It's true that in a society without government, nobody would have inflicted that worker-killing, industry-subsidizing, unsustainable, ecocidal clusterfuck on the Mojave desert. I also think in a society without government, nobody would be spending trillions of dollars to bail out failed financial companies; and probably nobody would be building robot death planes to fire missiles at Pakistani weddings. In each of these cases, I don't consider that to be a *problem* for a society without government; I consider it to be one of the *best things about the idea.*

It's true that in a society without government, nobody would have inflicted that worker-killing, industry-subsidizing, unsustainable, ecocidal clusterfuck on the Mojave desert. I also think in a society without government, nobody would be spending trillions of dollars to bail out failed financial companies; and probably nobody would be building robot death planes to fire missiles at Pakistani weddings. In each of these cases, I don't consider that to be a *problem* for a society without government; I consider it to be one of the *best things about the idea.*

Dan,

It’s not clear to me what level the question is supposed to be asked on. If it’s a question about moral ideals — what really ought to be done — then I think the obvious answer is complete and permanent repudiation — government debts …cannot be repaid except through government revenues, and government revenues are always extracted by force from unwilling third parties (viz., us). Those of us from whom they are extracted never consented to the debt at all, and have a perfect right to refuse to pay one damned dime. Of course, if those who did contract the debt (viz., governors at various levels) want to pay out of their own pockets, or to pass the plate and ask for donations, they should be free to do so. But I personally don’t give much of a damn whether or not U.S. or Chinese banks or petrocrat “sovereign wealth funds” ever get “their” money back. I’d be just as happy if they all starved.

If it’s supposed to be asked on a level that’s constrained in some sense by practical political possibilities, then I think the answer is still repudiation, but for a different reason. Not only are none of the possible “solutions” to the structural problem (massive spending cuts and/or tax increases to gain tax-surpluses, selling government “property” out to big buyers, etc.) even minimally just; they aren’t minimally likely, either. Nobody in government is going to do the things that they would practically need to do in order to reduce deficits or pay down government debts because they make decisions on a political, not a fiscal, basis, and face structural incentives that make permanent, sky-high-and-growing government debts not only unavoidable, but actually quite attractive. The structural constraints are such that they are almost surely never going to stop running up debts until their capacity to continue running them up breaks down completely and irreparably (either due to diminishing returns from tax increases, or due to diminishing returns from inflation, or from a complete crack-up bust of the financial system); at which point they will partially or entirely repudiate anyway. (The hope is that they will repudiate entirely because they will collapse and not get up again. But whether they do or not, I have no expectation that any politician would or could ever do anything to pay off the government’s debts, ever.)

Mark Uzick: I’m saying that, when addressing a non-radicalized statist audience, they are using “social justice” instead of “socialism”, “communism”, reparations for slavery or “redistribution of wealth”.

Christ. Generally they are using it instead of those terms because it better expresses their intended meaning, not because they are intending to deceive. “Communism” for example is not some kind of general synonym for “out of control economic statism.” It means something quite specific about institutions of property ownership in an ideal social order and most of the people who spend a lot of time talking about “social justice” (like, say, Sen or Nussbaum or “Progressive” welfare statists generally) don’t believe in it. Their views are objectionable for other reasons, but if you go around saying “A-ha! When you say ‘social justice,’ that is really just a code-word for organized collective ownership of all but small-scale possessory property, and a system of free distribution based on stated desire, or (in cases of shortage) collectively-determined need!” then you are just going to make an ass of yourself, because that’s generally not what your interlocutor really believes in, either at the beginning or at the end of the day.

“Social justice” is in any case a term which is intended to encompass a lot more concerns than just a concern with overall distributions of wealth or property-ownership. Nussbaum’s Sex and Social Justice, for example, discusses, alongside quite a few economic topics, other topics such as female genital mutilation, the objectification of women in pornography, the criminalization of prostitution, prohibitions on gay marriage, and the use of coagulated social power to deny women opportunities for sexual joy. This sort of discussion fits pretty awkwardly, to say the least, within any narrowly economic interpretation of what “social justice” is supposed to mean. To try to reduce “social justice” to a simple slogan about, e.g., achieving a more “progressive” or egalitarian distribution of wealth, is to seriously distort what the people who use the term are saying.

And even “welfare queens” vote in elections.

Because we all know how efficacious voting is as a means of getting your intended political outcomes.

I imagine that in ancient Rome, some of the urban plebs frequently prayed Jupiter that Caesar would never reduce their state corn ration. But if you don’t believe that Jupiter actually answers prayers, whatever this may say about their personal character (*), you certainly shouldn’t take this as a reason to regard them as part of the effective ruling class.

