Tag: debate

Democracy debate part 1

Konrad Razumovsky challenged me to a debate in response to my contention that direct democracy is superior to representative democracy. This is his initial statement.

“My opinion, as I have previously expressed, is that the problems of “mob rule” of which the Founders so famously warned have proven to be considerably fewer and less problematic than the problems of establishing a political elite that uses the illusion of democratic approval as a protective shield. Now that technology makes it viable for larger polities, direct democracy is a moral imperative in any society with a government that is justified by the will of the people.”
—Vox Day

For the purposes of this, I am using a slightly modified version of the definition of democracy from Merriam-Webster: a democracy is “a form of government in which the people choose leaders, or specific laws, by voting”.

I do grant, and cannot reasonably dispute the following: one, representative democracies or democratic republics do limit the impact of the will of the people, by intention or accident is irrelevant; two, the most dangerous thing for a nation, in the long run, is a political elite which is divorced from the common man, a political elite who believe they are justified and also able to sell their chicanery to said common man with a gross misrepresentation of the intent of a particular government; third—and finally, technology does many exceptional things, with respect to man’s ability to influence his condition including the methods by which government can be built.  That said, I have no real issue with direct democracy in theory, or in practice, but I am forced to dispute the implicit claim that a democracy is an appropriate form of government for a larger scale polity, with or without technological intervention and irrespective of its moral gravity.  That is to say that a direct democracy has a number of internal issues which render it ineffective, if not outright detrimental, to a civilization of a certain size.  Briefly, these are: one, no amount of technological development is equal to the task of preventing the poor use thereof; two, democracies derive their legitimacy from the collective people of the nation, which would be fine if governments existed to care for the people, which they do not; three, economics applies to voting just as much as everything else; fourth—and finally, though mob rule is, indeed, a historical falsity, something very similar to it does exist and is exactly the thing which placed the silly political elite into power in the current era.  There will then need to be some minor legwork done on historic democracies to determine if the theoretical framework matches the practice.

While it must be admitted by all reasonable men that modern information based technology has certainly made it possible for a democracy to function on a scale significantly larger than previously possible, in terms of both geography and population, these advances do little to address the frailty of the ballot box.  In the more traditional rendition of a democracy, there are legions of little vote counters who, being human, can each be induced by their own ideologies or the machinations of others to forget or misplace certain votes; there are instances of the dearly departed or even pets casting votes; and there is one supreme holder of the ballots who could, were he so inclined, read a different name than the one at the top of the chart.  I freely admit that technology removes the human element from these scenarios, the vote counters are machines who are incorruptible by their own bias and cannot be blackmailed; a machine is compelled to follow its programming regarding the necessary certification that a particular voter is eligible to cast such a vote, thereby reducing the rate at which Spot or Aunt Mildred interferes with mortal affairs; and a machine is honest about who is where on the final printout. 


All of this rests on the assumption that the machine(s) administering the vote enjoy a state of being free of that kind of harassment designed to cause a shift in the eventual outcome of the vote being so administered.  Obviously, direct and physical tampering with these Democratic Servers is undesirable, so steps must be taken to remove the possibility of such.  I see two feasible solutions: one, the voting process may be moved entirely to the cloud, divorcing it from a physical existence; or two, the physical Democratic Servers must be fiercely protected against intrusions.  The problem with the first is that everyone on the planet would have access to the voting system, regardless of the level of authentication required to vote, a machine is only a machine—it is easily fooled by anyone with sufficient knowledge of the systems which compose it.  In other words, the account security for these voting systems would need to be impregnable, not only from foreign agents, but also from those running for office.  Due to the grand and illustrious history of impregnable vaults being busted, unsinkable ships being sunk, irrefutable evidence being refuted, and unstoppable armies being crushed, it strikes me as a point of absurdity to assume that any such system built today will last any serious amount of time.

The solution to this seems simple enough: just appoint a certain group, a set of experts—if you will, to continually update the security protocols.  Of course, this puts the entire democracy at the mercy of these programmers for its integrity, which undermines the entire point of a democracy in the first place, in that the government is derived by the will of the people.  We would be better off simply making the computer programmers the oligarchs of the new world order from the get-go to avoid all of the inevitable build up to that point.  Which leaves the second option: defending the physical counting machine.  This is also a doomed scenario because the defenders of the machine become like the programmers in the first scenario, able to unaccountably pick and choose what inputs the machine receives thereby determining the outcome.  Ultimately, this is not a new problem: every democratic system, above a certain size, will have a praetorian guard of some sort.  None of which is meant to say that technology has no place in a democracy, simply that technology does not solve the problem of the concentration of political power into the hands of a few over time.  So, to put a finer point on it, technology does not preclude in any way, shape, or form the establishment of a political elite who use the illusion of democratic approval as a protective shield, either as the wielders of legislative or executive powers.

