppressor, but is instead, by the very nature of what is actually being engaged in by those engaging in it, value is the benefit that is created by each party voluntarily exchanging something that is of more value to the other party than it is to them, in exchange for what they've judged will be of greater benefit to them and their interests, so that each is better off because of that exchange - that's the growth by which an 'economy' grows! That same growth is what a top-down command economy eliminates the possibility of, and so ensures the failure of socialist/communist systems.
In a Free Market, Value is ultimately neither a thing nor an effort expended in generating it, but is what results from thought being put into mutually consensual action, and whether that thought in action originates from your own volition, as with the owner of a business that offers a product or service, or as the employee who carries out those thoughts and actions which were initiated by their employer, or as the potential customer's decision to act by purchasing what has been produced, the reality of Value in that exchange, is revealed through their all having agreed in the exchanging of it.
There are very few things in society that are more magical than the plain reality of this.
"But Van, what if they didn't get what they bargained for?!" That proves, rather than disproves, the nature of Value - if they misjudged the benefit to them of what they exchanged, the overall value of their property will have been diminished by that error, without a single additional item or effort having been engaged in. But if they truly didn't get what they'd agreed to in that exchange - if they were conned or otherwise defrauded - then a crime has been committed, and, assuming the exchange did occur within a Free Market, they'll have some recourse for that through their judicial system.
'But Van! Don't you realize that government must step in and save us from market distortions, and stagnation, and inefficiencies...' Oh yes, do tell about the long and glorious history of government interventions that have eliminated market distortions, stagnations, and have generally made our lives more productive and efficient (see the UCLA Economics study of how FDR's 'recovery' extended the Great Depression by 7yrs)!
'But Van! Don't you realize that rent-seeking behavior leads to underconsumption!', which the economically minded assert justifies overriding our puny individual interests and assessments - and the right to make them - in service to the common/greater good. I have some questions, such as according to who, and by what means, were they able to examine not only the needs, judgment, and interests, of the those individuals involved in renting, and those renting to them, but also those of the entire market? And how will they determine 'the best' decision that should be been made by government for all parties concerned?
By what means does anyone attain to such asspoundingly colossal levels of arrogance? Oh yeah... through 'economic thinking'. Never forget that Communism slaughtered 100 million people across the 20th Century for 'The Common/Greater Good', and did so by simply lying - the pen is horrifically mightier than the sword.
Given the nature of such theories, how are we to assess their actual value (and to who)?
What is the value of any theory? Is it the impressive mathematical abilities demonstrated in the calculations and scope of projections that are made by it? Is a theory justified by how well it recognizes & describes reality while identifying and conforming to its limitations, so as to observe, understand, and employ valid principles in making factually verifiable and accurate predictions which follow from that theory?
It's often useful to turn such questions around a bit, and ask ourselves: Why do we abandon a theory? Because it ceases to intrigue us or fails to flatter our current opinions? Or because we come to notice that reality isn't what is guiding, clarifying, or being revealed, by it?
If you find yourself struggling with that, you should take to heart the example of a decent physicist, who, absent the introduction of a consequential new theory, wouldn't bother with spending another moment of his time on deciphering the elaborate calculations and predictions presented to him in a paper, once he realizes that the plans were for a perpetual motion machine. Once a physicist realizes that those calculations, however impressively elaborate they may be, are made in futile service to what in principle cannot be supported or achieved, then he'll dismiss it out of hand, just like that, tossing it away as utterly meaningless and worth less than the paper it was unfortunately printed upon.
Once you can avoid focusing on the distracting numbers and dire oppressor/oppressed warnings of doom being waved before you, you begin to see what value LTV has to them, 'economically' speaking. LTV is the wand that the magician's waving before you in grand gestures, which, when combined with his pretty and efficient assistant, and his numerical sleight of hand that makes the rabbit (you) disappear from the hat (economy), you'll see how it enables them to portray Profit, Landlords, Rent, Business Owners, etc., as 'non values', and mere parasitical leaches and thieves - no Labor, no Value = the oppressors of the oppressed! - in a dialectic that has served for nearly two centuries now, as the fertile entry point for envy and evil to spread out into the various ideologies of popular public opinion.
But there's a side effect from accepting LTV, that's even worse than the theory itself, which was and is an essential component of what Marx most sought to accomplish.
Most people today are familiar with the relativistic claims that any claim to objective truth is nothing but your subjective preference. But the dialectics of 'Your truth isn't my truth', pale in comparison to the wrongs that are successfully smuggled into popular opinion, by claiming that what truly is a subjective process (all thought originates within a subject - AKA: you - whether or not, and how consistently a person seeks to objectively conform their thoughts to reality, is another matter), is nothing more than a deterministically 'objective' material process, i.e. 'You don't think, you don't choose, your consciousness is but a side effect of genes & chemistry'. Do you hear Hume & Kant in that?
What's accomplished there, is that first their philosophical views deny our ability to know reality as it is - deterministic or otherwise - then the materialistic ideas LTV drives forward, effectively eliminate your individual thoughts and concerns from their collective consideration, which becomes the primary means of laundering their most fantastic illusions, into a presentable approximation of reality ("...Janet Yellen said today that the latest GNP & Jobs Creation numbers indicate to the FED that the economy is continuing to improve..."), which ensures that the only 'real' decisions made, will be those that are made under its auspices, top down, from the T.U.R.D.'s of 'Economics', on downhill to you.
That also ensures that what the Political Economy of Smith, Say, and Bastiat, had exposed as being fallacies, pretenses, and abuses, will be easily ignored by them, and so the confused and chaotic errors which those fallacious actions will continue to flood into the market, diluting, confusing, and worsening all available information, leaving people helpless before the sluggishness of its 'supply chain issues', inflation, and the market's increasing inability to respond to individual interests and needs, in a vicious cycle that can and will only ever make matters worse, while causing people to demand 'action!' to stop the bogeyman from tormenting them - AKA: a totalitarian's wet dream.
Totalitarian Opposition to individual decisions: Breaking the Say's Law
Which brings us around to the #2 issue, that of supposedly refuting Jean Baptiste Say's The Law of Markets, or Say's Law, because eliminating that from people's awareness & understanding, as Keynes understood, is critical for successfully operating the dazzling machinery of 'Economics' magic. The reason why is not so much what Say's Law itself does, as the fact that it provides the clearest indicator of the inescapable connection between products, services, Value, and reality, which, when understood, shows the aspirations of the economists to be but a bit of fluff in their ideological clouds.
The existence of that revelation is so threatening, that other economists after failing to find flaws in it, first tried ignoring it (which not even J.S. Mill could manage to do), and then lied about and mischaracterized it, as our buddy Keynes did, in order to insert the favorite figments of their imaginations, in its place.
But again, there's nothing complex about Say's Law, it simply states the fact that reality isn't magically made to vanish, by the fallacious claims that state power can be used to 'make opportunity' in a state controlled market.
Say's Law simply restates the obvious reality that economic sophistry attempts to evade, that production comes first, that "supply constitutes demand", or IOW:
All of the other issues associated with Say's Law, whether of general gluts on the market from 'over production', or underconsumption, won't be an issue, and it doesn't in any way suggest or deny that particular variabilities may require changes in pricing by some involved in the market, in order to sufficiently appeal to customers, in the current context of what is being offered and sought after in the market.
Is that so terrifying? Well it is if what you're trying to do is to con your way past the constraints of reality, as Keynes and those who followed after him have been, which is even and especially true of those who say "I'm not a supporter of Keynes!", as such dialectical tactics are typically less about admitting or correcting the errors that the renowned wizard had engaged in, than with carrying the useful parts of the old scheme forward as the new 'only reasonable' means of nudging them further and further away from the terrifying (to them) reality, which both the old and the new lie want so much to not have to face up to.
If 'Economics' is the popular gateway into the dialectical Wizards Circle, then Say's Law and Political Economy are the keys to escaping from it, as recognizing the reality of causality in 'economics', is only a very short philosophical step away from recognizing that it would be unreasonable to not reject all claims that are not compatible with what we can understand to be objectively real and true, which is very real threat to their dazzling economic machine.
Torpedoing Say's Law is a key factor in gaining power over 'an economy', as doing so effectively gives 'economic thinkers' a buffer to keep reality at a distance from those within that market they seek to control (AKA: eliminating your choice from), and throws open wide the gates to the power of unlimited government.
Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with
Which brings us to #3 in how Economic Thinking severs a people from Reality, and that's through their use of The Law. The Rule of Law that is concerned with Justice, deriving a clear system of rules for presenting evidence & arguments so as to ensure the best possible judgement can be made about what the truth of the matter was. The starting point of that system is an acknowledgement that both you and the state, can be in error, while also understanding that what is real and true can be discovered (the reality that we can make an error, is proof that we are able to know what is true), which means that there are matters we can and should understand, about what should govern the writing and administrating of laws, in order to provide a reasonable framework for adjudicating those disputes that will arise amongst people living together in society.
TLDR: Caring about what is true, leads you and your fellows to establish reasonable rules & consequences for behaving reasonably towards each other.
If, as I've argued, ideas in action form the roots of both individual rights and of private property, then to the extent that you are denied the power to take those actions that you think are best for your life and property, or if you are compelled to take actions you otherwise would not have made, that is the extent to which your property and indeed your own active presence in your life, has been taken from you.
Replacing your presence in your own life with the TURD's idea of the 'common good', is exactly what the favorite tools of 'Economic Thinking' - government policies, laws, regulations and regulatory agencies - do: they remove your thought and action from what you have property in, which effectively nationalizes both your property and your life, progressively and surreptitiously accomplishing the ideal that Marx openly stated as summarizing his entire philosophy: 'the abolition of private property'.
What Fascism - developed under the heavy influence of American Pragmatism - contributed to that same purpose, was to turn 'property' into mere possessions that were authorized, overseen by, and managed as needed by, govt experts, who had ultimate control over what had once been 'Property'. In that ideology, while The State is happy to allow some people to have title to the appearances of property, it is The State which has the ultimate power to limit and permit what actions those people are allowed to 'decide' to use it for, and to withdraw said 'property' from their possession, at the whim of whichever bureaucrat is involved in overseeing it.
And before you too quickly shake your head at such horrors, take note that such pragmatic behavior is exactly what our regulatory agencies here in the good-ol-USA, are doing day in, and day out, in the alphabet bureaucracies of our Administrative State - which was, after all, designed under the Pragmatic influence of American 'Progressives'.
This is the problem.
Contrary to Marx's claim that Private Property alienates us from ourselves (and attempting to follow his 'reasoning' is a potentially fatal step into his dialectic), Property is the means by which an individual is able to become more secure and confident in their life, because their rights are morally and legally secured to them, by and through those commitments that each individual shares in common with everyone else in their community, and their shared commitment to the institution of Justice, through objective Law.
Whether Private Property is abridged in the name of the 'common good' by way of 'Progressivism', or 'Liberalism', or 'Conservativism', or 'Socialism', or 'Fascism', or 'Communism', are ultimately distinctions without a practical difference - only what is bad can result from them.
Whether done outright, or gradually through progressive regulation, what abolishing Private Property accomplishes at one and the same time, is to corrupt the people's morals at the foundations of their community and alienates them from their fellows (where it transforms into predators of envy), and in eliminating the law's ability to observe, uphold, and defend, the principle of individual rights, severs the institution of 'The Law' (now transformed from the highpoint of Western understanding in our Founders' era, to 'law' in name only) from having any actual concern for 'Truth, Justice, and the American Way'. To abolish Private Property, is to revert society back 2,500 years into the B.C. era, where the ideal of 'justice' was at best that of the Sophist Thrasymachus', who held that 'justice' was nothing more than a tool for serving the interests of those in power.
It is the ultimate in Pro-Regressivism.
That goal couldn't be carried out openly in The West, at least not at the start, it needed to be advanced out of the direct sight of the people, and was insinuated into their understanding through the treason of its philosophers and academics, who subverted their institutions to form new 'norms' of Education, Law, and Economics. Positivist Law, which from the same Positivist root of the Social Sciences as Economics sprang from, like Pragmatism, contemptuously discards principles & reason, for what it asserts 'to work' for the 'greater good' in their place, on the basis of making what are ultimately the arbitrary assertions of those in power (the B.C. conception of 'Justice'), which involved the latter 'Classical Liberals' in rejecting the wisdom of those who preceded them, such as John Adams noted in cautioning:
'Economics' was used to replace Political Economy, by the Socialists, Utilitarians, & Positivists who later formed themselves into the late 19th Century Progressives, needed a means to escape from the 'restrictions' of the hierarchical and orderly understanding of classical philosophy, which was reflected in, and was too easily given away by, the term that preceded it: Political Economy, which was everything they were seeking to dialectically 'evolve' mankind out of, and out of the SCSR which gave people the means to see what is real and true as common sense.
Economics is and always has been the 'respectable' establishment face of 'Social Justice'.
If the field of Economics was concerned with actual Justice, rather than 'social justice' it would have to comply with its place in that hierarchy of what is, what follows, and what is good to follow, but the very name of 'Political Economy' would require reporting back on what its narrower focus might reveal to be either ineffective or at cross-purposes to those fields of politics, law, justice, Ethics, etc., which it should be integrated into and proceed from. If that was so easily brought to attention by the term 'Political Economy', their efforts would quickly be seen to be... not even up to the level of being wrong, and that economists were attempting to act against those constraints which it is necessarily derived from.
Economic Thinking, together with the utilitarian and pragmatic need to replace principles with formulas that vary with who is to be shown favoritism towards, is not only incompatible with the moral hierarchy of what is, what follows, and what is good, it is necessarily opposed to it, and so acts to undermine and negate it through its quantitative formulas for promoting the violation of individual rights & property, for 'the greater good' - which is the dialectic step by which a person and a people become demoralized.
People have the idea that being 'demoralized' means something like 'down in the dumps', but that's not it at all. Being demoralized, means you are no longer in the habit of, or able to, see things from a moral perspective of right & wrong, and instead see only what is useful or convenient.
Economic Thinking entails sacrificing the Good, to Utility. AKA: Evil.
As we've already noted, we can concern ourselves with the economy running efficiently as 'a' good, but it cannot possibly be the Good that the Law is intended to serve, and be good? Or remain good? 'A' 'good' that is actually Good, cannot somehow justify altering, reordering, overriding, what is 'good' in order to serve it. Yet what are 'Economic Thinkers' decisions and conceptions of a common or greater 'good', based upon? What could possibly justify their claim to having 'found it'?
It seems to me that the word 'hubris' must shudder under the conceptual load that's implied by claiming to be able to comprehend what impositions would be involved in violating the individual rights of an entire society of people, in order to 'correct' that economy which results from their decisions. Especially as such impositions would involve, as they must, decisions having been made not by thought by by abiding by regulations that were written at such a distance in time and place from the realities that can only be known and understood by those facing them firsthand. Such 'alchemical' decisions made by experts from afar, and imposed upon and in place of those decisions you would have made, depletes and destroys value, and cannot help but be utterly indistinguishable from stupidity.
Similarly with 'Pricing' being the miraculous power of a free market that it is, because it transmits something of each interested person's judgment of valuation which meaningfully conveys their own estimation of their needs and expectations of available supplies and demand for it, into and within a system whose expanse cannot even be imagined (see 'I, Pencil'), let alone recognized, measured, or managed.
While the prospect of somehow managing an economy appeals to the pride of those who are foolish enough to imagine themselves up to 'the task', an economy cannot be managed from the top down, it can only be destroyed from there, by eliminating Value and the ability to express your judgment of what is of value to you, from the economy.
It's important to realize that 'Economics' is dependent upon both the skeptical 'empiricism' of David Hume's claim that only 'empirical facts' are credible, and that we should be skeptical of all metaphysical and moral claims "...send it too the flames...", as well as Kant's *defense* that it only seems that way because we can't actually know reality as it is at all, and so must act on the Kantian Categorical Imperative of expectant TURDs. That combination has put modern misosophy - hatred of wisdom - into action and ruined people's grasp of causality in their lives, and began separating them from reality, by enclosing them within their own ideas of it.
Exiting 'Economic Thinking' and re-entering into the Reality of what is real and true
Remember the Physicist and the theories of Perpetual Motion - don't get sucked into trying to validate or follow the numbers. The first task involving the legitimacy of any economic theory, is to determine its metaphysical standing, causal connection, and ethical value, and only then moving on to determining whether or not the theory is potentially valid, and determining whether or not it conforms to, or violates, sound principles, and determine whether its intent is to measure what is real and true, or to justify what is unreal and unjustifiable.
Ask yourself this, if you don't start from the position afforded by the high ground of principles rooted in reality through common sense, how long might you otherwise continue listening with interest as you become ensnared in the details, without being sure of what it stands upon, and where it's leading? If you don't first grasp the relevant first principles and check both your position, and the direction you're being led in, you can easily find yourself stepping into the Wizards Circle. With every step you take into that, you are at risk of an abrupt and unexpected exit from reality, just as Descartes Cogito and 'Method of Doubt' lured people, not only into doubting reality, but to stepping into an interior world of untethered ideas, where doubt alone presupposes itself superior to reality, based upon your now your baseless presumptions of what you 'clearly and distinctly conceive are true' (AKA: whims) which presumes itself to have the power to dictate and validate, what you desire to believe is real and true.
Where Kant declares that "I found it necessary to destroy reason [which of course is the very same faculty he's using to choose the words he's using there] in order to save religion" [which is a condemnation of both religion and reason], how much further will you continue reading? How about when he says that we cannot know reality [which if true, by what means could either he or you know that?!] as it is? Or when he says you must abide by categorical imperatives [based upon what, and how?], that he declares you must believe [because it's really the most reasonable...? Wait... reason...? reality...wut?!], How much further will you continue reading in the thousands of pages that were explicitly concocted to justify his ideal system?
When you see that someone's ideas and plans are inviting you to blindly enter into their matrix, so as to destroy your ability to think anything other than someone else's ideas, what more do you need to drop them like a hot potato? If you don't begin your thinking from a principled position that's rooted in a metaphysical understanding of reality, causality, logic, and ethics that is available to every human being by virtue of being human, how will you be able to recognize that system that is constructed to appeal to your basest desires, for the evil fantasy that it is? America was the result of the best of the West, and the SCSR as expressed by Thomas Reid, Beattie, James Wilson, and others of our Founders' era, which made it possible to see and to reject the idea matrix of modernity. But gradually, progressively, over the years, We The People have allowed that foundation to be eroded, and we allowed it for 'The Common Good!'.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Understand Classic American Liberalism and decline to be mislabeled
When the 'Economic' wizards invite you to step into their wizard's circle of 'managing the economy', you need to recognize it for what it is: a choice between the reality of living a life worth living, and that of an isolated, confused, and meaningless miasma of competing powers and fleeting utilitarian pleasures of ever diminishing Value.
My position follows from being aware that 'economic thinking' is fundamentally rooted in the truly pro-regressive presumption that power should be used to violate the principle of individual rights and property, for the 'Greater Good', while also understanding that the 'Greater Good' is a utilitarian notion that implicitly entails creating a victim class of those deemed by pro-regressive T.U.R.D.'s to be at odds with those of the 'greater' class of the moment, as a fungible pretext for ensuring a steadily growing audience for the Oppressor/Oppressed narrative, that their dialectic is dependent upon.
That narrative can only be 'justified' by the modern system of epistemology that was concocted to deny and evade the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian understanding of metaphysics, in order to escape from identifying what is & is not a contradiction, so that Ethics could be reduced to meaningless rules that serve the current narrative, and therefore I reject the idea that the field of 'Economics' is a legitimate 'school of thought'.
Consequently, I reject their proposals to violate the lives and individual rights of all for the 'Greater Good', as a proposal with so little connection to what is real and true, that it is not even up to the level of even being considered wrong.