(*) I don’t think it actually says much about that, either.

People won’t think of or believe in M.T. as a principle, but particular examples of M.T. may become a fallacy that someone or some group believes.

I have no idea what you’re referring to here. M.T. is not a fallacy. It is a valid rule of inference. Its validity of course is demonstrable and has nothing to do with what “someone or some group believes.” My question had to do with what observations could possibly have served as an inductive basis for knowing that it is valid (not merely that people tend to accept it when shown it in action, but that it is truth-preserving in all possible worlds, etc. etc.). The upshot of the question is that if there is no such inductive basis, then, since M.T. is in fact valid, the knowledge that it is valid must come from some source other than induction.

Given sufficient time, the falsification will come to enough M.T. type fallacies to noticed by someone paying attention. Eventually, someone might classify all these cases as a particular type of fallacy.

Anyone can classify anything as anything. The question is whether they are classifying them rightly, and what would provide evidence for the classification. I was not asking what kind of paperwork someone might do on “noticing” that M.T.’s validity had been falsified; the question, however, was what set of contrary observations could possibly provide sufficient evidence for the decision that M.T.’s validity had been falsified in the first place, or could reasonably justify the classification of all its instances as fallacies.

Market anarchists see freed markets, under conditions of free competition, as tending to diffuse wealth and dissolve fortunes—with a centrifugal effect on incomes, property-titles, land, and access to capital—rather than concentrating it in the hands of a socioeconomic elite. Market anarchists recognize no de jure limits on the extent or kind of wealth that any one person might amass; but they believe that market and social realities will impose much more rigorous de facto pressures against massive inequalities of wealth than any de jure constraint could achieve.

–Charles Johnson

My answer is that even deductive logic and all of metaphysics had to, at some point, be derived using inductive logic as a basis.

Really? What series of repeated observations led you to inductively infer that modus tollens (*) is a deductively valid form of inference?

Is there a different series of observations which might have falsified the validity of M.T., had you encountered it? If so, what would the hypothetical falsifying case(s) look like?

(*) “If p, then q. It is not the case that q. Therefore: it is not the case that p. QED.”

I hesitate to wade into this when I haven’t read much of the recent contributions. But I am pretty sure that Internet is not the sort of thing that the author of the Tractatus means to treat under the heading of “formal concepts.”

The examples that he gives in 4.1272 are “object,” “thing,” “complex,” “fact,” “function,” and “number” (with an “etc.” suggesting that there may be more).

What marks them as deserving of special attention is not the extent to which they are “implicit” or somehow pragmatically presupposed by this or that proposition (as, say, the existence of the Internet might be presupposed by the attempt to intervene in an endless blog comment thread). Lots of proper concepts, ordinary objects, etc. are in that way. (An attempt so to intervene presupposes the Internet in roughly the same way that it presupposes my computer’s keyboard.)

Rather, what marks them as deserving of special attention is the role they play in the elucidation of logical form. 4.1271 says that in a propositional variable (for example, “x is a book”, “x is evenly divisible by y”) the variable places are the signs for formal concepts (presumably in “x is a book” “x” is supposed to be the sign for the formal concept object; in the second case, “x” and “y” are signs for the formal concept number).

To mention the formal concept which a variable-sign signifies is to mention something about “the constant form that all its values [the values of a particular variable] possess,” that is, the role that giving a value to the variable plays in giving a definite meaning to the proposition.

If it helps, you might think of this in connection with PI 1 and the discussion of “kinds of word” or parts of speech. You can say “8 is a number” if you like; but the point here seems to be that this is to show which variable-places in a propositional variable 8 could be a candidate value for. This is in some sense like saying “Dog is a noun,” or “To bark is a verb.” They tell you something about where you might put the signs into a meaningful sentence, and the sort of role that the signs you put in would play in giving the sentence its meaning. To say that “dog is a noun” is not to give some sort of special information — even very basic information — about dogs; to say that “8 is a number” is — according to the author of the Tractatus — not to give some sort of very basic information about 8, but rather simply to elucidate the role that the sign “8″ plays in giving meaning to a proposition like “There are 8 books on the shelf and none on the floor.”

Had I actually been carrying contraband, no doubt I would have been more particular about closely adhering to traffic laws. However, given how easy it is for police to gin up a pretext from one of the <a href="http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/06/09/10000_ways/">10,000 or so</a> excuses they have at their disposal, I think that reminding people of police-state tactics, advising them not to cooperate with police, advising them not to talk with police, and advising them not to consent to any searches, are all probably more useful pieces of counsel than telling them that being more law-abiding will somehow keep them safe from invasive police tactics.