Friedman and Objectivism

Eva, You criticized me in this thread. I am defending myself. Good luck with that complaint (sarcasm).

Here's our (Steve & I) thoughts on thread hijacking...
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ArticleDiscussions/2415_1.shtml#24
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1962.shtml

Unfortunately due to the technology of this website, if I were to defend myself elsewhere, someone reading this thread wouldn't seamlessly see my defense.

You are trolling me after I apologize... not improving your reputation with me.
(Edited by Dean Michael Gores on 1/08, 10:08am)

Post 21

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 9:52am

"I, in reality, am far more an Objectivist than he"

Oh? What do you know of what Objectivism is? What manner do you live, is it consistent with how an Objectivist would act? What great actions have you done through your life that have been beneficial to the Objectivist cause?

Eva:
- Read Altas Shrugged and The Fountainhead
- I'm guessing you have earned little to nothing in the private sector.
- Wrote nothing, done nothing that promotes individualism nor the success of Objectivists

Dean:
- Read Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, The Virtue of Selfishness, Human Action, others. Debated on RoR for wow almost 10 years now?
- I'm a self made millionaire via software engineering, investing, and now I freelance and am staring my own companies. (OK OK, my parents paid for my college education... but after that...)
- Canvased and donated for Ron Paul 2008 presidential election
- Wrote numerous articles here on RoR. Well known in the Objectivist community, contributed lots of analysis on The Federal Reserve, the philosophical state of Americans and implications on voter dynamics in our democratic system, nutrition (paleo diet), and processes to increase capitalism.

====

Now as for how I differ from an Objectivist... I think that Objectivists have are naive in physics, information theory, biology, and evolution.
- I think reality is deterministic, and yet humans still think for themselves and make choices.
- A la evolution, I think there are/will be factions of humans, verses in Objectivism there is only one faction (the human faction)
- I've recognized that capitalism is the relation between friends within a faction or between friend factions... and that socialism/communism/etc is a system where there are enemy human factions.
- Rand says "There is no conflict of interest between rational men". I disagree, I think that its rational for needy parasite humans and manipulative wolf humans to parasite and predate... But I agree that there is no conflict of interest between two men who consider all humans in general their friend faction... this I believe is what Rand meant. And then I go further and identify that even though there is no conflict of interest, there are conflicts between what Objectivists think should be done due to having different sets of information about the context and having different sets of people whom they trust.
- Objectivists like Steve and Rand? integrate following the NIOF principal as an absolute necessity in their goal system, verses I do not (see factions, conflict of interest above)
- Given that our reality is a fully self consistent deterministic truth set, and that all possible truth sets exist independently... I've discovered the origin of our reality and integrated Plato's a-priori ideas with our observed continual physical reality.

From my perspective, Objectivism is a subset of my philosophy, where the mystery of how reality works is more resolved and free will is actually defined and consistent with a causal reality. Furthermore an Objectivist is a person who is in a faction that considers all humans who respect the individual rights of other humans as their friends, as opposed to other factions that are racist, social-economic-class-ist, etc.

My philosophy could be extended to work for other factions (such as the racist or classist), including even arbitrary non-empirical Gods are worshiped (so long as the contradictions are eradicated)... but I do not belong to those factions, and do not develop ethics nor technology for their success... I belong to the faction that "considers all humans who respect the individual rights of other humans as their friends".

I reject Rand's claim that its in every human's self interest to join the Objectivist faction. She identified the general of what humans are and created an ethical system for that... but some humans are different and hence have different ethical systems. I say: Humans (producers, welfare recipients, and politicians) are like scaled ancestors of fish (herring, lampreys, and sharks). Given the human producers allow it, the parasite and predator niches are evolutionarily successful.

Post 22

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 10:26am

Dean, I really see nothing in Eva's posts that warrant continuing that back-and-forth, nor do I see anything that suggests a need for moderation.

If being cocky or being ignorant of this or that were sins there would be lots of us lined up in the guilty queue.

I think it was good that you apologized, but if it were me, I'd let it go at that point, with or without reciprocation.

If you think it needs more attention, my suggestion would be to make a very short post saying something like, "Eva, This is what I believe needs to be understood," with a link to a new thread (in Dissent, so that a less respectful tone from either party would be less public).
Just saying :-)

Post 23

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 10:46am

Steve,

"If being cocky or being ignorant of this or that were sins there would be lots of us lined up in the guilty queue."

Very well. Hm, well at least we established friendship first before being rude to each other. I... should get some work done.

Cheers,
Dean

Post 24

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 11:56am

Steve,

Ugggh...thanks!

