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
I'm going to guess Ludwig von Mises. (I didn't Google; promise.)
ReplyDeleteMike gets it in one!
DeleteAlthough I must admit, I vaguely recall Kevin Carson citing this quote (or something like it) to make a point several years ago.
ReplyDeleteAnd didn't the author build on that premise to provide a utilitarian basis for minarchism ?
ReplyDeleteThat dirty socialist!
ReplyDeleteThe thing about this is that there is nothing wrong with admitting it. If libertarians were to admit this, it wouldn't take away from their case at all, only their more idiotic declarations of pacifism.
ReplyDeleteOh Samson, you have really misjudged them here. The whole allure of the homesteading fable is that then they can claim to be pure and demonstrably right, from first principles. Their argument against intervention is also based on the notion the free markets are "justice preserving". But that means little if the initial condition is unjust. If you want a simple minded mantra you can throw at opponents then you cannot allow problems like that in.
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