How to Make Sure Your System Comes Out on Top in Every Debate

By -
"In the first place, there can’t BE any externalities in a purely private property society because the costs can always be internalized." -- Mattheus von Guttenberg

Ancap: In a purely private property society is a society in which everything will function perfectly.

Skeptic: But wait... what about the lack of a court of last appeal for disputes?

Ancap: There cannot BE any lack of things a purely private property society, because in one, as I think I mentioned, everything will function perfectly. Any other questions?

Comments

  1. Mattheus von Guttenberg6:34 PM

    I pity the poor strawmen you choose to wheel out and wail on.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah8:03 PM

      I did not know you were made of straw, Mattheus!

      Delete
  2. Samson Corwell11:14 PM

    I'm not sure that you'll respond to this considering the age of this post, but the issue of externalities as it relates to law has always confused me, especially when it comes to libertarianism. If X is made illegal, then isn't that all that matters in these cases? I mean, I'm not sure I see a difference between banning X and tort law that covers damages resulting from X if there's some sort of legal measure in place.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more