The fact is that unlike that period of Political Economy that thrived during our Founders era, 'Economics' is explicitly opposed to that which would give it an active and legitimate connection to what is real and true. 'Economic Thinking' has no basis in reality, and no matter how dazzlingly they claim or even succeed at predicting various inflationary rates, income distribution curves, or the 'velocity of money', they are no more able to validate 'a reality' inherent in their fundamental presumptions, that the accuracy of Ptolemy's epicycles validated that Mars orbited around the Earth.
'Economic Thinking' is one of the many notions that we should dismiss out of hand, and do so upon the same basis that:
Only an approach based upon a principled observance of reality, can enables you to discard those systems and ideologies - political, economic, educational, or otherwise - that some may seek to label you with, such as 'anti-government' or 'libertarian', without having to look any further into them than the 'oh-so fine' sounding truisms which pose as being 'realistic', when on the face of them, they are anything but that.
However many pages worth of HTML I've generated with this post, it can be boiled down to keeping one sentence in mind:
That same history shows that the undermining and rejection of those ideas and principles, has consistently led to a rapid loss of prosperity and a return to barbarous brutality, misery, crime, war, and horrific scales of mass murder.
If we would like to experience a lessening of crime, barbarous behavior, and an increase in prosperity, we need to reject the 'economic thinking' which serves as a tool for forcing our society to obey the distant and arbitrary decisions of T.U.R.D.'s who's regulations can only inject stupidity and confusion into everyone's lives on the strength of a baseless promise to 'help' some supposed aspect of them, which can and will only cause unanticipated chaos, corruption, and a return to barbarism. See Bastiat's The Law.
And finally in conclusion, as that same history promises that if we turn away from the lure of 'economic thinking' and engage again instead in the pursuit of Political Economy and those ideas it was derived from, where the power of government is limited by a Rule of Law dedicated to upholding and defending the lives and individual rights and property of its people, restraining its powers from interfering in its people's education and commerce in matters other than to set standards of weights & measures, arbitrate and enforce contracts, patents, while diligently punishing fraud, embezzlement, abuse, and generally keeping the peace - as its role was widely understood to be at the time of our Founders, America and The West can show the way to greatness once again.
That scope cannot be fully encompassed under the newly popular label among the better folk who label themselves as 'Classical Liberals', of being 'anti-communist', because communism is far too narrow a term for what we're up against today. It's not a single philosophy, gnostic or not, that's taking us backwards, it's the burning desire that's been embedded into fields of religion, philosophy, art, history, education, law, and 'economics' - seeking above all to regress backwards past the true progress of our Founders' era, back even further than before Christianity, to sophistical paradise of the powerful who ruled before Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates.
And as only that small sliver of time and understanding within the 'Classical Liberal' period which gave birth to America, also rejects those ideas that have undermined it, the only description that I'll happily tape to my back, is that of a Classic American Liberal (thanks again Clint!)
They are Pro-Regressive, and what I am opposed to is that. So if you need any labels for me, they are: Classic American Liberal and Anti-ProRegressive.
So at least I've gotten that much out of my time on X-Twitter.
Wait... what?! Replaced reality? Ok, I realize that may sound a wee bit extravagant, but humor me for a moment, after all, haven't we already seen an example of this occurring with how the popular understanding of the 'Common Good' has developed? The first thing we need to realize, is that in order to make what people mentally understand to be real and true, seem to disappear, is, as every magician knows, a fairly simple trick. And that while performing that trick may require the magician to use some physical aids, such as smoke and mirrors, and an attractive assistant, the most important part, the part where the real heavy lifting occurs to make even something as large as the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear before the eyes of his dazzled audience, is what takes place upon that stage between the audiences ears, through the willing assistance they give to the magician's theatrical distractions and mis-directions.
What we need to do to catch them in the act of pulling the joker from their sleeve, is to calmly work our way down through their stated positions, and the implications of them, into the results that they count on slipping past you unseen. Recognizing their reasons for them, and consequences of them, is what must be seen and understood by us, before we can understand what it is that's being passed off to us as 'economic thinking', so that we can get back to the reality they've made disappear from our awareness.
The most visible part of their stagecraft comes from the wand waving of the magician, that's Semantic Deception, and you need only look to terms such as 'racist', 'peaceful protest', 'woman' 'gender', and others recent verbal victims, to see how effective this pro-regressive magic trick has been upon those who don't pay attention to what's been done with the words we recognize by sound, but miss the new meanings that's being slipped into our minds unquestioned and unseen.
The physical 'smoke & mirrors' portion of the trick involves the 'rigorous' use of physical textbooks, tests, diplomas ("you sir, would you verify for the audience that this is just a hat"), and sets the stage of what's visible to the eye, and the performance begins as the flourishing movements and sleight of hand, together with the attractive assistant's attention getting outfits (from climate change to sex, greed, murder, Russian disinformation, and News at 11), enables their semantic deceptions to transfer the latest narrative into unquestionable beliefs, that gradually, progressively, become the popular assumptions of their evolving cultural baseline.
For 'reality' to be made to disappear, requires only taking those words we use for considering what is real and true, and utilizing the active participation of our schools and media to redirect our attention away from what those words used to refer to, into a new use and meaning, and in no time flat: viola`!, while the spelling of the words themselves remain the same, We The People's default ability to access the reality which those words had originally referred to - Liberty, Happiness, Property - has disappeared from popular understanding - it's been 'unburdened by what has been'.
With that in mind, I want to refer you to an essay of Frederic Bastiat's that was the inspiration for Henry Hazlitt's book "Economics in One Lesson", called "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen", and I encourage you to try and take notice of both what is unavoidably seen when discussing the 'economic' headlines of the day, and what is pointedly not seen in most discussions of them.
What is seen and cannot be missed, is of course the endless details that are hurled into our attention in tedious debates over whether this or that policy, ranging from Minimum Wage laws, to Tax Cuts, to Controlling Inflation, will cause this or that 'economic indicator' to rise or fall by a whole or fraction of a percentage point, and how that may or may not cause still other indicators of GDP, CPI, etc., to rise or fall. Those indicators will prompt discussions & debates over whether 'the FED should raise the discount rate', or to impose or repeal a ' Capital Gains rate hike', and heated discussions over still more economic policies and whether or not 'they' 'should increase monetary supply', etc., and eventually, those in government will follow which advice suits them best and take action to implement some or all of the recommended 'economic policies'.
Did you catch the sleight of hand being performed just beneath the surface of all such policy debates? Here's a few questions to help reveal the trick:
Those questions will tease out some of the more obvious points which are usually not seen in these discussions, though surely they'd come as no surprise to anyone, in that they justify these broad and far reaching (into your life) policies on the basis that they'll be 'good for the economy' (probably - depending upon which economist is listened to, and which type of response is wanted from the popular audience).
- Q: Are these policies clear & unambiguous to policy makers & the public? A: No, few things are more murky than 'economic' language.
- Q: Will people's jobs & lives be affected by these 'Economic Policies'? A: Yes, some for better, some for worse.
- Q: Do you have a choice in whether these 'Economic Policies' will affect your life? A: No, 'they' will choose what's 'better' for the greater good.
Less obviously, but no more surprising, is the fact that all such 'economic policies' enacted by government are imposed upon us through the force of law, and you & I would be punished and/or imprisoned for ignoring or violating them.
Now did you notice the card being slipped up the sleeve?
What mostly goes unseen, is that this means that our Rule of Law has been made to serve the interests of 'the economy', before the interests of those living within the economy.
Aristotle, Politics, Book III
"...for desire is a wild beast, and passion perverts the minds of rulers, even when they are the best of men. The law is reason unaffected by desire."
Cicero, Republic:
"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions"
When they perform this trick right, we find that the most prominent concerns that people had in our Founders' era - Liberty, Justice, Individual Rights/Property Rights - go unseen in the debates that fill the news, and that's because that entire reality has been made to disappear from public awareness.
Cicero, Republic:
"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions"
And the Pro-Regressive magicians take a bow.
Also unseen and pointedly unconsidered, is what principle of Law is compatible with the government of We The People, showing such favoritism to some, while at the same time penalizing others, not as a rightful response to unlawful actions of some individuals, but towards those 'singled out' by their collective employment and financial status & standing. What remains unseen, is what standard of law supports such actions - the traditional standards that Thomas Jefferson found "...in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c..." to justify the Declaration of Independence, are incompatible with whatever these new standards of law that 'economic thinkers' have in mind are - so what standard is it that is now being used to determine whether our laws are to be viewed as being either good laws, or bad laws?
Also kept unseen is what 'Justice' must be twisted into meaning, so as to turn the force of law upon society, on the basis of calculated probabilities, rather than as 'just deserts' for individual actions.
What should be seen, is that this means that the very ideal of 'Justice' not only cannot involve impartiality, it must direct an expressed partiality towards those favored by those in power, and - 'Poof!' - Lady Justice's blindfold and our Founders' ideal of Justice for all, are made to disappear.
Justice wanders from Progress to Regress:
Thrasymachus: "Justice is what benefits the powerful"
Aristotle: "equality by merit"
Deuteronomy 1:17: "Do not show partiality in judging; hear both small and great alike."
Leviticus 19:15 "Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly."
Cicero: "justice renders to everyone his due", "hear the other side"
John 7:24 "Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”
Economics: "We must act in the best interests of the economy."
What very obviously is there to be seen by those who're willing to look, is that 'economic thinkers' justify these alterations, both seen and unseen, so as to impose them upon us all for the 'common good'.
Thrasymachus: "Justice is what benefits the powerful"
Aristotle: "equality by merit"
Deuteronomy 1:17: "Do not show partiality in judging; hear both small and great alike."
Leviticus 19:15 "Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly."
Cicero: "justice renders to everyone his due", "hear the other side"
John 7:24 "Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”
Economics: "We must act in the best interests of the economy."
What else goes mostly unseen when engaging with the 'economically minded' over any of these questions of the economic 'common good', is that their justifications for the extensive intrusions of governmental and extra-governmental forces as being necessary for enforcing 'economic' policies into our lives (hi there FED), is that this not only stealthily presupposes extensive revisions to have already been made to our fundamental concepts of Justice and Law, but to our metaphysical, causal, logical, and ethical understandings of what we think 'Good' is, and means.
Such changes as these aren't typically discussed out in the open, but behind committee doors, and are then slipped into popular understanding as foregone conclusions (answers which abort your questions) through academia (hi there textbooks & testing!), often by pragmatically muddying the waters to make them appear shallow and 'safe enough' to be swept aside and left unseen (hi there modern 'epistemology').
Whose expectations are our elected representatives and appointed officials serving, by putting ideas like these into practice? It's certainly not in order to uphold our rights or to correct actual wrongs done to the public in common, but instead to further the expectations of the 'T.U.R.D.'s' preferred economic indicators. Those indicators are used by them, for them to justify the creation of numerous & vaguely defined institutions & agencies, which we're told simply must be given the power to operate within our lives, administering daily doses of power being injected into and over every decision we might make, concerning every aspect of our lives & property. The affects that these indicator-serving actions have upon our day to day lives, is central to what's caused the ills and unrest that beset us today.
Our having conceded these fundamentally moral, legal, and political concerns and actions, to being 'economic concerns', has in a very real sense replaced - or at least overpowered - those decisions that should in reality be ours to make in our own lives. In everything from pasteurized milk, to medicines, and indicators of how educated you are or aren't, 'economic concerns' are used to replace an active part of your life, with someone else's decision for how you 'should' be living it. Putting the matter more starkly, our willingly engaging in 'economic thinking' has effectively transformed our understanding of the key phrase of our Declaration of Independence, from being 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness', to that of 'life, *liberty*, and maintaining the 'T.U.R.D.'s' 'GDP'' (Gross Domestic Product).
And all of this we're told by our T.U.R.D.'s, is fully justified by the necessity of improving 'the economy' for the greater good.
Do you see how significant a portion of the reality of being an American, has been made to disappear by this sleight of hand?
There are a great many things that we no longer give much serious thought to in our day to day lives, because 'economics' has become so central to the thinking that we order our lives around, even in less than obvious ways, as with the reason that most people give when asked why they send their kids to school:
'to get good grades so they can get a good job', not to benefit from the clearer understanding of themselves and of life that can come with a good education, but to acquire economically useful skills instead, which, as 'bad money drives out good', has made 'Education' disappear from our schools.
Those actions which 'Economic Thinking' advises, have entailed substantial alterations to our understanding of the nature and purpose of education, and of law, and of justice - and more importantly, to our own standing in regards to them - which has been accomplished with ease by way of our loosely accepting and affirming that 'something must be done to improve the economy'.
These are just some of the most obvious surface indications of how far reaching these mundane and tedious 'economic' policies of 'the dismal science' have gone, and how effectively our understanding of reality has been so easily altered and shifted out of our conscious attention and control, by means of 'economic thinking'.
But wait! There's more!
Have you noticed that if you attempt to question the wisdom of imposing 'economic policies' in place of questions of what is real and true and right and wrong, your concerns are going to be addressed by them from within the frame of 'economic thinking'? Meaning that concerns such as those I've raised concerning the primacy of metaphysical & ethical principles, over that of economic utility, will be reframed as if they were expressions of one or another economic thinker or school, such as Hazlitt, von Mises, Hayek, etc., or just plain ignorance of economics, which installs 'Economic Thinking' as the standard? And then of course if they do respond to my points any further, they will do so from within the frame of whichever economic school of thought, such as Marx, Keynes, Stiglitz, etc., it is that they support.
X-Twitterers say:
"So thinkers that existed prior before the industrial revolution, correct? Lol Even Adam Smith advocated for taxing rentier privilege..."
The 'economic thinker' presumes that every aspect of your life, exists first & foremost within the interests and powers of their 'Economic' concerns - be it Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, etc., - which they presuppose society to be operating within, and they consider any other views as being outside of, or beneath, the 'valid' range of answers for the ills they care about.
Coincidentally (not) in service to the 'progressive' goal of getting 'good grades' to develop our workforce of 'human capital', our schooling has drilled into us the habit of scanning through meaningless worksheets and textbooks for the 'correct answer' to True/False & 'Fill in the blank' questions that we don't understand or care about, and which probably weren't worth asking in the first place ('What were the six causes of the Civil War?'), and so having been accustomed to such shallow thinking, most students are trained into never developing the habit of integrating what they learn, into the rest of what they know (get in the habit of noticing that Truth integrates your understanding all the way up & down, while lies disintegrate and stop it).
'Property'... as in 'private property'? No, no, nOooo, you see, that property is publicly accessible, and so its use, be it 'wetlands', 'working conditions', or 'handicap access', must be made to serve 'the common good'...', and whether they do so explicitly as by means of something like eminent domain, or implicitly by regulation ('no smoking'), they do so in the name of a 'common good' that is not and cannot be good for all, through the force of laws which have been remade into rules that serve 'the economy', rather than providing justice for those living within 'the economy'.
Slow down bro - thinking about rights, government, justice, law, politics, can't start with rights, government, justice, law, politics
Here we need to pause once again so that we don't allow ourselves to get ahead of ourselves. Despite what 'Civics Class' might lead you to think, rights, government, justice, law, politics, are not where we should start thinking about rights, government, justice, law, or politics from. Such matters are neither stumbled upon fully formed like rocks in a field, nor dreamt up by whim, they develop out of more fundamental observations and questions, and if we fail to consider them in that way, there's no limit to what will remain unseen to us, as we're led to focus on what is too conveniently seen.
Because 'Rights' are consequences, not causes, 'Rights' cannot be the starting point for thinking about 'Rights', reality and how we inhabit it is. Identifying what is and what that requires of us, comes first (or should), and leads into identifying those First Principles of what is, what follows, and what should be, which can then provide a foundation for, and meaningful guidance to, your thinking.
Common Sense will tell you that if you're going to climb the stairs to the top of a multi-story building, there's no means of a shortcut for you to somehow take a single step that will extend from the foot of the stairs, to a step that's mid-way up and around the flight of stairs to the third floor - you know you have to enter the stairwell at its start on the ground floor or basement level, and climb up to that point - it's just common sense. Likewise, as government involves "...the greatest of all reflections on human nature...", you shouldn't attempt to start making decisions about "rights, government, justice, law, or politics", without first starting with what you do and do not understand of reality, and the nature of what being human is and requires.
If you skip that and pretend it doesn't matter, how are you going to know that any of your positions are realistic? Get out of the habit you learned through twelve years of schooling to seek after answers without understanding the questions that led to them, and don't be so trusting of those who encourage you to continue doing so.
Accepting 'answers' without having established their basis in what is real and true, seeking after and defending 'acceptable answers', without giving consideration to the questions they claim to be an answer to, or whether they were even valid to ask in the first place, is the hallmark of ideological thinking (which, BTW, began with 'Economic Thinking'). Recognize that the shallow flowchart-logic habit of thinking - a *praxis* if you will - is only concerned with 'the right position' that you must be either for, or against, to gain some mark of approval from them, and not with whether it is true or false, and so right or wrong.
These ideas with no visible means of support - where are they leading you to?
Not only have people forgotten that the ground floor of whatever they might undertake to do, buy, or sell, begins with their judgement of what they can see is real and true, but their willingness to begin considering consequential ideas, on the basis of what those same theories and theorists promise, is stepping into a matrix of circularity that should bring P.T. Barnum's phrase to mind:
"You can't cheat an honest man."
"That nature exists, it would be absurd to try to prove; for it is obvious that there are many things of this kind, and to prove what is obvious by what is not is the mark of a man who is unable to distinguish what is self-evident from what is not." - Aristotle, Physics, Book II, part 1
Yes, they are conning you, but accepting their assertions on the basis of the theories they assert them with, is volunteering to be misled by con-men, in order to 'gain' something that's too good to be true. We The People should stop doing that.
Most of all, what I hope to bring to your attention here, is that the 'Social Science' of 'economic thinking', is inviting you to step into a practice of thinking that is less about theories and thought experiments, than with deadening your ability to recognize the warning signs of your departure from what is real and true, steps which dis-integrate what you can see is real, from what you know is true. The fact is that most of our popular political/economic labels today are rooted in the same disjointed and baselessly self-important terms and fields, and are not something we should be willing to treat as legitimate, let alone conform to.
x-Tweet'rs demand "What would you do about interest rates & deficits?!"
Consequently, much to my x-Tweet'rs annoyance, when I'm asked to engage with them in discussing policies they presume to be 'normal' for everyone to simply take a position on ("... what will you do about rentiers..."), I won't pretend to not notice that the doormat that they've laid out for me at the entrance to their thought experiment, is one that's been precariously nailed onto the outside of a window that's been busted open on the 3rd floor of their ramshackle philosophical building, and sorry, no, the '1st Floor -Lobby' label they've taped above it, doesn't change anything about that. BTW, it's amazing how often those urging you to leap into their 'thought experiments', are not willing to indulge you in a discussion that does enter through the actual philosophical ground floor entrance ("...thinkers that existed prior before the industrial revolution, correct? Lol ...").
It's as if they don't see it, and think that you can't see it - which as we'll see, is less 'as if' and more 'that's exactly it'.
“Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give their opinions.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila
This routine expectation that people will be willing to perform philosophical parkour to reach their upper floor 'entrance', while pretending that the ground floor doesn't even exist or would somehow matter if it did, is common to discussions of 'Economics', and 'Social Studies' too. An example of which would be those introductory lessons that begin with talk of the 'Social Contract', which, with apologies to Locke (and sneers & jeers for Hobbes & Rousseau), simply won't do as a starting point. Why? Because that is making the parkour leap from the sidewalk to the 3rd floor window, so as to evade coming into contact with the foundational contexts which make up the entire 1st & 2nd floors (not to mention the basement) that are necessary to support that 'Social Contract'.