Strip away every piece of government and political theory, until the very first portion of it is obvious, and we will see that government cares precisely not at all about the people under it because they are not its purpose and concern, in the West at any rate.  This singular purpose is the recording of property beyond that which is unquestionably within an arbitrary individual’s control.  Indeed, the entire function of government is to provide the threat of violence necessary to keep the integrity of property lines.  I could go into considerable detail regarding this facet of government, but this is neither the time nor the place for that.  Suffice it to say that physical property which is too large to conveniently command as an extension of oneself is the thing which demands the fomentation of a government of any variety.  To put it bluntly, a democracy, even if that democracy functions perfectly, places political power in the hands of all living members of a particular society regardless of their standing in terms of property which requires the existence of a government.  If all members of this democracy share a portion of this property, there is no problem as each member of the democracy ultimately has the same interest: the protection of the integrity of property as defined by the legal code enacted by this democracy; if only some members of the democracy enjoy the privileges of property ownership, then there becomes a schism in the end goals of the populace due to one group having property and the other not.  In times past, I would probably feel compelled to simply dismiss this schism as the product of the basest portions of human nature and therefore an ignorable affliction in an enlightened society, however, the past few decades serve as ample evidence that even the mightiest and most careful cultures can be brought low.  The moral standing of property envy is irrelevant at this point, it exists and must be countenanced and thwarted in some more robust manner than an appeal to fragile culture.  Until such a time as men become wholly divorced from their envy and petty jealousies, such that those without strive to achieve the same status as those who by grace have instead of simply using any and all possible leverage—including the use of government force—to deprive the latter group from their holdings, allowing such men, those who do not bear some interest in the ultimate good of the nation—and, by extension, the weight of property, dilutes or undermines the ultimate point of the establishment of a government in the first place.  Therefore, a democracy will eventually destroy itself.

Economics, the study of rational choice, is most assuredly a matter of concern for the democrat, simply because it is the ideal means by which men do their voting.  Obviously, the hope is for every voting member of a democracy to make his choices rationally, but the decision to vote is, itself, subject to a rational tradeoff.  It is a common observation that a vote in a democracy above a certain size is functionally useless.  A single vote in a nation of one hundred is worth considerably more than a single vote in a country of millions.  Granted, technological advances can make the costs associated with voting, leaving work early, time consumed casting the ballot, among others, much smaller but does little to ensure that a particular vote is actually worth casting in the grander sense.  Consider California, where it is not uncommon to find men of the right choosing not to vote simply because there is no point in doing so.  The analysis by these men is a simple one: there is a significant number of individuals within the State of California, to the point where an individual vote is insignificant, and the vast majority of Californians simply disagree with these right leaning voters.  A callous solution would be to instruct these people to move elsewhere, where their neighbors tend to agree with them, but this is an implicit admission that the discrete vote matters not at all.  Were the large scale democrat to admit that his ideology necessarily ignores the trees for the forest, I would have considerably less of a problem with the whole system of thought as the link between an increase in large scale democracy and the decline of individual rights could be more adequately documented and discussed.  To put it in a slightly more direct way, if a democracy exceeds a certain population threshold, then the democracy ceases to be able to effectively operate in a manner which is consistent with classically liberal thought.

Mob rule, or the tyranny of the majority, does not exist, in any meaningful form, but its close cousin, let’s call it the tyranny of geography, does.  For example, communities on the edge of the ocean have considerably different concerns than the community on a mountainside.  It would be unreasonable to expect the mountainside community to build houses on stilts to avoid tidal flooding, and the seaside community to have steeply sloped roofs to more effectively shed snowfall.  Such dichotomies can be found everywhere, with certain areas developing a particular solution to a problem which does not exist elsewhere.  Now, geography and climate can certainly cause people to behave differently discretely, but it has not been established that this would impair the ability of the aggregate of such localities to enact an effective democracy.  Indeed, if the total population of the seaside community and the mountainside community are virtually equivalent, then neither party would be able to force every house to have stilts or steep rooves, instead getting what seems not disagreeable to both.  The only problem is that such an arrangement simply does not happen in reality.  Let us examine New York State.  There is a collection of a few cities along the coast which dominate the entire policy of the state despite the rest of the state being of precisely the opposite political affiliation.  In other words, a concentration of people, brought about by geographic concerns, such as the suitability of a particular place to function as a port or commerce hub, may very well have certain governmental needs which do not exist outside of the densely populated areas, a governmental solution which could very easily eliminate the livelihood of these rural or suburban communities, and a democracy places complete authority over these potentially suffocating policies in the hands of those who choose to live in hyper concentrated areas without providing ser
ious recourse to those in the boonies.  In a democracy, cities warp the political landscape to their own benefit, sometimes costing the smaller and more numerous communities which share its jurisdiction greatly.  If the wholesale ruination of the nonurban is permissible, then a democracy with a large footprint is acceptable; if not, then democracy must be limited in geographic size.

To briefly reiterate, a successful democracy would be fairly small in size and scale, encompassing a small area geographically and inhabited by a certain, relatively low, number of residents.  Bold claims to be sure, but not without historic precedence: I would draw your attention to both the Iceni tribes of pre-Roman Britain and the Her Majesty’s Privateers of the colonial era.  Both cases are successful democracies, successful in that they enjoyed social stability and developed cultures which further lubricated the systems put in place, with the community placing authority in an individual, either chief or captain, whose concern ensured that the democracy as a whole was benefited.  Should this figure of authority be found wanting, he did not have armies at his disposal to put down a vote of no confidence because his army consisted of his neighbors and friends who had a real interest in the good of the community as a whole.  In short, if the chief or captain failed to perform their duties in an acceptable manner to the people of the democracy, then removing them was an almost trivial matter: the army which did the removing was the army who followed his orders was the people who did the voting.  Of course, these examples merely show that a democracy does work on a local level but fails to evidence an inability of the system to meet the needs of a larger populace, in terms of both raw numbers and territory.  For this, we should investigate the history of Athens which, after having demonstrated its superiority in every possible field to its harshest critic—Plato, quietly fell apart due to internal issues between the various voting groups as these groups matured past their nascence within a few generations.

