In a previous post I discussed the well-known fact that economists’ predictions are always wrong, and why they always are. But one obvious problem with predictions was left out of the discussion, and I would like to discuss this problem in a separate post. In contrast to the previous post, which was quite general in [...]
Peter Klein wrote a blog post yesterday on the Mises Economics blog continuing the agorist vs. anarcho-capitalist discussion on organization. In his post, Klein summarized his contribution to the discussion followed by a quoting Rothbard’s assessment of agorists view on organization. But both Klein and Rothbard make unsupported general conclusions that they seem to base [...]
As a student of economics I am exposed to idiotic statements more or less daily. What is so moronically stupid about these statements is not that they have to do with economics or that they are uttered by stupid people. On the contrary, the problem seems to permeat our postmodern society and most bright people [...]
I’ve at the time of writing this post spent over a year in an American graduate program (doctorate) and there are some things I want to share with you. It is of course the case that most things taught are so-called mainstream science and as such it is as blindly fixed on empiricism and technical [...]
The increase in mechanisms of government mass surveillance of the peoples of Europe, which is of a magnitude that cannot be exaggerated, is finally causing critical discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere. In one of the European countries that is so far most affected by this unprecedented power-grab by governments (including super-governments such as the [...]
In this day and age, science is considered a field for empirical study. The word “science” is almost synonymous with “empirical.” Actually, it runs deeper than that: whatever is not explicitly empirical is automatically dismissed as unscientific, ideological storytelling or masturbation dressed in scientific wording. This was not always the case, but that is not [...]
A well-known problem in philosophy and political economy since the time of Thucydides and Aristotle, and in modern economics since 1968, is what Garrett Hardin termed the “tragedy of the commons.” The classic example is that of an “open” village pasture equally available to shepherds. It is, unless the villagers somehow agree to regulate the [...]
I have written a number of articles on the Carsonian concept of vulgar libertarianism, libertarians who mistakenly identify the current state regulated market as a “free market” and that therefore apply free market logic in defending e.g. sweatshops in Southeast Asia. The problem with this view is of course that there is no such thing [...]
I usually stay out of discussions about rights, whether they exist and which ones are “real.” Part of the reason for this is that I find it rather boring to discuss whether philosophical constructs exist or not (it should be fairly obvious that they don’t in any normal sense of the word), and partly it [...]
As I stated clearly in a previous blog entry, the topic for my article Blame Anarchism? on Strike the Root was not new; I have written on it before. So I was very surprised that this article stirred up such a debate – it seems I really touched a nerve among many anarchists. Sadly, most [...]