The Obama Administration insists that “‘Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,’ and it should be dealt with accordingly.” Nonsense, of course. Only scarce goods can be property and therefore only scarce goods can be stolen. Ideas or information patterns are nonscarce goods. If I take your bicycle, you don’t have it anymore. If I copy your idea, now we both have it. Copying, i.e., piracy, is not theft.

As the Left is wont to do in lieu of sound argument, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke recently related what is meant to be a heartrending story:

Recently, I’ve had a chance to read letters from award winning writers and artists whose livelihoods have been destroyed by music piracy. One letter that stuck out for me was a guy who said the songwriting royalties he had depended on to ‘be a golden parachute to fund his retirement had turned out to be a lead balloon.’ This just isn’t right.

My first immediate thought was why isn’t it right? Shouldn’t a progressive egalitarian’s own values lead him to be against intellectual property?

“What,” the progressive egalitarian should say, “you do a little work maybe once in your life, work which would be impossible if not for the shared cultural traditions from which it is derived and re-mixed, and get lucky (unearned talent, fortuitously good timing, etc.)…and you think you shouldn’t have to work for society again!?! That’s hardly fair, now is it? To paraphrase Proudhon, intellectual ‘property’ is theft!”

Lest the reader get the wrong impression, I am not as insensitive to the artist’s plight as this hypothetical progressive egalitarian. And I do not share his collectivist values. We come to similar conclusions via different reasons. I do not think that merely having an idea entitles one, legally-speaking, to be monetarily compensated by others or to have the power to prevent others from using their own property as they wish. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen. It is implementing them effectively, and in such a way as to earn a profit, that is hard. Accomplishing this is praiseworthy, but one should not rest on one’s laurels. Life, to say nothing of a flourishing life, requires productive work in order to be maintained and improved. Intellectual property is an attempt to use the coercive power of the state via granted monopoly-privilege to defy this reality as well as economic law and moral principle. The artist Secretary Locke mentioned could have saved (more) for his retirement and/or kept producing art instead of relying upon royalties to see him through his old age.

~*~

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Over at Forbes.com, Reihan Salam had something rather unexpected but very welcome to say about the CEO of a major corporation:

That the success of the Kindle is good news for Amazon should go without saying. But it represents a remarkable environmental advance as well. The publishing industry in the U.S. felled roughly 125 million trees and generated vast amounts of wastewater. And, of course, physical books have to be transported by trucks, which generate carbon emissions, exacerbate congestion, increase traffic fatalities and cause wear-and-tear on already overburdened roads. One assumes that Bezos didn’t have the environment foremost in mind when he pushed the Kindle concept forward, yet he’s arguably done more to fight climate change by threatening hardcovers and paperbacks with extinction than any number of environmental activists.

Salam goes on to argue that Amazon will ‘win the internet’ through the Kindle and its rapidly growing ebook sales. I don’t know about that. What does it mean to ‘win the internet’? He only considers Facebook as a rival. What about Google? Android and ChromeOS are poised to dominate the mobile phone and tablet pc markets, putting Google into direct competition with the Kindle. Then there’s Google Search, Books, Voice, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Chrome browser, TV, and so on and so forth.

But bravo to Salam for daring to recognize in public the (probably unintended) positive environmental externalities of business decisions and technological innovation driven by profit-seeking amidst market competition — indeed, for daring to rank them on par with or above that of ‘altruistic’ environmental activists.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

What you say!!!

There has been a lot wailing and gnashing of teeth recently over a joint announcement by Google and Verizon of a legislative-framework proposal they’ve been working on.

Now, I’ve seen this variously referred to as a backroom deal or pact, a secret treaty, or a set of regulations Google and Verizon are imposing on the internet. The FCC is shamefully abdicating its responsibility to regulate the internet! Nevermind that the D.C. Circuit court determined recently in the Comcast case that the FCC has no such regulatory authority over broadband internet; hence, the calls to disastrously reclassify broadband internet access in order to place it under the same regulatory rules as regular telephone service. Some are even intimating that Google and Verizon are trying to ‘own’ the internet. Net neutrality activists are up in arms about this proposal, viciously attacking Google for selling out and reversing its longstanding defense of net neutrality, and calling for people to stage a silly boycott of Google products and services. If you don’t join the herd, you get labeled a Google-Verizon apologist or it is insinuated that you are on their payroll (see comments on the CNET articles linked below, for example).