None of which quite addresses the most obvious point of a pure democracy: the laws or leaders enjoying the vote.  How precisely does the leader enact his will?  If historic trends are any indication, then a democracy is simply a form of government used to legitimize a dictator.  Does the democracy then choose to be of the form where every proposed law is voted on by the general populace?  If so, then one of two eventualities arise, either: one, the populace appoints, presumably by democratic means, a body of persons who propose laws, which is the establishment of a political elite who are naturally compelled to use their power for their own purposes; or, the laws are crowdsourced in some fashion, which would probably result in charming little laws akin to the naming of certain Antarctic Icebreakers.

All of these issues combined, or any one of them—really, is sufficient to fully dissuade the serious political philosopher from accepting democracy as some great panacea for the ills of society.  There is a place for democracy, to be sure—as it is very good at what it does under the appropriate circumstances, but its structural integrity is built solely upon its locality.  If a democracy reigns supreme over too large an expanse of people or places, then it will eventually destroy the very livelihood of those different people and places simply due to the nature of the thing.  This is an observation noted by the Founders, and was solved in their day by establishing requirements beyond that of mere life for voters and building the United States Senate upon the legislatures of the various states.  In fact, there was a little war fought over how ineffective these precautions were in thwarting the tendencies of democracies from 1861 to 1865, with numerous potential solutions being offered by one of the sides in that conflict.  More than any other factor, the spread of the belief of the justness of a pure and true democracy has contributed to the decline which is now so apparent throughout the West.  Insisting that more of the same is the solution is to argue that the United States, and nations like it, should cease to be one nation; a perfectly acceptable assertion, to be sure, but very different from the initial conceit of an objectively superior form of government for a nation of any serious size whose government derives its legitimacy from the will of the people.

I will post my response here sometime in the coming weeks, but I will note that Konrad appears to have completely missed the target by attacking the concept of democracy itself instead of defending the superiority of representative democracy to direct democracy. I have no intention whatsoever of defending the core concept of democracy itself, as my argument is neither theoretical nor idealistic in nature, but entirely practical, eminently possible, and directly relevant to the present political situation.

Up and over their heads

MC listened to the Day-Murphy debate on free trade:

I was unable to attend on Friday, but I just listened to the audio.  Excellent debate, loved the format.  Really should make anyone stretch their thinking as well as help them come to their own conclusion.  Admittedly I heard things I had not heard before and my knowledge base was expanded and continues to be with these debates. 

One point you made that “Let reason be silent when experience gainsays it’s existence”.  This seems to be the problem with most economists and Austrians is that they are so sold on their theories and their ability to come to a conclusion that is elegant reasoning, they totally miss the forest for the trees.  I think most economists lose the common man because the common man lives in the real world and knows that those elegant theories have failed to bring about a better result in reality.  The previous debate and this one has shown me that these economists are not too acquainted with real life and the practical effects free trade has had on this country. 

I did not vote to make my country poorer so as to make the rest of the world richer.  I am a Christian, but my benevolence is my decision, not one forced on me by my government.  I don’t think that is what God had in mind when he asked me to help the poor. 

Anyway, both of these debates are more instructive than anything I learned in college and infinitely more practical.  Please keep these coming.     

I wasn’t crazy about the format in practice, as it prevented either interlocutor from really pinning the other down, but I think it was both fair and useful in that it illuminated the arguments for both sides, at least for those capable of following them. I suspect it can be improved, but regardless, it wasn’t bad for a first experiment.

On the other hand, it has been rather remarkable to witness the slack-jawed astonishment of the lesser free trade advocates, who completely lack the ability to even begin processing the simplest of my anti-free trade arguments.

Who is this guy? I highly question his economic understanding.

All five of his opening arguments are extremely weak. For example, he puts forward the notion that decreased real incomes and increased indebtedness proves free trade doesn’t work. I mean, are you serious? How can anyone make such a stupid argument? As if free trade is the only determinant of real incomes and indebtedness, that domestic economic and fiscal policy has nothing to do with it? How naive must he be to think everything bad that happens domestically can only be explained by free trade. People give this Day guy too much credit.

This is further evidence of the inability to communicate across the 30-point IQ gap. The gentleman clearly doesn’t realize that he is attacking the same correlation-causation argument that I am, only he is doing so considerably less competently because he doesn’t understand that I am not making an anti-free trade argument per se, but rather, explaining the falsity of a very common free trade argument.

He makes the same mistake twice,in fact, as he also fails to understand that I am citing an empirical failure of the theoretical free trade model when it comes to quality:

The example he provides to show that protectionism promotes quality products was the example of Parmesan cheese in the EU, where producers of a definite kind of Parmesan of a cultural value get the legal monopoly on labeling the product vis-a-vis imported versions. In his opinion, the protected cheese is of much better quality.

Well, I guess that’s the case for government imposition of restrictions on trade, to ensure the nation state has high quality cheese.

Notice how free trade advocates are reliably dishonest, in that they make appeals to exceptions when it suits them and deny the legitimacy of such appeals even when the exception is valid because it disproves the free trade model. I could as easily say that one very common case for the removal of government restrictions on trade is to ensure the nation state has high-quality automobiles.

