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NOTE Antimarket Ethics: A Praxeological Critique

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In the chapter that I'm dealing with, Murray Rothbard wants to present a scientific economics.

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He says, praxeology is a value-free economics, but at the same time, as everyone knows,

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he's very strongly committed to libertarianism. He has very strong views on ethics.

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So the question comes up, how can he have, can he, if he sticks to being, having scientific value-free economics, can he still have comments about ethical issues, can he still make statements that in economics that somehow involve ethics, can he say things that are in favor of the free market as he wants to do without transgressing values?

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Value Freedom. Now, judging by the very good questions that people submitted, I think a lot of the people here are interested in the notion of value freedom.

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So, I want to say a little bit about that term, vert-fri, value free.

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Okay, now, when we talk about values, I think we can distinguish two senses of values, two things we might mean when we say science or economics, specifically, should be free, value-free.

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Now, we might understand the first sense is subjective preferences, supposing that where we can't say that these preferences are true or false, we can't speak of...

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I wish I could do the same.

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So, we can't say that these preferences are true or false.

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For example, most people have a preference for either dogs or cats.

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Some people like dogs better, others like cats better.

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We can't really say either group is right or wrong, just each group has its own preferences.

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People have various preferences for food.

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We can't really say this person has the wrong taste in food just because they differ from the one I have, they just have subjective preferences.

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So we can see if you believe in, if you have preferences of those, that kind, you can see why you wouldn't want them in a scientific discipline,

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discipline, because we'd just be introducing arbitrary preferences, as science is supposed

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to be telling us about the nature of the world, how things really are, so we wouldn't want

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to have in the science any subjective preferences. But now we can distinguish a stronger, a different

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sense, I shouldn't say stronger sense, a different sense of value, where values refers

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just to any judgment about how the world ought to be, what people should do, what's good

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or what's right.

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And here, that's a different sense because it doesn't, when we say that something is

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right or ought to be, it doesn't follow immediately that we're talking about a subjective preference

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in the first sense.

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It doesn't follow just from saying that something ought to be the case, that this is just an expression of personal preference that we can't say is objectively right or wrong.

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Now, there's a lot of people, or some people at any rate, think that the second sense of preference, that's to say the judgements about what ought to be what's right or wrong, reduces to the first sense.

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and Human Rights. That's to say, they think that all judgments about ethics, what ought to be the case, what's right or wrong, are simply expressions of subjective preference.

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This is definitely not a view that Murray Rothbard held. He was very much against that. But there are people who hold that. And this view, that's to say this view that reduces all ethics to subjective,

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was very popular in the 1930s, especially the logical positivists favored this view, it's called emotivism.

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A.J. Ayer wrote a famous book in 1936 called Language, Truth and Logic, advocating this, and there was another book by Charles Stevenson, Ethics and Logic.

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This was very influential on economists who formulated the idea, especially in the thirties, that economics should be value-free. Lionel Robbins was one of the main people favoring that view, and he was very much someone who was influenced by the positivists.

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So you can see, if you hold this positivist view, you'd have a reason to exclude judgments about ethics from economics,

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but the question then comes up, well, what if you don't hold such a view? Should you still exclude ethics from economics?

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Now, one argument that's sometimes given to support this view is this. People will say you can't deduce a statement about what ought to be an ought statement just from descriptive statements.

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Statement about what is, you can't deduce a normative statement from a descriptive statement or set of descriptive statements.

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So this would be a reason for thinking there can't be an objective ethics because no statement about what ought to be follows from descriptive statements or set of descriptive statements.

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Now, one problem here is, supposing that argument is true, it's not evident that there couldn't be an objective ethics, because maybe there are certain objective statements that we just know to be true, that aren't deducible, that aren't deduced or claimed to be deduced from descriptive statements, just we know or see them to be true.

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I say we shouldn't murder people for fun. Maybe we can just see or grasp that this is a true statement even if it doesn't follow from descriptive statements.

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And one further point about that is it isn't clear actually what the argument is supposed to be that we can't deduce ought statements from is statements.

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sometimes people say well the in order to the there's no the ought statements

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aren't contained in the premises if you start with the deductive descriptive

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statements you'll see there are no ought statements contained in those premises so

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you can't then deduce an ought from an is but see that isn't really an argument

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When you say the ought statement isn't contained in the premise, that's just another way of repeating the point that it isn't deducible from the premise, just repeating the claim that one can't be deduced from the other.