So what should libertarians make of all this?

As libertarians, we must of course oppose the Google-Verizon proposal and favor the abolition of the FCC and all internet regulation.

First, it is necessary to get a few facts straight. Larry Downes provides the best analysis I’ve yet seen in “Deconstructing the Google-Verizon Framework” at TechLiberation.com and “What the Google-Verizon proposal really says” at CNET. (There’s some overlap, but it’s worth reading both.) Also good and level-headed are Peter Suderman’s “No More Net Neutrality?” at Reason.com’s Hit & Run and Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer’s “Just say no to Ma Bell-era Net neutrality regulation” at CNET (though libertarians cannot agree with their claim that governments should step in “when . . . self-regulation fails”).

As Downes points out,

the Google-Verizon framework has absolutely no legal significance.  It’s not a treaty, accord, agreement, deal, pact, contract or business arrangement—all terms still being used to describe it.  It doesn’t bind anyone to do anything, including Google and Verizon.

Moreover, if Downes’s analysis is correct, there are very few significant differences between the Google-Verizon proposal and the FCC’s own Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) made way back in October of last year. So much for the “FCC is abdicating regulatory responsibility” nonsense (the authority for which it lacks, remember). Keep in mind this is just a proposal. We don’t know if the FCC or Congress will adopt any of its points. Google and Verizon cannot write or impose regulations without Congress and the FCC.

According to Downes, it is primarily for the very points on which the Google-Verizon and FCC proposals are identical or very very similar that Google and Verizon are being attacked. And, bizarrely, it is these points that net neutrality advocates usually support — and, notably, do support…when they come from the FCC. Odd how vague terms and turns of phrase get interpreted much more charitably when coming from a government bureaucracy than from a corporation.

Where the Google-Verizon proposal does differ significantly from the FCC proposal is where things get interesting. It does suggest the FCC not be granted any authority to regulate broadband internet access and only be granted the authority to enforce rules passed into law by Congress. Libertarians can get behind the first part of this at least. And one would think people of a democratic bent would approve of keeping regulatory control in the hands of a democratically-elected body rather than a technocratic, politically-appointed bureaucracy.  Unsurprisingly, the FCC is none too fond of this part of the proposal, insisting the only way net neutrality will be achieved is if Congress gives them more power and authority. Imagine that.

The proposal significantly departs from net neutrality by suggesting wireless broadband, i.e., mobile network, infrastructure is not mature enough yet to function reasonably well under its rules. This appears to be a compromise Google made with Verizon, long a staunch opponent of net neutrality, in order to come to an agreement on a middle-ground policy proposal before Congress or the FCC got it into their heads to do something drastic, like reclassifying broadband internet or otherwise granting the FCC broad regulatory authority to screw up the internet.

Another noted exception to net neutrality is the exclusion of ‘unlawful’ content from the non-discrimination rule. Libertarians can object to this that there is much that is unlawful, under positive law, in the US that should not be. But is this exception really that unusual? Don’t landlords often include such provisions in leases? Do we really imagine that governments won’t mind ISPs allowing ‘unlawful’ activity and content or that ISPs won’t mind bearing the risk of liability for what customers do on their networks? Instead of attacking Google and Verizon on this, net neutrality advocates ought to attack governments for unjust laws and get them repealed. Still, it would be heroic of Google and Verizon to defy governments on this.

The Google-Verizon and FCC proposals don’t seem all that radical, status-quo altering, or different to me. It seems much is being made ado about nothing and the claims of the death of Google’s commitment to net neutrality as well as the FCC’s exercising of its regulatory responsibility have been greatly exaggerated.  Surprise Surprise. The boring truth wouldn’t generate as many page views and as much anti-corporate political outrage.

But all this is really neither here nor there. Whether Google has sold out on net neutrality or not, whether Downes’s analysis is correct or not, whatever the correct interpretation of certain phrases in the Google-Verizon proposal that net neutrality advocates are criticizing – it shouldn’t have a significant impact on how libertarians ought to view what Google and Verizon are trying to do.  Google and Verizon are attempting regulatory capture. They are trying to get Congress and/or the FCC to regulate the internet in certain ways. This is understandable. It can be seen as defensive in a sense – to prevent regulation that will be harmful to their business. The proposal seeks to preserve the lack of net neutrality in wireless broadband, at least for now, effectively maintaining the status quo for Verizon. And it seeks to preserve, codify, and extend net neutrality in wired broadband, which benefits Google on personal computers.