My concern is how this thread, "Friedman" has broken down into personal invective. Outsiders who might want to join & participate will read this and say, WTF,OMG, no way Jose.

That's why I've requested moderation--to protect the intergrity of RoR. Even a newbie can see that.

In the sticks n stones department, I can take care of myself. What, again should annoy everyone is the obligation to find content bemeath layeers of personal attack.

Re charges as such:

* ignorant -- hardly
* cocky-- a malaprop. The word derives from 'behaving like a rooster', or trying to achieve alpha domination over the hens. As you can imagine, this implies that you're an innocent chicken, or that I've somehow treated you like one.

I believe that I was also called 'scum'....do people with lots of posts somehow earn the right to use such abusive language?

Eva

Post 25

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 12:18pm

Eva,

When I said I saw no need for moderation I was referring to when Dean was calling for you to be moderated. I thought that Dean was wrong to call you "scum" and I don't like the invective that sometimes bubbles up.

(In the interests of fair disclosure, I've let my emotions run away with me on far more than one occasion - but I'm getting better in my old age :-)

There is no special privilege that comes with having lots of posts. I suspect that this forum, which I very much enjoy, will forever be plagued with the occasional blasts of negative emotions. My hope is that when this happens that one of the parties will attempt to ignore the other, or to shift that exchange to a new thread in the Dissent area.

We tend to be a bit unruly about staying with the theme of the thread and fairly tolerant of thread-abusers, up to point. (Professor Machan is among those who would like to see closer adherence to the thread, and I understand his concern.)

I can only say that I hope you find it tolerable to ignore the posts that attack you in ways that don't seem appropriate. I think that after you have been here longer, there will be more people that, having gotten to know you, will rise to your defense where appropriate (not that you need it :-)

I've always known that I like posting here are as a way of improving my communications skills, and for digging deeper into understanding the subjects that interest me. But I'm also starting to see that I use this forum, at least a little bit, to explore being a better me. (Hope that didn't come across as condescending, pompous, or like some kind of lost boy scout)

Post 26

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 12:22pm

Eva,

As I said earlier, I was mistaken to think you were and call you a socialist. A socialist is scum to me... I meant for my earlier to also apologize for calling you scum. It has nothing to do with how long a person is on the forum. But related, duration and amount of interaction on this forum builds trust between the members... and you currently have very little trust.

Post 27

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 1:52pm

Forgive me for posting on-topic here, but Milton Friedman was an inconsistent advocate of a free market. His "monetist" theory said that the central bank should regulate the money supply to keep pace with the economy. He even recommended a general 3% increase in the money supply, assuming a healthy economy growing "naturally" at that rate.

The Austrian theorists were not and are not of a single mind on many issues, but they basically accept that the government has no role in the money supply. First and foremost Hayek demolished the idea of "a" money "supply." There's lots of moneys and we make more kinds all the time. DMG is a strong advocate for Bitcoin.

I do agree that the Federal government does need to control its own creation of its own moneys - FRNs, T-bills, warrants, food stamps, etc., etc. - and if by some tea leaves they choose to increase 3% per year, a truly free market would respond. But the government is under no obligation to own its own factories (printing presses, mints) and could just use whatever moneys it chooses to accept from the existing options. Back in 1800 and 1802 radical Republicans in the Senate tried to shut down the Mint as an unnecessary public expense. Until the Civil War many (if not most) East Coast merchants were more familiar with Spanish money which they counted by English pounds-shillings-pence. Of course they paid their taxes in "US dollars" of silver or gold as required. The US Mint published annual reports of the relative values of legal tender foreign gold and silver coins.

Another point of contention with Friedman was his work in Chile. We easily see the Allende government as a Marxist coup that destroyed the economy there. The cure - mass tortures and public executions - might have been worse than the disease. However, in the video documentary Commanding Heights Friedman makes the case that he warned the generals that their hold would be brief, that free markets and free minds are inseparable: do one, you get the other.

Objectivism is not easily open to political compromise. Ayn Rand denounced Ronald Reagan. So, was Milton Friedman just another Hjalmar Schacht, holding up a fascist looter regime?

Post 28

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 2:55pm

...Milton Friedman was an inconsistent advocate of a free market.

It would be hard to find anyone who couldn't be criticized if we throw out all sense of balance. If one looks at the life and works of Milton Friedman and then wants to focus on his acceptance of a Fed that limits money supply increases to 3%, then they have no balance. I have no problem with damning the Fed. It should be eliminated, but that's different from an attack on Friedman as if his position on the Fed WAS Friedman, or was even representative of him. Friedman was one the most energetic and effective advocates of a free market that we have ever seen.

