Comments Elsewhere

... Jeff, I think the U.S. government's record of military experiments on non-consenting subjects is a better example here than Northwoods. Northwoods was easy

... What positive effect, exactly, has having "one (1) voice for liberty" in Congress had? ... Well, no, he's not "fighting" anything. He's sitting in

... Joshua, Do you make no distinction between views which are (as a matter of fact) wrong, and those which are the product of cognitive vices like ignorance,

... If we're going to go for big secret government conspiracies that managed to stay secret for long enough to achieve the government's intended purpose, I'd

... Hash: SHA1 ... Perhaps it has done both, at different times and different places? The Church has been around a long time -- say about 1,600-1,800 years in

... Hash: SHA1 ... The people affiliated with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute are certainly not against natural rights, as a rule. Most if not all of them are

... Hash: SHA1 ... Michael, That's certainly one way in which the term "capitalism" is used. (Specifically, that's how a number of individualist anarchists and

Yeah. One of the notable subcategories of failed predictions, which, in the interest of brevity, I didn’t really discuss at much length, are the number of things which Kurzweil predicts which actually are now feasible or already implemented, and which have in some sense broken through — but as permanent niche products, which remain popular with a select class of people for a select few applications, and which pose no foreseeable threat of displacing anything or taking over the world like Kurzweil imagined they would. Reliable speech-to-text software is another example — you can pick up Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a couple hundred dollars and it’s good enough that a number of professional writers use it to do more or less all their writing. It’s just that all of them happen to have carpal tunnel syndrome or severe motor disabilities. Just about everyone else still uses a keyboard, even on devices like iPhones that don’t even have a physical keyboard (but do have a physical microphone, which could have been used for speech-recognition if anyone cared enough to insist on it).

It’s not that these technologies aren’t available, or even that they are priced out of most people’s reach; it’s just that people have the technology now but most of us don’t have much of a use for it as of yet. And there are, of course, drawbacks and trade-offs involved (you may love the idea of dictating your latest memo; but do you really want to hear all of your coworkers dictating theirs at the same time?), which futurists characteristically fail to take any account of.

If the mic cut-out occurs during a discussion of malign spontaneous orders, one thing to keep in mind is that Roderick does have a pun associated with that discussion — “spontaneous ordure” — which may be the occasion for both the groaning and the apologies, rather than anyone getting upset over the content of the claim.

Kevin Carson:

Similarly, the labor theory of value is based, not on an inductive generalization from the observed movement of prices, but on an a priori assumption about why price approximates cost, except to the extent to which some natural or artificial scarcity causes deviations from this relationship. (Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, pp. 70-73)

J. Neil:

Translation: Kevin Carson has some blue-sky theory out of his ass — without looking at what happens in the real world

Now we have J. Neil Schulman, who claims to be an admirer of Ludwig von Mises, objecting to the use of aprioristic economic theory as “blue sky-theory out of his ass without looking at what happens in the real world.” Awesome.

Ludwig von Mises:

Consequently, a proposition of an aprioristic theory can never be refuted by experience. Human action always confronts experience as a complex phenomenon that first must be analyzed and interpreted by a theory before it can even be set in the context of an hypothesis that could be proved or disproved; hence the vexatious impasse created when supporters of conflicting doctrines point to the same historical data as evidence of their correctness. … Disagreements concerning the probative power of concrete historical experience can be resolved only by reverting to the doctrines of the universally valid theory, which are independent of all experience. Every theoretical argument that is supposedly drawn from history necessarily becomes a logical argument about pure theory apart from all history.

(Ludwig von Mises, “Epistemologial Problems of Economics”, Ch. 1, s. II.2)

J. Neil:

If Kevin’s theory could accurately describe price fluctuations in a free market, Kevin wouldn’t be making his living emptying bedpans for a living. He’d be a filthy rich Wall-Street broker.

1. Again. We don’t live in a free market.

2. And, now we have J. Neil Schulman, who claims to be an admirer of Ludwig von Mises, apparently objecting not only to the use of aprioristic theory in economics, but also believing that an accurate economic theory ought to produce quantitative predictions. Really, dude?

Do you know anything in particular about Ludwig von Mises’s economics? You just angrily dismissed to two of the three central ideas that von Mises is known for. (At least you didn’t bring up Kevin’s work on calculation problems in big corporations, which would have given you an opportunity to angrily dismiss the third.) All of which indicates to me that you are either ranting in utter ignorance, or else you just don’t give much of a damn about what’s true and what’s false, as long as you get to slam Kevin Carson in the process.

In either case, you ought to be embarrassed.