Tag: debate

Inflation vs Deflation IV

Nate has put together an excellent response entitled Mount Chapter 3, the full significance of which I suspect even he doesn’t recognize yet, but which I will begin to illuminate in my next post on the subject:

So… now here we sit happily atop Mount Chapter Three.  Ain’t the view grand?  Now… with all of this as a basis of monetary understanding… we can address Vox’s traps… I mean… questions.

1. Are gold and silver commodity money?  All gold and silver?  Money is a condition that can be deferentially diagnosed by behavior.  Are they functioning like money?  Then they are money.  Its the behavior that makes them money.  It is the commercial commodity that lends subjective value and thus allows us to categorize them in LVM’s terms.

2. Are the Federal Reserve Notes, in both cash and deposit form, commodity money or fiat money?  The standard answer is fiat.  But in reality FRN’s have characteristics of both credit money and fiat money.

3.Does TMS2 represent your definition of the money supply? No.  like M2  it is only a useful tool for estimation.  It is flawed… but it serves for watching trends.  I am agnostic on the claim that money supply can even be measured  accurately.  But I lean toward it being a pure impossibility.  Its like watching ants at a huge ant mound.  You have no idea how many ants are actually there…  guessing is pointless… but you can stand back and watch them and tell if the swarm is growing or shrinking.

4. What are the various components of TMS2, commodity money, fiat money, or some combination therein?  Given the nature of my explanation of Chapter 3’s 4 types of money… its abundantly clear that all categories in TMS2 are fiat money.  Many are credit money as well… but its impossible to parce in our banking system due to the various shenanigans… AND… if you listen to Ludwig… well…

“As a rule it is not possible to ascertain whether a concrete specimen of money-substitutes is a money-certificate or a fiduciary medium” 
– Human Action( p. 433)

With apologies to Vox, he has taken a large list of money substitutes and asked me to  do what Mises says literally cannot be done.

Read the rest of it there.  As for those who are concerned about the score, I think I can assure you, that is almost certainly the least interesting aspect of this debate.  Not, of course, that I am conceding anything in the slightest.  I am just as capable of seeing the obvious as anyone else, the difference is that I also see that which is, apparently, considerably less obvious.

Inflation vs Deflation III

Nearly twenty years ago, I reached the finals of a karate tournament.  It was the third and final point-fighting tournament of my brief career and the first one in which I wasn’t ejected in the first match for “excessive contact”.  (I never liked point-fighting, which is essentially a version of tag.)  My opponent in the final was a good friend from my dojo, a sort of pocket Hercules who could do six reps at 275 and whose nickname was Terminator.

Our sensei encouraged the referee to let things go for once, we both fully unleashed on the other, but after the scheduled two minutes was up and the score was only 2-2, the referee turned to our sensei before the overtime and said “do these guys fight each other every day or something?”  No matter how fast and hard we threw our kicks and punches, it was very hard to penetrate the other’s defenses because we both knew perfectly well what the other guy was intending.

In like manner, because Nate and I are both familiar, and more or less in accordance, with Austrian School economics, a lot of this debate is likely to strike readers less familiar with it as pointless.  But rest assured, it is not.  It is precisely because the windows of opportunity are going to be small that an amount of testing and probing for weakness is going to be required.  Also, as a long-time reader of this blog, Nate is very familiar with my approach to critical discourse and is going to be exceedingly wary of the various traps I habitually lay for my interlocutors.  So, be patient and try to resist the urge to try to leap ahead, because this is not going to proceed immediately to the superficially obvious chasm, which is the different opinions concerning debt, that separates us.

In his first response, Nate indicated his acceptance of the monetary tradition of Turgot with two critical addenda.  He writes:

Note that nowhere in either of Vox’s proposed definitions do we find this critical factor.  Turgot omits it.  Law omits it.  Mises, Rothbard, Salerno.. and pretty much every other Austrian has agreed that the key factor of money is the fact that it completes a transaction.  Completing a transaction is the one thing that money does, that nothing else does.  In the interest of charity and goodwill… I will suggest that Turgot’s characteristics of money are all fine with me… provided that we remember that the value supposedly stored by the money is subjective, and, we add the requirement that I have hitherto beaten into the ground.  It must serve to complete the transaction.

I have no objection to either addendum and am content to accept it as a reasonable definition of money for the moment, although I reserve the right to propose alternative definitions should this definition prove to be insufficient in the course of the debate.  So, this leaves us with the following characteristics of money:

  1. A medium of exchange
  2. A unit of expression
  3. An object of commerce i.e. an exchangeable good
  4. A tool of economic calculation
  5. An intrinsic store of subjective value
  6. A completer of transactions

Before I proceed further, I must first explicitly answer the question Nate posed to me:

Lots of things store value.  Lots of things can be used to estimate value. Lots of things can be employed to aid in an exchange.   Money does all of those things.  But money is the only thing that does all of those things, and completes an exchange without creating a need for another transaction.  True or false?

Again, for the sake of argument and in the interest of charity and goodwill, I can only answer one way: true.  Armed as we now are with this expanded definition of money, we can proceed to begin considering the question of the money supply.  In doing so, I would recall to Nate the following two statements by Mises, with which we already know, from his previous post, he is almost surely familiar.