How is it intellectually legitimate for free traders to point to low-quality American autos in the 1970s as a meaningful example, but illegitimate for anti-free traders to point to high-quality Italian cheeses in the 2010s as an equally meaningful one? Especially when the latter clearly disproves the assertion that government protection necessitates lower quality goods for the domestic market.

What I found particularly amusing were those critics who simultaneously complained that I was making non-economic arguments, then insisted that my position was immoral or in violation of the human right to freely engage in economic activity. It never even crossed their mind that their arguments were considerably less economic in nature than my own.

One thing I’ve noticed is that midwits reliably fail to understand the difference between a positive argument and the critique of an opposing argument. This explains why so many people are, on the one hand, saying that my arguments are weak while so many others are impressed at how I have methodically destroyed the pro-free trade arguments. It rather reminds me of the atheist response to TIA, in which many of them expressed disappointment in the weakness of my arguments for the existence of God.

But they were only weak in that they did not exist at all. They were an altogether different creature, being critiques and debunkings of dozens of arguments against the existence of God.

Today’s lesson in rhetoric

An SJW white knight was attempting to attack Mike Cernovich over his observations concerning false rape claims. I joined in, and things went pretty much how you might expect from there.

Avram Meitner @AvramMeitner
Feminists aren’t responsible for rape! Spoken like a true misogynist.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
True. Feminists are responsible for fake rape, near rape, virtual rape, and regret rape. None of which is actually rape.

Avram Meitner ‏@AvramMeitner
Anonymous rape advocate.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
Why do you advocate rape? Is it a personal hobby or do you think rape is good for society?

Avram Meitner ‏@AvramMeitner
Anonymous rape advocate now tries to deflect from his rape advocacy.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
“I’d like to amputate part of your healthy baby, suck his penis and give him herpes.”
– Avram Meitner, rape advocate

Sick!

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
You not only advocate rape, you advocate child rape! Get help, you sick paedo.

Avram Meitner ‏@AvramMeitner
When a rape advocate is exposed, they naturally rely on dishonesty to squirm out of it.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
Exactly. You falsely accused me. I accurately quoted you.

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
You lied, Avram. And you brought inferior rhetoric despite your obvious vulnerability to it. You failed Sun Tzu 101.

You are blocked from following @AvramMeitner and viewing @AvramMeitner’s Tweets.

It’s like clockwork. Never forget the Third Law of SJW: SJWs Always Project. They have no capacity for defense, and their inclination towards hypocrisy means that they won’t hesitate to complain about the very behavior that they exhibited first. This leaves them extremely vulnerable, especially in public, as others won’t hesitate to point out that hypocrisy.

They’ll start with rhetoric, then try to retreat to pseudo-dialectic; don’t fall for it, just stick with the rhetoric. If it wasn’t working, they wouldn’t be retreating.

Free Trade debate podcast

Tom Woods has posted Episode 684 Debate on Free Trade, with Bob Murphy and Vox Day, on his site. Below is part of my 10-minute presentation opposing the resolution, which stated:

Free trade is always economically beneficial in the long term,
and the more free trade is practiced by a country, the higher the
standard of living of its inhabitants will be.

The Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki once wrote: “The memory of having sat at someone’s feet will later make you want to trample him underfoot.” While I have been seated, metaphorically, at the feet of the great Austrian economists for most of my life, I harbor no desire to trample them. I retain genuine affection and respect for the Austrian School of economics.

However, just as the classical economists eventually gave way to the superior understanding of the Austrians, so Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard will one day be surpassed by the post-Austrian economists of the future. Is that day here yet? I will argue that it is, at least with regards to the doctrine of free trade.

The world has changed in many ways in the 240 years since Adam Smith triumphed over the mercantilists. The most significant changes, with regard to the topic at hand, concern the mobility of capital, a factor which was not accounted for by either Smith or Ricardo, and the mobility of labor, a factor which was never taken into consideration by Mises or Rothbard.

Let me first state that I accept Bob’s general terms with regards to both free trade meaning unlimited transactions between domestic and foreign parties, and national wealth being measured on average. I am presenting five arguments against free trade tonight: they are empirical, mathematical, existential, practical, and logical. Given the time constraints, it is not possible to go very deep into any of them, but each of the five represents a very serious and substantial challenge to the claim that free trade makes a nation wealthier in the long term.

My first argument is empirical. The conventional argument in favor of free trade has changed very little over the centuries, and was repeated this very week in a major essay by Francis Fukuyama in Foreign Affairs. It states:

  1. International trade has become increasingly free over time.
  2. Wealth has increased during the same period.
  3. Therefore, free trade produces wealth.

Or to put it another way, as Bob did in his excellent textbook, Lessons for a Young Economist, “If we imagine an initial situation of worldwide free trade, and then further imagine that an individual country decided to “protect” its domestic industries and “save jobs” by preventing foreign goods from crossing its borders, its residents would become much poorer.”

But this is not true. We have considerable evidence that freer global trade does not necessarily make an individual country wealthier. For example, although the free trade in goods has considerably increased over the last 50 years, real wages are lower in the USA than they were 43 years ago. So is the country wealthier? Proponents of free trade often cite growing GDP per capita, and it is true that since 1964, US GDP per capita has risen from $3.5 thousand to $54.6 thousand, a 15-times increase.

That means the USA is wealthier, right? No, because over the same 50-year period, total US debt per capita has risen 34 times. If your income doubles, but your personal debt goes up by a factor of 4.5, are you wealthier? No, of course not. Your perceived increase in wealth is a mirage.

