From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sat May 11 2002 - 13:02:32 MDT
Phil Osborn <philosborn2001@yahoo.com>, Wed, 8 May 2002
>I had the misfortune to know Wendy McElroy -
I don't know her personally. However, I think her newsletter
is excellent. --> http://www.ifeminists.com/
>To illustrate just how destructive she was of the
>climate of intellectual inquiry, She and George Smith
>at one point strongly and repeatedly promoted the
>concept of "sniping from the gray areas." This was a
>convenient catch-all into which any problem for which
>libertarian theory did not have an answer could be
>thrown and henceforth ignored. [...]
>Those of us with scientific backgrounds (BS-Physics,
>for me) will recognize that this principle, if
>followed in the hard sciences, would have prevented
>about 99% of the progress in every scientific field,
>as it is those pesky anomolous results and unanswered
>questions that lead to the breakthroughs and
>integrations.
I don't know the environment in which this occurred, but the smart and
honest people I'm familiar with, who know libertarianism well, do not
claim to have easy answers for every difficult social problem, and the
answers that they _do_ have to difficult social problems, do not fit
well into a 60-minute public forum, or into a 30-second sound-bite, or
reduced to a set of universal physical laws. The detailed discussions
occur in the published literature.
----------------------
Murray Rothbard, while discussing von Mises' _Human Action_:
begin{quote}
Mises also provided a much-needed methodological critique of the
currently fashionable mathematical and statistical method in
economics, a system derived from the Swiss neo-classicist Leon Walras,
and a methodology that has all but crowded out language or verbal
logic from economic theory. Mises pointed out that mathematical
equations are only useful in describing the timeless, static,
never-never land of "general equilibrium." Once depart from that
Nirvana, and analyze individuals acting in the real world, a world of
time and of expectations, of hope and errors, then mathematics becomes
not only useless but highly misleading. He showed that the very use of
mathematics in economics is part of the positivist error that treats
men as stones, and therefore believes that as in physics, human
actions can somehow be charted with the mathematical precision of
plotting the path of a missile in flight. Furthermore, since
individual actors can only see and estimate in terms of substantive
differences, the use of differential calculus, with its assumption of
infinitely small quantitative changes, is singularly inappropriate to
a science of human action.
end{quote}
(Rothbard, M., The _Essential von Mises_, pg. 34, The Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 1983.)
----------------------
Robert Nozick, in his description of the minimal state (which he
labels as 'utopian' until the end of this chapter (Part III) when he
makes the philosophical equivalence):
begin{quote}
One persistent strand in utopian [minimal state] thinking, as we have
mentioned, is the feeling that there is some set of principles obvious
enough to be accepted by all men of good will, precise enough to give
unambiguous guidance in particular situations, clear enough so that
all will realize its dictates, and complete enough to cover all
problems which actually will arise. Since I do not assume that there
are such principles, I do not assume that the political realm will
wither away. The messiness of the details of a political apparatus and
the details of how it is to be controlled and limited do not fit
easily into one's hopes for a sleek, simple utopian [minimal state]
scheme.
end{quote}
(Nozick, R. _Anarchy, State, and Utopia_, Blackwell Publ, 1980, pg. 330)
----------------------
David Friedman, when he talks about deducing libertarian conclusions:
begin{quote}
Many libertarians appear to believe that libertarianism can be stated
as a simple and convincing moral principle from which everything else
follows. Popular candidates are 'It is always wrong to initiate
coercion' and 'Everyone has the absolute right to control his own
property, provided that he does not use it to violate the
corresponding rights of others.' If they are right, then the obvious
way to defend libertarian proposals is by showing that they follow
from the initial principle. One might even argue that to defend
libertarian proposals on the ground that they have desirable
consequences, as I have done throughout this book, is not only a waste
of time, but a dangerous waste of time, since it suggests that one
must abandon the libertarian position if it turns out that some
coercive alternative works better.
One problem with deducing libertarian conclusions from simple
libertarian principles is that simple statements of libertarian
principles are not all that compelling. Lots of people are in favor of
initiating coercion, or at least doing things that libertarians regard
as initiating coercion. Despite occasional claims to the contrary,
libertarians have not yet produced any proof that our moral position
is correct.
A second problem is that simple statements of libertarian principle
taken literally can be used to prove conclusions that nobody,
libertarian or otherwise, is willing to accept. If the principle is
softened enough to avoid such conclusions, its implications become far
less clear. It is only by being careful to restrict the application of
our principle to easy cases that we can make them seem at the same
time simple and true.
end{quote}
Friedman, D. _The Machinergy of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism_,
Open Court publ., 1989, p. 167.
----------------------
Lest you think that I'm diminishing libertarianism, I am not. I'm
pointing out that it shouldn't be applied as if it is a simple black
box. If libertarians have not the appropriate venue to discuss it,
then labelling difficult issues as 'details' or 'gray' in a public
forum was not necessarily a bad thing to do.
Amara
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." --Anais Nin
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