“We may give the name of commodity money to that sort of money that is at the same time a commercial commodity; and that of fiat money to money that comprises things with a special legal qualification. A third category may be called credit money, this being that sort of money which constitutes a claim against any physical or legal person. But these claims must not be both payable on demand and absolutely secure; if they were, there could be no difference between their value and that of the sum of money to which they referred, and they could not be subjected to an independent process of valuation on the part of those who dealt with them.”
  –  Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 61

“The nominalists assert that the monetary unit, in modem countries at any rate, is not a concrete commodity unit that can be defined in suitable technical terms, but a nominal quantity of value about which nothing can be said except that it is created by law. Without touching upon the vague and nebulous nature of this phraseology, which will not sustain a moment’s criticism from the point of view of the theory of value, let us simply ask: What, then, were the mark, the franc, and the pound, before 1914? Obviously, they were nothing but certain weights of gold.”
  –  Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 66

The same, of course, is true of the thaler, or dollar, of which the U.S. version is 24.057 grams of silver.  This, naturally, leads me to conclude with the following questions, to which I should like to see Nate’s answers:

  1. Are gold and silver commodity money?
  2. Are the Federal Reserve Notes, in both cash and deposit form, commodity money or fiat money?
  3. Does TMS2 represent your definition of the money supply?
  4. What are the various components of TMS2, commodity money, fiat money, or some combination therein?

Inflation vs Deflation I

Since I agreed to start the debate, I did not go back and re-read Nate’s initial and inadvertent post on the subject to which I linked last week.  This is not a response to that post, but as will soon become readily apparent, is a reversion to the foundation for our difference of opinion.

There are, as those who will recall my pair of YouTube videos on the subject, a variety of definitions of inflation.  The Neo-Keynesians alone have no less than five: theoretical, official, textbook, practical, and core.  It’s not necessary to get into any of them now, however, because they all eventually point to the same subject, and ultimately, the same question: what is money?  This is the crux of the matter, because despite the various opinions concerning the subject of inflation, what it is, and precisely what causes it, there is no extant theory of economics that takes serious exception to Milton Friedman’s statement that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”, the outdated and long-disproven Keynesian notion that it is a phenomenon somehow inversely related to unemployment notwithstanding.

In reviewing the various definitions of money and looking at everything from Richard Cantillon to the three major current schools, Samuelsonian, Friedmanite, and Austrian, it rapidly became clear that the Austrian School economist, Joseph Salerno, had already walked the path that I was beginning to tread in his excellent paper “Two Traditions in Modern Monetary Theory: John Law and A.R.J. Turgot”, which is the first essay in his book Money, Sound and Unsound.  In this essay, Salerno shows that there are fundamentally two competing ideas about money, neither of which are even remotely new, as both monetary doctrines predate Adam Smith.

Of the first tradition, which dates back to John Law, Salerno writes:

In 1705, Law published his principal work on money, entitled Money and Trade Considered: With a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money. Law’s “proposal” was intended to provide his native Scotland with a plentiful supply of money endowed with a long-run stability of value. The institutional centerpiece envisioned in Law’s scheme resembles a modern central bank, empowered to supply paper fiat money via the purchases and sales of securities and other assets on the open market. Also strikingly modern are the theoretical propositions with which Law supports his policy goals and prescriptions.

Law initiates his monetary theorizing with two fundamental assumptions about the nature and function of money. The first is that if money is not exactly an original creation of political authority, it ideally functions as a tool to be molded and wielded by government. Law believes that the State, as incarnated in the King, is the de facto “owner” of the money supply and that it therefore possesses the right and the power to determine the composition and quantity of money in light of the “public interest.”

Writes Law:All the coin of the Kingdom belongs to the State, represented in France by the King: it belongs to him in precisely the same way as the high roads do, not that he may appropriate them as his own property, but in order to prevent others doing so; and as it is one of the rights of the King, and of the King alone, to make changes in the highways for the benefit of the public, of which he (or his officers) is the sole judge, so it is also one of his rights to change the gold or silver coin into other exchange tokens, of greater benefit to the public.…

Translating Law’s statement into modern terms, money is an “instrument” that is or should be deliberately designed to achieve the “policy goals” considered desirable by political money managers and other government planners.

Law’s second basic assumption is that money serves solely as a “voucher for buying goods” or an “exchange token.” Thus, for Law, “Money is not the value for which goods are exchanged, but the value by which they are exchanged: The use of money is to buy goods and silver, while money is of no other use.” In other words, money is a dematerialized claim to goods having no valuable use in itself.

It is more than a little startling to read Law’s statements, particularly in light of the smug, self-satisfied way we hear the same sentiments echoed more than three hundred years later by those who think themselves clever for realizing that money has no intrinsic value, and therefore, cannot possibly serve as a store of value in its own right, as it only possesses the exchange value conferred upon it by the power of the State.

Salerno notes that the Law monetary tradition is the dominant one, and comments: “The neo-Keynesians, monetarists, and supply-siders, differ among themselves in important areas of theory and policy, but all share most of Law’s fundamental ideas about money.”  He goes into some detail concerning the primary factors the three schools share concerning money and monetary policy, which include:

  1. Money as a policy tool
  2. Money as an exchange token
  3. Stabilization of the price level
  4. The resource costs of a commodity money
  5. The supply of money as a political monopoly

I will not go into detail to support Salerno’s conclusions, but a brief glimpse at the most influential textbook in modern economic history, Paul Samuelson’s Economics, should suffice to prove that they are fair and accurate.

