... They're still alive, and currently in control of about 3 dozen autonomous villages in Chiapas. Which is more than I can say for most Mexican revolutionary

I don’t think that “innocent” in “innocent suspect” can be understood as an alienans adjective just as such — an innocent suspect still is a suspect. For Jones to recognize Smith as innocent would be for Jones to no longer suspect them, but of course that’s an epistemic issue, whereas Smith’s innocence or guilt doesn’t depend on Jones’s state of knowledge.

It does have the interesting feature of being like Moore’s paradox in a certain respect — you have a description which is not internally contradictory (it’s perfectly possible for a person to be both innocent and also suspected), but nevertheless cannot be rationally applied in a first-person context (I can rationally say that someone you suspect is innocent, and I can even admit the possibility that someone I suspect is innocent; but I cannot coherently assert that that is actually the case, since for me to describe someone as innocent is for me to thereby remove them from my list of suspects).

Roderick: I’ve often seen it claimed that freedom for women was actually somewhat stronger in the late medieval period than in the early modern period. Of course I’ve seen the opposite claimed as well. I haven’t studied the issue enough to judge one way or another, but I don’t rule either position out.

One of the funny things that happens in discussions about this stuff is that the Middle Ages often get indicted for events that actually happened in the Renaissance and early modernity. One of the strong reasons for saying that early modernity Europe was even worse for women than medieval Europe had generally been, is the mass torture and mass murder of hundreds of thousands of women in the European witch-craze from the mid-15th through the mid-18th century.

Yet this gynocide is almost never discussed, except by a handful of feminist scholars, as an important feature of modernization; witch-hunts are far more commonly treated as either an isolated incident that just happened to overlap with the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, or, worse, as if it were somehow a medieval phenomenon, quite in spite of the fact that it didn’t start until the last half of the 15th century, whereas most secular and religious authorities in medieval western Europe, from Charlemagne up until the 14th century, held to the Augustinian doctrine that witches did not exist, that any belief in the efficacy of witchcraft was heretical, and even (as at the Council Frankfurt) held that witch-hunters could be punished by death.

MBH: But you can’t a priori rule-out the ability to commoditize debt

No, but I think you can discover some apriori conditionals (of the form “If condition X obtains, then you cannot successfully commoditize debt”). And I think that some of those conditions have antecedents which can be known (aposteriori) to be very unlikely to ever turn out false. (E.g., basic facts about the extreme diversity of ways of making a living and the extreme diversity of time-preferences among human beings.)

And, in any cae, like I said, I think that the important distinction between what’s being called “commodity money” here and other kinds of money isn’t actually the distinction between commoditized and non-commoditized goods, but rather an underlying distinction which (under present conditions) the commodity/non-commodity distinction tends to track — the distinction between goods in hand and promises of future delivery of goods. I certainly think that that distinction is conceptual, not just empirical, and has a lot of important features which can be spelled out apriori, on praxeological grounds.

MBH: especially were there program which did consider debtors on a case-by-case basis.

Huh? I’m not sure I understand where you’re going here. My point is that, to precisely the extent you have to consider debtors on a case-by-case basis, you’re (therefore) no longer treating debt as a commodity. People evaluate Van Goghs on a case-by-case baiss; they don’t buy barrels of petroleum or tons of wool that way.

MBH: Right? To classify as a commodity there just has to be demand somewhere.

No. Not all goods are commodities. Among other things, a commodity good is (1) fungible and (2) produced by multiple producers. But debt in general is not fungible: its value varies with the risk of default, among other things, which has historically made it very difficult to commoditize successfully.[^1] U.S. government debt (within particular classes of debt) is fungible (e.g., US$1 of one T-bill is as good as US$1 of another T-bill), but it’s fungible precisely because it is only put out by a single producer, not by multiple producers.

Of course, technical quibbles aside, the real point of distinction here is that the kinds of money called “commodity money” are typically based upon an existing good which is already in hand. (Because of the standard list of desiderata for monetary goods, the goods-in-hand tend very strongly to end up being classic commodity goods like precious metals, base metals, agricultural produce, etc.) The other kinds of money which we’re discussing are not a record of an already-existing good, but rather are based on promises for future delivery of some good which does not yet exist, or some service which has not yet been performed. (In the case of government fiat money, the “service” not yet performed is simply the “service” of not punching your head — that is, the value of the money comes from the fact that it pays your taxes.)

[^1]: Of course, there were some pretty prominent recent attempts to do so — that is, to convert debts into fungible goods by adopting some common standards of classification for the “quality” of the debt (e.g. the risk of default) which could be used as a reliable signal for the real value of the debts, without having to consider much of anything about debtors on a case-by-case basis.

You may have noticed that this has so far turned out rather poorly, and has generally not succeeded at its intended aims.

I demand a form of currency whose value remains constant in all frames of reference.

Monetize c!

Given that gold is currently trading at upwards of US $1,100 for a 1oz round about the size of an old dollar coin, dude must either have some really small pockets, or else needs to carry around a lot more money than most of us do.

Cal: I’m a degreed economist. I speak as a member of the economic profession.

Congratulations, kid, but speaking as a member of the profession is not the same thing as speaking for it. In this case you are clearly advocating a view of value which is distinct from that of praxeological theories such as Mises’s and Rothbard’s. (Mises would argue that predecessors like Menger also, at least implicitly, advocated a praxeological view of value at odds with the view that you are advancing; whether that interpretive claim is right or not, the point is that at least some of the folks you claim to be speaking for here do not actually accept the way you are trying to formulate things.)