As for the business of Chile, nonsense. Watch this short Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzgMNLtLJ2k.
-----------

Ayn Rand denounced Ronald Reagan. So, was Milton Friedman just another Hjalmar Schacht, holding up a fascist looter regime?

My two responses to this were:
1.) Who would see Ayn Rand's denunciation of Reagan as logical flowing into implying that Friedman might just be a supporter of fascist looters? Hello! Is there any reasoning going on there?
2). If someone treasures liberty, how can they not see Friedman as a hero, and how could they instead go to the extreme of smearing him in this fashion, what does that say about them?

Post 29

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 6:10pm

Michael,

You are truly forgiven for having posted on-topic (Thanks!).

The history of all hitherto known existing economic theory is a history of market struggle.
In other words, economists have argued for three thousand years as what's to be marketeered, and what's to remain under social control.

Aristotle, for example, was clear that necessities should be circulated according to need, (metadosis), while it was beneficial to huckster (kapelike) non-necessities within the agora.

Adam Smith famously wrote that the Poor Laws actually repressed wages for the workers, who'd be far better off if they were renumerated by market value So under the influence of his school, plus with a little help from Townsend, who was far more concerned with malthusian extermination, the last, Spreenhamland (1795) was repealed in 1832.

The experiment lasted for two years--sufficient time for parliament to gather the data--proving Smith incredably wrong. So 1834 is the beginning of what we now consider welfare state politics. In other words, what we seem to have amassed is 180 years of data that indicates that labor when paid market value without subsistence, will be drawn down as a whole into misery.

The redress is called 'socialism'--scum as it might be to some.

Friedman was unique in that he antedates the late Austrian school; he bypasses their argument for the abolition of the Fed (and European national banks), rather opting for a non-market solution to money control. Otherwise...goods and services are best circulated at market value.

So yes, there's huge difference between saying, 'money supply balances out against goods in circulation (Austrian)', and 'No, the amount of money causes goods to circulate at a certain rate". Choose one. The choice is just as clear as the Ethical Objectivism of Rand (discovery) versus Subjective Relativism (to each his/her own to create their own values). but I digress...

Personally, I believe that Hayek was doing his obscurantist number in claiming 'many moneys'. He was saying that control is ineffective because other convertable currencies are still on the market. But was he not aware that nations have been geeting together for centuries to discuss controls/

The historian Karl Polanyi, in fact, attributed the cause of both world wars to the instability caused by rapid movenment of currencies throughout Europe...

Eva.

Post 30

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 6:31pm

Steve,

Friedman's attitude that the Fed should be maintained, and that the amount of currency in circulatiion should be held constant by monetarist means, runs counter to the Objectivist position of no control and subsequent abolition. Even I know that!

My larger point is that every economist seems to have his/her own control fetish. Krugman, for example, wrote during the Clinton years that the net effect of 'open trade' with Mexico (ie labor) would be on ultimate benefit to the American worker.

Which, in turn. leads to another question: how 'open' should be open when it comes to international trade?

The time scenario for 1973 Chile is this: On 9/11, under the direction of the CIA, the military siezed power from an elected government. In several days, 3500 people were murdered by said military. Within six months the secret service, DINA, had murdered at least 2000 more. Then there were the tortured and jailed. numbering 10,000 more.

In the video, Friedman says that 'he' did not consult with Pinochet; yet 'his' Chicago boys did.
Chicago was well-aware that they were consorting with a murderous military regeme that their own government plotted to overthrow.

So if you don't care, or want to suggest that Chicago's actions were somehow beneficial, fine. But it's not nonsense.

Eva

(Edited by Matthews on 1/08, 6:32pm)

Post 31

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 9:07pm

Let me just clarify a point from Matthews and answer my own rhetorical question.

Eva wrote:"Chicago was well-aware that they were consorting with a murderous military regeme that their own government plotted to overthrow.

You meant that (a) they were consorting with a military regime and that (b) their government plotted to overthrow a democratically-elected one. Allende's administration was overthrown by the Pinochet coup. I know what you meant, you just skipped a few words in the middle there.

Beginning with the premise that Objectivism argues against compromise on principles - as for example Ayn Rand's refusal to support Ronald Reagan - how, then does an Objectivist evaluate Milton Friedman?

As I said, he was an inconsistent advocate of the free market. It seems from his continued works that modern libertarians actually pulled him some increments away from his earlier governmentalist positions. In Capitalism & Freedom he wrote that anti-trust laws were necessary. Later, he took that back. More famously, he was the originator of income tax withholding, a policy he since felt a need to explain, if not excuse. Finally, as Barry Goldwater's economic advisor, Friedman advocated for a "negative income tax" i.e. a basic guaranteed level of income as being far cheaper and more effective than the welfare system in place in 1964 - and certainly true today. Objectivists would suggest something else.