“There are two distinct functions of money: as a medium of exchange and as a standard unit of value….  We may summarize our analysis of the use of money by listing its two essential functions: (1) as a medium of exchange and (2) as a standard unit of account or common denominator of values.”
– Economics, pp 57-58

    The second and competing monetary tradition traces back to Turgot, the man whom Joseph Schumpeter and the Austrian School tend to regard, with Richard Cantillon, as the true father of modern economics, whose rightful place in the history of economic thought has been usurped by Adam Smith.  Of the Turgot tradition, Salerno writes:

    Turgot flatly rejects Law’s primary contention that money is merely an exchange token, whose supply must be manipulated by the political authorities in order to achieve selected policy goals. According to Turgot money is essentially a medium of exchange and the unit in which relative prices are expressed: “These two properties, of serving as a common measure of all values [i.e., the unit in which all prices are expressed] and of being a representative pledge of all commodities of a like value [i.e., the medium of exchange], include all that constitutes the essence and utility of what is called money.…”

    As Turgot points out, however, these two functions of money can only be performed by an article which is already widely used, valued, and exchanged under barter: “… all money is essentially merchandise. We can take for a common measure of values only that which has a value, and which is received in Commerce in exchange for other values: and there is no pledge universally representative of a value save another equal value.” Since money thus necessarily originates as a useful commodity from within the market economy itself, Turgot emphatically denies the possibility that “a purely conventional money” without a pre-existing purchasing power can be imposed from outside the market. According to Turgot, “It is not in virtue of a convention that money is exchanged against all other values; it is because money itself is an object of commerce, a part of wealth, because it itself has a value, and in trade all values are exchanged against equal values.”

     So, the primary factors of money in the Turgot tradition are:

    1. A medium of exchange
    2. A unit of expression
    3. An object of commerce i.e. an exchangeable good
    4. A tool of economic calculation
    5. An intrinsic store of value

    Having laid out the two primary definitions of money, I now turn it over to Nate to declare which of these two competing traditions he holds to be money, or if he has some third definition of money he believes would be better utilized concerning this debate.

    The Great Inflation-Deflation Debate

    Nate forces my hand by kicking it off on his own blog:

    It appears to me that there seems to be a bit of confusion out there about what the money supply is doing.  Is it growing?  is it shrinking?  Inflation?  Deflation?  Stagflation?   Obviously I am a hyper-inflationist…   Our buddy Vox is a deflationist.  So what gives?  Does it matter?

    Well… if we’re going to talk about this we’re going to have to establish some kind of basic vocabulary.  For example… what is money?  I know… you’re thinking dollar bills and coins.  Yes and no.  Money is an exchange medium that is used to complete a transaction.  The critical characteristic of money is that it does not require any additional transactions to satisfy the terms of the exchange.  You got your money… and that’s good enough.  Lets look at gold for example.  Gold is money.  It always has been money.  You want some of my cattle… you give me a small amount of gold… and we’re done.  Modern cash is similar.  You give me cash.. I give you a cow or two… we’re done.  Cash is money.

    What about debit cards?  I swipe your debit card… I give you cows…  we’re not done.  Your bank has to send money to my bank.  That’s an additional transaction.  Debit cards aren’t money.   Same for checks.  Checks aren’t money either.  They are IOUs for money.

    Go to his place.  Read the whole thing.  If it doesn’t make sense, read it again.  Grok it in its fullness.  I will respond here within one week.

    A debate challenge is issued

    My recent opponent on the issue of sexual equality, Ed Trinmell, has presented a debate challenge, which I have accepted:

    Within eight hours of the debate challenge I issued to feuding bloggers John Scalzi and Vox Day, Vox responded positively in the comment threads of the original post.

    Half of the debating lineup is on board. But what about the other man?

    Within an hour of my debate challenge post, John Scalzi mysteriously posted an ad hominem attack against his opposition. Scalzi now states that he will make a charitable contribution at the end of 2013 in lieu of further acknowledgements of Vox Day, who has agreed to debate him in a neutral venue….

    Should John Scalzi agree to this debate for the benefit of Children International, I will volunteer to function as moderator. My ground rules will be as follows:

    • This will be a civil, professional, and dignified debate. I will not allow ad hominem attacks, profanity, or excessive sarcasm from either man.
    • This debate will be fair and ideologically balanced. The questions will be equally weighted so as to favor neither Vox Day nor John Scalzi.
    • Specifically, I will challenge Vox regarding his views of women in the political process (which I am on record as opposing). I will challenge John regarding the premises behind his now-infamous “straight white male” essay—which generated a lot of controversy on the Internet last summer.

    It’s certainly an intriguing challenge.  Can I present a credible and convincing case for opposing equality in the political process?  Does McRapey have anything to offer in support of his claims of racial, sexual, and orientational equality beyond false game analogies and repetitive ad hominem attacks?

    And then there is the question that all impartial parties will surely be asking: does John Scalzi possess the courage required to take the risk of having his spinal column metaphorically ripped from him in public?  My guess is that he does not.  He’s a rabbit.  He’s a gamma male.  His blog readership is smaller than mine.  His intellectual influence is miniscule in comparison with mine. He has no original ideas; he’s little more than a parrot.  I strongly suspect that he cannot credibly defend his assertions, which is why he merely repeats them over and over again.

    Just as PZ Myers disheartened his supporters by twice backing down, I assume that Scalzi will find a way to rationalize his inability to defend his views in public.  That lack of courage, that manifest lack of confidence in the strength of his positions, is one reason my influence will continue to grow in comparison with his, as was the case with regards to the Fowl Atheist, who is increasingly regarded as a joke even within the atheist community.  Dr. Myers tried the “I’m too important to waste my time on a crackpot” approach back in June 2008, when my readership was 38.5 percent of what it is now.  It may be worth noting that Mr. Scalzi’s fans appear to be woefully ignorant concerning the facts of the situation.  Consider this tweet directed to my attention earlier today:

    “just a thought, but “superintelligence” doesn’t need to mooch off real thought leaders ( @scalzi ) to get people to notice you.”