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So I don't think there's a good argument that you can't deduce ought statements from his statements.

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I'm not claiming that you can do that, although Rothbard, as you read his Ethics of Liberty, thought you could, but I don't think there's been any good arguments that you can't.

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Now, the last argument I want to mention that's relevant to this, this is one that was raised by Francesco in his comment.

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Now he has an argument, something like this, something, this is just a paraphrase, I hope I've got this right,

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So something like descriptive statements don't imply, how am I doing here?

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Okay, normative statements and then we have an implied premise,

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Science consists of descriptive statements plus the implications of descriptive statements.

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Descriptive

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So therefore

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Descriptive

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Normative statements

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Part of Science. Now, as I've mentioned, I think there's some reason to question this

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first person, whether we should, whether it's a good argument in favor. I haven't given

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an argument that's false, but I wonder whether it's true. But let's suppose we accept this,

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so then we have a valid argument. You see, then the problem becomes, suppose this is

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So we say normative statements aren't part of science.

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Well, then let's have a new concept we call science with an asterisk.

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We characterize that as exactly like science, but one that includes normative statements.

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The question then is why should we practice science rather than science asterisks?

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So, you see, we still don't have a good argument why we shouldn't have narrative statements in science.

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But Rothbard, what he wants to do in this chapter, he says, I think he does think economics is value-free,

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but I don't think for him that's a sort of a deep truth about the world. It's just a matter of convenience.

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convenience, he doesn't want the, to, he thinks it's a separate area, but it isn't

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that there's some big problem that would arise if you included objectively true value

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statements, if there are such within science. Now, what does, within that limit, that is

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Confining Ourselves to Value-Free Statements

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What, if anything, can an economist say about ethics?

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Well, he suggests there are two sorts of criticisms we can raise against anti-market arguments.

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One is what he calls an existential criticism.

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This is one where the argument rests on a false factual claim.

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For example, supposing someone said the free market is no good because it causes business depression.

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Well, we know from the Austrian theory of the business cycle that that isn't right,

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that depressions are caused by government expansion of bank credits.

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So this is the claim that we can reject without making value judgments because it just rests on a false factual premise.

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Now the other one, the other type is I think is a very interesting philosophical one.

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He says that supposing you can show that a certain goal is impossible to reach, it's impossible goal.

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and we'll see later an example of what he, the one that falls into it, he says, suppose you show that it's an impossible, a certain goal is impossible,

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then it would be irrational to try to achieve that goal.

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So we wouldn't be making any controversial value judgments just thinking, well, if something's impossible, it's irrational to achieve that.

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also suggest, well, if the goal is impossible, then trying to achieve that goal is also impossible, because we know it's the truth of praxeology, that the value of the means derives from the value of the end.

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You can see, this is a very good passage. I think Bob Murphy, in his study guide, is right to call attention to this.

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on 1298, I think. Yeah, you see, this is, this is, let me get this up here. You see,

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is that, can people read that? You see, this is very, this is a very important page if

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you read this. Now, the footnote there is very interesting because he defends the famous

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Maxim, the end justifies the means. He says, well, since the value of the means, it depends on the value of the end, so it's true that the end justifies the means.

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This is, but what he, sometimes when people say that, of course, what they, what they suggest is there are no, there are no moral absolutes, something like supposing it's all right to torture

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people if you have a sufficiently valuable goal. Of course, Murray doesn't mean anything like that because he suggests, also in that footnote, if you read that, that if you have a, if you think, say, that something shouldn't be, should never be allowed, say you thought torture was always wrong, that would simply be an end for you. So, he wouldn't be taking this premise, the end justifies me.

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in any sense in which this involves any kind of relativist morality.

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I should say, you have to be careful if you say, well, if you have these prohibitions

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to say that that is an end for, that is an end for, suppose you say, you don't, you think

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that torture is absolutely forbidden, so then you say, well, you haven't, one of your ends

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is that you never, that torture not be allowed. You have to be careful not to take that in

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in a maximizing way, because then you could have cases, say, where you're torturing people

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because you think that would reduce the total amount of torture. That wouldn't be an example

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of what is meant there by holding something. It would be absolutely forbidden. That would

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be what Bob knows it calls a side constraint, something that you're never allowed to do.