Do I exaggerate? If you ask a few of the questions which you are expected to leap over with their philosophical parkour, you may notice what narratives it inserts as premises without your having considered them, and which leaves such 'answers' at best, meaningless and misleading. To see what I mean, let's take a look at the two words of the 'Social Contract':
IOW, before you can begin meaningfully discussing a 'Social Contract', you would already need to have given a great deal of thought to everything else about men living in society with each other, of the kind that can eventually lead up to an understanding of what went into The Federalist No. 51:
- 'Social'? Meaning society? What kind of society, could any society form and agree to such a thing? Tribal? Feudal? Theocratic? Piratic? Nomadic? Does it matter?
- Could we take any random group of individuals - Hermits? Savages? Collectivists? - and toss them together to be 'Social' in a society?
- Could Rousseauian 'noble savage's agree to this 'social contract'? Could a person, or a people of them, whose idea of being 'free', means only having the brute power to prevent their being subdued by the power of others, be what this society is formed from?
- What is it that forms a people into 'a' suitable society?
- 'Contract'? What is meant by that?
- What must such a contract be understood to be, to be bound to one?
- What understanding, if any, would need to be common to such a people, to conceive of such a 'contract'?
- How does a people understand that a contract is being complied with, and how would they recognize it is being violated?
- What consequences would violating that contract entail, and how would that be enforced? By who? To who?
"...It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to controul the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to controul itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions...."To start with a 'Social Contract', is to begin by diverting reasonable consideration away from the wide, deep, and structurally sound (?) set of ideas, that must first be shared and respected within a community, and which are required to be understood amongst them, before such a 'social contract' could even be conceived of, let alone made, agreed to, and maintained.
Contrary to everything that's been taught for generations, you need to insist on starting from the ground floor of reality, with what you can see is real and true, and then work your way up through the relevant concepts and arguments they present. Should they ever present a theory that at least appears to conform to reality, those could be worth exploring further, but when they won't acknowledge that they're clearly proposing to build new additions upon an unsupportable foundation of error and/or deceit, then it's very likely that they're trying to fool you into accepting a narrative position in place of your understanding the actual issues, so as to obscure your view of reality.
When you see that's the case don't waste time arguing with them, simply 'shake the dust off your feet', and continue on your way.
Also keep in mind that as you begin looking into the development of ideas, and their effects across history in this way, you're going to begin running into opposition to some theory or position of someone that you've been accustomed to regard as an authority on the matter. When that happens it's good to keep a quip of Aristotle's in mind:
"Plato is dear, but Truth is dearer", and don't let your own ego pull rank - stick to what you can see is real and true, and keep at arms length what is not, or is shaky, at best. To put it another way, while it may be fine to quote this or that theory or theorist - such as John Locke - as an authority on a matter, remember that their authority - if any - comes from their having identified relevant facts & principles which they demonstrated to be verifiable & just. It's just as important to remember that their authority extends no further than where they depart from having demonstrated that, and that's the line that you need to hold to, and to hold them to.
Resist being led into subjects awash with enthusiasts who're focused on sweeping you along with their narrative of 'What is Seen', and look for what they are quick to leave unseen in their positions, and therefore be unlikely to enter into your thinking at all. When you notice what is not there that should be, that warrants your taking a judicious 'pause for the cause' to at least consider how they ever managed to leave it out of, what we should've been taught should be kept in mind.
IS that so - It all depends upon what the meaning of 'Is', is
Where we should begin is of course where the beginning of the subject is, because if you haven't given some thought to what the meaning of the word IS, is, then what it is will assuredly be taken from you by those who recognize that you haven't yet grasped it, and seeing the power they can gain by using that to their advantage, they'll do so before you've even noticed that it's gone (welcome to the last thirty years (at least)). The sorts of things that should be on people's daily radar, but usually flies well under it, are the most routine points that're used, misused, neglected, or violated, in the standard practices that you very likely do not connect with 'economic thinking', such as what is meant by an 'Idea', or a 'Concept'.
If you've ever said "Well it's just Common Sense", you can thank Thomas Reid and his refutation of Hume's notions, for it, :
Being able to develop a strong enough grip upon what IS, so that it won't easily slip from your grasp, is one of the most significant features that underlies and structures the Western form of reasoning. Its purpose and effect is to help you determine what is (Metaphysics ), what is most likely to follow from that Causality), as well as testing the validity of what we believe (Logic), and then clarifying what we should do in response to that (Ethics).
That is what traditional philosophy always practiced, so as to identify, clarify, and determine whether or not you were justified in believing that what you've understood to be real and true, was or wasn't so, which is the means of keeping you free of the webs of sophistry that TURDS seek to wrap about your understanding.
Although the moderns' advertised that their new field of 'epistemology' exists (ahem) to help you to 'justify belief' - that's not quite the same thing. One problem with their claim, is that it is founded upon the basis of Kant's assertion that we cannot know reality as it is (which is just the tip of that philosophical iceberg), which is what modernists and post-modernists depend upon in subverting and replacing what traditional philosophy sought to have people understand.
Let's begin at the actual beginning, by flagging a few key points from Metaphysics,
Note that these three points don't strike you in three sequential steps, all three - Reality, Identity, Awareness - are always simultaneously implicit in, and entangled with, every thought and observation we make.
- Reality exists. - You perceive that the hand before you exists (and yes Neo, even if it's only a computer simulation, the simulation, or a dream, in that context, it exists)
- Identity - What reality exists as, entails its identity - You don't see the reality of your hand as an undistinguished whole, you identify it - from non-contradiction this isn't that, runs from a silhouette to a molecular scan - through perceiving the elements of your palm, fingers, thumb, etc.
- Awareness - observing what Reality exists as, engages our awareness of our conscious selves - we become aware that there is a self that's observing the hand before us, and that it too exists within reality.
And for the unwise guys who might say:
"You can't prove that reality exists!", every word they used in saying that: 'You', 'can't', 'prove', 'that', 'reality', 'exists', presumes that reality does exist, and that something about it is being communicated by those words they've chosen within it, to you who can understand their words and exist within the same reality as they do. Have a nice day. If they persist with something like:
"You don't know what's true for me!", just retort:
"So how do you know what's true for me?", and if they retreat into:
"No one person can know that their judgment is true!", they fully deserve a retort of:
"Is that true in your judgment?", and so long as you don't follow down the path of their thinking (and the virus of modernity is trying to draw you in there), and instead examine what they've said and the implications of their statements, a technique known as Retortion, you can safely disarm their mind-traps and continue on your way.
With the outrageous obviousness aside, there are some importantly obvious points to make:
What these observations make self-evident to us, is that when we attend to having our thoughts and actions reflect reality, we're able to increase our knowledge, successful actions, and wisdom.
- It is self-evident that human beings are endowed with five senses and a mind at birth.
- It is self-evident that the development of the mind & senses enables us to perceive, judge, and reasonably understand what is real and true in our world.
- It is self-evident that only by intelligently conforming our thoughts to reality, can we learn from our experiences and be better able to take those actions needed to serve and preserve our lives - materially, individually, socially.
Equally self-evident, is that whether by accident, error, or carelessness, we can be wrong. We can make mistakes.
When we fail to conform to reality, we experience some degree of failure and confusion in whatever it is we might've been trying to achieve.
Which, believe it or not, is a good thing.
Why?
Because it tells us at least three very important facts:
A moment's consideration makes plain that discovering an error is at the same time revealing a truth that is the most fundamental one of all - which is essentially Aristotle's law of non-contradiction,
- that thinking well is not an automatic process, but is one which requires us to be attentive to reality and in our thinking about how to respond to it,
, and,- what that reveals is that our ability to discover an error, is confirmation that we can recognize what is real and true!
- It's important what we direct our attention to.
that a thing cannot be both true and false at the same time, and in the same manner and context., as being the 1st rule of thought, and the foundation of logic. It is also a truth which is the most feared by those who primarily value power, because it has the potential to explode all of their artful sophistries - the wrapping of layers of confusing words to mask contradictions - and leaves them powerless.
They hates it. Truly they do.
What this means for the rest of us, is that we can perceive the world around us, and by virtue of our knowing firsthand that we are capable of making errors, we also know that we're capable of perceiving and judging what is true (if not, an 'error' would be an unknown concept to us), and we do that best by methodically reasoning between our perceptions and judgement, towards a better understanding of what is real and true. It's important that we choose to direct our attention - sensorially and mentally - towards what is actually relevant to a matter, no matter how inconvenient that might be to our feelings and preferences.
But what do we know of how we're able to perceive the world, and abstract ideas from it?
Using the tools available to him at the time, Aristotle used the image of how a signet ring is impressed into wax, as an analogy for how reality is impressed into our minds by means of our sensory perceptions, which we then use in forming our thoughts and memories. From Part 12 of De Anima:
(A) By a 'sense' is meant what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter. This must be conceived of as taking place in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold; we say that what produces the impression is a signet of bronze or gold, but its particular metallic constitution makes no difference: in a similar way the sense is affected by what is coloured or flavoured or sounding, but it is indifferent what in each case the substance is; what alone matters is what quality it has, i.e. in what ratio its constituents are combined., and from there he went on to surmise that when we are born our minds must be 'tablula rasa', a 'blank slate', as prior to our having the data of the senses to work with, we should have no knowledge or ideas of them.
(B) By 'an organ of sense' is meant that in which ultimately such a power is seated.
Note: Aristotle was not equating the mind with the wax, the analogy was illustrating the action of the sense perceptions carrying reality into our mind, with the wax being what we retain of that action in memory. He also did not say that our thoughts are, or are limited to, the data of our sense perceptions, or that we are nothing more than our perceptions. Tabula Rasa meant only that our knowledge of the world we live within, begins with our experience & perceptions of it.The process of identifying what it is we perceive, begins with a part of our mind that precedes any of the contents our senses provide to it, and is what was once commonly understood to be a, if not the, central feature of human nature, The Three Acts of the Mind. If the term is unfamiliar to you, you can thank your education for having robbed you of it, as did mine, but cheer up, you can remedy that, just as I did.
To hit the highlights of what I went over here, the Three Acts of the Mind is a central function in how our mind operates:
First Act: Apprehend (Understand) - We open our eyes, and whether seeing something for the first time, or understand that we know it by name, a Rock for instance, we apprehend it, conceptualize, identify itThese acts are initiated just below our conscious awareness, at the level of observing the 'signet ring' of reality being impressed through our senses into our mind, where some impression of it is left in the 'wax' of memory. In every waking moment the 'difference engine' of the human mind is constantly involved in performing these acts, observing, distinguishing and identifying what has been observed and what's remembered, and making an initial judgment about what to do about the differences it finds, in a process that is common to all human beings, everywhere and every when, the effects of which Thomas Reid called 'Common Sense' (an enjoyable audio of Reid's Inquiry here).
Second Act: Judgment - The act of mind which combines or separates two terms by affirmation or denial. 'Rock is hard' is a judgment
Third Act: Reasoning - From our observations and judgments, we move towards further conclusions and applications of them. 'As rocks are hard, I should avoid striking my toe against them.'
As Reid notes:
"...The same degree of understanding which makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life, makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident, and which he distinctly apprehends.Common Sense begins with the most basic level of experience, as the effects of touching a hot coal or stove produces the common and self-evident recognition, judgement, and reasoning, everywhere and every when, that one should not touch hot coals or stoves. The good sense of that is self-evident to all who have any sense, and denying it would be evidence of that person's sense being impaired, as Reid also notes:
All knowledge, and all science, must be built upon principles that are self-evident; and of such principles every man who has common sense is a competent judge, when he conceives them distinctly. Hence it is, that disputes very often terminate in an appeal to common sense...."
"...The laws of all civilised nations distinguish those who have this gift of heaven, from those who have it not. The last may have rights which ought not to be violated, but, having no understanding in themselves to direct their actions, the laws appoint them to be guided by the understanding of others. It is easily discerned by its effects in men's actions, in their speeches, and even in their looks; and when it is made a question whether a man has this natural gift or not, a judge or a jury, upon a short conversation with him, can, for the most part, determine the question with great assurance..."The scope of what is considered to be common sense, rises from direct experience at the level of having the basic sense to not touch hot stoves, on up to ever higher levels of thought regarding what the individual and their community share a common understanding of, or can be expected to. What that means, is that the faculty of Common Sense is not an entirely 'black box' feature, but is open to our actions improving (or degrading) it, meaning that we can consciously 'train' ourselves in how well we perform the Three Acts of The Mind, though after the fact, so to speak, by developing our habits of thinking, knowledge, and purpose, and by what we accept as being of value (by belief or action), all of which depends upon what we attend to.
For instance, staying close to the direct level of experience, in any human society across the ages, if you were to play a musical instrument to anyone with adequate hearing, they would report hearing its sound, and whether or not they recognized the instrument or even considered the sound pleasing, it would be self-evident to them that what they heard had come from that instrument. It would be equally true in all of those instances that those who'd consciously developed their habits of listening, and by paying attention to what they're hearing they could develop the ability to further identify that sound they'd heard as being the note 'C' or 'C#', or a combination of notes that make up the chord 'C# minor', and whether the instrument playing it was in or out of tune. To those who'd developed that ability, those identifications would be 'self-evident' to them, and anyone else who later developed that ability would as well.
Those actions of the mind of apprehending, judging, and reasoning which we've just looked at in regards to touch, and hearing, are equally active with the input of the other senses of sight and smell. The same applies in regards to the far more intricate issues involving our knowledge, thoughts, and habits of mind, and as the legal example of Reid's just noted, 'anyone' within a society should be able to identify what would commonly be considered to be foolish thinking & behavior, and so remark with words to the effect of:
'That just goes against common sense!', which is the 'output' of the three acts of the mind operating upon what can reasonably be expected to be commonly known to all.
To the degree that the sense of such conclusions seem obvious to people, the conclusion is drawing upon a common understanding that is so fundamental to their thinking, that the response is close to coming without conscious thought, it is self-evident, though if you were to ask them to go on and explain their conclusion in detail (a favorite 'gotcha' of 'on the street' reporting), it would likely take a few moments of conscious consideration of what it is that they know, to explain it if you could - try explaining how you know a note is C#. The more basic the reasons, the more the sense of it has been absorbed into their 'common sense', and so the more likely they haven't had to consciously consider the details of it in ages - to see what I mean, try giving an off the cuff explanation for why Fall follows Summer, or why there are four seasons.
OTOH, someone such as a logician who has consciously developed their habits of mind and knowledge in the practice of logical reasoning, and so often has occasion to actively consider the subject, would likely be able to identify the particular errors and fallacies responsible for that same common sense conclusion, and the details of which would seem as 'self-evident' to them, as identifying the notes 'C' or 'C#' would've seemed to the musician. And yet someone else of equal intelligence from outside of that community, might not be able to 'make sense' of the statement at all - at first - though once familiarized with the context, they too would be likely to come to the same conclusion.
The operations of the Three Acts of the Mind are common to all people, everywhere and every when, but what contents of the mind are common to people within a community, and so able to be recognized as 'Common Sense', depends upon the knowledge and behavior that is commonly understood in that community, and what people choose to focus on.
Developing what is recognized as a societal baseline of knowledge and expected norms of observation, identification, and judgement - and behavior in accordance with that - is a large part of what education aims at. It's with that baseline in mind, that I invite you to consider the nature of an 'educational system' that willfully fails to provide its students with what should be common sense in their society.
What should also be commonly understood, and can be simply by being attentive to the operations of the mind, is that because our perceptions do reliably inform us about reality, we're able to recognize that we're capable of making mistakes in identifying what it is we perceive ('I thought that round green object was an apple, but it was a tennis ball'), and in judging what actions we should take ('It's for hitting, not biting'), and in reasoning our way to being aware that what we are able to perceive, may not be all that there is to perceive or conceive (such as that while green is a shade we're able to perceive, others such as infrared light, are not within our field of vision, yet remarkably we are able to discover that), and what should be done about it.
An important point to make here, is that our sense perceptions (technically this refers to sensation, percept, and perception, but unless you want another several pages, 'perception' will have to do) are never wrong.
But Van! We do make mistakes, you just cited an example of mistaking an apple for a tennis ball!
Hold on now, read what I said again. Through our senses we perceive that range of reality which they are attuned to (we don't perceive all ranges of color, but we do perceive those within the range our eyes are attuned to, yes, even those who're color blind still perceive the range they're capable of) as it is. What we tend to think of as errors of perception, comes from our making errors in identifying what it is we are perceiving. The perceptions themselves (yes, including the oddities of vision, and delusions and hallucinations are matters of the mind, not of perception), are of reality as it is, and if that were not the case, we could know nothing at all.
It also matters, as I've been noting, what and how you pay attention, do you attend to that particular issue of importance within the context which makes it important, or do you allow your focus to fixate on that one point and forget about the context it has importance within? If you're not getting the distinction, there's the famous 'monkey business' video of people asked to concentrate on a basketball being passed amongst them, that you should take a moment to watch.
But because we are able to perceive the world around us, and because we are able to make mistakes in judgement, it is especially consequential that we be attuned to the nature of what we identify, and what contextually follows from that, which is the nature of causality - cause and effect. Understanding how it is that the nature of matter, and of our own thinking, are integrated and follow a process, a telos, where one thing follows from another, is important to have a grasp of.
In observing the reality we are able to observe of the world around and within us, Aristotle proposed his theory of 'The Four Causes' (gone into in more detail here), which observes the nature of how effects are preceded by causes, which logic and reason follow from (and would not be possible without), and how best to use those insights to abstract ideas from reality and so develop our experiences into knowledge of the world to a far greater degree than sense perception alone could ever have provided us, and which we can gain wisdom from. The Four Causes are, in brief:
While I'll understand if you don't care much for what causes a bronze statue to be produced, by developing the habit of looking deeper into the nature of causation than only the shallowest of surface appearances, you'll be more aware of where you are situated within the world, more informed about what it is you are observing, and less mystified about what's going on around you.
- the Material Cause: “that out of which”, e.g., bronze is what a statue is made out of.
- the Formal Cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.
- the Efficient Cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
- the Final Cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, or that health is the end that's being aimed at by walking, losing weight, medicine, and surgical tools; e.g., or that to enhance a park setting is why a bronze statue is commissioned for a place in it;
In short, an attention to causation, enables you to have a more thorough understanding of what truly does matter to you, in your life, both immediately, and long range.
And you should especially note that modern philosophy dismisses and ignores the Efficient and the Final causes from all consideration (and Thomas Aquinas' addition of the Exemplary Cause, which guides the intellect), and focuses only on the 1st two causes - as they must, because the pretenses of their theories would be unstainable otherwise (teaching college students to hate Israel for 'occupying' land, is infinitely easier to accomplish by pointing only to the first two causes of borders and guards, while ignoring the efficient and final causes of history and justice, and the contradictions those would expose in the rest of what they're taught on the issue).
How this all fits together, and whether or not we're aware of it, is something that we shouldn't breeze past too quickly, so let's pause and take note: We perceive reality and are able to identify it, and in abstracting from our experiences and considerations, we're able to assemble and associate those perceptions and observations into considerable amounts of interrelated and integrated knowledge, that knowledge branches out fractal-like from any one particular aspect of what we experience, and from which, properly understood, is able to provide us with a wisdom which can enhance and guide our experience in life, and the quality of it.
A brief illustration of that follows from beginning with the senses alone, that we perceive from some distance over there, a round, no... wait... a spherical object, green in color, and moving to pick it up, it feels smooth to the touch, solid, has some weight to it - ooh, it smells tart, tastes sweet & juicy. With that data as a starting point, we are able - by choice coupled with action - to methodically reason and investigate the substance of the apple. It's within our power to develop a knowledge of the apple itself and the tree it came from, and of the soil, fertilizer, and climate that it grows best in. Investigating the structure of the skin and meat of the apple can lead us into an understanding of the structure of the cells and chemistry that it's made of when alive, and how its materials decompose back into the soil, afterwards. From all of that we can develop habits of understanding and behavior in regards to what we come to understand to be real and true, that extend from beyond that of growing and eating an apple, to the wisdom to apply the principles which that understanding was developed through, to every other aspect of our lives.