    How, one wonders, can John Scalzi possibly be considered a “thought leader” of any kind?  He has no ideas of his own.  Even his fiction is openly derivative, whereas my original concepts have been cited in science journals, on Wikipedia, and provided scientists with hypotheses for which their subsequent experiments have found empirical evidence.  Furthermore, I have no need to mooch off anyone, least of all Mr. Scalzi, in order to get people to notice me.  Not only did he first come to my attention as a result of him and a number of other SFWA members reacting to one of my WND columns, but my blog readership first surpassed his in 2011.

    This failure to understand that there are two sides to the political spectrum is apparently a common misapprehension on the part of the left; some in the SF/F community have publicly complained about Black Gate giving me a platform despite the fact that nearly a quarter of its annual traffic in recent years has come from VP alone.

    A discourse on Euthyphro

    Since this exchange concerning the classic dialogue took place on Chad Orzel’s blog more than four years ago, a lot of you never had the chance to read it.  I think it’s worth posting here in its entirety because it is very nearly a textbook example of the way half-educated midwits who can’t believe they are not smarter than their intellectual superiors behave.  Notice how at every step along the way, there are repeated attempts to disengage, attempts to avoid having to support the naked assertions without recanting them, pointless passive-aggressive shots, and in general, a consistent effort avoid dealing with the actual subject at hand.  And, in the end, the hapless midwit simply runs away, still clinging to his now-exposed assertions, appealing to others in the hopes that they will pat him on the head and tell him that he is still a smart and good boy.

    This behavior is quite typical when dealing with the moderately intelligent.  They are so accustomed to being superior that they literally cannot grasp the idea that the thinking of the highly intelligent is as far beyond them as they are beyond those they regard as ignorant mouth-breathers.  Anyone who disagrees with them must be stupid and a bad thinker; the possibility that they are in over their heads despite their ability to even follow, much less address, the salient points genuinely does not occur to them.  This particular discourse began with a throwaway comment by one Jasper in reference to The Irrational Atheist.

    [T]here’s no reason not to allow him to continue to maintain those
    particular beliefs – although not necessarily the beliefs in the book
    itself, most of which are a little sad, insofar as he genuinely appears
    to think that he’s resolved the Euthyphro dilemma. (A clue: he hasn’t.)

    As usual, nothing but safely general comments… because you can’t make
    the specific case. Regarding Euthyphro, you’re about the 20th atheist
    to claim this. And yet, every time I ask the person to explain
    precisely how my resolution of the dilemma on either Christian or
    Socrates’s own terms is mistaken, they fall silent. Every single time.
    So, by all means, Jasper, please show how my resolutions of it are
    flawed, as I always like to improve my arguments. Post your critique on
    my blog or email it to me, I’ll post it in its entirety and we’ll see
    how valid it is.

    In seeking to resolve the dilemma, you state that At first
    glance, this looks easy enough, as simply substituting “obedience” for
    “the pious” will destroy the dilemma because it eliminates the tautology
    posed. One can’t do this since it’s not right to simply substitute
    whatever terms one likes and declare the problem solved.     Later in the argument, you then say: At
    this point we can reach three conclusions: 1. The Euthyphro “dilemma”
    is defeated by shifting the focus from “the pious” to “obedience,”
    therefore it is an inappropriate criticism of Christian morality that is
    founded on obedience to God’s Will.     So this point is based on you doing something that you have previously declared is not allowed.

    You also state that it can only be considered a genuine problem
    for those who insist that a fixed principle cannot be arbitrary. In
    other words, for those paying absolutely no attention to reality. There
    are a panoply of fixed variables which, if they were different than they
    are, would radically alter the reality of our universe.     Here you
    conflate moral principles with physical variables; but they are not the
    same, and consequently this point is irrelevant.

    You finally state that The section about disagreement between gods
    regarding the pious and impious does not apply to a monotheistic god or
    a Supreme God who rules over other, lesser gods and deines their
    morality for them.     Socrates and Euthyphro agree in the course of the dialogue to discuss that “what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious” – in all respects, a situation identical to being under a monotheistic god. So this point is irrelevant.

    The rest of your refutation rests on a misunderstanding of what
    actually constitutes the Euthyphro dilemma. You focus obsessively on a
    literal translation of the language, rather than attempting to
    understand the underlying argument. In modern terms, this is phrased as:
    Is something moral because god commands it, or does god command it
    because it is moral? You simply don’t address this at all in your
    supposed refutation, as far as I can see; I may be missing the point
    entirely, but in that case you have not managed to convey your argument
    well. You may then say that you are not prepared to compromise your
    writing in order to make yourself understood; but then why did you
    bother to write in the first place?

    Jasper, thank you very much for presenting your response to my critique
    of the Euthyphro “Dilemma”. In summary, yes, you did miss the point, in
    fact, you managed to successfully miss the point on all four issues you
    raised. As promised, I will explain this in whatever detail is
    necessary on the blog tomorrow, so please consider stopping by.

    Vox: if that’s the case, I’ll withdraw my points, so there’s no need to
    post them on your blog. Since you accuse nearly everybody that disagrees
    with you of missing the point, your only problem is that you appear to
    be unable to communicate fairly simple points, which I would have
    thought was a pretty crippling problem for a writer.