Cal: All significant, modern economic schools (as in post-Keynes) are conceptually founded on marginalism

That’s fascinating. But since I just told you that my purpose here has nothing to do with arguing against marginalism (or, for that matter, against subjective theories of value), why are you telling me this?

Cal: When Mises is talking about “value for the purposes of economics,” he is not talking about value qua value – he is talking about the revelation of value.

Again, Cal, Mises does not accept the legitimacy of the distinction that you are trying to make between “value qua value” and “the revelation of value.” This is a distinction that you would like to make; it is not a distinction that Mises accepts. (In fact, it is part and parcel of Mises’s conception of praxeology that he rejects it.) You may think that there is some secret meaning behind the phrase “have no independent existence” which allows you to attribute to Mises a view on which value actually can be characterized as existing independently of comparison amongst an ordinally ranked system of alternatives, but I don’t know why you expect anyone to take such a claim seriously.

Cal: the point of revelation vs. more fundamental thing is made

That may be your point. It’s not Von Mises’s. Again, he makes it quite clear in the opening conceptual analysis of action and of value that he rejects the notion of a “more fundamental thing” to value than value-as-revealed-preference. Perhaps you think that this point needs to be made because you have confused an account of value-formation with a conceptual analysis of value per se — that is, committed a rather crude genetic fallacy — and supposed that, since Von Mises isn’t addressing value-formation in his remarks, he must be addressing something “less fundamental” when he discusses revealed value. But if so, you’ve simply missed the import of his argument on a very fundamental point.

Cal: There is a difference between claiming that labor-entailment may tend to affect subjective valuation (still an essentially nonsensical claim) and stating that it does, unqualified. Check basic logic on modality here.

Well, no. You might want to consider the form of statement that Thompson (2008) calls an “Aristotelian categorical” — for example, “Cats have four legs” or “The human female gives birth to live young” — as well as other common related usages, such as “Eating cheese makes me feel sick” or “Cats like me.” If you ever spend much time on the logic of modal terms, you may come to see that there are actually lots of things asserted in a categorical mode which state a real relationship but do not actually involve either a claim of necessity, or a claim of actual universality.

Cal: Also, stating that “costs” in the broad sense of the word affect subjective valuation is meaningless. Cost, disutility, is also subjective.

I’m aware that cost is subjective. You might have gleaned the fact that I’m aware of it from the fact that I said as much in the note you’re supposedly replying to. Before you begin your next lecture, you might want to take the time to read what people are telling you.

The reason I brought it up is because you made a statement which was oversimplified to the point of being extremely misleading (“Nothing does necessarily affect subjective valuation. It is 100% subjective”). Either this claim means (1) that nothing necessarily affects the subjective valuation of a single marginal good, considered in isolation from other concurrent valuations — in which case the claim is flatly false, since economic rationality requires that concurrent valuations (including the valuation of costs) form a consistent preference-ordering; or else (2) that nothing other than other subjective valuations affects the system of subjective valuations as a whole — in which case the claim is vacuously true (because any mental state which necessarily affects the system of subjective valuations becomes counted as part of that system, just by that very fact), but non-responsive, since it doesn’t actually do anything to refute or even to complicate Marja’s point about costs.

Cal: The attempt does not, at all, in any way, presuppose anything about the fundamental nature of the formation of value.

I didn’t say that your attempted distinction presupposed something about “the fundamental nature of the formation of value.” I certainly realize that Mises didn’t say anything in the passage I quoted about value-formation, but then, neither have I. What I said was about Mises’s view on what it means to say that Jones economically values X. Not his view on how Jones forms that value for X.

Cal: Mises is not saying value is comparative, he is saying that it is revealed comparatively (ordinally) and subjectively.

You’re asserting this, but where’s your argument? I gave you specific passages of text in which Mises straightforwardly says that for the purposes of economics value does not exist independently of the revealing of comparative preferences in action. Not that it isn’t known by third parties; that it has no independent existence. For Mises, there just is nothing for economics to talk about separate from actual or hypothetical revealed values. (Which, necessarily, express a consistent ordinal ranking. Among other things.) Of course, you can agree or disagree with Mises’s views about the conceptual analysis of value — it certainly sounds like you are more interested in the sort of psychologistic perspective that Mises rejected — but then you should perhaps speak only for yourself, and not for “all modern economics,” or for all proponents of the subjective theory of value.

As for explaining marginalism 101 to me, you can save yourself the effort. I already understand how that works. My comments here have nothing to do with rejecting marginal utility theory.

Cal: No, Marja, labor-entailment does not necessarily affect subjective valuation.

1. She didn’t say it “necessarily affects subjective valuation.” She said it does affect it. Note the difference in modality. One can correctly assert that a general tendency obtains without claiming that it is a necessary or conceptual truth.

2. However, I will also note that, given the meaning of the term “cost,” basic requirements of rationality do require that costs have a certain bearing on value-ordering. (For something to count as a cost is for it to lower a state of affairs in an actor’s preference order, ceteris paribus. If it did not, then it must not really be a cost for that economic subject.) Hence there are at least some factors that necessarily affect subjective valuations — among them costs — because they are themselves already part of subjective valuations, and valuations, to count as valuations, must be part of a consistent ordering.

dennis,

You might be interested to read this article from last summer’s issue of The Match!, where Fred Woodworth argues much the same claim. As Woodworth points out, what’s going on isn’t just a matter of government police consciously emulating military training, attitudes, tactics and equipment (although they do do all of that); it’s also a matter of them getting militarized just in simple terms of personnel, through many active programs (in collaboration with the Feds) to recruit former government soldiers after their tour in occupied Iraq or occupied Afghanistan has come to end.