By conforming our thoughts to what is real and true, perceptually and conceptually, we're able to achieve a greater understanding of our world than could ever be grasped by sense perception alone; this is true materially, ranging from the biology of cells to the infrared spectrum, and from the very small level of sub-atomic particles to the beyond vast nature of the structure of distant galaxies. Likewise immaterially as well, in regards to how observing and understanding yourself and those around you will find common ground in the moral principles and virtuous behavior that form into habits of character that benefit ourselves and those in society with us, which aid us in guiding our future thoughts and actions.
The unifying nature of that, is what we saw Bastiat noting in his Economic Harmonies, and it shows in what Reid had earlier observed as well:
"...The same degree of understanding which makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life, makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident, and which he distinctly apprehends.Leaving the malicious distractions of modernity aside, when our concerns are for what is real and true, our perceptions, conceptions, and understanding, do not distance us from, or serve as barriers between, ourselves and the reality we exist within. Rather, through abstracting from what we are able to perceive to be real and true, we develop concepts which both reflect reality, and enable us to unite our thoughts and perceptions with our experiences, to better understand the lives we're living and the world we're living within, than perceptions alone could ever provide.
All knowledge, and all science, must be built upon principles that are self-evident; and of such principles every man who has common sense is a competent judge, when he conceives them distinctly. Hence it is, that disputes very often terminate in an appeal to common sense.
While the parties agree in the first principles on which their arguments are grounded, there is room for reasoning; but when one denies what to the other appears too evident to need or to admit of proof, reasoning seems to be at an end; an appeal is made to common sense, and each party is left to enjoy his own opinion..."
IOW, the very practical fruits of attending to metaphysics, causality, and ethics, is an improved ability to engage in an organized pursuit of happiness, which is the most reliable method for achieving some level of success in living lives worth living, and does so in a way that you can be thankful for whatever prosperity you do achieve, which is an approach that epitomizes the culture of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West.
Any claims and assertions against that will, and are possibly even intended to, reduce the scope and quality of your life, and your ability to live it well.
For those who doubt the consequences of lacking that, there's sadly no shortage of object lessons to be learned from 'stars' who've tragically ended their lives by their own hand or habits, after having achieved the trappings of 'success' without having first learned what a successful life is, and how to support and sustain it.
Mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you disappear from your life
As David Hume demonstrated by his inability to identify a 'self' when he looked into his own mind, mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you disappear from your own life. Those engaged in that mystification, 'gnowingly' or not, are in opposition to the understanding that we can know reality as it is, which is the idea promoted by the nominalists, rationalists, skeptics/empiricists, and idealists, whose ideas about 'ideas' take varying approaches to having you believe that thinking not only doesn't make reality clearer to us, but misleads and separates us from it, trapping us within our minds in a 'copy world, which distances our understanding from what is actually real and true.
What may come as a shock to fans of sci-fi like the Matrix, is that the real technology trap has nothing to do with machines & computers, it's Ideas and their systematic misuse which are the means of trapping you within an ideology, which excludes you from your own life and ability to live it well.
Beware the 'innocent' progress from Error, to Pretense/Pretext, to Malicious lie
A prime example of such an ideological technology trap, is the bizarre twist that modernity has taken in misconstruing Aristotle's signet ring & wax analogy, and aided by our ignorance of the Three Acts of the Mind, the idea of being born with a 'blank slate', Tabula Rasa, has come to be viewed as having less to do with how our senses give us access to reality and store that in memory, than with alleging that our minds only have access to those impressions that the 'signet ring' of reality has 'somehow' impressed into that wax they equate our minds with, and that it somehow does so without our involvement. What that means is that we are unable to have contact with reality ourselves, as by this theory we can only have a muddled awareness of the impressions that've somehow been left behind in the wax, and which we can only 'feel' from the interior of the wax, and whose impressions we follow around like bread crumbs in an attempt to figure out what has happened 'out there', even though the theory means that we can't have any 'real' effect upon our senses determined lives anyway.
Beware the switcherroo involved in the term 'Empiricism'.
There exists the legitimate scientific sense of Empirical facts, as sound observations, methodically noted and measured, and not accepting as fact what cannot be substantiated. That's all well and good and admirable.
But there is another philosophical sense of 'Empirical', that entails rejecting the human means of cognition, by abstractions and conceptualization, and does so under a false front of 'scientism!' and virtue signalling, as it sniffs at and dismisses concepts and reasoning in favor of 'hard facts', facts which are invariably assembled into unfounded positions such as 'trust the science!'. I recommend against doing so.
However bizarre that might seem, that is what the 'copy theory' of ideas has come to mean, and it is modernity's claim that our own experiences, ideas, and memories, 'aksually' separate us from reality, and equally bizarre is the fact that a number of well respected and admirable people have helped in establishing it.
There exists the legitimate scientific sense of Empirical facts, as sound observations, methodically noted and measured, and not accepting as fact what cannot be substantiated. That's all well and good and admirable.
But there is another philosophical sense of 'Empirical', that entails rejecting the human means of cognition, by abstractions and conceptualization, and does so under a false front of 'scientism!' and virtue signalling, as it sniffs at and dismisses concepts and reasoning in favor of 'hard facts', facts which are invariably assembled into unfounded positions such as 'trust the science!'. I recommend against doing so.
John Locke for instance, in the act of batting away the rationalism of Descartes, nevertheless advanced a materialistic theory of ideas in his thoughts on education and morals, the error of which has been intensified with every iteration of thinkers who've added to it, particularly in the development (and misuse of) 'Empirical Thinking', which is:
relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theoryThomas Reid identified the root error that Locke had made,
"...[536] First, Because, when he purposely defines the word idea, in the introduction to the Essay, he says it is whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, or whatever the mind can be employed about in thinking. Here there is no room left for objects of the mind that are not ideas...."
According to Hume, the only things we can have the confidence to trust and talk about, is empirical evidence taken directly from experience ('taken' how?). But he continues (almost as if he has no regard for causality) if we then reason from those same experiences, we cannot understand there to be any 'real' causal connection between them, other than their being 'contiguous in time'. According to Hume, our believing that we can understand how one experience follows from another - causality - is nothing more than 'a priori' ideas which we deceive ourselves with.
And what are these 'a priori' ideas which Hume derides? Webster's defines 'a priori' as:
"relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions", and gives the example that:
"So, for example, "Every apple is a fruit" is an a priori statement, since it shows simple logical reasoning and isn't a statement of fact about a specific case; "apples are sweet" is a posteriori, as it expresses something the speaker knows from experience."The fact that these ideas assume that neither 'apple' nor 'fruit' are considered to have resulted from 'logical reasoning' connected to experience, is something you should take a moment to consider the meaning of, and what such a statement tells you about the thinking that thinks that is 'true'. The IEP, which entirely buys into Hume and modernity's usage of the terms, tells us:
"...A given proposition is knowable a priori if it can be known independent of any experience other than the experience of learning the language in which the proposition is expressed, whereas a proposition that is knowable a posteriori is known on the basis of experience....", meaning that 'a priori' ideas are the waxen impressions that we've formed within the interior of our minds, and we have done so without any real connection to reality. Note: What they are saying and the exceedingly dangerous path they are inviting you to travel down (which is what Reid & Beattie warned against), and beware: it takes only a few steps to abandon the path and ground of Common Sense, and become sucked into the Idealist's Matrix.
According to Hume, the 'reality' is that because we've formed these ideas within our minds, separate from reality, then:
"... If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything. The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits...."
"...to convince us of this proposition, that where there is no property, there can be no injustice, it is only necessary to define the terms, and explain injustice to be a violation of property. This proposition is, indeed, nothing but a more imperfect definition....", and so Hume claims that conceptual terms such as property, justice, violation, are totally unlike reliable empirical facts and math, which, in his mind (and it's worth noting that in his mind, he chose to target the foundations of Justice), requires reasoning directly from experience in order to very reliably discover,
"...That the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides....", and,
"...That the cube root of 64 is equal to the half of 10, is a false proposition, and can never be distinctly conceived. But that Caesar, or the angel Gabriel, or any being never existed, may be a false proposition, but still is perfectly conceivable, and implies no contradiction...."Well. What can common sense tell us about this today?
Quite a lot, actually, as Thomas Reid & Beattie's arguments are every bit as applicable and effective today, as they were when they first made them, and it should be emphasized that it was their arguments and understanding that carried the day over Hume's, and so deeply informed the understanding of our Founders' era.
The only thing keeping their common sense from being understood by us today, is the attention that modernity has diverted away from their arguments. It's worth noting that Hume would've been relegated to an odd philosophical footnote in history, if not for the pernicious rise of German Idealism which Hume woke from its 'dogmatic slumber' (via Kant), and the aid that was given to that by 'Classical Liberals' such as J.S. Mill.
I strongly recommend reading what Thomas Reid had to say, especially as what he says is exceedingly clear, and said with a lively humor, which exposes the folly of Hume's assertions, and makes plain the obvious truth that reality is directly known and knowable to us.
That being said, there are still a few additional points I'd like to add in regards to the key issue that Hume & those following him, rest their cases upon, which is 'a priori', and his putting 'empirical thinking' up on a pedestal to portray it and themselves as being 'strictly logical', proclaiming deductive logic to be the gold standard while turning his nose up at abstractions and inferences, either ignores or evades that fact that all deduction is derived from, and requires, prior inference!
If someone says inductive logic is inference, is not dependable, they're confessing that they don't really know what they 'no!'. All deductive concepts, resulted from what previously had been inferred from something else, which was found to be sound enough to take as self-evident - all deduction implies those instances which that concept was inferred from.
Hume can only declare the primacy of his 'empirical thinking' by evading the fact that logic operates by means of general abstractions, being compared to less abstract particulars, and that neither logic nor science could operate at all, if we 'dispensed with' inferences, abstractions, and systems that adhere to them.
All of that equally escapes his attention when he says:
"...That the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides....", and,
"...That the cube root of 64 is equal to the half of 10, is a false proposition, and can never be distinctly conceived...."I wish I could ask him:
"Tell me David, where in experience do you find this '64' of which you speak?", because the fact is that neither Sixty, nor six, nor four, are found anywhere in nature. '64' exists only in the mind of man, and does so only in one that has successfully abstracted from quantities of anything, to arrive at the concept of number, and from which he's then able to apply those numerical concepts to everything that can be quantified (and to discern those qualities that aren't quantifiable).
How could anyone 'do math' uncontaminated by 'a priori' concepts? And if it's so central to 'empirical thinking', how & why does counting, mathematics, not to mention geometry, have to be so studiously learned? How does knowing that '2 + 2 = 4' become Common Sense?! And how to do any of that without the use of either syllogistic reasoning, or any of the other conceptual abstractions involved in either defining or calculating a hypothenuse, or to know and prove their calculations to be correct?
Without those abstractions, neither Hume nor anyone else could acquire the ability to count from 0 (!) to 64, nor to sum up the internal angles of a triangle, without first respecting and applying the exceedingly abstract concepts and systems of numbering, counting, and addition.
What Hume and modernity framed as a consequence of his ideas, turns a blind eye to is the understanding that 'causality' isn't something we simply string together from a sequence of events, Causality is the consequence of identity in action, and interaction with other identities within a given context - materially and immaterially - and that Logic would not and could not exist without it, and without which no 'empirical' observations or calculations could be made at all.
To be a sceptic, to be an empirical thinker (as Hume intends it), to be a person that can sincerely proclaim that
"...The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits...", is to be as far from being a realist as can be imagined. It's not at all surprising to note that the words that he conveniently makes use of, words like "sciences", "enquiries", "men", "contradiction", "existence", "intelligible", "true", "confused", not to mention "existed" and "identity", and so on, are metaphysical conceptions which legitimate Science, not to mention Mathematics, depend upon and could neither exist nor be performed without!
To say even so much as '64', is to make every bit as much use of 'a priori' concepts, as what Hume meant to slight with 'Caesar' or 'or any being never existed', and doing so is evidence of a dis-integrated mind, which is the sadly un-surprising result of a mind that is bereft of the unifying benefits of metaphysics. The conceptual blindness that is a consequence of ignoring, evading, denying, some (and always more) of what is real and true, truly dis-integrates you from the world, and from your own self, as it wipes out the very thing that makes Common Sense possible - our ability to apprehend, to make a judgment, and to reason from that reality.
The lack of connection that such a person's ideas have to what is real and true, leaves them as the prey of, and into themselves becoming, fabulists, conceptual embezzlers, and intellectual amnesiacs, as it involves their thinking in a level of distance from reality that's hardly even up to the level of being called dishonest, because there is so little reality left in their comprehension to be dishonest about. For Hume to have equated the validity of concepts that have been inferred 'a priori', with words arranged to speak of falling pebbles extinguishing the sun, was a demonstration of his having already fallen into a fantasy world of Ideas, where effects are so easily disassociated from their causes, that he'd left himself trapped within an idea of a world without identity, within a mind so stripped of meaning, value, or purpose, that he was unable even to identify that as being 'bad'.
As Josef Pieper noted in his amazing, and amazingly brief essay, 'Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power':
"...Can a lie be taken as communication. It means specifically to withhold the other's share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality. And so: corruption of the relationship to reality, and corruption of communication - these evidently are the two possible forms in which the corruption of the word manifests itself..."
Thomas Reid"... contended that there was a fundamentally incorrect hypothesis at the heart of the treatise which he could neight accept nor verify, a hypothesis which he referred to as the 'ideal system' or the 'theory of ideas,' which taught that every object in our knowledge is only an idea in our mind This hypothesis is also called the 'copy theory,' the idea that the only relation between the external world and our mental ideas of that world is that the latter are (hopefully) a copy of the former..."
The elephant in the room that Hume is evading, is that his claim that 'non-empirical' words imply "... no contradiction...", that is only the case for the person who has failed to integrate their own thinking, which is less a comment upon reality and our ability to know it, than a confession of having given so little meaningful thought to the nature of identity, experience, and causality, that he failed to ensure that the concepts he 'understands', are connected to, and derived from, what is real and true.
Whether that came as a consequence of his having slipped and fallen into Descartes' notion of an artificial doubt (Descartes' rationalism is distraction, his artificial doubt is the key) as being a 'something' of the mind, or just a lazy and self-flattering cynicism, the consequence of failing to be concerned with the danger inherent in accepting contradictions, is abandoning the basis of common sense. Such a foundation as that is wholly incapable of supporting or adhering to reality, or a system of ethics that reflects it, or of utilizing logic as anything other than a tool for word games, which leaves their own words having, and able to have, no meaning, even to himself and serves only to support schemes for peddling pure sophistry of the kind that Aristotle debunked 2,000 years earlier.
Hume sadly demonstrates the truth of that in his own statements. When reading his thoughts and those who think like him, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that in Hume's ideal of empirical thinking (not the good kind) - you don't really think, you don't choose (free will, in his opinion, being only a sensory illusion). In Hume's idea of Empiricism, there was, 'empirically speaking', no 'You' in you:
"When I introspect, I see no 'me' within", and that a person was:
"... nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity...", and that without those perceptions, there is no 'you':
"...When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist..."Hume was a phantom in his own mind, , unaware of the fact that the 'Self' he sought was that which was doing the seeking. He took the position that a human being is nothing more than "... a bundle or collection of different perceptions...”, and from that position he admonishes us that all a 'realist' can do, is to recite those isolated 'facts' that he's observed to happen sequentially, and that we should refrain from fabricating any additional 'ideas' - especially moral ones - upon them:
"...It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another34. Such is the foundation of moral reasoning, which forms the greater part of human knowledge, and is the source of all human action and behaviour....", and so advises us to dismiss them as mere fictions:
"...If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.", which leaves man bereft of an understanding of reality, of causality, of logic, of ethics, and of science as well.
In Hume's two-dimensional world of 'facts', we're incapable of coming into 'the fullness of understanding', and can neither comprehend nor justify a difference between a criminal shooting a person to rob them, and a policeman shooting a criminal to prevent him from murdering his intended victim - both deaths are but empirical 'facts', and as their causes are illusory, so must be the pretense that there should be consequences for those actions.
To put the matter more provocatively, by Hume's way of thinking, today's woketivists epitomize his ideal of 'empirical thinking', since, as per David Hume, they've seized upon all abstractions and 'a priori' concepts that enable us to identity and understand what a woman 'really is'. Having seen to it that all such abstractions have all been "committed to the flames", 'their truth' is now unmitigated by 'abstractions' of understanding and delusions of causation, it is the simplest and most 'logical' of things for them to insist that mutilating a person's genitalia and breasts to alter the shallowest of outward appearances of experience, does in 'fact' empirically make a 'man' into a 'woman', and a 'woman' into a 'man', and how could any empirical thinker deny that?!
The people whose minds have been taken by modern thinking don't believe that they're pretending when they say that a man can be a woman. The 'Woke Virus' has so stripped their minds of the ability to engage in common sense realism, that they actually believe that surgically altering appearances, or even donning costumes, can and does transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man. Their seemingly over-the-top reactions to anyone who denies that 'fact' to them, is their frantic and hysterical response to an understanding that legitimately threatens to obliterate their entire worldview and concept of 'self', and so they treat your disbelief as an all-out assault upon what remains of their soul.
That is the endpoint of the supposed 'reasonableness' of Hume's empirical skepticism, and his attacks upon Causality, and it has enabled such perilous cracks to be inserted into the foundations of the house of The West, as to have even stripped it of its roof (the Arts & Humanities), which has left the western world unable to find shelter from the anti-western storms of modernity.
That erosion of the West that Hume's empirical skepticism made to seem clever and 'sciency', was quickly advanced upon by Immanuel Kant, who transformed Hume's radical skepticism into the full blown idealism that has made the Western World so structurally unsound over the course of the last two centuries. Kant, who claimed that Hume had woken him from his 'dogmatic slumbers', was less interested in refuting Hume, than in doubling down on his claims and extended them with his own assertion that aksually our sensory media don't give us impressions of reality, instead they create our reality,
"...It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition...", which we're only then able to experience by being systemically encased within our own subjective copies of it.
Critique of Pure Reason, translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1901), 41.
According to Kant, the experience of thinking prevents us from having any real experience of 'the thing itself' of reality.
It's that Kantian system that forms the basis of our modern practice of 'epistemology', and it's that process of 'thinking' that has progressively insinuated itself into every aspect of our lives - philosophy, religion, art, history, education, law, and 'economics' - which has been progressively transforming what had been the solid foundational rock that the House of The West was built upon, into only so much sand.
The radically worse nature of Kant's theory of morality, which is based upon explicitly non-contextual nature of his 'categorical imperative' (which naturally begins not with reality, but from your preferences severed from it), is such that actually claims that it would be immoral to lie to the murderer at your door who's come to kill your daughter, by telling him she's not at home. Kant was called out on that implication of his 'Categorical Imperative', and Kant held to it:
"...if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may... ", emphasizing that, even to a would-be murderer, you 'should' be
"To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred unconditional command of reason, and not to be limited by any expediency"That's what Kant's ideal of 'morality' looks like in practice, and indeed once you dispense with reality, causality, and a respect for what we can understand to be real and true, your own thoughts become a threat to your life and happiness.
In sum, where in traditional philosophy our minds and our knowledge are the benefits of being human, to the modern idealist, our lives, minds, knowledge, and abilities, are the curse of being human which they want to rid our world of - and that is who the proverbial 'They' are.
It's important to be aware of what they want you to buy into, and to give some active thought to noticing and identifying the evidence of it in what's happening around you, because there are those amongst us who are actively attempting to interfere with and even prevent you from being aware of that. It is important to realize that when given an idea, the mind will fill in the blanks with your expectations, unless you pay attention to how reasonable those assumption are or are not. It's important to be aware of all of this because your lack of clarity enables them to peddle banalities such as 'your truth is not my truth', and considerably more involved versions of that (such as monetary theory, 'price inflation', and income distribution curves), to reshape 'your reality' as they see fit.