Freer trade has clearly not produced greater wealth for America or Americans, but rather, greater indebtedness. This is not to say free trade can never benefit a national economy, but we have clear empirical evidence that in the case of the United States, it has not. Therefore, the resolution is false.

My second argument against free trade is mathematical. Free trade theory relies, at its core, upon the Law of Supply and Demand. But in Debunking Economics, Steve Keen cites the work of William Gorman, who in 1953 utilized mathematical logic to prove that the Law of Demand does not apply to a market demand curve. It only applies to single individuals, and it is not possible to derive a market demand curve by simply adding together the quantities demanded by all individuals at each price. In other words, the combination of all rational consumer preferences results in an irrational market where lower prices may or may not increase demand.

This proof has many implications for economics that have not yet been explored, and among the obvious casualties is David Ricardo’s theory of Comparative Advantage. The math literally does not add up. Therefore, the resolution is false.


Listen to the rest of it there. Brainstorm members will receive a full transcript once it is complete. I should note that Steve Keen informed me that there is a more substantial mathematical case to be made against free trade than the one I presented, but as it was his point and not mine – and frankly, I don’t fully understand it yet – I did not utilize it in the debate. I will devote a separate post to it later.

Mailvox: debate responses

We had a nice turnout for the Day-Murphy debate on free trade last Friday, and most of the 250+ registrants showed up for it. It generated more than a few questions, and here are some that later showed up in my email. NC wonders about the role of the state:

I greatly enjoyed the debate. Thank you broadcasting the debate and the work you put into the arguments.  I found the debate valuable as I mull over my own thoughts.

I’m curious if you have thoughts on this:  I think that your arguments depend on the existence of the state.  I compare your arguments to a similar case of discriminately acting on relationship principles; that is, if one is interacting with a sociopath, one would not act on relationship principles of openness and honesty, for the sociopath would not conform to those principles, exploiting them for advantage.  I think Trump emphasizes “good deals” over free trade because of the realities of coercive government institutions–nation-states which would violate principles of free trade like a sociopath would violate principles in a relationship.

If, after a generation of peaceful parenting, the nation-state dissolves, would not a free trade environment be the principled and logical environment of such a society?

No, my arguments depend upon the existence of the nation, not the state. If there is no coherent group of self-identified people sharing traditions, characteristics, and values, then there is no need to concern ourselves with their collective fate, as we owe nothing to them, share nothing with them, and can abandon them and ignore their interests without a thought. This, of course, is one reason why the globalist elite wants to destroy cohesive, coherent nations, for much the same reason they want to destroy the family. The individual is easily corrupted or destroyed, the nation, not so readily.

The dissolution of the nation-state on the basis of peaceful parenting does not logically lead to a free trade environment, moreover, it is about as credible as a monetary system that relies upon leprechauns distributing gold harvested at the rainbow’s end. That is pure libertarian fantasy babble, which is even less coherent than the Marxian withering away of the state leading to the worker’s paradise.

GO also thought rather well of the debate, a transcript of which will be provided to Brainstorm members:

I thoroughly enjoyed the debate. I have enjoyed Mr. Murphy’s writings over the years. I thought he mildly tried to take you on personally. You didn’t do that and stuck to the debate issue making excellent points. I also like Tom Woods. I think they both learned a lot by getting involved with you. I have begin to wonder about the rigidness of some of the Austrians. I am happy to see a challenge to them from a non-communist or socialist perspective.

I was actually quite pleased that Bob was sufficiently concerned by the arguments I presented in the Miller debate to view me as a potential threat to the conceptual status quo. This is extremely unusual, as for the most part, free traders consider their position to be utterly unassailable. As for Tom, he was not only an excellent moderator – I was very impressed by him and think he would make a great talk radio guy – but he made a very interesting comment when we met the day before the debate to make sure everyone’s system was working correctly.

He commented that the free traders had not helped strengthen their own position by failing to seriously consider the arguments on the other side. This is understandable, as for two centuries, their underlying assumptions more or less held. And it was easy to dismiss the impact of the Japanese mass-immigrating to Australia, as Mises did, so long as they weren’t actually doing it.

So, I think that even if I’m not able to convince either Bob Murphy or Tom Woods of the inimical nature of free trade, I suspect this debate may mark a step towards stronger Austrian arguments in defense of free trade. Unless, of course, I am able to convince the entire Austrian School that a rethink of its core position on the subject is required.

JK saw the same flaw in one of Bob’s arguments that I did:

Great brainstorm yet again! I was annoyed by Bob’s use of a country giving a bunch of free SUVs to the US as a reductio ad absurdum, but a country might use that strategy to destroy another country’s infrastructure, and that would definitely not enrich the country who receives the goods.

But  I would have loved to have asked him this, had I thought of it: if the receiving country is enriched by cheaper imports then surely if the other country produces all things and therefore the receiving country nothing, then that country should be infinitely enriched, no?

Well done Vox.

I wasn’t annoyed by the argument, I was amused by it. There is a very good reason dumping, or selling goods below their cost, is legally prohibited by most countries, and that is because it is correctly seen as harmful to the recipient. As I mentioned in the debate, I don’t think Bob quite grasped how damaging the welfare analogy is to his neo-Bastiat “free sunlight” argument. Free goods damage an economy in much the same way free welfare checks damage an individual; in neither case do they make the economy or the individual wealthier in the long term. Quite to the contrary, they make them dependent.