But if you read other nominally pro-market economists such as Ronald Coase, Robert Mundell, Joseph Stiglitz, and Gary Becker, you do not find any explicit advertisement for capitalism, which, indeed Friedman did write over the long course of his career. Unlike them, he was an advocate, a partisan. The question remains though: absent a non-contradictory morality, some of his prescriptions were questionable. He was great at describing the free market. He fell flat when suggesting ways to improve it.

As for Pinochet, the atrocities cannot be talked away, even if it were possible to justify a military coup against a constitutionally elected government. That said, Friedman warned the junta that if they instituted market reforms, they would be turned out of government. That happened. Free markets and free minds are inseparable.

Or so we say. What about Singapore? You can make all the money you want, as long as you don't criticize the government or chew gum. (Not to hijack the topic, but it does point, perhaps, to the special influence of western culture in Chile.)

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 1/08, 9:08pm)

Post 32

Wednesday, January 8, 2014 - 9:40pm

Michael,

No, the possessive pronoun 'their' refers to the government of The Chicago Boys, The USA, which indeed plotted to overthrow Alliende.

In this regard, it takes a rather goonish attitude to have participated: Chicago people knew all along that the putsch was carried out to bring in what Chicago wanted done. So how naive does one have to be not to see ulterior motive?

Next, I presume that someone will eventually say, 'When the Franks slaughtered the 30,000 inhabitants of Jerusalem, they had no idea that, within five years, 30,000 Frankish citizens would simply show up to repopulate the city".

This swings back to morals as proposed by Gert, as doing no harm. You're responsable for what needs to be known. Stupidity is no excuse, hence amoral.

The notion that markets and democracy are consistent is indeed refuted by Asia.

This is because, eevn in the west, democratically-elected governments are free to choose market/control modeling that best fits their own particular outlook. Regardless of my own beliefs, I need to come to terms with the fact that others, in other well-run countries, have decided differently.

Eva

Post 33

Thursday, January 9, 2014 - 6:45am

Eva, you need to dig a little deeper into Ayn Rand's non-fiction. Better than any other advocate of capitalism, she explained clearly how Singapore or Shanghai can prosper as "capitalist" without an explicit acknowledgement of human rights. The political conservative in America are just our "Asians" - willing to let people make money, but still desiring the implicit right to control their minds.

You said earlier that you are interested only in examining the world as it is, not measuing it against a rationalist ideal that never existed. Fair enough. Let me suggest that history is replete with examples of how freedom works and slavery does not. Even partial, incomplete, implicit, and imperfect examples show the reality of the better way. By comparison, in Aristotle's worldview, in order to move a cart, an ox must pull it. If the ox stops, the cart stops. Newton abstracted that to show that a single impulse of momentum will send the cart in a straight line forever absent any other outside forces. Newton's was an "ideal sytem that never existed in the real world" if you want to see it that way and dismiss it and explain physics in Aristotlean vocabulary.

So, too, do you use the vocabulary of an old-fashioned paradigm when you write that "democratically-elected governments are free to choose market/control modeling that best fits their own particular outlook."

Governments are not individual entities. They are symbiotic organisms in which parts may work to achieve common goals or not. More to the point of the new paradigm, they have no right to decide which "market/control model" to enforce.

In days gone by, the state was (not surprisingly) considered the "house" of the strongest ruling family. The "house of Hapsburg" did not refer to some castle and its front lawn: they meant "Austria" -- all of it, and everyone in it. The British parliamentary system first rejected that (implicitly) and then finally and completely the American Revolution put an end to that paradigm. So, too, did Ayn Rand and other modern libertarians break with the democratic republic. Rand in particular defined the moral society as that which is moral for the individual. The individual is primary. The rest follows from that. It starts with Robinson Crusoe. He is on his island and instead of Friday whom he rescues from a few cannibals, along comes a tribe of cannibals who agree not to eat him as long as he works for them. They take his home, his goats, his wheat, his gun (of course), and they even let him vote on whetther tomorrow he will fish or plant.

The so-called "democratic republic" is functionally better than a "divine rights monarchy", but it is not fundamentally moral. And another important point from Ayn Rand's Objectivism is that no dichotomy exists separating the moral from the practical. A truly moral capitalist society will eclipse Singapore and Shanghai because it will benefit form the practical consequences of that morality.

This is not a rationalist ideal that never existed. It is a paradigm for understanding that which has always existed.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 1/09, 6:53am)

Post 34

Thursday, January 9, 2014 - 12:10pm