Which they can only get away with doing, so long as you're unaware that you can and should know what is real and true.
The good news of course is that Reality hasn't gone anywhere, and neither has your ability to experience and perceive and verify it, the only thing that's been altered is where our attention is habitually directed to, and how & why it has been misdirected, and to break that spell we only need to open our eyes up to the sleight of mind being performed upon us, and be willing to engage with it. As Aristotle said at the opening of his Metaphysics, 'All men by nature desire to know', and to that end our senses provide us with the ability to perceive reality, and it is our mind, memory, judgement, gives us the ability to reason our way to understanding far more about the nature of what we're perceiving, than perception alone ever could.
The nature of human nature is that the three acts of the mind occur naturally, and they do so without separating us from, or encasing us within, a lesser matrix knockoff of the world we live within. Believing otherwise is a philosophical spell which skepticism and idealism teach us to cast upon ourselves. Stop doing that. Stop reinforcing that.
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| ...from Stephen Coughlin's Unconstrained Analytics |
The reality is that a common good must be common to all.
So in this metaphysical whirlwind of a tour of how a respect for what is real and true can lead to well ordered and prudent thinking, we've also glimpsed how easily it can be undone. Those who do manage a sound philosophical framework, are better equipped to imagine living in a civil society, and begin conceiving of what would be required for such a society to sustain and maintain itself across time, without it at the same time becoming a powerful threat to them.
Man is a political animal. We naturally want to live in society with others, while at the same time we also want reasonable boundaries of separation between us and them; those who do care about what's real and true and about each other as well, are a people whose thoughts will bring them around to the idea of Individual Rights.
By focusing on the essentials, we can thumbnail how the reality of what is real and true, reveals and defines the concept of Individual Rights. Because it's rooted in the nature of being human (an expanded version of this here, and here), growing out of those actions which the reality of living as a human being requires a person to choose to perform. We must be able to engage in:
, no one could be expected to live a fully human life without the ability to take such actions.
- thought,
- speech,
- association,
- action,
- the developing of convictions and abilities needed to identify what you value,
- the need to defend what you value against those adverse conditions and predators that may arise
That is not only an undeniable truth, it's one that is true here, there, and everywhere there are human beings, and everywhen across time, and it is so because they are human beings first. It's true in the same way, for everyone, regardless of their environment or circumstances.
IOW: The need to take these actions is a central fact of Human Nature, that is expressed through an uncorrupted Common Sense.
What does vary by place and circumstance, is how well people recognize and respect these realities, , and whether we differentiate a sound we all hear as being only noise, or have developed the ability to identify that sound as C or C# Minor, both are done so with respect to what is real and true for all. Yet however that might be reflected in a society, the fact remains that human nature requires people to be able to take those actions that the nature of being human demands of them. To deny and/or deprive someone of the ability to do so, is at the very least, immoral, and it will foolishly deprive them of the 'Wealth of Nations'.
Shorter version: Individual Rights are what results from recognizing the logical consequences of creatures employing their Free Will in a rational respect for reality and the value of each person which was the gift of Judeo-Christian religion, truth and understanding will be recognized as the most vital tools of survival.
As that becomes understood, the reciprocal nature of individual rights becomes self-evident, and for that to be followed, we must apply it as a principle:
Individual Rights must be recognized and respected for every member of a society, or else no one can have a reasonable expectation of enjoying them.Far from being the random whims of popular fancies or the privileges of a powerful few, each person has a responsibility to recognize that their own individual rights depend upon their respecting the same of everyone else in their society. Valuing the ability to live your own life, requires abiding by the principle of not treading upon another in exercising their rights, and also not advocating for or tolerating those of your fellows - friends or not - doing so to others you don't like. Unless those who constitute your community are committed to respecting and upholding the principle of individual rights for every individual in that community, then everyone will soon find themselves back to being only as free as their own muscles 'tooth & claw' can manage by force to keep the predators - animals or human - at bay - which is the norm that those who seek power, truly crave - across time.
That understanding is and must be a common understanding and highest value in a society - an actual Common Good - if that society is expected to be of value to its people.
To repudiate human nature, turns your own nature against yourself and humanity.
To effectively practice that principle requires two other features, because simply understanding that cannot provide the means of sustaining that sentiment in the face of the disagreements - honest and otherwise - that are sure to arise amongst people. Communities first need to establish a reasonable system for justly resolving the disputes and deliberate violations of those rights that may arise between individuals. Doing so requires a clear set of rules of engagement between people, that will be recognized and enforced by the people as a whole, and that is the basis of a Rule of Law, within a system for formulating and implementing them, which is the role of a Judicial System.
To go beyond an authoritarian sense of 'maintaining order', that system needs to have a deserved reputation for ensuring that all parties to a dispute will have the opportunity to make their best case, and have it honestly considered, according to written rules that are clear, reasonable, and applied equally to all without prejudice or preference, so that each party can agree that a judgement was fairly made, even when it goes against them.
While living in society naturally provides us with neighbors, it is only from orderly thinking that is centered around a respect for what is real and true, that the idea that 'good walls build good neighbors' will emerge, which is what the idea of the Rule of Law is meant to embody. The Law enables society's individuals to unite into one body politic, while upholding and defending the Individual Rights of all its members, provides the separation which preserves them as Individuals within that society, and as with 'Good walls make good neighbors', a healthy sense of individualism simultaneously recognizes the separation that individual rights affords them, and at the same time embraces the community which makes that possible.
It should be equally self-evident that for such a system to be practical, the people of the community must have the manners, morals, understanding, respect and reverence for what is real and true, that is necessary for sustaining it, which is what's behind John Adams comment that:
“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
The 'lone wolf' image of liberty, is not only hogwash, it is a dialectical attack upon both Individuality and Liberty as such.
The third item required (in addition to law and morality), is one additional component - or rather recognizing its presence in the first two - that's needed in order to tie those abstractions of morality and law into the reality of day-to-day life, and that's the concept of Property, as understood in James Madison's brief essay on it.
The ability to respect another person's property - what they have property in - is what results from the people of a moral and lawful society recognizing and upholding the individual rights of its people. That tripartite awareness strengthens the bonds of trust between them, both protecting and encouraging their ability to make individual decisions within society, which enables them to enjoy living lives worth living.
Those are the blessing of liberty, and that is what enables happiness to become a normal aspiration in society, and a sound respect for law, morality, and property, are indispensable to that.
Liberty is a result of all of its working parts. That is the understanding that formed the bedrock of anglo-American law, which Lord Coke had expressed as :
"Everyman's home is his castle!", it's what enables it to have meaning, and it does so because the manners and morals of the people and their respect for the inseparability of individual rights/property rights, enables their laws to form the walls & battlements of each person's castle - but those battlements can only be as sound and sturdy as their understanding of the principles they rest upon.
It's at that level that those actions necessary for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are understood to be inalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence, and why our Bill of Rights forbid our government from making any laws - no matter their intent to aid or protect - that would infringe upon our individual ability to take those actions or to be secure in the property and relations that are the fruits of them (see the bullet points above... or James Madison's veto message).
For that reason I do not agree with a recently popular notion, especially popular amongst libertarians, that our Declaration of Independence would have been improved if Thomas Jefferson had used the phrase 'life, liberty, and property', instead of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. Indeed, if our society, or any other, attempted to begin with (or revert us back to) the denuded notion of 'property' as an empirical factoid denoting physical possession alone (as utilitarians and 'classical liberals' like J.S. Mill would have it), rather than its being that crucial point which integrates the intersection of thought, action, and consequence, without which that society would be unlikely to lead to anything more than a crude and glittery form of barbarism which might blaze brightly, and briefly, but would surely burn itself out soon enough.
Liberty is not simply 'Individualism' (which in its narrow sense views human nature as being just as malleable as collectivism does, but on a smaller scale), and it's damn sure not 'Collectivism', it is what results from recognizing how individuals are able to live together in liberty, as a society which they all share in. Healthy individualism, simultaneously involves recognizing how people being able to act on their judgement, contributes to their community ('The Wealth of Nations'), and recognizes how the individual depends upon the community protecting their ability to do so - just as 'good walls make good neighbors', walls and neighbors give meaning and definition to each other - and in that sense, Liberty, is what results from a philosophical, societal, and religious union, of the proper relationship between individual and community - the one in the many.
The thoughtless savage - whether a Rousseauian savage, or J.S. Mill's savage 'individualist' - due to the paucity of their own conceptual development, never has and never will be able to engage in liberty, for as Edmund Burke said, 'their passions form their fetters'. They can know nothing more than the sparsest freedom of the moment, a moment that's always in peril, for if like Hume, they too cast their abstractions into the fire, then fire and strife becomes their sole destination.
Nothing can be said to be for the 'common good' or for the 'Greater Good', which begins by undermining, denying, ignoring or eliminating, the fundamental principles which make it possible for what is good, to become the common baseline which that society exists to preserve.
From that realization, should come a redoubled respect for what is real and true, and recognizing how central Truth must be to the enjoyment of liberty, comes additional reverence for it, which puts down sturdy roots for morality and conforming 'the pursuit of happiness' to them. There should also come a redoubled anger towards those who'd push the passive aggressive assault upon what is real and true that is relativism - 'your truth isn't my truth' - you should recognize the violent attack upon all you hold dear, which such sentiments as that undoubtedly are.
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| ...notations from The Palmer Worm |
"Letgo of that Republic!' Gimme that...!"
It wasn't long after Ben Franklin said that the Constitutional Convention had delivered:
"A Republic, madam, if you can keep it!", that some people began working to ensure that we would not be able to keep our republic, or the state of mind which makes one possible. That absence of mind is what the pro-regressive haters of wisdom (Misosophers) have been seeking after, and the fields of Education and Economics are what they saw as being the most effective avenues for loosening our grasp upon it, so as to separate us from what is real and true.
That alternative understanding is what John Dewey was describing and arguing for throughout his "Liberalism and Social Action" (and most everything else he wrote and 'taught'):
" Because the liberalism of the economists and the Benthamites was adapted to contemporary conditions in Great Britain, the influence of the liberalism of the school of Locke waned. By 1820 it was practically extinct. Its influence lasted much longer in the United States. ", and he goes on to describe how through the efforts of Jeremy Bentham (Utilitarianism), J.S. Mill (Classical Liberalism), Comte (Positivism/Social Science), that slowly, progressively, changed:
"...Gradually a change came over the spirit and meaning of liberalism. It came surely, if gradually, to be disassociated from the laissez faire creed and to be associated with the use of governmental action for aid to those at economic disadvantage and for alleviation of their conditions. ...", and,
" Organized unity of action attended by consensus of beliefs will come about in the degree in which social control of economic forces is made the goal of liberal action. The greatest educational power, the greatest force in shaping the dispositions and attitudes of individuals, is the social medium in which they live. The medium that now lies closest to us is that of unified action for the inclusive end of a socialized economy."[emphasis mine], so that:
"The notion that organized social control of economic forces lies outside the historic path of liberalism shows that liberalism is still impeded by remnants of its earlier laissez faire phase, with its opposition of society and the individual. The thing which now dampens liberal ardor and paralyzes its efforts is the conception that liberty and development of individuality as ends exclude the use of organized social effort as means. Earlier liberalism regarded the separate and competing economic action of individuals as the means to social well-being as the end. We must reverse the perspective and see that socialized economy is the means of free individual development as the end."What we who hope to keep our Republic need to understand, is that what lurks behind phrases such as: "... that socialized economy is the means...", are the ideas of Hume & Kant, which deliberately distance us from reality, through our own thoughts, thoughts which requires that any meaningful understanding of Individual Rights, must be evaded and denied at all costs, in order for it to be possible to urge that 'some' must be deprived of what is rightfully theirs. The results and purposes of such thoughts, is nothing less than the means of weakening the good of all.
We need to understand that Liberalism (Liberty in practice) became the 'LINO' (Liberal in name only) of the modern Left, by dialectically paralyzing itself through its equivocating use of the 'greater good' in place of what is Good, that turned The Law into a means of depriving some of what is rightfully theirs as a sacrifice to the benefit of a partial 'all', which is in direct contradiction to the American understanding of individual rights, and as contradictions cannot exist, such unprincipled actions ensure only that the more consistently brutal will win out.
Similarly for the notion of 'individualism' when portrayed as a 'lone wolf' mindset (as advanced by both J.S. Mill and John Dewey), which is no more valid an alternative to, or in truth much different from, that of 'collectivism'. A coherent society can only be formed by multiple individuals consciously acting in concert with others, on the strength of what they've agreed to establish as the shared concepts, understanding, and recognition of what is real and true. That shared understanding is what makes it possible for them to form a system together, and is what makes living together in liberty possible, for all in that society.
It is important to recognize that a 'diversity' of antithetical principles, is far from being 'our strength', and is much closer to being a recipe for desolation and destruction. Likewise, society must recognize that tolerance should only be extended to those whose actions are tolerable - when those whose Common Sense has been so corrupted as to have made their behavior unfit to live in accordance with even a minimum of such expectations, they cannot and must not be tolerated. An is of behavior, must be recognized as leading to a justifiable ought.
At the risk of belaboring the point, Liberty by its very nature, cannot be whole or complete, until those common societal defenses are formed and maintained as the basis of accepted norms for its judicial system, which is entrusted to render justice in a manner that becomes durable across time, with reliable systems and rules for preserving and defending its people's lives, property, and rights, and resolving whatever disputes might arise over them, within laws that a civil society can prosper within. The effectiveness of those actions is limited by how well or poorly We The People observe and abide by what is real and true, while at the same time so long as they don't forcibly interfere in another's rightful choice or peace of mind, they remain at liberty to choose it.
No function can be legitimate - no matter what 'benefit' it promises - if it originates in the idea of taking actions that violate that liberty which is common to all - there can be no 'good' that can be served by that (or a 'right' to promote it without consequences).
King of what goes unseen, is the question of how can those who know best, know best if they don't even know what you know about what's of value to you?! How do T.U.R.D.'s know better than you, your reasons for setting a price for your labor or product, or to decline what another is offering?
And if they don't know your reasons, can they know any better the individual reasonings of those making up entire industries?
Can the words 'being certain' have any meaningful part in such goals, when 'certainty' is used to close off questions? And by what authority do they silence your right to set that price?
"Van? What do you mean by 'Silencing you'? Setting limits on 'fair wages & pricing' is not an issue of free speech!"Oh really? When I say "It's not worth it to me to do X for that much", is that not expressing my judgement in words of what I've judged the value of an item presently is within the context of my life and interests? What is meaningfully changed by expressing that in an abbreviated form with a $ attached to it, so as to communicate the value it might have to you?
Your decision to set a price, is not only your statement of what in your judgment is a fitting value for a product or service, it's also an invitation to others to join in a discussion with you in order to come to an agreement over it. That mutual freedom of thought and action - liberty - is cancelled when you are both forbidden from doing so (see everything from 'minimum wage laws', to limits on stock trades).
How is forbidding you to give and defend your legitimate judgement, not silencing you? In forcing you to conform to the judgement of another - a bureaucrat or regulator no less - can be nothing but the deepest afront to Franklin's "This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together;"?!
The 'economic thinking' that blithely advocates for the social and governmental power to nudge, impose, force, every individual's actions to comply with what 'experts' have decided from the ignorance of a distance that's blind to what you can see firsthand, is of value, and insist instead that you should do [... Should...?] as they say, in regards to what is of concern to you in your life, is a thoroughly revisionist conception (and corruption) of the 'common good'/'greater good'. I identify that as being Pro-Regressive, as it necessarily entails a process of eliminating the unity of virtue, morality, ethics, and recognition and respect for reality, individual rights, and property, from consideration, so as to reduce matters to a transaction of quantities of usefulness as assessed by those TURDS in power.
To that, and to all other such acts of barbarity, I'm personally a hard 'Hell No!' on. And of course what makes that important, and why it's deliberately left unseen by 'economic thinkers', cannot be explained under the label of 'Economics'.
Summing up by returning to the Questions that should precede Hazlitt's 'Economics in One Lesson'
The reason for this *diversion* into abstractions of metaphysics, causality, and ethics, was to highlight the importance of keeping the reality in mind which we've been 'educated' to ignore, which we can do by simply making a routine of asking questions like:
, and by doing so we keep what is real and true in mind, and the pretense that reality is irrelevant, is itself made to disappear.
- Is this rooted in what I know to be real and true? - metaphysics
- What consequences are most likely to follow from this? - causality/logic
- Are those consequences justifiable? - ethics
Those who aren't in the habit of conforming their thinking to what is real and true, will have no foundation for opposing the 'economic thinking' which views our judicial system as nothing more than a 'complex' Rule of Rules, and who believe that so long as TURDs (The Umpires of Reasonable Discourse) have the skills to manage its technicalities, there's no 'reason' why they shouldn't manipulate it (us) to do whatever it is they want to get done.
Those who do have that foundation, OTOH, are going to have a visceral response to those 'economic actions' that are proposed to manipulate 'the economy' (society), which are incompatible with the judicial standards and principles that our system was founded upon, and each proposal will, and should be, met with a response:
It is only by keeping questions of metaphysics, causality/logic, ethics, present in our mind, that we are able to be exceedingly aware of the consequential nature of the Rule of Law, and so have the presence of mind to insist that its principles that were derived from Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Coke, will be considered as being of primary, rather than of secondary importance, in all such matters.
- A Proposal: "...Imo rentiers have to be eliminated through policy so that productive investment, circulation and stability is promoted..."
A Response: Does targeting someone based upon their status, rather than their actions, solve an actual problem, or is it fabricating an Ideal to disrupt an existing standard?- A Proposal: "... Just laws" depend upon consideration of the public welfare and not simply of individual rights in discerning ..."
A Response: That is reframing the law by reversing its relation to the individual rights of the citizenry, to target the rights of those of them who are 'rentiers', which is assaulting the rights which they all hold in common, and so will degrade the welfare of all.- A Proposal: "...competing rights claims require Law that has the Common Good as an end..."
A Response: Reducing 'law' and 'rights' to meaningless labels so as to mask positions that excuse taking actions for the 'common good!', puts an end to a 'common good' and solidifies the power of those already in power, and it's all downhill for the rest of us from there.
Those are the questions and concerns that must be satisfied before moving on to considering the longterm results and primary and secondary consequences of any proposed 'economic action', which was what the focus of Henry Hazlitt's 'Economics in One Lesson' was, and if we fail to keep that order, we will have already surrendered to utility, and the fall into 'economic thinking' that must follow.
If the proposed action survives those tests, then it's a question of whether government - the force of law - should be engaged in that action - because it can, doesn't mean that it should.
Setting weights & measures, yes, that's both necessary and appropriate.
We need a lot less thought about what 'good' government can do for us all, and a lot more consideration of what mayhem government can wreak in our lives in the name of the 'common good'. A Thomas Jefferson said:
"...in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution..."It is up to us to keep that We The People's power, bound down by the fewest possible laws, and to see to it that they are written with the greatest possible clarity, and that too requires an attention to metaphysics, causality/logic, and ethics.
These are not questions that should be considered lightly, and the fact that they are rarely considered at all, is a direct result of how extensively 'economic thinking' has permeated our society, and why it must be expunged.
"But Van! Are you seriously rejecting all of the modern science of Economics?! Why not clamp down on what's 'bad' and keep what's 'good'?"I'll answer that with an illustration - picture this if you will:
You find yourself confined within a casino, and you've come to realize that every game is being rigged by the house.Did you pick A or B?
You discover that some players have figured out how to manipulate the House's manipulations to their own benefit, even though it adds additional burdens to the other customers who're either unaware that they're being conned by the House, or unable to do anything about it.
Would you:
- align yourself with the corrupt House (say hello to The Fed)?
- align yourself with those scheming to take advantage of the House's corruption (say hello to George Soros)?