Meanwhile, in a separate move, Google is apparently starting to co-locate portable data centers with Verizon’s network hubs to speed up its services for mobile users as well as save space for other traffic and probably save the two companies money. There’s nothing wrong with this at all, legally or morally, as it is a shrewd business decision that involves no aggression; and it will only benefit users.

While the Google-Verizon legislative-framework proposal may be defensive in a sense, self-defense against impending aggression (i.e., the threat or use of initiatory force) cannot justify aggression against innocent third parties. The proposal as a whole will involve just such ‘collateral damage’. Government regulation involves initiating force against people to prevent them from engaging in voluntary, mutually-agreeable transactions with their own property.  As libertarians, we must of course oppose this and favor the abolition of the FCC and all internet regulation. Depending on your point of view, the Google-Verizon proposal may be the best politically-realistic option on the table or there may be better alternatives (though it’s not the abominable betrayal many are making it out to be), but because it is a proposal for regulating the internet it is not something libertarians can actively support.

Against this position I have personally seen a number of different objections (in blockquotes below):

This is naive and reflexive. What you propose is dangerous, because voters and internet users do not have a voice in corporate decision-making (unless they own stock and exercise voting privileges). This is not hands-off government, this is hands in the pockets government.

This makes it sound as if voters have much of a voice in government decision-making. This, along with turning to government to solve perceived problems, particularly when it has to do with corporations, could be labeled naive and reflexive. As if government agents are disinterested and altruistic. Public Choice Economics 101. I don’t see the difference between hands-off government and hands-in-the-pockets government. In any case, either type is an oxymoron. Government is always putting its hands in other people’s pockets, often on behalf of big corporations. Why are people still surprised at regulatory capture? I’d be surprised not to see it.

Libertarian idealism is great in theory, but in practice it is co-opted by the interests of those who have risen to the top in business and now want to solidify those gains by making it difficult for others to take the same level playing field they enjoyed when they were smaller.

This is not libertarian ideals in practice. The only way the guys at the top in business can do this successfully is through the government. This is the very opposite of the libertarian ideal; it is not libertarianism in action. It is precisely why much corporate regulation is actually proposed by the big players in an industry once they’ve risen to the top, not by forward-thinking, altruistic politicians. What the objection actually describes is Republicanism, which pays lip service to liberty and free markets but in reality is corporatist. But the Democrats are corporatist too, in a different way. The existence of internet regulation and the FCC just serves to support the state-corporate plutocratic partnership.

Libertarians do not suggest regulatory capture as a solution. We suggest abolishing the FCC so that there is nothing for Google or any other corporation to capture and no political reason for them to feel they need to do so.

Google is great and I would love to see government stay out of a fair fight. This isn’t one, and you’re rooting against your own best interests, unless of course you own stock in Google or Verizon.

What is fair about a fight in which those with the best political connections — usually the wealthy and big corporations, mind you! — can employ the massive force of the government to impose their will on those who disagree? This generally is not good for the little guy. In fact, if this issue weren’t thrust into the political arena, it wouldn’t even be fair to call it a fight. Politicizing the issue and vying for control over the minds, bodies, and property of others against their will is what turns this into a fight. It is not in my best interest (properly conceived) to force others to let me use their property the way I want.  Government regulation of telecoms has also gone hand-in-hand with invasion of privacy, such as government snooping after ‘terrorists’ and whatnot. And do we really want to open the door to Hollywood, the RIAA,  indecency police, and Homeland Security influence on internet regulation?

Allowing Google and Verizon to write regulations for themselves is like letting the financial industry regulate itself. (How well has that worked for us?)

As I’ve pointed out, Google and Verizon cannot write regulations without Congress and the FCC. Moreover, the financial industry most certainly was not left to ‘regulate’ itself. It is shot through and through with government regulation, regulation that failed, that will continue to fail, that is in fact counter productive. Regulation is what screwed up the rating agencies, making them worse than useless. Government interference in the housing market and the money/credit supply is what created the housing bubble upon which the infamous credit default swaps were built. Regulatory capture happened and will continue to happen in the financial industry. It has and will continue to happen with the internet so long as the government seeks to regulate it.