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It's not something where you say, if something is an end, something's absolutely prohibited.

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You say, well, you're trying to maximize, minimize the number of violations of that, and it's just you, you're never allowed to do it, regardless of what leads, how many violations at the end, whether it maximizes the number of, minimize the number of violations at the end, you see the distinction there.

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Okay, so that's the basic framework, but what is an example of this kind of case, where you can show that something is impossible, a particular goal is impossible.

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And he gives one great example I think on 1310. See, he said supposing somebody favors, is this, you see this, yeah, somebody favors absolute equality.

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He says this is something that's impossible to achieve because in order to have absolute equality, we really have to have people in identical situations and you couldn't have that.

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have that, you'd have. Say, suppose you said that we want people with this, two people

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in a neighborhood, wouldn't have exactly the same view or, of things, and there'd always

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be minor differences. So, absolute equality is an example of something that could never

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be achieved. So, see, this then, if you say people shouldn't try to achieve absolute

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and Equality, you're not making any controversial value judgments, you're just relying on the

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praxeological christen, this is an impossible goal, so therefore you shouldn't try to achieve

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it. Now, among the comments, I think Marion had a very interesting comment on this chapter,

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In this chapter, which I think would be relevant here, he says, which I think is a very subtle point, that performative contradictions aren't really contradictions, they just involve falsity, and then that this is the case only if you accept a correspondence theory of truth.

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Now, I think the first point is, is a very good one, that perform of contradiction, let me just put that down here.

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Okay, so much for that page. Okay, suppose the example perform of contradiction, suppose I say, I am not now uttering an English sentence.

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Well, since I am in saying that, uttering an English sentence, my saying that makes the sentence false.

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So, let's see, this is my saying or doing something makes the statement false.

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So, that's a performative contradiction.

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And I think Marion is perfectly right that this doesn't establish anything that's contradictory.

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It isn't contradictory, say, my not uttering an English sentence is not a contradictory state of affairs.

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In fact, it's very often true that I'm not uttering an English sentence, say, when I'm sleeping, but it isn't.

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So it's quite true that a performed contradiction doesn't imply, doesn't show a contradiction, only demonstrates policy.

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I don't think it's right that it only demonstrates falsities except a correspondence theory of truth.

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I'd say if you have a theory of truth where a affirmative contradiction doesn't come out false,

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you've got a wrong theory of truth. It would be kind of a bizarre theory of truth if

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my saying I'm not now uttering an English sentence could turn out to be a true statement.

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But, in any event, the problem here, I'm not sure I'm understanding, I think the point is correct, that a performative contradiction doesn't establish contradiction.

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But you see, this isn't really relevant to Rothbard's point, because what Rothbard is talking about here is an impossible goal.

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This isn't the case of performative contradiction.

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isn't that, say, people trying to achieve equality somehow brings it about that it's

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not, they're not, it's not possible to achieve equality. It isn't a performative contradiction.

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This is an outright impossible goal. I should say Murray loved performative contradictions

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when Hans Hoppe's argument, Haitian ethics relies on performative contradiction at crucial

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perception. When this came out, first I remember Murray was really enthusiastic. He would really

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get tremendously excited about that. If he could find another good performing contradiction

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argument, this was really, would really make his day. But this argument isn't one of them.

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Now, another type of argument, another criticism that I want to now deal with, of the free

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market involved, what I think is one of his, the best insights in the book, is one that's

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crucially relevant to modern political philosophy, he, I want to get this, you have to really

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combine what he says in two different places. Now he mentions, I'll show you here first

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time, I think 1533, he mentions an argument here that luck is involved in, sort of, that

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People's earnings on the market depend on luck, so this is given as an anti-market argument.

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Well, is it fair that, say, Bill Gates has enormously more money than I do?

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Isn't this just a matter of luck?

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So he makes what I think is a really brilliant point here.

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He says, now, in this particular passage, he's considering a case where people can see

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that everyone should earn according to what their discounted marginal value product is.

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But the person is claiming that luck accounts for a great deal of the person's income.