Did you notice that the appearance of there being only two options, pushes the reality that there are other choices and questions, out of mind? That's called an Affordance Trap, and it's best not to fall for it.
While I do think that the casino example is representative of our situation, the lack of options is not - we have multiple options, not least of which is to refrain as best you can from participating in, or legitimizing either of the options provided. Also, don't allow the options being offered to distract you from the most important aspect of the scenario, in that the true value being won or lost in that casino's games isn't money, it's your ability to live your own life, which the house is taking from you by limiting what decisions and actions you're allowed to make in your own life. Don't play along with that.
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| Affordance Traps |
Nevertheless, the social science known as 'Economics', is a field that was established in order to evade and undermine those philosophic concepts and principles which make our Founders' era understanding of liberty possible, and it does so by focusing attention upon those aspects of our lives and activities which it improperly quantifies, so as to justify the unprincipled use of 'better policies' for imposing power over an entire society.
Beware of the Affordance Trap of 'these are our only choices!', especially as the habit of thinking that's been drilled into us in our schooling, politics, and of course economic thinking, is especially susceptible to that.
Be aware that most of the magician's tricks, count on your unwittingly cooperating with their tricks - following along with the magician's waving wand, watching the pretty assistant, and later repeating their performance of 'GDP is down!' or 'Inflation is up!' - that's not 'economic analysis', that's Praxis, repeating what is ultimately meaningless as if it mattered. The secret to the magician's trick, is that it's not necessary for their theories to be consciously learned and understood, so long as the audience repeats the patterns of action performed for them, people will absorb it through their own routine actions, without ever having consciously noted or accepted the details of whichever theory that particular magic act was performing.
The 'Economic' choice is a dialectical action that involves you in not thinking of what is real and true, in favor of a fabricated idea of what is seemingly 'useful', which substitutes a narrow 'how' for the 'what'. All 'Economic' ideologies ignore and implicitly deny those more important considerations, in order to advance a narrative that rationalizes the substitution of a 'Greater Good', for 'the pursuit of happiness', and when you fall into the affordance trap of 'Capitalism vs Socialism', what you are thinking of are 'economic issues', 'economic liberty', 'economic justice', etc., and what you are not thinking of, are those metaphysical, ethical, and moral issues, that would interfere with the carefully laid trap of 'economic thinking'.
The nature of what the 'Economic' choice of 'Capitalism vs Socialism' involves you in putting into practice (praxis) - which both sides of the same economic coin are urging you to make - is that by getting you to think of your society as an Economy, you are no longer thinking of it as a society!
'Capitalism', it must be remembered, was not a term that Adam Smith referred to or used in his writings - that was a little discussed technique of finance which Karl Marx seized upon as a label that'd be useful for disparaging Adam Smith's understanding that Natural Liberty was the real 'The Wealth of Nations'. By tarring Liberty with 'Capital'/'Money'/'the root of all evil', Marx succeeded in using 'Economic Thinking' to lure popular opinion away from the Political Economy of our Founders' era, and their understanding that individual rights and liberty were inextricably intertwined with a sound understanding of Property, and that an objective rule of law is and must be dedicated to upholding and defending them.
That understanding, and liberty, made clear that it was vital for a person to have the liberty to act on their own judgement, as that was the key to not only their own wealth and prosperity, and that of the entire nation as well. Modern misosophy, ideology, and that which Marxism concerns itself with, redirected popular understanding towards reframing the narrative's focus upon money and techniques of finance, control, and 'individualism'.
Recognize that. Become aware of the reality they so desperately need you to not see, and alert others to it as well.
Realizing that, breaks it. There is another way, and it only requires your attention and willingness to consider and pursue questions to objective answers. Help others to see it too.
The truth has consequences. Recognizing that what is true, matters. Those who'd prefer to view you as Human Capital, know that too, and they fear it.
So now, with those cautions and points in mind, we can continue on and return to the post already in progress....
What 'Economics' buys you is Tyranny on a budget
With the awareness that metaphysics, causality, ethics should be the backdrop to your normal frame of mind, and aware that that understanding remains actively involved even when left unseen in discussions concerning an economy, you're now in a position to begin noticing the numerous issues that 'economics' routinely leaves unseen (and excluded), such as what I've been referring to over and again, which repeatedly goes unseen, and left unasked, and is actively evaded in economic schemes, which is the meaning of: 'Should'.
They use the sound of the word 'should', but not its meaning, and as you listen to them sounding hte word out it is important to notice that 'Should' is not an 'economic' term. Is 'Should' something that can be calculated from mathematical equations? [spoiler alert: No]. 'Should' is a term of ethics - what is or could be ethical about distant persons and powers deciding that person X 'should' be deprived of some of their property and rights, and that person Y should receive some of that property? When considering Ethics in a societal context of taking actions that affect the lives of entire populations, its scope is more directly referencing that other subset of Ethics, which is the field of Justice, which 'Economics' is but the ethical stepchild of.
Despite their heavy use of the word that they spelled as 'should', and 'Justice', 'Economics' operates by dialectically substituting what is 'useful' for what you should do, and the 'greater good' for what is good, in their descriptions of 'what is...'s, and 'need to...'s - they don't refer to what actually is Good, but only to what's most useful to them and to their economy.
The truth is that questions of what 'Should' is and should be, are determined by philosophy, not by 'Economics', which points out the fundamental problem with treating Economics as an authority over the operations of society, and it's worth pointing out again, that Economics doesn't begin with Economics.
'Economics' is not a primary standalone field.
'Economics' is not a secondary field.
'Economics' is not even a third level field.
'Economics' claim to the authority to order & reorder society, as an idealized means of social control which the likes of J.S. Mill & Karl Marx both envisioned, is only possible when the traditional branches and roots of philosophy (and reality) are at best ignored... on the way to their being reversed.
Simply recognizing metaphysics (covering the 'which is...?'), leads to an epistemology of causality (what 'follows') and logic (validating the hows') within ethics (covering the 'shoulds'), and emphasizes the fact that 'Economics' is much less than simply a subset of Ethics, as it is necessarily defined by, beholden to, derived from, and subordinate to, those traditional fields of thought. Happily for 'Economics', the moderns' new 'fourth branch of philosophy' which they labeled 'epistemology', enables and requires that traditional respect for reality to be ignored.
"... The popularity of the Cartesian method is not the consequence of a desire to remove metaphysical doubt, and find certainty, but precisely the opposite: to cast doubt on everything, and thereby increase the scope of personal license, by destroying in advance any philosophical basis for the limitation of our own appetites. The radical skeptic, nowadays at least, is in search not so much of truth, as of liberty - that is to say, of liberty conceived of the largest field imaginable for the satisfaction of his whims...."
pg. 6, "In Praise Of Prejudice - The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas" - Theodore Dalrymple
And what you begin to see the importance of that ignorance of traditional philosophy (as Mao assaulted 'the four olds'), when you take note of the low place in the regard of ideas that economics held in traditional philosophy, which, as Say noted, 'Economics', 'oikonomy',
pg. 6, "In Praise Of Prejudice - The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas" - Theodore Dalrymple
"...From οικος a house, and νομος a law; economy, the law which regulates the household. Household, according to the Greeks, comprehending all the goods in possession of the family...", it originally was limited to the management of household decisions, and was so because 'economic thinking' is truly suited only to first-hand experience, and can and should extend no further than that. As such, 'Economics' is in reality situated as a lower level (the lowest) subset of the field of Politics... which is itself a philosophical subset that's contained by the second level subset of the field of Law, which is in turn contained under and within Justice, which is in turn a subset of Ethics.
IOW, 'Economics', is a third-level subset of the third branch of philosophy, and from that backwater position, its managers have dared to claim the power to determine, dictate, and manage our lives. They've gotten away with evading the ground floors of philosophy by insisting that people perform feats of philosophical parkour to 'engage' with them, because we have allowed it to usurp the authority of those fundamental fields that are the proper avenues for even considering such issues.
Because we've allowed 'those who know best' and the TURDS to tell us that 'Economics', for all intents and purposes, replaces Philosophy (and even Religion) in our day-to-day lives, and to do so openly, it presumes to make decisions upon such matters for us, even as it proposes its various policies and distribution curves which blatantly ignores and even violates the very principles that are fundamental to those fields it's rightly subordinated to.
Do you begin to see why 'economic thinkers' don't want you thinking about metaphysics, causality, and ethics?
It's as if a newly hired retail store manager suddenly began assuming the power to issue orders setting worldwide policy and practices for the company, based upon his local concerns - and then the entire company management began abiding by it. If you were a stockholder of that company, wouldn't you be asking what's going on here? Shouldn't every stockholder be doing so?!
If this is true (and it is), if 'Economics' is as out of place, empty even, as I'm saying, then how has it been made to become such a real factor in our lives?
My reply to that comes from a phrase that, even keeping in mind the philosophical overview above, will likely be seen as an outrageous claim, and though to the best of my knowledge neither James Lindsay nor Stephen Coughlin have said it in this context, it fits the phrase they've utilized in connection with gnosticism and dialectics, and seems to me to fit exceedingly well here, which is 'stepping into the Wizards Circle'.
It is important for us to notice that 'Economics' begins by excluding metaphysics, causality, ethics. With that accomplished, it swaps out the quality of Good, for those quantities of utilitarian pleasures which then seem especially alluring to those who've accepted its invitation to take the economical and very consequential step into an alternate reality, a 'copy world' of 'transcendental' ideas, that have little to do with what is or can be real and true, but which is so clearly empty and meaningless to those who haven't.
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| ...Ouroboros image from The Palmer Worm |
That misleading nature is something that I think is more than hinted at, which Niall Ferguson, an historian & economist, partly exposed in his quip on economists' in thrall to, on John Maynard Keynes veiled quip:
"...even the most practical man of affairs is usually in the thrall of the ideas of some long-dead economist"More on that, next.
The TURD's Pro-Regressive retreat from the West A.D. to the B.C. past through the Wizard's Circle
There's something revealing in what the supreme wizard of the 'New Economics', John Maynard Keynes, said in the last paragraph of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), part of which is an often repeated quote:
"...Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist....", which he continued on from there with:
"...Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas..."You should keep your eye on that 'of a few years back', as it is revealing of the modernist game. Keynes concludes that last paragraph of his book with:
"... it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”, so that in Keyne's mind, and most others - including who's often taken as the leader of the opposition, Libertarian F.E. Hayek - it wasn't the wisdom that had stood the test of time, or even the selfish desires of those with wealth & power that they expected would determine the course of societal events, but instead, those ideas 'of a few years back' which had been learnt by men of "...twenty-five or thirty years of age...", are what would rule their minds when they came to power. They didn't expect wisdom, practical wisdom, or even their own interests to direct the course of society, they expected that direction to come from those ideas of the new 'Social Sciences', like 'economics'.
Despite the 1,936 years A.D. of expectations that the wisdom to lead society would and should be found in those men of experience who'd lived & learned more than others, Keynes thought that, in 1936, when no 'economist' had been long dead or defunct for more than a few decades, that those 'economists' were who were determining how society is, 'should', and would be, organized and run.
That's a telling reveal of how swiftly and thoroughly the new academic regime, which the Idealists had given birth to shortly after the opening of the 1800s (our colleges today bear almost no resemblance in either form or content, to those our Founding Fathers attended), had been able to utilize its new field of 'Epistemology' to divert society's attention away from the classical Western considerations of "What is" & "What follows", and "What should be done". Instead, those 'ideas of a few years back' were informing the new TURDS that since we kant know reality as it really is, 'they' should rely instead upon 'experts' to tell them what 'works best'.
Naturally, those deemed and certified to have that expertise, came from the new Social Sciences of 'Education', Social Studies', and 'Economics', which expertly traded away that broad understanding which had traditionally marked a person as being educated, for training in a very specific set of skills. These Idealists - subjectivists and empiricists - having traded away History for Social Studies, Philosophy for Economics, as well as transforming the high regard that people had for Logic, into its being perceived as either a tedious verbal parlor trick or the apparently meaningless hieroglyphics of symbolic logic - had implicitly and explicitly discarded the very basis of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture's form of knowledge and understanding. And as an encore, having made the foundations of Western society dissappear before our eyes, they planted their Utopian (no place) flag in its place, and have successfully convinced and compelled We The People, year after year, decade after decade, to send our children to absorb their 'New Ideas!' of nothingness.
The fundamental values which underlie the systems and macro perspectives of 'Economic Thinking', are what mark it out as being truly Pro-Regressive, as it is those collective sensibilities that are found on the far side of The West's dividing line between the years B.C. and A.D., that modernity most embraces. Now matter how otherwise admirable, it is true that however foundational the ideas and institutions of the West B.C. were, and are, the Greco/Roman without the Judeo/Christian - as expressed by the Greek dramatists, and Plato, and even with Aristotle and Cicero - presumed the individual to be utterly inconsequential in the face of the interests of society. It was only after the Greco/Roman had merged with the Judeo/Christian, that the individual came to be recognized in the West A.D., as a uniquely valuable person, each created in the image of God and recognized as not only having value as an individual, but as being on an equal footing in the eyes of justice with all other persons, no matter their social & political standing.
We forget today how truly revolutionary that view was, and still is, and how completely it is that our *modern* 'economic thinking' rejects and rebels against it.
Those moderns yearning for the B.C. worldview, needed a means of pivoting away from the A.D. understanding of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, in order to pro-regress back to the B.C. view where the individual served the collective. And the needed to do so without anyone noticing that they were being turned away from the foundations of the West, which required progressive efforts across centuries of time:
It would be difficult if not impossible to imagine the strategic deflections from reality that a person would have to become consciously accustomed to making, if classical philosophy hadn't been either ejected from or sterilized within wAcademic circles. The truth of that was essentially 'proved' by the experience of SCSR (Scottish Common Sense Realism)'s founder, Thomas Reid, who had effectively beaten Hume's skepticism back and arguably enabled America to be born, and at the last possible moment that was conceivable. Modernity's post-partum response to our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, was swift and brutal. Attacks were piled upon every aspect of SCSR, as it was verbally derided from every quarter of wAcademic circles by 'Classical Liberals' from Kant to J.S. Mill, and by the latter 19th century, they'd succeeded in reversing popular opinion about the common sense of Common Sense.
- Machiavelli tried to go against the A.D. tide, but his efforts were too obviously and easily called out.
- Bacon & Hobbes made a less direct assault upon the culture as well, but their notions tended to be thought of as additions - as 'reality adjacent' - rather than challenges to it.
- Descartes & Rousseau began to move the needle,
- it wasn't until the evolution of 'Economics' as a 'Social Science', that the TURDS were able to sidestep outward concern for individual rights and virtue, by promising to manage what had recently been considered an actual evil (the violation of individual rights & property under the law), in such a way as to promote the 'greater good' (rather than a mere singular Good).
The philosophical reverses which The West has suffered since then, couldn't have occurred, certainly not in less than a century, if the populace hadn't been simultaneously 'educated' into the cultural and institutional amnesia, which 'Economics' has proven itself so well suited to inducing in us.
It's difficult to overstate the willfully unseen presumptions involved in how that pivot is still being carried out in headlines such as:
"... The Wall Street Journal reports that GDP was up last quarter, and though the Chairman of the FED noted that the inflation rate has only slowed .03%, jobs numbers are expected to increase...", as it smoothly evades and conveys what our society has explicitly come to accept as being 'reality', and by our wearing those shaded lenses, we enable 'Economics' to assume the authority that it has assumed in our lives, with the confidence we once would have looked to religion and philosophy - or at the very least to law or politics - for advice on the *wisest* course of action to follow in our day-to-day lives.
The expectations of, and nearly invisible utilization of power that is conferred through the materialistic leviathan of 'Economic Thinking', eager to take whatever actions may be deemed necessary to 'help the common good', has necessarily entailed abandoning our earlier understanding of what was finally coming to be recognized as uncommonly good. Shorn of the foundations of The West, thanks to the 'epistemology' that modernity's misosophers such as Bacon, Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc., established to suppress our regard for reality, 'Economics' has had little or nothing to fear from the wisdom of those classical philosophers who've been safely memory-holed away from popular opinion.
No matter how at odds their various economic ideologies ('Capitalism, 'Marxism', 'Socialism', 'Libertarianism', etc.,) might appear to be with each other on the surface today, they only really have to contend with the 'long dead economists' opinions of 'a few years back', as they all share in the opinion that their views are a more than sufficient replacement for the traditional western understanding of metaphysics, causality, ethics, literature, law, and political reasoning.
With Economics freed by its votaries in and out of Government & wAcademia, it's been free to engage in Social Science experiments (what do you think 'public education' is?) that utilize We The People as an efficient means of generating the data ('privacy?! Ha!) it needs for forming and reforming its ever new & improved theories on how 'best' to drive policies which usurp whatever power (governmental, financial, and social) it claims to need for the benefit of the 'common good'.
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| You should *should all over yourself* |
That is the awesome social and political power that we've gone along with conferring upon 'economic thinking', so that where Political Economy once observed reality in order to understand what would be most just, and therefore most effective and good for all, 'economic thinkers' now read their indexes and curves as technological tea leaves to tell them how they should correct our course into the future, free from the 'wrong' actions of 'old fashioned' thinking. It's almost as if the positions of 'Priest & King' in society, which modernity loves to pat itself on the back for progressing past, were alive and well under the modern guise of 'defunct economists'.
Next time you hear the Economic news that cannot be avoided today, you should think of the magician up there doing his magic act on stage, and remember that he performs no magic there - none! - he only stylishly and theatrically uses his costume, top hat, and wand, and of course his attractive assistant, to distract the audience (of which you are seen as but a small part of) into being convinced that they magically did what you know they didn't do... to thunderous applause.
If you do pay attention, you'll notice there are three components of the economic stagecraft that its magicians use to keep the audience's attention filled with 'Ooh!'s and 'Ah!'s:
- Economics is not about reality, it's about spinning up a semblance of one (jobs#'s, unemployment %'s, average income), which you are expected to treat as if it were real. It isn't... and by stepping into its circle, you risk being lost to it.
- The Economically minded use terms such as 'Rights!' and 'Fair' not because they're meaningful to them - their every use is self-contradictory and without being rooted in metaphysics & ethics, Economics is fully blind to those concepts that even 'fair' is derived from - but for the effect the narrative produces in the audience, which furthers their aspirations of gaining power over 'this, that, and the other thing'.
- Economics operates through a dialectical simulacrum of language fused with abstruse mathematics - Economics Speak - not to communicate, but to both cow and corral the populace with, as they tweak their miniature models of reality.
If you keep your eyes on the magicians other hand, you might notice that 'economics' incessantly evades metaphysics & ethics, through its wand waving of diversionary references to aggregate market conditions, income brackets, fields of management, labor disputes, information management, so that it can use your income, cost of living, and the rising prices that you experience, to reduce you into references to percentages and anecdotal concerns that are 'too miniscule' to warrant the concern of TURD's who're focused on the 'big picture'. Be careful as the pretty assistant dressed in the tight skirt of NEWS & current events, winks and curtsies at you, or you might miss how your concerns are being efficiently handled as issues of 'micro-economics', whose mountains of carefully gathered data of GDP, CPI, etc., makes your cost of living yield to the societal concerns of the collective, which only they are prepared to manage, and which the individual must yield to, for the 'common good'.
Just keep in mind that there is no magic. Keep in mind that neither reality nor our Common Sense A.D. ability to understand it, have been made to vanish. Keep in mind that their magic consists of nothing more than distractions, and that all such magic tricks require tangible tools to distract you with, which is what we'll turn to next.