    Incidentally, why are you not prepared to address my response on this blog? It’s all very Sun Tzu, but a little bit childish.

    “Vox: if that’s the case, I’ll withdraw my points, so there’s no need to post them on your blog.”

    Please tell me you’re kidding. You don’t seriously expect me to
    believe that you’re willing to just take my word that your critique is
    flawed after you’ve informed us how my arguments are mostly sad and my
    Euthyphro refutation is a failure?

    “Since you accuse nearly everybody that disagrees with you of
    missing the point, your only problem is that you appear to be unable to
    communicate fairly simple points, which I would have thought was a
    pretty crippling problem for a writer.”

    I don’t accuse anyone of anything I can’t demonstrate. I don’t
    pretend to be a particularly good writer, so fortunately, it’s merely a
    pasttime. Perhaps if I really concentrate and write really well, I’ll
    be able to demonstrate why the Euthyphro refutations are solid.

    “Incidentally, why are you not prepared to address my response on this blog? It’s all very Sun Tzu, but a little bit childish.”

    I’ll post it here too if you like. I just assumed that no one would
    see it if I post it here tomorrow.

    You didn’t say that my critique was flawed, you said that I’d
    completely missed the point of your argument. If I’ve missed the point
    of your argument, that means that my critique is not of your argument.
    Nobody knows your argument better than you, so why wouldn’t I take your
    word on it?

    Since we’ve already established that you can’t convey relatively
    simple points, why on earth do you think you’re “demonstration” will be
    any more comprehensible than your original text? There are two
    possibilities here – either you’re a poor thinker or a poor writer –
    but in either case, why would anybody read your work?

    “In seeking to resolve the dilemma, you state that “At first
    glance, this looks easy enough, as simply substituting “obedience” for
    “the pious” will destroy the dilemma because it eliminates the tautology
    posed. One can’t do this since it’s not right to simply substitute
    whatever terms one likes and declare the problem solved.” Later in the
    argument, you then say: “At this point we can reach three conclusions:
    1. The Euthyphro “dilemma” is defeated by shifting the focus from “the
    pious” to “obedience,” therefore it is an inappropriate criticism of
    Christian morality that is founded on obedience to God’s Will.” So this
    point is based on you doing something that you have previously declared
    is not allowed.”

    You’re skipping over the extremely relevant section wherein I
    distinguish between refuting the Euthyphro dilemma on its own terms and
    refuting its mistaken application to Christian morality because the
    definition of that morality precludes the second horn of the dilemma.
    Ergo, no tautology and no dilemma. One cannot simply change Socrates’s
    definitions and claim to be attacking the dilemma on its own terms,
    while on the other hand, one cannot apply the dilemma to a specific morality such as the Christian moral standard without
    first changing those definitions.

    “You also state that it can only be considered a genuine problem
    for those who insist that a fixed principle cannot be arbitrary. In
    other words, for those paying absolutely no attention to reality. There
    are a panoply of fixed variables which, if they were different than they
    are, would radically alter the reality of our universe. Here you
    conflate moral principles with physical variables; but they are not the
    same, and consequently this point is irrelevant.”

    Conflate? Combine into one? Not at all. You’re forgetting the
    rather obvious fact that whereas the necessary physical variables of
    this universe are fixed, moral principles vary even within it.
    Therefore, it is a massive logical error on multiple levels to assume
    that in the universe next door, moral principles must be the same as
    they are in this universe, while physical variables are assumed to be
    different. In fact, given the competing moral principles currently on
    offer in this universe, one couldn’t possibly even say which of them
    must be the fixed ones next door.

    “You finally state that The section about disagreement between gods
    regarding the pious and impious does not apply to a monotheistic god or
    a Supreme God who rules over other, lesser gods and deines their
    morality for them. Socrates and Euthyphro agree in the course of the
    dialogue to discuss that “what all the gods love is pious and holy, and
    the opposite which they all hate, impious” – in all respects, a
    situation identical to being under a monotheistic god. So this point is
    irrelevant.”

    You’re incorrect. If you read the dialogue more closely, you will
    see that the situations are not identical because in the one case, the
    net result of “what all the gods love” is a drastically restricted set of
    polytheistic divine preferences reduced to the lowest common denominator,
    whereas in the monotheistic case, the preferences are singular and exercised in full.
    For example, Athena’s love for Athens would have to be excised in the former
    case, but retained were she the sole god in the latter one.

    “The rest of your refutation rests on a misunderstanding of what
    actually constitutes the Euthyphro dilemma. You focus obsessively on a
    literal translation of the language, rather than attempting to
    understand the underlying argument. In modern terms, this is phrased as:
    Is something moral because god commands it, or does god command it
    because it is moral? You simply don’t address this at all in your
    supposed refutation, as far as I can see; I may be missing the point
    entirely, but in that case you have not managed to convey your argument
    well.”

    This is a false statement based on intellectual laziness. There is
    no “underlying argument”, Socrates makes a specific and detailed
    argument which contains various assertions and assumptions along the way, and as I
    have shown, some of them are not logically justifiable. Now, if you want an
    answer to what you describe as the modern terms, it is that something
    is moral because god commands it. God’s game, god’s rules. Now, you
    can still argue that God doesn’t exist or that his rules are imperfectly
    understood by Man, but that’s a tangential subject that cannot be
    reasonably used to defend the dilemma.

    I think we’ll have a problem with continuing the dialogue. It seems
    fairly clear that – whether I have missed your points or not – you
    genuinely don’t understand either my comments or – more worryingly – the
    Euthyphro dilemma itself.