Are tropical countries where everything grows easily and the fruit just drops from the trees generally more wealthy than others? No, because the effect on the populace is not wealth-generating, but enervating.

Over the next week, I’ll attempt to respond in detail to some of the questions that were addressed to me during the debate that Tom did not pass on to me because we did not have time to address them.

Another free trade debate

This exchange with Louise Mensch on Twitter vastly amused me. In my book, it is right up there with the digression into sexbots in the James Miller debate:

Louise Mensch ‏@LouiseMensch
The idea you need free movement of people for a free market is a lie. We have free trade with USA without free movement

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
It’s not a lie. Read Mises: the same arguments apply. For full benefits of free trade, free labor mobility is required.

Louise Mensch ‏@LouiseMensch
no; we presently enjoy free trade with America no free movement between us either way

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You can see exactly how NOT free UK trade with USA is here. Complete with tariff codes and rates.

Louise Mensch ‏@LouiseMensch
live animals?

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
3.8 percent on the sale of domestic rabbits, to be precise. Just one of thousands of examples. Demonstrably unfree trade.

Louise Mensch ‏@LouiseMensch
er… I honestly don’t think most people are going to count bees and rabbits Vox

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
It’s 5.7% on nuclear reactors. Would most people count them?

In fact, the USA and UK have neither free trade nor free labor mobility.

Anti-semitism debate, part two

Louise Mensch and I continue to debate anti-semitism, Ann Coulter, and the #AltRight on Heat Street:

Louise Mensch:     So you don’t care that the left was correct about your racism and sexism? 

Vox Day:     We don’t care what they say or what they think, at all.

Louise Mensch:     You obviously do care because you’re employing tactics against this, you’ve just described.

Vox Day:     No, we don’t care what they do or what they think, but we are certainly engaged in a cultural rhetorical war against them, but we don’t care what they think about us. We’re their enemy, they’re our enemy, and that’s fine.

Louise Mensch:     But you’re not employing this against the enemy. I never see these memes employed against the left, ever. I only see them employed against people on the right. John Podhoretz, Ben Shapiro, Cathy Young, people who are 100% on the right. You don’t seem to bother with anyone of the left. Not that … By the way, God forbid that should be taken as an encouragement to go off to burn Hillary supporters with this stuff, but it’s red on red fire.

Vox Day:     I’m pretty sure they get sent to anyone who attacks them.

Louise Mensch:     You’ve put Ann Coulter in a difficult position, because she has said, not convincingly at all, that she isn’t anti-Semitic. And you’ve just described how …

Vox Day:     I don’t believe she is anti-Semitic.

Louise Mensch:     Right …

Vox Day:     She’s not anti-Semitic.

Louise Mensch:     … but then a whole bunch of anti-Semites are running to her defense by tweeting Holocaust cartoons at Jews?

Vox Day:     That’s what you’re not understanding is that the fact that one is not anti-Semitic does not mean that you have any obligation whatsoever to disavow anyone.

Louise Mensch:     Ann Coulter though, is being defended by a bunch of anti-Semites who as their weapon use anti-Semitism. In order to try and prove she’s not anti-Semitic, that’s not very helpful, is it?

Vox Day:     Well, but again I don’t think that that’s the objective or the concern.

Louise Mensch:     Do you guys even have an objective?

Vox Day:     Absolutely.

Louise Mensch:     What is it?

Vox Day:     The chief objective for … I probably … I don’t speak for the entire alt-right because the alt-right doesn’t have leaders, but I am alt-right, and my objective is the preservation of Western civilization.

Read the whole thing there. Jerry Pournelle did, although he’s been finding the whole thing a little hard to follow:

I’m afraid I wasted my time in trying to follow yet another debate about anti-Semitism, but I never did understand what they were debating about. While America has a small number of genuine anti-Semites (under any definition of the term), they are pretty well irrelevant. As Irving Kristol once said, America is a safer and generally more pleasant place for Jews than Israel is ever likely to be. Now of course there are organizations, mostly but not all Jewish, that equate any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but serious people, including Kristol, found that absurd.

There are of course places where there is real anti-Semitism, but most of them are Semitic now that the National Socialists no longer rule Germany. Fascism isn’t even anti-Semitic although the Nazi’s (who weren’t really Fascists) were. Mussolini had many high ranking Jews in his Fascist regime right up until he gave up trying to prevent the Anschluss with Austria and made alliance with Hitler. At Hitler’s insistence he began persecuting Jews, but it was not part of the Fascist – rods and axe – agenda until imposed by Germany.

But Islam certainly is anti-Jewish, right down to their Holy Koran; since many Islamic nations are Semitic – certainly not all, since neither Persians nor Kurds nor Turks are Semitic – the term anti-Semitic has more political meaning than descriptive accuracy, and is rather useless in rational debate – but on a practical level anti-Semitic in the Middle East means anti-Jewish, and at least to those who believe the Koran, means war to the knife. After the end of days, the rocks will cry out, O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him. Now that’s anti-Semitic. Only of course the Muslim who is to do the killing is likely to be a Semite.

Adding to the confusion is the very real problem I mentioned in the debate, which is that the only thing as potential dangerous to the Jewish population in the United States as 1940s-era German-style anti-semitism is insufficient anti-semitism. After all, DNA is destiny.