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So he said, well, how do we know that if, say, rich people are luckier by that criterion

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than people who aren't so rich. Maybe the rich people are getting less from their discounted

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marginal value product. So the crucial point here, I think, is maybe that when you talk

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about luck, this is always relative to some principle that you think should apply to distribution.

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Luck is always relative to a principle of distribution. Can't talk about people being

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Unlucky, absolutely. It's just relevant to principle of distribution. And you see this, which I think is a crucial point. This, for me, was the great passage in the whole chapter. It went on 1354 here. You see where, where he says, you see down here in this three-pecker,

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The Three Pecker, where he says, some people argue that people don't deserve their incomes at all.

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Say, what you get depends, say, on certain abilities that you have and certain talents you have.

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This doesn't depend at all on your moral dessert. Say, it isn't, I was watching yesterday, Tiger Woods was playing golf.

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His great talent isn't something that he's earned because of his moral merits.

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It's just he happened to have been born with certain exceptional athletic ability,

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plus his father trained him in golf from a very early age.

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So because of this, he's very lucky.

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So if he earns hundreds of millions of dollars, according to this argument, it isn't really fair.

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So we see here, we can see the point Rothbard is raising in the earlier passage really applies here.

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If you say that this is unfair, you're assuming that people really should start off equally.

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You're saying, well, since people should start off equally,

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then if some people have very much more than others, then they're lucky.

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there so and this is somehow unfair but unless you start off with this

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assumption you wouldn't have reason to say that he's he's lucky maybe he's just

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getting just what he should be getting in fact that's just what Rothbard

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contends Rothbard directly rejects the argument that people who use their

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The people who are talents or who are able to benefit from their superior talents are unlucky.

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He said, well, what could moral desert be if not using your talents?

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What would be, what could be a better example of deserving something?

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The reason I think this is a crucial point in political philosophy is this is one of the key arguments

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in the famous book by by Rawls, John Rawls, Theory of Justice. Rawls uses just the

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people don't we don't deserve our natural talents because it we don't

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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So, historical point in political philosophy, Rothbard cites Frank Knight as one of those

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who gave this argument, who said that we don't deserve our ability. Frank Knight was a very

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prominent economist, one of the founders of the Chicago School. He was a very unusual

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person. He was very skeptical about everything. He was somewhat in favor of the free market

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at least at various times.

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Joseph Salerno has done some research on him, I hope will be published sometime, but one

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time he supported the Communist Party candidate for president, although he was usually pro

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free market, but instead of arguing for the free market, what he would usually do would

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be say all the arguments for the free market are no good, but the arguments for socialism

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and even worse. So I would kind of support the market as the least bad alternative, but he

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uses just this argument that people don't deserve our, we don't deserve to benefit from our talents.

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And then this is one that Rawls picked up from Knight. If you look at Theory of Justice,

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you'll see he cites Knight exactly on this point. So this is, Rothbard was really anticipating a

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a very important development in political philosophy and criticizing it before it began.

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I think Rothbard's criticism is actually better than the one that Bob Nozick gave in his great

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book, Anarchy, State, Utopia in 1974, what in the chapter that Nozick devotes to Rawls,

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which is, I think, the second part of chapter 7. He says that Rawls' argument, even if it's...

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Rawls might be right that people don't deserve to benefit from their natural abilities,

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but it doesn't fall from that that people aren't entitled to what they get.

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So he distinguishes between dessert and entitlement, but I think Nozick is strong...

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I mean, Rothbard has a stronger argument because he says he challenges Rawls directly.

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Well, we do deserve to benefit from our superior abilities. Now, the chapter has a great deal, many other arguments, I'll just mention a few of these.

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One anti-market argument that he talks about is this, that each person in the market is trying to advance his or her own self-interest,

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Self-interest, where, of course, self-interest can include trying to benefit other people.

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But each person is trying to advance his or her interests as he conceives of it.

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But supposing people don't get their interests right, supposing they make mistakes about

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their interests, maybe we should have the state come in and interfere with people's

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and Socialist Freedom, so that they'll be acting in their own interests better than they would just if they were acting by themselves.

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And what Rothbard says there is, first, why should we think that the people that the state chooses as experts would be people who are devoted

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the individual's interest, wouldn't they be ones who would be fulfilling the purposes of the state?

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If you have, say, an individual chooses his own experts, or goes for his own experts' advice,

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then we would have, naturally, there would be a market for that.