The Wizarding World's Tools of Economic Magic: 'LTV'/'Value', 'Consolidation'/'Growth', and 'Rules'/'Law'
So as we turn to what it is that enables such behavior, and what it is that they feel gives them the authority to behave as their hearts desire, we see that it requires detaching you from reality and subduing you to its economic orders, through the manipulation of three key fixtures:
#1 - LTV involves making use of an early and partial error in defining observations, which has subsequently been reinforced across time into an evasive lie, which is what it is. It's not a thing of value, it's a scheme for enslaving the values of others. As you might imagine, my xTwitterers disagree with me on this, and think those who're 'liberty minded', need to do better. Indeed.
- LTV (Labor Theory of Value),
- (refuting) Say's Law,
- Law.
xTwitter'rs tell me:
"Ambrosius Macrobius @weremight
Arguing against LTV is a mug's game. Jes' Sayin'. Liberty minded individuals need to do better."
"Ambrosius Macrobius @weremight
Arguing against LTV is a mug's game. Jes' Sayin'. Liberty minded individuals need to do better."
We can look to LTV's origin as coming from a selective reading of John Locke, which was furthered in some ways by Adam Smith's pioneering effort to identify what Value is in the context of political economy, and from that end of history it was an understandable, if crude effort, but from this end of history, it doesn't stand up to thinking past two or three questions deep. Not that proponents of LTV can't make its calculations 'add up' by throwing one new epicycle after another upon it (notice the magicians wand waving of Inflation! Interest Rates!) - that hasn't changed much from Ptolemy's day to ours - but what it cannot stand up to, is a series of non-economic questions, which is why they aren't raised or acknowledged.
The real value that LTV has for the field of 'economics' today, is that it enables the dismissal and even disparagement of the individual's right to put thought and effort into producing value, through its claim that Value is ultimately reduceable to a collective muscular effort of "socially necessary labour time", as Karl Marx termed it. Whether or not most supporters of LTV realize it, Marx clearly saw what value LTV would have for his deliberate assaults upon every aspect of the West, and ever since his efforts it has played an essential role in utilizing all of the dazzling machinery of economic indexes & measurements that 'economic thinkers', from the 'Classical Liberal's on down to today, have used in diverting attention away from the void that LTV injects into popular thinking.
This is something that shouldn't be passed over lightly: Marx & Engles's purpose for advancing communism was always that communists should, in their words:
Thinking that Marx settled upon LTV (Labor Theory of Value) because it was 'true', and would be beneficial in improving people's understanding of markets... is less foolishly naive, than dangerously negligent.
The calculative machinations that fill this paper:
'... openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions....'The same destructive purpose that drove Marx in writing the Communist Manifesto, was the same malevolent sentiment that drove his poetry, plays, and other writings, and is embodied in his favorite quotation from his favorite play, "Dr. Faust", which everyone who knew Marx brought up when recalling him, where the demon 'Mephistopholes' says:
"Everything that exists deserves to perish"That's not the hallmark of a person who entered into anything for productive purposes. Marx didn't turn from writing the Communist Manifesto, to injecting 'Das Kapital' into 'Economics', in order to explain a theory of value best suited to improving the economy of any nation, but because he saw 'Economics' as the most effective means of bringing utter destruction to the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West.
Thinking that Marx settled upon LTV (Labor Theory of Value) because it was 'true', and would be beneficial in improving people's understanding of markets... is less foolishly naive, than dangerously negligent.
"...The alleged refutation of the labour theory of value was an integral part of the marginalist attack against Classical and Marxist analysis. However, statistical analysis of price-value relationships made possible by the data available since the later 20 th century suggest considerable empirical strength of the labour theory of value...", are dazzling, but they are just that. Machinations. And like Ptolemy, though without his innocence, they're able to make their numbers match with what we see from our position on the surface of the economy, while at the same time concealing those aspects of reality that threaten their views.
But just as no matter how well Ptolemy's epicycles got his numbers to add up, I'm not going to be buying that either Mars or the Sun are revolving around the Earth, I'm also not going to go along with the pretense that LTV is a legitimate 'economic tool' for monitoring, evaluating, and ultimately justifying the forceful governing of society through.
I'm not opposed to LTV because I'm concerned that its numbers don't add up - though I'd be surprised if their various epicycles didn't have them adding up impressively well - even if their fellow economists of nominally opposing camps (see here and here) routinely counter them - I dismiss it out of hand as an invalid concept, because of the more important reality which it participates in evading.
See if you can catch a glimpse of what I'm referring to here, in this explanation from a socialist supporter of LTV (which, BTW, gives a more accurate summary of Marx's positions than most of his economic opponents or supporters do):
"...Moreover, it is unquestionably the case that Marx’s approach to the subject has made an impact even on mainstream economics itself. For example, his notion of the real price of labour power being the time it takes for an average worker to obtain the money to purchase a given basket of goods is widely seen to be a particularly useful measure of comparative living standards between countries. Similarly, his argument that the real price of commodities (as measured by their labour content) will tend to fall as a result of mechanisation. Progressively replacing living labour does seem to have been borne out by the facts. Technological innovation has indeed brought about a remarkable reduction in the real price of many commodities...."[emphasis mine]What I'm drawing your attention to here is less an issue of converting dollars to pesos, than to how the wording reveals a glimpse of what's being concealed.
The contextual differences in 'comparative living standards' experienced with, "...a given basket of goods is widely seen to be a particularly useful measure of comparative living standards between countries...", are squeezed out consideration. What's not compared - what is left unseen - are such conditions as how a worker is able to work (by choice or forced, freely hired, or unionized), was that 'given basket of goods' filled by the worker's selections at a market that had some say over what they were offering, or were those the only goods supplied to them and so him, which excludes the most important factor of comparing markets out of the equation?
What that reduces the 'comparison' to, is a purely material measurement of quantities of things 'between countries', which are then calculated for as if they represented only a mere matter of converting dollars to pesos.
That is the wizardry of economics in action.
It's up to us to poke at what we can glimpse is being left out of these claims, to question how it is that one country has more valuable "socially necessary labour time", than the other? Why are there any differences in standards? Does the musculature of the people of one country, differ so much from the muscles of those of the country they're being compared to? What guides those muscles, or is it muscle alone that powers 'a result of mechanization', or of 'Technological innovation'? Where do those 'powers' come from?
I'm not asking those questions to get their answers, but to indicate what they won't acknowledge, or ask, but only explain their way around. Take for instance the LTV practice of FDR's 'workers' programs that paid one set of ditch diggers to dig a trench, and another to then fill it back in, which, after all, was rewarding them for performing a "socially necessary labour time" - the fact that nothing of VALUE was created by that, is ignored, and argued away by various statistically impressive calculations for those ends justifying their means.
You need not doubt that they do have 'answers' of their own - lots of them - but their answers to such questions typically involve or depend upon the massaging of issues of Supply & Demand, Class warfare and considerations of Oppressor/Oppressed dynamics into their calculations. The sheer quantity of such 'answers' enables them to turn a blind eye to any honest (what is necessary for 'honesty'?) consideration of LTV's nature, until what they'll admit is 'seen', has been transformed into an inert 2D material thing that can be safely manipulated into the economic machinery of 'differences in standards'.
If you can avoid being diverted into the usual issues of Supply & Demand and class consciousness, and instead poke around a bit deeper into the philosophic nature of the 'economic' front, you'll soon find one or more equivocations such as those involved in LTV.
A ready example of there being far more than "socially necessary labour time" involved in determining values, is readily at hand in any movie you might choose to watch, decide what you think of it, and then watch the credits roll.
Those several minutes' worth of credits that we now see scrolling by at the end of any big budget movie, comprise those who were determined to be of value by a decision maker (individual or corporate), to provide products & services that were deemed necessary to get the movie made. What is seen in the credits, are what reflect the producers view of what they'd judged to be worth paying for.
All of those factors and values that were negotiated, went into determining the cost (actual, opportunity cost, etc.,) of making that movie you're watching the credits of. But although each of those services gave value to the producer and (presumably) earned a profit for themselves, neither their nor the producer's efforts determine even the monetary value of that movie.
- What is unseen, though assumed, in the credits, is how each of those credited for their services, had negotiated with the producers for the value of what they would or would not include in their services that were listed in the credits, and clearly an agreement over their value to the production was successfully made.
- What goes unseen, are those choices and services that were passed over, either by those potential providers who decided that their services were worth more than the producers were offering, or because the movie's producers decided that their services were not valuable enough to the production to be secured.
How the monetary value of a movie is ultimately determined, is by what is or isn't successfully negotiated between movie goers such as yourself - customers - and what the theater box-offices asked for the privilege of viewing it. The results of all of those negotiations added together, go into determining whether that big budget movie is shown to have the monetary value of a blockbuster success, or of a box-office bomb. And of course there are many movies that bombed at the box-office, that many people have spent uncounted hours watching over and over again because, in their judgement, it adds value to their lives - 'It's a wonderful life!' comes to mind, considered a box office failure when released, has steadily grown in value since then to a great number of people worldwide.
All of that involves 'value' being determined and used in several different contexts - as it should be - and none of those values add up to 'socially necessary labor time'.
What the 'error'/judo-flip lies in, and relies upon, is you not engaging your judgement, so that LTV can maintain the pretense that 'socially necessary labor time' is the 'heart and soul' of Value.
Bastiat clarified the issues involved in this, in these two essays from 150 years ago, from 'of Value':
"...Hitherto the principle of Value has been sought for in one of those circumstances which augment or which diminish it, materiality, durableness, utility, scarcity, labour, difficulty of acquisition, judgment, etc., and hence a false direction has been given to the science from the beginning; for the accident which modifies the phenomenon is not the phenomenon itself. Moreover, each author has constituted himself the sponsor, so to speak, of some special circumstance which he thinks preponderates,—the constant result of generalizing; for all is in all, and there is nothing which we cannot comprehend under a term by means of extending its sense. Thus the principle of value, according to Adam Smith, resides in materiality and durability; according to Jean Baptiste Say, in utility; according to Ricardo, in labour; according to Senior, in rarity; according to Storch, in the judgment we form, etc., and 'Exchange':
The consequence has been what might have been expected. These authors have unwittingly injured the authority and dignity of the science by appearing to contradict each other; while in reality each is right, as from his own point of view. Besides, they have involved the first principles of Political Economy in a labyrinth of inextricable difficulties; for the same words, as used by these authors, no longer represent the same ideas; and, moreover, although a circumstance may be proclaimed fundamental, other circumstances stand out too prominently to be neglected, and definitions are thus constantly enlarged..."
"...From this I conclude that value (as we shall afterwards more fully explain) does not reside in these substances themselves, but in the effort which intervenes in order to modify them, and which exchange brings into comparison with other analogous efforts. This is the reason why value is simply the appreciation of services exchanged, whether a material commodity does or does not intervene. As regards the notion of value, it is a matter of perfect indifference whether I render to another a direct service, as, for example, in performing for him a surgical operation, or an indirect service, in preparing for him a curative substance. In this last case the utility is in the substance, but the value is in the service, in the effort, intellectual and muscular, made by one man for the benefit of another. It is by a pure metonymy that we attribute value to the material substance itself, and here, as on many other occasions, metaphor leads science astray...", and as Bastiat concludes later in the same essay:
"I say, then, Value is the relation of two services exchanged."
It is thought put into action, that is the determiner of what property you have in the goods or services you produce. What is produced, is produced for the purposes of exchanging it for other goods & services, because in the context of that exchange, you place more value upon what you are exchanging your for - and vice versa for the other party - in order that each might gain what is of greater value to them, and so in the context of that exchange, an objective value is created.
Pay especial attention to what the defenders of 'Economics' mean by rejecting the 'subjective theory of value' - they mean that your judgment of what is objectively prudent to you, is of no 'objective' (by which they mean an object, a thing, a factoid of empirical data) value, it isn't *real*, and so it needn't be considered or respected in the policies they advocate. That same underlying POV and justification is what's behind their enthusiasm for their curves of 'income distribution' and 'human capital', in that your judgement is dialectically rendered as being of no concern, as only material operations matter to them.
Fundamentally they are rejecting the value of your judgement, to your life, in their economy.
'Economic Factors' ranging from minimum wage, to cost of living, interest rates, etc., are used, and revised as needed, to elevate the needs of society as a whole, over the 'anecdotal needs' of any one member of it, and if the smooth running of the 'Greater Good' magic show requires ejecting some members of the audience, well, sorry, but 'Rentier' that you are, that's for the best too.
As you see that for what it is, you'll soon notice that contrary to the ideological pretentions of the Marxist LTV, value is not some material thing that is being taken from one person, and given to another, through some 'systemic' transferring of materials or money from the oppressed to the oppressor, but is instead, by the very nature of what is actually being engaged in by those engaging in it, value is the benefit that is created by each party voluntarily exchanging something that is of more value to the other party than it is to them, in exchange for what they've judged will be of greater benefit to them and their interests, so that each is better off because of that exchange - that's the growth by which an 'economy' grows! That same growth is what a top-down command economy eliminates the possibility of, and so ensures the failure of socialist/communist systems.
In a Free Market, Value is ultimately neither a thing nor an effort expended in generating it, but is what results from thought being put into mutually consensual action, and whether that thought in action originates from your own volition, as with the owner of a business that offers a product or service, or as the employee who carries out those thoughts and actions which were initiated by their employer, or as the potential customer's decision to act by purchasing what has been produced, the reality of Value in that exchange, is revealed through their all having agreed in the exchanging of it.
There are very few things in society that are more magical than the plain reality of this.
"But Van, what if they didn't get what they bargained for?!" That proves, rather than disproves, the nature of Value - if they misjudged the benefit to them of what they exchanged, the overall value of their property will have been diminished by that error, without a single additional item or effort having been engaged in. But if they truly didn't get what they'd agreed to in that exchange - if they were conned or otherwise defrauded - then a crime has been committed, and, assuming the exchange did occur within a Free Market, they'll have some recourse for that through their judicial system.
'But Van! Don't you realize that government must step in and save us from market distortions, and stagnation, and inefficiencies...' Oh yes, do tell about the long and glorious history of government interventions that have eliminated market distortions, stagnations, and have generally made our lives more productive and efficient (see the UCLA Economics study of how FDR's 'recovery' extended the Great Depression by 7yrs)!
xTwitter'rs tell me:
'...Rentiers distort resource allocation by directing resources towards rent extraction rather than productive uses. This can lead to inefficiencies, stagnation, and increased economoc polarization as resources are misallocated and economic rents accrue to a few rather than being reinvested into the economy...."
If you look into such claims of 'economics', you'll find impressively lengthy theories and calculations 'proving' their assertions & dire warnings, which we are supposed to accept as justifying their dismissing what we can see in our own lives is real and true. Just ignore the reality that we agree to pay rent for a property, because we agree that the landlord is providing a value to us in that property he's maintained, that we are renting from him, just ignore that we invest in a company because when our judgement of their competence is correct, we receive some monetary value from their having brought more value to their customers.
'...Rentiers distort resource allocation by directing resources towards rent extraction rather than productive uses. This can lead to inefficiencies, stagnation, and increased economoc polarization as resources are misallocated and economic rents accrue to a few rather than being reinvested into the economy...."
'But Van! Don't you realize that rent-seeking behavior leads to underconsumption!', which the economically minded assert justifies overriding our puny individual interests and assessments - and the right to make them - in service to the common/greater good. I have some questions, such as according to who, and by what means, were they able to examine not only the needs, judgment, and interests, of the those individuals involved in renting, and those renting to them, but also those of the entire market? And how will they determine 'the best' decision that should be been made by government for all parties concerned?
xTwitter'rs tell me:
"...Ultimately, rent-seeking behavior leads to underconsumption, where insufficient aggregate demand.
Imo rentiers have to be eliminated through policy so that productive investment, circulation and stability is promoted...." [emphasis mine - note it]
How do they determine the unforeseen consequences that eliminating rentiers' through policies' will have, upon the rest of those involved in 'the economy'? They only want you to consider that which is seen, and to ignore that which is not seen. They want you to dismiss the reality you can clearly see (metaphysics), they want you to ignore what you understand will follow from that (causality & logic), and to disregard what you understand should be done about that (ethics), and to top it all off, they want you to forget Henry Hazlitt's One Lesson and the importance of considering not only the immediate results of the actions they propose, but what will result in the long run. That concern of Hazlitt's was perhaps most honestly addressed by the economic Wizard John Maynard Keynes, in his "The Quantity Theory of Money", as:
"...Ultimately, rent-seeking behavior leads to underconsumption, where insufficient aggregate demand.
Imo rentiers have to be eliminated through policy so that productive investment, circulation and stability is promoted...." [emphasis mine - note it]
"In the long run we are all dead", and what they want most of all, is for you to dismiss what IS Good, over any period of time, for the 'Common/Greater Good'... which... truthfully amounts to the same thing.
By what means does anyone attain to such asspoundingly colossal levels of arrogance? Oh yeah... through 'economic thinking'. Never forget that Communism slaughtered 100 million people across the 20th Century for 'The Common/Greater Good', and did so by simply lying - the pen is horrifically mightier than the sword.
What is the value of any theory? Is it the impressive mathematical abilities demonstrated in the calculations and scope of projections that are made by it? Is a theory justified by how well it recognizes & describes reality while identifying and conforming to its limitations, so as to observe, understand, and employ valid principles in making factually verifiable and accurate predictions which follow from that theory?
It's often useful to turn such questions around a bit, and ask ourselves: Why do we abandon a theory? Because it ceases to intrigue us or fails to flatter our current opinions? Or because we come to notice that reality isn't what is guiding, clarifying, or being revealed, by it?
If you find yourself struggling with that, you should take to heart the example of a decent physicist, who, absent the introduction of a consequential new theory, wouldn't bother with spending another moment of his time on deciphering the elaborate calculations and predictions presented to him in a paper, once he realizes that the plans were for a perpetual motion machine. Once a physicist realizes that those calculations, however impressively elaborate they may be, are made in futile service to what in principle cannot be supported or achieved, then he'll dismiss it out of hand, just like that, tossing it away as utterly meaningless and worth less than the paper it was unfortunately printed upon.
Once you can avoid focusing on the distracting numbers and dire oppressor/oppressed warnings of doom being waved before you, you begin to see what value LTV has to them, 'economically' speaking. LTV is the wand that the magician's waving before you in grand gestures, which, when combined with his pretty and efficient assistant, and his numerical sleight of hand that makes the rabbit (you) disappear from the hat (economy), you'll see how it enables them to portray Profit, Landlords, Rent, Business Owners, etc., as 'non values', and mere parasitical leaches and thieves - no Labor, no Value = the oppressors of the oppressed! - in a dialectic that has served for nearly two centuries now, as the fertile entry point for envy and evil to spread out into the various ideologies of popular public opinion.
But there's a side effect from accepting LTV, that's even worse than the theory itself, which was and is an essential component of what Marx most sought to accomplish.
Most people today are familiar with the relativistic claims that any claim to objective truth is nothing but your subjective preference. But the dialectics of 'Your truth isn't my truth', pale in comparison to the wrongs that are successfully smuggled into popular opinion, by claiming that what truly is a subjective process (all thought originates within a subject - AKA: you - whether or not, and how consistently a person seeks to objectively conform their thoughts to reality, is another matter), is nothing more than a deterministically 'objective' material process, i.e. 'You don't think, you don't choose, your consciousness is but a side effect of genes & chemistry'. Do you hear Hume & Kant in that?
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| ...This is what the 'New Economic Thinking' is opposed to. |
That also ensures that what the Political Economy of Smith, Say, and Bastiat, had exposed as being fallacies, pretenses, and abuses, will be easily ignored by them, and so the confused and chaotic errors which those fallacious actions will continue to flood into the market, diluting, confusing, and worsening all available information, leaving people helpless before the sluggishness of its 'supply chain issues', inflation, and the market's increasing inability to respond to individual interests and needs, in a vicious cycle that can and will only ever make matters worse, while causing people to demand 'action!' to stop the bogeyman from tormenting them - AKA: a totalitarian's wet dream.