Anti-semitism debate, part one

Louise Mensch and I debate anti-semitism on Heat Street:

Louise Mensch:     This may surprise the people that have been following our debate thus far, but, I feel like those were all small, little, light-hearted warm up debates, because now we’re going to get into it. Because we’re going to debate anti-Semitism. I want to get a bit granular, because I was surprised and disappointed to see you flaming a very good friend of mine, Cathy Young – who is an equity-based feminist, for those of you that don’t know her, reading this debate – and a long time ally of Gamergate and has worked extremely hard to separate genuine feminism from the kind of “fauxminism” that bullies men for no good reason.

I can’t remember the exact tweet so you can correct me if I’ve got this wrong, but: “…as she would know if she were a real American,” as though she were not an American, or she were less American that you are, which I think is a) racist; b) completely ridiculous; c) unbecoming of an alpha-male who ought to show some loyalty to a tried and tested ally. What I don’t like about this, apart from racism in general, and I say it with reverence, because you of all people know that I’ve been #notyourshield forever, is that it seems to give quite a lot of comfort to those fauxminist harridans, who’ve always said that Gamergate is just about abuse etc … This is a woman who stood strongly with movement forever, and the first sign of disagreement on anti-Semitism and you guys throw her under the bus. So I’ll let you come back, what do you have to say?

Vox Day:     Well, I’m perfectly prepared for things to get hardcore, I’ve been listening to Ministry all afternoon in preparation for this. By the way, I did not know Cathy’s work on Gamergate. We are loyal; until now I did not know.

Louise Mensch:     (Laughs) OK, now I’m scared. Go on.

Vox Day:     First of all, let me point out that, in terms of feminism, Cathy Young committed something that is, in the eyes of the alt-right a … A significant error of the sort that removes any right to avoid criticism. She, very very publicly, and very very vehemently, attacked Ann Coulter. The response that she got was a direct result of that, from me and from others. You can even, if you wish to, portray it as the alt-right white knighting for Ann Coulter. I don’t think that would be accurate but you certainly could do that if you wanted to.

Louise Mensch:     Well Ann Coulter’s been … I mean, you know, please, she attacks herself. She’s been attacked by me and others. She’s said some rabidly anti-Semitic things, about the Jews etc. So …

Vox Day:     I don’t think Ann Coulter’s reasonably said anything that can be considered anti-Semitic. 

Louise Mensch:     How many goddamn Jews do they think there are in America, that kind of thing.

Vox Day:     There’s a difference between … Anti-Semitism, in its historic form, means hatred of Jews.

Louise Mensch:     Yes.

Vox Day:     And there’s a huge difference between hating Jews and wondering why the hell everyone is babbling about them, again, when the subject really has nothing to do with them.

Louise Mensch:     Well in this case Ann Coulter used the words “Jews.” “How many goddamn Jews does he think there are in America,” quote unquote.

Vox Day:     Well yeah, because ..polls show Americans think that 33% of Americans are gay, and certainly there … I don’t know what the exact figure is, I don’t recall a similar study being performed with regards to what percentage of Americans other Americans believe are Jews. I don’t know. But I would guess that the perceived percentage is seriously overestimated, due to the constant discussion of Jews, by American Jews, in the media, because American Jews in the media are prone to navel-gazing.

Louise Mensch:     Vox, Vox, this was Ann Coulter who brought it up herself, who made the remark, herself. Really, as an “Ayn Randian radical,” don’t you recognize this is entirely Ann Coulter’s own fault? She brought it up, nobody else did, she ranted on about the Jews. She outed herself! Nobody else was talking to her about the Jews. On the left it’s people like Ken Livingston in London. He doesn’t seem to be able to go into any interview in London without mentioning the word ‘Hitler’ five times a second. And it was Coulter’s own fault. No one was talking to her about the Jews in Israel. She was commenting on the first Republican debate, and she brought it up, herself, entirely herself, unprompted.

Vox Day:     Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t she discussing the fact that the candidates were discussing Israel, or Jews or something like that?

Read the whole thing there, and discuss it here.

Real vs imaginary democracy

Another selection from my suffrage debate with Louise Mensch at Heat Street that I think is worth discussing:

Louise: Let’s start with the fact your argument is,  if women vote, it will have a given outcome that will move society to the left. On those grounds, you should surely object to voting of any description, including by men, because your argument appears to be that if the people vote a way that you don’t think that they should vote, this shouldn’t be allowed.

Your argument in fact, as logically stated just then, is not against women voting. It’s against democracy itself. You think that if people vote, in this case you think women should be banned because they’re more likely to vote left-wing. That is an argument saying that if somebody votes the wrong way, they should be banned from voting, which is of course itself an argument against democracy at all. What do you say to that?

Vox: I say that you are mis-applying it, because as I said, I support everyone voting in a direct democracy, because there everyone is directly expressing their own will, and whatever they get, they deserve. If we all vote to burn down our houses, and then we burn down our houses, yeah, there was no deception there. We all knew what we were getting in for, and we got it. What we’re talking about is representative democracy, which is by definition not democracy. We’ve already decided that we’re going to limit the will of the people.

Louise: No, we haven’t. The will of the people in a representative democracy, for example the United States, is that they choose, they have realized en bloc that it is too much to vote on every single decision directly. You’d have a referendum for everything from your local dog catcher to gun control, abortion, et cetera, and you’d presumably have as many referenda as people wanted to make motions. It doesn’t work.

In a representative democracy, the decision that the people are taking is we are going to elect you to exercise judgment for us in this way, right?