Moreover, the politicians and bureaucrats are ignorant of the very things they are regulating. Regulators didn’t catch Enron. They didn’t catch Madoff’s scam and they ignored the guy who did. They didn’t understand credit default swaps. Does anyone really expect them to understand how the internet works, what business models work best, and what consumers really want? The late, and unlamented, former Senator Ted Stevens, famously referred to an email message as “an internet” and described the internet as a “series of tubes” (referenced in the post title). This man chaired the Senate commerce committee for years, overseeing a large overhaul of the telecommunications bill and ‘authoring’ S. 2686, the Communications, Consumer’s Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006.

Do telecoms understand the technology better than politicians and political appointees? Yes, they do. That’s precisely why they should not be allowed to police themselves.

What you say!!!

The illogic of this is mindboggling. I do not understand how “telecoms understand the technology better than politicians and political appointees” leads to “That’s precisely why they should not be allowed to police themselves.” Is this based on fear? I’m more afraid of politicians and political appointees. They have much more power and much less accountability. That makes their ignorance all the more worrisome. At least companies have to compete with one another for (voluntary) customers and revenue.

I think most people do not understand the extent to which the telecom and internet industries are regulated by governments already, leading to myriad problems, including distorted and decreased competition. Separate economy and state, and corporations would have far less power.

What I am advocating is defending the status quo. If the status quo must be defended by regulation, then I am for government regulation.

Why defend the status quo? What’s so special about it? Change can be good. Ask Obama. Seriously though, by what right can anyone use regulation to maintain the status quo?

Left alone, I’m afraid internet would go the way of television — mostly garbage for free and very dumbed down, the more you pay, the better. My other biggest concern is lack of access to information by people who are low income, or schools on limited budgets, etc.

The internet is for porn! Seriously though, I’m fond of Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. Still, there is a lot of great, free content on the internet. That would be the case even without net neutrality. And I see no reason why non-commercial sites like Wikipedia would slow to a crawl and become hard to use, as some have irresponsibly claimed.

Peter Suderman said it well:

And, of course, that’s the big picture here: allowing and encouraging a diversity of feature sets and service options for content providers and consumers. Neutrality advocates stress the concept of equality for a reason — the goal is to ensure a level of sameness amongst consumers. But when it comes to information-service markets, especially the growing world of mobile data access, not all plans, phones, and networks are created equal. But that’s as it should be, because not all consumer needs are the same. Those who want more should be able to pay for it. Those who don’t shouldn’t have to.

Broadband may be becoming so voluminous and cheap that we’ll effectively see net neutrality for most users by default. But if this turns out not to be the case, and traffic needs keep up with expanding supply, then we might not see net neutrality fully realized in all respects. If net neutrality is not what would arise in an unhampered market, then so be it. It won’t be the end of the world and the poor will not be more unable to access the internet (at reasonable speeds) than they already are. I expect they will be better off.

Free wifi with reasonable speeds is offered by a growing number of businesses, including coffee shops and restaurants. Even Sam’s Club will soon be offering free wifi to shoppers. Businesses have an incentive to do this as a loss leader, to get customers inside to sample and purchase their products and other services. Companies like Google want everyone to be online and having a good experience; it’s better for their bottom line.  Even Verizon benefits from providing customers a satisfying internet experience.

Tell Googlizon to do no evil, but do it for the right reasons.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

There’s a new website and group blog in town, by a great group of radical Austro-Libertarians, including yours truly. It’s The Libertarian Standard. I’ve been pre-occupied with admin work for the site the past couple weeks, getting it set up and looking nice, but I’ll be getting around to blogging relatively soon. I’ll probably be doing a lot of cross-posting between TLS and here. Hopefully TLS will help break my blogging dry spell. In the meantime, check out the introductory post and the About page as well as all the great posts already published by my fellow TLS bloggers. We’ve also got a Twitter account (libstandard) and a Twitter list of tweeting TLS contributors as well as a Facebook fan page set up. I hope you enjoy our work!

That was to be the subtitle for my chapter in Open Court‘s recent addition to their Popular Culture and Philosophy series, Transformers and Philosophy: More Than Meets the Mind. Alas, no subtitles made it into the book.

I have received official permission to provide a pdf copy of my chapter, “Freedom Is the Right of All Sentient Beings,” on my website. Technically, I don’t think I really need legal permission; I don’t recall signing over to Open Court the copyright that federal law automatically vests in me as the author. Anyway, download it from that link and enjoy!