    For example, your response to my first point appears to be completely
    unrelated to the point that I’ve actually made – which was that you
    said “one could defeat it by doing X, but obviously one can’t do X” and
    then later said “by doing X, I’ve defeated the argument.” On the
    “drastically reduced” set of preferences – it’s irrelevant to the
    discussion. If there’s only one thing on the menu of divine command, it
    still poses exactly the same problem for theists. On the “variable
    morals”: well, you’re the one arguing that there is in fact only one set
    of fixed morals in this universe (your god’s) – and since some physical
    variables in this universe do vary depending on context, it seems that
    your point is defeated on both sides. To be brutally honest, though,
    your writing is poor enough that it’s possible that even you’re not sure
    what your argument is.

    Euthyphro stands. If you honestly don’t see that, there isn’t really
    anywhere for the discussion to go – we can just leave it here and other
    readers can decide for themselves. 

    If you want an answer to what you describe as the modern terms,
    it is that something is moral because god commands it. God’s game, god’s
    rules.

    Quod Erat Demonstrandum! It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

     “I think we’ll have a problem with continuing the dialogue. It
    seems fairly clear that – whether I have missed your points or not – you
    genuinely don’t understand either my comments or – more worryingly –
    the Euthyphro dilemma itself.”


    Actually, Jasper, you omitted what has become the most obvious
    conclusion, which is that you’re simply not very intelligent. The fact
    that you are having trouble understanding this doesn’t mean everyone is.
    But do keep making those little passive-aggressive statements, I’m
    sure they’re very convincing.

    “For example, your response to my first point appears to be
    completely unrelated to the point that I’ve actually made – which was
    that you said “one could defeat it by doing X, but obviously one can’t
    do X” and then later said “by doing X, I’ve defeated the argument.””

    It’s not unrelated and I didn’t write “by doing X, I’ve defeated the
    argument”, I wrote “The Euthyphro “dilemma” is defeated by shifting the
    focus from “the pious” to “obedience,” therefore it is an inappropriate
    criticism of Christian morality that is founded on obedience to God’s
    Will”. It is not only appropriate to amend the relevant terms in order
    to correspond with a religion that differs from the original, it is
    necessary. You are clearly having problems understanding the
    distinction between refuting the dilemma on its own terms and explaining
    why the dilemma can’t successfully be applied to Christian morality.
    Christian morality != “the pious” or “what God loves”.

    “On the “drastically reduced” set of preferences – it’s irrelevant
    to the discussion. If there’s only one thing on the menu of divine
    command, it still poses exactly the same problem for theists.”

    No, it isn’t because the second horn of the dilemma depends upon
    this “irrelevancy”. You clearly haven’t read the dialogue closely
    enough. Socrates even admits that he is amending his original
    definition because he has to narrow it so closely that all individual
    preferences are removed in order to maintain the viability of his
    argument. This is why the second horn could be a problem for
    polytheists, (although it really shouldn’t, due to the bait-and-switch
    on Socrates’s part), but it is no problem for monotheists or those who
    worship one supreme God.

    “On the “variable morals”: well, you’re the one arguing that there
    is in fact only one set of fixed morals in this universe (your god’s) –
    and since some physical variables in this universe do vary depending on
    context, it seems that your point is defeated on both sides. To be
    brutally honest, though, your writing is poor enough that it’s possible
    that even you’re not sure what your argument is.”

    You’re dancing to avoid the obvious. Physical constants are assumed
    to vary from universe to universe. There is absolutely no logical
    reason to declare that moral principles could not vary as well, whether
    the Creator God is the same in both universes or not.

    “Euthyphro stands…. Quod Erat Demonstrandum! It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.”

    It doesn’t stand in either modern or Greek terms. Do you also find
    William of Ockham’s logic to be funny and sad, given that he reached
    precisely the same conclusion I did?

    Where do you go with these kinds of discussions, when somebody misses
    the point of a basic philosophical argument so completely – and defends
    himself by accusing everybody who disagrees with him of missing the
    point? I begin to see what you were getting at in your original post…

    Perhaps, after reading this, one will better understand why I am so often forced to tell people that they are missing a relevant point. Now, perhaps it is because I am a bad thinker, or because I am a bad writer and my points are so often insufficiently clear. Or, alternatively, perhaps Most People Are Idiots.
    I leave it to you to decide which explanation is more strongly supported by the documentary and scientific evidence.

    The distaste for debate

    It is interesting, is it not, how fear and loathing of debate pervades the Left:

    Not to put too fine a point on it, professor McKenzie looked
    terrified. When this distinguished economics prof had invited me to give
    a lecture entitled “Is CO2 Mitigation Cost-Effective?” at Southeastern
    Louisiana University, the provost had called him in to ask why
    professors worldwide had written demanding that I be disinvited.

    Disinvitation is a favorite debate-stifling technique of the left. A
    couple of years ago, when Prince Philip invited professor Ian Plimer to
    give the annual Duke of Edinburgh’s Lecture at Buckingham Palace
    explaining why global warming is a scam, the Children’s Coalition went
    into conniptions. Within weeks and without explanation, Ian was rudely
    disinvited.

    Regardless of whether it is Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, or the vast and corpulent mass of feminists, the Left has an observable tendency to shun debate.  They assert many different reasons for doing so, but the truth is always revealed by their seemingly contradictory willingness to debate the incompetent and the overmatched.