 Vox: No, but that was never made. This structure was imposed on us, and so no one has ever, there’s never been a referendum supporting this. There’s never been any votes for that, but the rules of the representative democracy are such that they are intentionally designed to limit and even eliminate democracy. For example, in California, when you saw Section 8 pass, and then it was overturned by the will of a single judge.

The whole system of representative democracy is to a certain extent a misnomer because it is actually entirely anti-democratic. The whole reason these structures, both on the parliamentary side and on the judicial side, is specifically designed to prevent democracy. Once you’ve accepted that principle of, “Okay, we’re going to limit democracy,” then it’s really a question of where you’re drawing the line. I’m just suggesting that a line should be drawn in a different place than it happens to be drawn today.

 Louise: But you are suggesting, you just said, which I don’t agree with, but you just said that representative democracy doesn’t equal to the will of the people, period, so you’re not really arguing against women having the vote. You’re arguing against anybody having the vote in representative democracy. You’re arguing for an anarchic … On the one hand you say you’d like to conserve things. On the other, you wish to tear down representative democracy, which would mean dismantling the entire United States’ constitution and system of government, because what you have just to women applies to everybody and everything.

If representative democracy is so bad, it can’t be okay, even if only men have the franchise.

Vox: But we’re talking about two different issues here. We’re talking about on the one hand a discussion within the context of representative democracy, and obviously it’s much more conceivable at this point in time to modify the rules of the existing system, and then we’re talking about completely trashing the system in favor of something else….

I would like to see the transition from representative democracy to a techno direct democracy simply because it’s possible now. Not only that, it’s actually entirely viable considering, at least in the United States, most of the so-called representative don’t even read the legislation that they vote on.

Louise: I can tell you, the fact is, again, just like I can speak to this, having been an elected representative. Those are incredibly complicated. It would in fact, while commentators often make this point, you rely on summations, as we all do, in order to understand what the bill is arguing. Otherwise, you would have to be a lawyer in order to be an effective politician, which I think it’s one of these canards.

“Oh, they didn’t read the bill.” The fact is that bills are written in highly legal language, and as a elected representative, the responsible thing to do is to read, understand, and familiarize yourself with a summary of a given bill, because only a lawyer can understand the ins and outs of the clauses in which legislation, and that’s why it’s called legislation, is written.

Now, before you comment on this, read this article about the Montana Supreme Court striking down legislation that was a) passed by the Montana State legislature, then b) passed by 80 percent of the Montana electorate.

The Montana Supreme Court has barred state officials from reporting the immigration status of people seeking state services, striking down the last piece of a voter-approved law meant to deter people who are in the U.S. illegally from living and working in Montana.

The court’s unanimous decision on Tuesday upholds a Helena judge’s 2014 ruling in a lawsuit that the law denying unemployment benefits, university enrollment and other services to people who arrived in the country illegally was unconstitutional.

The justices went further, rejecting the one remaining provision that required state workers to report to federal immigration officials the names of applicants who are not in the U.S. legally.

“The risk of inconsistent and inaccurate judgments issuing from a multitude of state agents untrained in immigration law and unconstrained by any articulated standards is evident,” Justice Patricia Cotter wrote in the opinion.

The Montana Legislature sent the anti-immigrant measure to the 2012 ballot, where it was approved by 80 percent of voters. The new law required state officials to check the immigration status of applicants for unemployment insurance benefits, crime victim services, professional or trade licenses, university enrollment and financial aid and services for the disabled, among other things.

Now, if you are so inclined, please attempt to defend “representative democracy”, which is observably neither representative nor democratic. And recall that you will receive neither points nor credit for citing the outdated “mob rule” objection which preceded these events by more than 200 years and quite clearly did not anticipate them.

The debate between direct democracy and so-called representative democracy is more accurately described as a debate between democracy and a deceptive parody thereof.

Should women vote?

Louise Mensch and I discuss everything from conservative feminism to universal suffrage and Native American intelligence at Heat Street:

Louise:  We’re now debating feminism. Vox, you go first. Hit me with your best shot, as Pat Benatar once said.

Vox:  Okay. Louise, I know that you identify yourself as a feminist, and you also identify yourself as a conservative. Given the connection between feminism and progressive politics, I am curious to know how you rectify those two positions, those two identities.

Louise:  I don’t see that there is any reconciling to be done.  I can’t stand the social justice warrior thing of identify as. I am a feminist. I am a conservative. I said in our last debate to you that conservatism was about equal opportunity, and to me feminism is therefore a subset of conservatism. If conservatism is principally about equal opportunity, personal liberty, free trade, etc, feminism is a subset of that – because feminism argues that men and women should have equal opportunities.

Which is not to say the same opportunities, but equal opportunities. I recognize the biological differences between the sexes. To me there is no distinction between conservatism and feminism, except that feminism is a smaller version of conservatism, it’s a subset of it.

Vox:  I agree that the logic holds. That’s within the logical structure your proposing that that is consistent, but the problem I have with that is that surely an aspect of conservatism is to conserve something. It seems readily apparent to me that feminism is intrinsically incapable of conserving anything from Western civilization, to even a functional, civilized society.

There is more, considerably more, there. Read the whole thing. Then discuss it here, keeping in mind that it is a transcript of a free-flowing conversation and I frequently have absolutely no idea what she’s going to throw at me next.

It’s actually a rather interesting challenge, especially in light of the fact that I know people are going to have hissy fits over anything that is worded in an infelicitious manner.