The chapter title comes from a quote by Optimus Prime in the first of the recent live action movies. The chapter itself is kind of a condensed and lite version of the Aristotelian-liberal theory of virtue ethics and natural rights explained in more detail in my dissertation, applied to the transformers and to artificial intelligences more generally.

Cory Doctorow recently announced an experiment to prove that giving away free ebooks works. Michael Stackpole responded with a deconstruction of Cory’s experiment. He makes a number of good points about the experiment, though I think he comes off unnecessarily harsh on Cory personally. And one gets the impression that he feels threatened by the growing anti-IP movement. He has his own (antiquated) business model and bottom-line to protect after all, though I applaud him for being a pioneer in experimenting with ebooks and podcasting. One remark of his in particular, in his second blogpost on Cory’s experiment (“What is Cory Doing Right?“), cuts right to the heart of the matter. I left a comment on his blogpost in response but for whatever reason it hasn’t appeared yet and might never appear [Update: must have been stuck in moderator limbo, it finally appeared] , so I’m reproducing it below:

“For some reason folks think it’s okay to say to a creator of intellectual property that the product of our labors should be free; yet they never convincingly press that argument at a farmer’s market.”

This is because intellectual property is not legitimate property, whereas a farmer’s produce is. You might check out the following:

• Stephan Kinsella, “The Case Against IP: A Concise Guide,” Mises Daily (Sept. 4, 2009).
• Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property, Mises Institute (2008).
• Roderick T. Long, “The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights,” Formulations Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1995).
• Michelle Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly, Cambridge University Press (2008).

At least one science fiction author has a pretty sound grasp of economic theory and history, and of the current financial crisis.

Ludwig von Mises over half a century ago proved, beyond a shadow of doubt, that a little intervention in one sector of the economy creates an incentive for a lot of intervention in ever larger sections of the economy; and the government must forswear either the goals it has set as policy or the means selected to pursue them to resist, if ever, that incentive, and suffer the humiliation and financial loss of reversing long-standing policy. (A nice summary of his argument can be read here: http://mises.org/midroad.asp. A complete study of the underlying logic and epistemology can be read here: http://mises.org/resources/3250.)

Read the rest. He even mentions Bastiat.

There are two things he says that jumped out at me that I must disagree with, however.

Sadly, one cannot run a free market republic in a land where the citizens are ignorant of the basic scientific laws governing the market relations.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, except for the part about running a republic. We don’t need anyone to be running any kind of republic. The state itself is an evil. We shouldn’t settle for a free market republic. And no free market republic could ever remain free market for long anyway.

The other point of disagreement is that he seems to blame the financial crisis on the wealth-transferring “Dems,” as in Democrats I assume, but the Republicans are guilty of wealth transfer from Main Street to Wall Street too. Precious few Republican politicians give more than lip service to the free market. McCain is no small government, free market man.

I added a new quote to the Great Quotes on the left sidebar. I hope it is not too pretentious of me, as it is one of my own, albeit but a modification of a great Rothbard quote on ignorance of economics.

Here they are for comparison:

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Murray Rothbard

“It is no crime to be ignorant of philosophy, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be abstruse and of little relevance for life. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on philosophical subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” – Me

And yes, there is a real living inspiration for this little piece of creative modification, but the person or persons shall remain nameless – or at least unnamed by me here. ;o)

…because according to this quote cited by Gregory Benford in his happy-birthday letter in Locus Magazine (January 2008), he claims that “there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not (pace Marx) in the case of politics and economics.” Well, far be it from me to disagree that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but Clarke is wrong here. Sir Clarke, you may be 90 years old now, and happy birthday by the way, but it’s never too late to acquire a firm grasp of sound economic theory.

Benford does report some remarks by Clarke I do agree with, however. For example: “for the one fact about the Future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.” Sounds more American than British to me.

And here’s another: “exact knowledge is the friend, not the enemy, of imagination and fantasy.”

Finally, here’s one that evokes, for me at least, the evils and waste of statism: “All this effort, all this death, when we could be building the staging area for a seaborne space elevator.”

Update: In his May 2008 memorial letter for Clarke, Benford adds two more quotes that I like:

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

“New ideas pass through three periods: It can’t be done; it probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing; I knew it was a good ideal all along!”