Totalitarian Opposition to individual decisions: Breaking the Say's Law
Which brings us around to the #2 issue, that of supposedly refuting Jean Baptiste Say's The Law of Markets, or Say's Law, because eliminating that from people's awareness & understanding, as Keynes understood, is critical for successfully operating the dazzling machinery of 'Economics' magic. The reason why is not so much what Say's Law itself does, as the fact that it provides the clearest indicator of the inescapable connection between products, services, Value, and reality, which, when understood, shows the aspirations of the economists to be but a bit of fluff in their ideological clouds.
xTwitter'rs tell me:
"If Say's law were the case, there would be no business cycles or depressions. The circular flow is interrupted- the law fails to operate- mainly because of rent extraction..."
"Be careful here. There are sound historical arguments that Say never actually uttered the alleged economic law attributed to him..."
My xTweeters offered their pronouncements that the existence of business cycles and depressions, are proof that Say's Law has been refuted, which is the type of pure B.S. that followed from Keynes' straw-manning of Say's Law, which Henry Hazlitt demolished in an excellent chapter that's available online "Keynes vs. Say's Law"
, including:
"If Say's law were the case, there would be no business cycles or depressions. The circular flow is interrupted- the law fails to operate- mainly because of rent extraction..."
"Be careful here. There are sound historical arguments that Say never actually uttered the alleged economic law attributed to him..."
"...No important economist, to my knowledge, ever made the absurd assumption (of which Keynes by implication accuses the whole classical school) that thanks to Say's Law depressions and unemployment were impossible, and that everything produced would automatically find a ready market at a profitable price....", and that,
"...Keynes 'refuted' Say's Law only in a sense in which no important economist ever held it."The 'economically minded' will equivocate upon this and that term, while dropping important contexts here and there, to give the impression that Say's Law made a false claim, and then reach into the top hat and pull out a rabbit to show that claim (which it never made) is a false one, and then having dazzled & disarmed you with the magician's sleight of mind, they continue on with economic theories of the market which simply don't apply. Which is why Hazlitt says:
"... there is still need and place to assert Say's Law whenever anybody is foolish enough to deny it. It is itself, to repeat, essentially a negative rather than a positive proposition. It is essentially a rejection of a fallacy..."Say's Law is not a Rule, or a complex theory by which some other 'school of economic thought' has (or can) discredit it. Say's Law is simply the inescapable conclusion which any reasonable person is able to arrive at, after having observed the theories by which T.U.R.D.'s have been using to justify their giving or withholding of favorable treatment & privileges to some, in exchange for political power overall, have been exposed as being nothing more than sophistic fallacies.
The existence of that revelation is so threatening, that other economists after failing to find flaws in it, first tried ignoring it (which not even J.S. Mill could manage to do), and then lied about and mischaracterized it, as our buddy Keynes did, in order to insert the favorite figments of their imaginations, in its place.
But again, there's nothing complex about Say's Law, it simply states the fact that reality isn't magically made to vanish, by the fallacious claims that state power can be used to 'make opportunity' in a state controlled market.
Say's Law simply restates the obvious reality that economic sophistry attempts to evade, that production comes first, that "supply constitutes demand", or IOW:
You produce a product or service in order to offer it in exchange for some other product or service that you value more than it., meaning that you can have all of the demand you want, you can even designate anything as money you want - gold, paper, bitcoin, clamshells - and have all of that you want, but unless someone actually produces something, nothing will exist to be purchased or traded for.
All of the other issues associated with Say's Law, whether of general gluts on the market from 'over production', or underconsumption, won't be an issue, and it doesn't in any way suggest or deny that particular variabilities may require changes in pricing by some involved in the market, in order to sufficiently appeal to customers, in the current context of what is being offered and sought after in the market.
Is that so terrifying? Well it is if what you're trying to do is to con your way past the constraints of reality, as Keynes and those who followed after him have been, which is even and especially true of those who say "I'm not a supporter of Keynes!", as such dialectical tactics are typically less about admitting or correcting the errors that the renowned wizard had engaged in, than with carrying the useful parts of the old scheme forward as the new 'only reasonable' means of nudging them further and further away from the terrifying (to them) reality, which both the old and the new lie want so much to not have to face up to.
If 'Economics' is the popular gateway into the dialectical Wizards Circle, then Say's Law and Political Economy are the keys to escaping from it, as recognizing the reality of causality in 'economics', is only a very short philosophical step away from recognizing that it would be unreasonable to not reject all claims that are not compatible with what we can understand to be objectively real and true, which is very real threat to their dazzling economic machine.
Torpedoing Say's Law is a key factor in gaining power over 'an economy', as doing so effectively gives 'economic thinkers' a buffer to keep reality at a distance from those within that market they seek to control (AKA: eliminating your choice from), and throws open wide the gates to the power of unlimited government.
Transforming the Rule of Law into Rules for Ruling with
Which brings us to #3 in how Economic Thinking severs a people from Reality, and that's through their use of The Law. The Rule of Law that is concerned with Justice, deriving a clear system of rules for presenting evidence & arguments so as to ensure the best possible judgement can be made about what the truth of the matter was. The starting point of that system is an acknowledgement that both you and the state, can be in error, while also understanding that what is real and true can be discovered (the reality that we can make an error, is proof that we are able to know what is true), which means that there are matters we can and should understand, about what should govern the writing and administrating of laws, in order to provide a reasonable framework for adjudicating those disputes that will arise amongst people living together in society.
TLDR: Caring about what is true, leads you and your fellows to establish reasonable rules & consequences for behaving reasonably towards each other.
If, as I've argued, ideas in action form the roots of both individual rights and of private property, then to the extent that you are denied the power to take those actions that you think are best for your life and property, or if you are compelled to take actions you otherwise would not have made, that is the extent to which your property and indeed your own active presence in your life, has been taken from you.
Replacing your presence in your own life with the TURD's idea of the 'common good', is exactly what the favorite tools of 'Economic Thinking' - government policies, laws, regulations and regulatory agencies - do: they remove your thought and action from what you have property in, which effectively nationalizes both your property and your life, progressively and surreptitiously accomplishing the ideal that Marx openly stated as summarizing his entire philosophy: 'the abolition of private property'.
What Fascism - developed under the heavy influence of American Pragmatism - contributed to that same purpose, was to turn 'property' into mere possessions that were authorized, overseen by, and managed as needed by, govt experts, who had ultimate control over what had once been 'Property'. In that ideology, while The State is happy to allow some people to have title to the appearances of property, it is The State which has the ultimate power to limit and permit what actions those people are allowed to 'decide' to use it for, and to withdraw said 'property' from their possession, at the whim of whichever bureaucrat is involved in overseeing it.
And before you too quickly shake your head at such horrors, take note that such pragmatic behavior is exactly what our regulatory agencies here in the good-ol-USA, are doing day in, and day out, in the alphabet bureaucracies of our Administrative State - which was, after all, designed under the Pragmatic influence of American 'Progressives'.
This is the problem.
Contrary to Marx's claim that Private Property alienates us from ourselves (and attempting to follow his 'reasoning' is a potentially fatal step into his dialectic), Property is the means by which an individual is able to become more secure and confident in their life, because their rights are morally and legally secured to them, by and through those commitments that each individual shares in common with everyone else in their community, and their shared commitment to the institution of Justice, through objective Law.
Whether Private Property is abridged in the name of the 'common good' by way of 'Progressivism', or 'Liberalism', or 'Conservativism', or 'Socialism', or 'Fascism', or 'Communism', are ultimately distinctions without a practical difference - only what is bad can result from them.
Whether done outright, or gradually through progressive regulation, what abolishing Private Property accomplishes at one and the same time, is to corrupt the people's morals at the foundations of their community and alienates them from their fellows (where it transforms into predators of envy), and in eliminating the law's ability to observe, uphold, and defend, the principle of individual rights, severs the institution of 'The Law' (now transformed from the highpoint of Western understanding in our Founders' era, to 'law' in name only) from having any actual concern for 'Truth, Justice, and the American Way'. To abolish Private Property, is to revert society back 2,500 years into the B.C. era, where the ideal of 'justice' was at best that of the Sophist Thrasymachus', who held that 'justice' was nothing more than a tool for serving the interests of those in power.
It is the ultimate in Pro-Regressivism.
That goal couldn't be carried out openly in The West, at least not at the start, it needed to be advanced out of the direct sight of the people, and was insinuated into their understanding through the treason of its philosophers and academics, who subverted their institutions to form new 'norms' of Education, Law, and Economics. Positivist Law, which from the same Positivist root of the Social Sciences as Economics sprang from, like Pragmatism, contemptuously discards principles & reason, for what it asserts 'to work' for the 'greater good' in their place, on the basis of making what are ultimately the arbitrary assertions of those in power (the B.C. conception of 'Justice'), which involved the latter 'Classical Liberals' in rejecting the wisdom of those who preceded them, such as John Adams noted in cautioning:
"Obsta principiis, nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards..., as the law further drives out the hierarchy of philosophy and sets power free to rule over you as it wills, it will afford no more protections to the lives, rights and livelihood of the people laboring under those laws, than what their leaders find convenient for them to retain. For now.
'Economics' was used to replace Political Economy, by the Socialists, Utilitarians, & Positivists who later formed themselves into the late 19th Century Progressives, needed a means to escape from the 'restrictions' of the hierarchical and orderly understanding of classical philosophy, which was reflected in, and was too easily given away by, the term that preceded it: Political Economy, which was everything they were seeking to dialectically 'evolve' mankind out of, and out of the SCSR which gave people the means to see what is real and true as common sense.
Economics is and always has been the 'respectable' establishment face of 'Social Justice'.
If the field of Economics was concerned with actual Justice, rather than 'social justice' it would have to comply with its place in that hierarchy of what is, what follows, and what is good to follow, but the very name of 'Political Economy' would require reporting back on what its narrower focus might reveal to be either ineffective or at cross-purposes to those fields of politics, law, justice, Ethics, etc., which it should be integrated into and proceed from. If that was so easily brought to attention by the term 'Political Economy', their efforts would quickly be seen to be... not even up to the level of being wrong, and that economists were attempting to act against those constraints which it is necessarily derived from.
Economic Thinking, together with the utilitarian and pragmatic need to replace principles with formulas that vary with who is to be shown favoritism towards, is not only incompatible with the moral hierarchy of what is, what follows, and what is good, it is necessarily opposed to it, and so acts to undermine and negate it through its quantitative formulas for promoting the violation of individual rights & property, for 'the greater good' - which is the dialectic step by which a person and a people become demoralized.
People have the idea that being 'demoralized' means something like 'down in the dumps', but that's not it at all. Being demoralized, means you are no longer in the habit of, or able to, see things from a moral perspective of right & wrong, and instead see only what is useful or convenient.
Economic Thinking entails sacrificing the Good, to Utility. AKA: Evil.
As we've already noted, we can concern ourselves with the economy running efficiently as 'a' good, but it cannot possibly be the Good that the Law is intended to serve, and be good? Or remain good? 'A' 'good' that is actually Good, cannot somehow justify altering, reordering, overriding, what is 'good' in order to serve it. Yet what are 'Economic Thinkers' decisions and conceptions of a common or greater 'good', based upon? What could possibly justify their claim to having 'found it'?
It seems to me that the word 'hubris' must shudder under the conceptual load that's implied by claiming to be able to comprehend what impositions would be involved in violating the individual rights of an entire society of people, in order to 'correct' that economy which results from their decisions. Especially as such impositions would involve, as they must, decisions having been made not by thought by by abiding by regulations that were written at such a distance in time and place from the realities that can only be known and understood by those facing them firsthand. Such 'alchemical' decisions made by experts from afar, and imposed upon and in place of those decisions you would have made, depletes and destroys value, and cannot help but be utterly indistinguishable from stupidity.
Similarly with 'Pricing' being the miraculous power of a free market that it is, because it transmits something of each interested person's judgment of valuation which meaningfully conveys their own estimation of their needs and expectations of available supplies and demand for it, into and within a system whose expanse cannot even be imagined (see 'I, Pencil'), let alone recognized, measured, or managed.
While the prospect of somehow managing an economy appeals to the pride of those who are foolish enough to imagine themselves up to 'the task', an economy cannot be managed from the top down, it can only be destroyed from there, by eliminating Value and the ability to express your judgment of what is of value to you, from the economy.
It's important to realize that 'Economics' is dependent upon both the skeptical 'empiricism' of David Hume's claim that only 'empirical facts' are credible, and that we should be skeptical of all metaphysical and moral claims "...send it too the flames...", as well as Kant's *defense* that it only seems that way because we can't actually know reality as it is at all, and so must act on the Kantian Categorical Imperative of expectant TURDs. That combination has put modern misosophy - hatred of wisdom - into action and ruined people's grasp of causality in their lives, and began separating them from reality, by enclosing them within their own ideas of it.
Exiting 'Economic Thinking' and re-entering into the Reality of what is real and true
Remember the Physicist and the theories of Perpetual Motion - don't get sucked into trying to validate or follow the numbers. The first task involving the legitimacy of any economic theory, is to determine its metaphysical standing, causal connection, and ethical value, and only then moving on to determining whether or not the theory is potentially valid, and determining whether or not it conforms to, or violates, sound principles, and determine whether its intent is to measure what is real and true, or to justify what is unreal and unjustifiable.
Ask yourself this, if you don't start from the position afforded by the high ground of principles rooted in reality through common sense, how long might you otherwise continue listening with interest as you become ensnared in the details, without being sure of what it stands upon, and where it's leading? If you don't first grasp the relevant first principles and check both your position, and the direction you're being led in, you can easily find yourself stepping into the Wizards Circle. With every step you take into that, you are at risk of an abrupt and unexpected exit from reality, just as Descartes Cogito and 'Method of Doubt' lured people, not only into doubting reality, but to stepping into an interior world of untethered ideas, where doubt alone presupposes itself superior to reality, based upon your now your baseless presumptions of what you 'clearly and distinctly conceive are true' (AKA: whims) which presumes itself to have the power to dictate and validate, what you desire to believe is real and true.
Where Kant declares that "I found it necessary to destroy reason [which of course is the very same faculty he's using to choose the words he's using there] in order to save religion" [which is a condemnation of both religion and reason], how much further will you continue reading? How about when he says that we cannot know reality [which if true, by what means could either he or you know that?!] as it is? Or when he says you must abide by categorical imperatives [based upon what, and how?], that he declares you must believe [because it's really the most reasonable...? Wait... reason...? reality...wut?!], How much further will you continue reading in the thousands of pages that were explicitly concocted to justify his ideal system?
When you see that someone's ideas and plans are inviting you to blindly enter into their matrix, so as to destroy your ability to think anything other than someone else's ideas, what more do you need to drop them like a hot potato? If you don't begin your thinking from a principled position that's rooted in a metaphysical understanding of reality, causality, logic, and ethics that is available to every human being by virtue of being human, how will you be able to recognize that system that is constructed to appeal to your basest desires, for the evil fantasy that it is? America was the result of the best of the West, and the SCSR as expressed by Thomas Reid, Beattie, James Wilson, and others of our Founders' era, which made it possible to see and to reject the idea matrix of modernity. But gradually, progressively, over the years, We The People have allowed that foundation to be eroded, and we allowed it for 'The Common Good!'.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Understand Classic American Liberalism and decline to be mislabeled
When the 'Economic' wizards invite you to step into their wizard's circle of 'managing the economy', you need to recognize it for what it is: a choice between the reality of living a life worth living, and that of an isolated, confused, and meaningless miasma of competing powers and fleeting utilitarian pleasures of ever diminishing Value.
My position follows from being aware that 'economic thinking' is fundamentally rooted in the truly pro-regressive presumption that power should be used to violate the principle of individual rights and property, for the 'Greater Good', while also understanding that the 'Greater Good' is a utilitarian notion that implicitly entails creating a victim class of those deemed by pro-regressive T.U.R.D.'s to be at odds with those of the 'greater' class of the moment, as a fungible pretext for ensuring a steadily growing audience for the Oppressor/Oppressed narrative, that their dialectic is dependent upon.
That narrative can only be 'justified' by the modern system of epistemology that was concocted to deny and evade the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian understanding of metaphysics, in order to escape from identifying what is & is not a contradiction, so that Ethics could be reduced to meaningless rules that serve the current narrative, and therefore I reject the idea that the field of 'Economics' is a legitimate 'school of thought'.
Consequently, I reject their proposals to violate the lives and individual rights of all for the 'Greater Good', as a proposal with so little connection to what is real and true, that it is not even up to the level of even being considered wrong.
The fact is that unlike that period of Political Economy that thrived during our Founders era, 'Economics' is explicitly opposed to that which would give it an active and legitimate connection to what is real and true. 'Economic Thinking' has no basis in reality, and no matter how dazzlingly they claim or even succeed at predicting various inflationary rates, income distribution curves, or the 'velocity of money', they are no more able to validate 'a reality' inherent in their fundamental presumptions, that the accuracy of Ptolemy's epicycles validated that Mars orbited around the Earth.
'Economic Thinking' is one of the many notions that we should dismiss out of hand, and do so upon the same basis that:
- ... the physicist dismisses the schemes of perpetual motion cranks,
- ... we dismiss the baseless claims of alchemists to be able to transform lead into gold,
- ... we reject the tyrants claim that his word is and must be accepted as law,
- ... we recognize and reject idealism, pragmatism, modernism, post-modernism, and all of the various strains of critical theories, as incompatible with the reality of human nature, morality, science, and the long trail of human history.
- ... we reject contradictions because our embrace of what is real and true is just Common Sense
However many pages worth of HTML I've generated with this post, it can be boiled down to keeping one sentence in mind:
Our history has shown that those societies that have developed the ability to form laws respecting property and individual rights, to be necessary for unleashing the prosperity of free markets, filled with reasonable people who're able to use their law-abiding judgment, and have only developed out of the ideas and culture of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture of Western Civilization.
- What is this, does this follow from that, and if so, should it be followed?
That same history shows that the undermining and rejection of those ideas and principles, has consistently led to a rapid loss of prosperity and a return to barbarous brutality, misery, crime, war, and horrific scales of mass murder.
If we would like to experience a lessening of crime, barbarous behavior, and an increase in prosperity, we need to reject the 'economic thinking' which serves as a tool for forcing our society to obey the distant and arbitrary decisions of T.U.R.D.'s who's regulations can only inject stupidity and confusion into everyone's lives on the strength of a baseless promise to 'help' some supposed aspect of them, which can and will only cause unanticipated chaos, corruption, and a return to barbarism. See Bastiat's The Law.
And finally in conclusion, as that same history promises that if we turn away from the lure of 'economic thinking' and engage again instead in the pursuit of Political Economy and those ideas it was derived from, where the power of government is limited by a Rule of Law dedicated to upholding and defending the lives and individual rights and property of its people, restraining its powers from interfering in its people's education and commerce in matters other than to set standards of weights & measures, arbitrate and enforce contracts, patents, while diligently punishing fraud, embezzlement, abuse, and generally keeping the peace - as its role was widely understood to be at the time of our Founders, America and The West can show the way to greatness once again.
That scope cannot be fully encompassed under the newly popular label among the better folk who label themselves as 'Classical Liberals', of being 'anti-communist', because communism is far too narrow a term for what we're up against today. It's not a single philosophy, gnostic or not, that's taking us backwards, it's the burning desire that's been embedded into fields of religion, philosophy, art, history, education, law, and 'economics' - seeking above all to regress backwards past the true progress of our Founders' era, back even further than before Christianity, to sophistical paradise of the powerful who ruled before Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates.
And as only that small sliver of time and understanding within the 'Classical Liberal' period which gave birth to America, also rejects those ideas that have undermined it, the only description that I'll happily tape to my back, is that of a Classic American Liberal (thanks again Clint!)
They are Pro-Regressive, and what I am opposed to is that. So if you need any labels for me, they are: Classic American Liberal and Anti-ProRegressive.
So at least I've gotten that much out of my time on X-Twitter.
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