    Contrast with this the readiness of those on the right, even the most hapless, to publicly engage with those with whom they disagree.  I don’t think much of Gary North and his homoerotic arguments – no one actually wants to poke a “gun” in his rotund “belly” – but I do give him credit for being willing to at least attempt to engage my ideas concerning the intrinsically inimical nature of free trade.

    One of the things that has been interesting to observe over time is the way that the heated attacks on me, both in public and via email, have all but disappeared even though my overall readership has never been larger.  Why is this?  My theory is this is because most of my critics, be they atheists, feminists, evolutionists, or free traders, have learned they simply cannot win in a direct confrontation.  They can’t openly criticize my ideas because they have learned, much to their surprise, that they cannot adequately defend their own.

    As Aristotle pointed out more than two thousand years ago, even at the rhetorical level, the side more closely approximates the truth will tend to win out, because it is easier to argue when your arguments are based on truth rather than falsehood.  Events will always ultimately prove the arguments of the global warmers, the godless, the female supremacists, the socialists, the Keynesians, and the monetarists to be false because their ideas are false.  This is why a good memory is one of the most lethal weapons against them and why it is so easy to win debates against them, as given enough time, they are going to contradict themselves. 

    Why?  Because they have no choice.  Being false, their positions have to be dynamic, which means they can never hope for any significant degree of consistency.  This is why ex post facto revision and double-talk are the hallmarks of the Left, and is why the first thing Leftists do when they are in a position of power is to erase history and attempt to silence any voices capable of calling attention to their fictions and contradictions.

    People have occasionally asked me how I so readily identify the weak points in an opponent’s arguments.  It’s actually very simple.  Look for the spin.  No matter what form it takes, the spin is only there to obfuscate the falsehood.  Expose that, and you not only expose the falsity of the argument, but also strike a blow against the credibility of the individual presenting it.  If longtime readers have learned anything here, I hope it is the ability to see through the incessant spin and strike to the heart of the deceit.

    Adios Amendments 4 and 5

    The judicial war on the U.S. Constitution continues apace:

    American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case. Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21–or face the consequences including contempt of court.

    Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” which has become known as the right to avoid self-incrimination.

    “I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer,” Blackburn wrote in a 10-page opinion today. He said the All Writs Act, which dates back to 1789 and has been used to require telephone companies to aid in surveillance, could be invoked in forcing decryption of hard drives as well.

    It’s always interesting to see the logical contortions through which America’s corrupt judges go when they are determined to reach a conclusion that flies directly in the face of the Constitution. Given that Americans have “the right to remain silent” as well as the right to be “secure in their papers and effects”, there is no way that a judge can legitimately order any American to cough up a passphrase.

    This is just one more piece of evidence demonstrating that the federal government is corrupt, lawless, and unconstitutional. It is an Augean Stables that is likely beyond the ability of any one man, even a principled man like Ron Paul, to clean up. But can anyone suggest with a straight face that Mitt Romney, the $45 million man, or that fat little Freddie Mac-owned troll, Newt Gingrich, have any interest whatsoever in doing so?

    On the debate

    I am afraid you will all have to wait a few more days for Round Four. I was traveling last week and got absolutely no writing of any kind done.

    PZ Myers Memorial Debate Round 3 – the judges

    Alex: I’m still adding to my detailed notes, but I’ll make them available to anyone upon request.

    1. The first attempt at explanation is almost invariably wrong. I find the hypothesis, as it relates to the question at hand, specious and unconvincing. Vox’s rebuttal was very slightly more convincing. Very small edge to Vox.

    2. Proposition B, aka Vox’s Argument from Objective Morality. Vox carries the day.

    3. Proposition A, aka the Ancient Aliens. Vox again.

    Vox’s arguments are tighter, sharper, and more concrete. Round to Vox.

    Markku: What I attempted to do in order to judge the debate format was to identify the specific attacks from Dominic, and the corresponding counter-arguments from Vox. Since Vox was on the defense, he merely had to counter the attacks in order to fulfill his responsibilities. The shortened forms displayed here should not be understood as capturing the argument but merely showing which part of the text I am talking about.

    Dominic: no one does [have a complete model of what constitutes conciousness]

    Vox: [I mentioned it] to demonstrate b) the materialist internal model cannot be assumed to be correct.

    Vox from round 2: but their opinion is irrelevant at this point

    Verdict: Successfully countered. Claim of irrelevancy is not a claim of your own explanation’s superiority.

    Dominic: admitting that our moral sense is another part of our conciousness while having no idea what conciousness is composed of amounts to admitting B3 [“that the moral sense is informed by a source external to the conscious mind”] is false

    Vox from previous round: we must decide if it is more likely that the signal is internally or externally generated. (?) And because this definitive moral law is constant and arbitrary, there must be a lawgiver capable of both defining and transmitting it.

    Verdict: Vox defined the “signal” (the only part he claimed external) as where the moral sense’s information comes from, calling it moral law and merely calling its externality more likely. Not certain. Dominic just took what Vox had explicitly admitted and pronounced the claim, not unsatisfactorily proven, but false. Had it been the former, there could be sensible further debate about the evidence.

    Dominic: [Freud vs. external moral law] is a false dichotomy.

    Vox from round 2: Freud’s theory and its variants is the most established of the various internal models

    Verdict: Models, plural, means admitting several options. No dichotomy.