I haven’t been posting much (all right, not at all) lately as I’ve been studying for my comprehensive exams. I recently attended the ASC at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. I presented a paper entitled “On Praxeology and the Question of Aristotelian Apriorism.” A revised version of this paper can be found on my website as can a revised version of my paper on Roman virtue, liberty, and imperialism. Exact links can be found in my previous post. While I was there, I also interviewed for a fellowship. I’ll have an update on that before long.

Gus diZerega over at Liberty & Power has made a couple of posts arguing not only in favor on the democratic peace thesis (about which I have posted before; see here) but also, and far more incredibly, that democracies are spontaneous orders. See his posts here and here. I commented on the latter, offering a partial critique of his arguments on both counts. I don’t think he is entirely wrong, but on the important points, and particularly on democratic peace, he is. I won’t be getting into his feud with Robert Higgs, however.

Today I left a comment over at SOLOHQ on Heidi Morris’s article “Reason and Reality: The Logical Compatibility of Austrian Economics and Objectivism,” disagreeing with what I take to be mistaken views of Austrian economics by a couple of the other commentors. The article is interesting, and admirable in its attempt to bridge the divide between the two schools of thought on both philosophical and economic issues, but it is also a little superficial in its treatment. For instance, one of the major hurdles to such a reconciliation is the subject of apriorism. Rand explicitly rejected apriorism (or at least Kantian apriorism). It remains to be shown how (or even if) praxeology-as-an-a priori-discipline can be compatible with Objectivism. (I think it can be, although it may require a little reformulation.) I recently began work on an essay dealing with this very problem. I plan to submit it to JARS when it is finished. Keep an eye out for future posts linking to rough drafts.

Last semester I took a political science seminar on international conflict. I wanted to learn more about international conflict. I blogged about it here, here, and here. Unfortunately, the class was oriented primarily around mainstream (i.e., empirical and quantitative) political science, so I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked. Everything I learned must be qualified by the fact that questionable methods, epistemology, and datasets were used for all of the research we studied.

Another downside to the class was that I had to do an empirical, quantitative research paper. So I did the paper on the democratic peace thesis. I “tested” the thesis at the system level of analysis, meaning that I tested for the effects of the percentage of democracies in the international system on three types of war: inter-state war, intra-state war, and extra-state war. The idea was that if democracies are not supposed to go to war with each other, then a higher percentage of democracies in the international system should be correlated with a lower incidence of war.

I found virtually zero support for the democratic peace thesis and even found some support against it. In a number of the models, the percentage of democracy in the international system was positively and significantly correlated with the incidence of intra-state (i.e., civil and secessionist) wars.

Of course, war here is measured according to the coding rules established by the Correlates of War Project as conflict that results in at least 1,000 battle deaths. My dataset ranged from 1816-1997.

I’m not at all surprised by the results. Joanne Gowa, in Ballots and Bullets, argued that the democratic peace was an artifact of the Cold War; it appeared to be true only because Western, capitalist, democratic nations had a shared security interest against the Soviet Union. My professor, David Sobek, though he argues that Gowa’s book suffers from methodological deficiencies, improved on Gowa’s methods in an as yet unpublished paper and was surprised to find her results confirmed.

Again, while I am wary about making any definitive claims based on empirical, quantitative evidence regarding social phenomena, the evidence against the democratic peace thesis is continuing to grow. And, more importantly, this empirical evidence is supported by strong theoretical arguments.

My own paper can be found here.

It’s funny… I was told by a professor in my department a while back that my beliefs on economics and political economy amounted to nothing more than ideology. Indeed, my “ideology” (libertarianism) made him, in his own words, uneasy. Well, it was his fault for asking ideologically-laden questions in class in the first place. One time, he asked my fellow grad students and I, in our comparative political economy class, whether we favored a flat income tax or a progressive income tax. Most preferred progressive, of course, but when he got around to me I quite naturally had to say: no income tax. But that answer was out of bounds. It is perfectly acceptable to debate the merits of different varieties of statism, but to question the merit of statism itself is out of the question. It wasn’t long after this episode that he called me into his office and told me that the theories of the Austrian School of Economics, because they didn’t involve empirical (quantitative) testing, amounted to an ideology and that my Austro-libertarianism made him uneasy. He then recommended that I seek another major for my Ph.D. (Miraculously, I still got an A in the class.)