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People would try to benefit the consumers of such expert advice.

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But we would have no reason to think that in the market,

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I mean, it would state that that would be the case, that the so-called experts were just trying to advance their own purposes.

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And then he also makes, I think is a very important argument, he said, which I think, where is this?

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I think this is on 1502, I think.

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Okay. So, you see, he says, well, isn't there a contradiction between the people who favor democracy and who also say that the state should promote this kind of expert advice that would interfere with people's choice, because he says, well, how is it that people are supposed to be competent to choose the government

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It isn't thought that they're so bad, so incompetent, or so unable to pursue their own interests that they choose the wrong experts for the government, but still they can't choose the right people in their own affairs.

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Now, Harry had a very interesting comment here. He wants to know, well, is it really so, is there really something contradictory in someone asking for expert advice?

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Doesn't it make sense to think that we could think other people are wiser than we are?

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And indeed that does make sense, but that isn't what Rothbard is criticizing.

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I think he's not saying we shouldn't seek expert advice, just that there's contradiction if you say that, or at least, I don't know if it's a formal contradiction, at least there's some incongruity in suggesting that people should be able to choose the government, but not to choose their own expert advisors.

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I think I'll just conclude with two other criticisms that Rothbard deals with.

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Two other points. One, I thought is a very interesting one, he says that, and sometimes you see people argue this way,

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You say, people really have, some people have much more market power than others, so that

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really when free market advocates say they want to prevent coercion or they're against

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coercion, they're not really, they're not considering important kind of coercion.

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For example, supposing, say, he gives, in case someone is taking a job with the Ford

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The Ford Motor Company, supposing somebody said, well, considering that this is just one person, he's bargaining, let's assume there's no unions, he's bargaining with a gigantic company, really, this person doesn't have any bargaining power, so isn't the Ford Motor Company coercing him, they're forced, they really, he has no choice but to accept the offer.

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As Rothbard points out, he has a very good way of getting to the essence of a problem.

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He said, well, what's involved in this claim? There's coercion. Supposing the person says,

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I don't like your wage offer. I want twice as much as you're offering me.

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Then Ford Motor Company said, no, no, you either take what we're giving you or we don't offer you a job.

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In what sense is this coercive? It's just that the Ford Motor Company is saying, we won't deal with you except on certain terms.

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They're just refusing to make an exchange, say, at double the wage rate.

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So, obviously, refusing to enter into an exchange is not coercing people.

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You say if you force the Ford Motor Company to get into the exchange, then that's the

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case of coercion. Rothbard said you really have a choice between what concept of coercion

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you're using. If you want to admit that coercion, it either means stopping someone from violently

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interfering with somebody, which is the plain sense of the term, or it doesn't. You can't

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Combine that with this other type of coercion. Say, well, you're also coercing people if you try to force them to do what you, if you try to force them to get involved in, in, in exchange that they don't want you. You say, well, they're coercing people by refusing to engage in exchange. That isn't coercion at all. That's just something else. So you can't really combine

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The last topic I'll mention, which I think is one of his very good, best contributions, is he thinks that property rights aren't just a particular subspecies of rights. All rights, he suggests, can be analyzed in terms of property rights.

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He gives the famous case that, quoting from Albert Wendell Holmes, where Holmes said that free speech wouldn't defend the right of someone falsely to yell fire in a crowded theater.

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It's not to yell fire in a crowded theater, it's falsely to yell fire in a crowded theater.

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So what Rothbard says there, well, what's involved in the claim of free speech is that you have the right to speak freely on your own property.

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So the person who falsely yelled, fire, would be guilty of a property rights violation.

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So what about exposing the theater owner, who's the owner of the property, falsely yelled, fire?

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you could say, well, can Rothbard handle that case? He says yes, he can, because there he's committed fraud against the moviegoers, because what they've paid for is a ticket to an uninterrupted performance of the play, so he's committed fraud against them, so he gives, is a very good example showing how, what would Norman take to be right, not involved, not connected with property, free speech,

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involves property rights. So there are a great many other topics, but I think I'll finish now.

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I suppose I could finish by asking Bob Murphy to repeat the last few sentences of my talk,

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but I don't think I'll do that. Okay, thanks very much.