    Dominic: heterosexual attraction to the opposite sex [is internally generated] (…) It is just another desire, a consequence of biology

    Vox: If this were true, Freud and his successors would not have had to construct their tripartite model in the first place

    Verdict: Vox’s answer doesn’t hold water. Sexual attraction comes from id, as opposed to ego, according to Freud’s model. These are already two separate processes of mind, both seemingly pure biology. If we can have two, we could have three.

    Dominic: Without further context, [aliens, plasma beings and time travellers] are equally plausible explanations

    Vox: It is merely an object lesson in the importance of not leaping to conclusions or placing inordinate confidence in a tool that is inadequate for the task at hand.

    Verdict: The agnostic option is in the middle, and doesn’t do the atheist any more good than it does the theist. What Dominic needs in order to do anything useful is to look at the options that don’t involve gods and argue why they are more plausible than the others. Nor does the mere existence of those options do any good to Vox, but he is not listing them to that end.

    Dominic: The concept of gods are what we first postulated to explain the inexplicable. Consequently, the concept itself, is wrong.

    Vox: But theists readily admit our understanding of the nature of the divine is far from perfect.

    Verdict: Successfully countered. It was particular gods with particular features, responsibilities and names, which were arguably postulated to explain such things. Any of those things not only can be wrong, but must be in the overwhelming majority of cases. It is enough to satisfy Dominic’s principle.

    Round goes to Vox

    Scott: Dominic continues his argument that the first explanation is usually wrong. Nothing he says, however, is new, and I continue to disagree with it.

    He does address me at one point, and while I don’t want to intrude on the role of the debaters, I feel that at least addressing why I don’t think his counter addresses my point will illustrate why I don’t find his argument convincing at large. (Moreover, Day makes similar points in his rebuttal.) I said: “[S]ure, people will color their experiences with the divine with trappings taken from their culture. But that’s just them trying to understand something far beyond their ken. People who first saw the sun imagined it was a guy in a chariot. Nevertheless, that they put it in terms of the familiar doesn’t show the sun doesn’t exist.”

    To which Dominic responded: “For some reason, Scott was under the impression he was disagreeing with me here, but he made my point quite well. Yes, there is a Sun out there, but it sure as hell isn’t a guy in a chariot. It is something else besides a god.”

    But that wasn’t my point. My point was the mere fact that we explain things in term of the known doesn’t prove that there isn’t something out there to be explained. Dominic said:
    “Show me someone recounting an experience of being sexually molested by little grey aliens with big heads and huge hypnotic eyes who’d never heard of or been exposed to Hollywood films or other popular culture sources that tell us what aliens do and what they look like.”

    In saying this, he was denying, so far as I can tell, the existence of aliens because people who “encounter” aliens explain those “encounters” in terms familiar to them. But, say I, this would be the same as denying the existence of the sun based on the fact that people used familiar terms to describe it. But the sun clearly exists. Ergo, this argument would prove entirely too much.

    Note the fact that the sun is not a chariot in the sky is completely irrelevant. Of course it isn’t. But the operative fact is that the sun exists, despite our folk explanations of it. Gods, gods, or aliens, what have you, may exist in the same fashion, though we early on explained Him as astride Merkabah.

    Dominic continues to harp on gods being the first explanation implies they’re wrong. What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that “God” is not some unique answer that was made for all time in Bronze Age Israel. The Christian God has greatly evolved since the gods of the Ancient Greeks, as has *Dyēus phter himself. Aquinas’s God is not Zeus. So I’m perfectly willing to except that the first answer is nearly always incorrect–but I don’t think that has any weight on the argument. Just because our first stab at what a God is is wrong doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist–which is what Dominic wants to infer. God just isn’t what was described by our first hypothesis. In the same way, our first stab at science was wrong–that doesn’t mean since as a whole is a failed hypothesis. Better hypotheses will be presented with time, just as more plausible gods are presented with time.

    So while we can heartily accept Dominic’s observation that the first explanation is usually wrong–and it seems Day does as well–I don’t think that takes us where Dominic wants it to.

    So, respectfully, I think the argument fails. In fact, I think Dominic at least twice now has attacked arguments out of context. He attacks Day’s Aztec argument, but not for the purpose for which Day advanced it. In the same fashion, he appreciates my sun-chariot argument as supporting his claim that the first explanation is wrong. But my argument was not addressed at that particular argument of his, so whether or not it supports it is besides the point–it is aimed elsewhere.

    Dominic makes other points. He says the failure to explain consciousness does not mean that morality is external to humankind. I agree entirely. And Day seems to as well. But, and here I agree with Day, this certainly does not show it to be internal to humankind either. Day cites the failure to explain our moral sense through traditional models as pointing to something external. And well he should, because this is quite suggestive, and will be until: 1. a model of our morality produced through naturalistic processes is convincingly demonstrated; or 2. we find ourselves willing to accept that evolution produces some counterintuitive things that we, through lack of evidence and repeatability, may never be able to fully explain.

    Does this show that God is the rule-giver? No. But it, coupled with evidence that God exists and has given rules, is not nothing.

    Day repeats much of my own response to Dominic’s argument. His attack is far-ranging, and, though there are parts of it I disagree with–that science may have unexplored frontiers does not suggest to me it doesn’t have substantial authority in saying what does and does not exist–I think on the whole his response the stronger. Day seems to back off of previous statements that evil implies God, now content to say it implies external morality, whatever its provenance may be. But even if morality can exist without a creator–nonetheless, that it does exist gives one some pause in denying a creator entirely.

    Round to Day.

    As the judges scored the third round 3-0 in my favor, I will elect to present the argument for Round 4 and Dominic will rebut. This is the second-to-last round.