What is funny is that these so-called social scientists reject logical arguments and value judgments as unscientific while holding up empirical quantitative testing of arbitrary hypotheses with crude measures as scientific. They seem to think that truth cannot be arrived at by logical reasoning and that value judgments are arbitrary and subjective. Yet they do not see that if my position amounts to nothing more than ideology, then all the more so does theirs. They have simply shifted the realm of what is considered acceptable debate from metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics to a certain methodology. A case in point is hegemonic stability theory in the field of international relations. Scholars debating the merits of this theory cannot agree on how to define, measure, and operationalize hegemony; consequently, they cannot agree whether the theory is correct or not (assuming dubiously that empirical quantitative analysis could answer that definitively anyway). So, one can’t question the ideology of empirical qualitative/quantitative (especially quantitative) hypothesis testing. One can only question how to go about doing this so-called science from within the accepted ideological framework. The dismal state of affairs prevailing in the hegemonic stability theory debate pervades all of mainstream political science; indeed, I dare say, all of mainstream social science.

Well… It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been rather busy what with the three graduate-level classes that I am taking, another class that I am teaching, and the fact that my clunker of a car went belly up so I’m looking for a new, cheap replacement.

In any case, my three classes are going well…aside from the fact that I have to do an empirical quantitative analysis research paper in my international conflict class. Not sure what I’ll do the paper on yet.

My seminar on the metaphysics and morals of death (from an analytic philosophy perspective) is proving interesting. We are primarily looking at the fundamental questions of whether death (as opposed to the process of dying) is a harm, and whether the dead can be harmed. The answers to both questions, particularly the latter though, have important implications for ethical and political theories. If the dead cannot be harmed, then why should we respect their interests, wills, contracts, etc.? I plan to write a paper on these issues from a neo-Aristotelian virtue-ethics approach. I’m also going to apply for an IHS Summer Graduate Research Fellowship to develop it for publication.

And my seminar on Austrian philosophy, formal ontology, and realist phenomenology goes well. I’m finding I still agree with Barry Smith that the Austrian economists can benefit from studying the Austrian philosophers (the Brentano School, Husserl, Reinach, Wittgenstein). The last vestiges of Kantianism need to be shed from praxeology. Rothbard began this process, but did not complete it. Namely, it needs to be recognized that rather than the whole corpus of economic theory being implied in, and deduced directly from, the action axiom in some analytical and tautological sense, there exist a vast web of synthetic a priori propositions from which praxeological theory is woven around the central action axiom. (If my meaning here isn’t clear, I can elaborate in future posts.) However, I think both the Austrian philosophers and economists can benefit from studying Ayn Rand. And all three can benefit from returning to the great Aristotle himself. Accordingly, I am thinking of writing my paper for this class on “Ayn Rand, the Austrians, and Aristotelian Apriorism,” which I could then expand into a thesis for my second M.A. (in philosophy).

My class, introduction to political theory, is going well (I think). I’m almost done discussing Plato’s Republic. I can’t wait to move on to Aristotle’s Ethics (in its entirety) and Politics (selections).

The Economist writes: “The Heritage Foundation‘s annual index of economic freedom produced a surprise: America fell out of the top ten for the first time since the measure was created in 1995. The index gave the top honour to Hong Kong, followed by Singapore. Haiti suffered the steepest drop in its rating since last year, and North Korea took the wooden spoon again.”

The US fell to the rank of 12 out of 161, but it hasn’t been #1 for a while.

However, Stefan Karlsson at the Mises blog argues that the Heritage Foundation’s methology is seriously flawed. As always, it is good to be wary of statistical measures, especially of such a high degree of aggregation. And Mr. Karlsson makes some good points.

Philosopher Barry Smith has argued in several places (see “The Question of Apriorism,” for an example), contra the Austrian economists, that the action axiom is not irrefutable. He points out that an alien could deny that human beings act. I think that he is correct here if the action axiom is defined as the fact that human beings act. But even so, any attempt by a human being to refute the action axiom would still be self-defeating. In any case, I would argue (as I believe notable Austrian economists have) that the action axiom is universalizable to all volitional beings, in which case a denial by an alien that human beings act would hinge upon an empirical-contingent claim, viz. the denial that human beings are volitional beings. The truth of the action axiom is thus never in question, and it remains irrefutable.

I comment briefly over at the Mises Economics blog on the correlation between Rand’s theory of the agent-relative nature of values and the Austrian theory of subjective value, and on value-neutrality in economic science. Also, I wholeheartedly agree with Sheldon Richman’s comment immediately following mine.