Hugh Johnson
Member
I never bóught their argument, you clearly have not read my posts. I have said that their writings are nothing more than cover for predatory capitalism. It would clearly not work and that rhetoric is simply used by the intelligent psychopaths on top to convince the stupid psychopaths on the bottom that they too will get to prey on other people freely in the coming utopia. I have used their words, because even according to them, it would be a tyranny where kids are sold as slaves.The thing about the libertarian system, and any evaluation of it (including yours), is that there is no consideration of the role of culture and other humanistic elements. Such an act (child selling) most would find morally reprehensible, and they would prevent it if it was in their power. It's funny because you bought the libertarian premise that humans can become homo economicus and will ignore any sense of what is fair, just, or beautiful. Even Rothbard and other libertarians don't truly believe humans are computing automatons, because they will almost always bring subjective value and personal preference into discussions about markets. Is this inconsistent? Yes.
All ideologies stemming from the stunted version of the Enlightenment incorporated as the English ideology are inconsistent (I talked about the Enlightenment and English Ideology in my response to Ashoka). I term ideologies in this fashion Platonic or Western. These ideologies exist and develop by stealing ideas from thinkers working in the Aristotelian or Eastern fashion, and installing them in their models.
The first episode of the Quax podcast introduced me to the binary of the Rationalists and Empirics. The Rationalists (Platonic, Western) must steal from the Empirics (Aristotelian, Eastern). This is the only way for the Rationalist ideology to survive and and continue, they must feed on the new facts generated by the Empirics. They can't generate their own discoveries, because it would disrupt their models. The models are the authority; anything contradicting the accepted model is expurgated and isn't granted full status as scientific fact. The Rationalist system is actually a dialectic. Each cycle of the dialectic integrates the current model with problematic data, and this yields a synthesis of the new model.
Ray has covered how poorly the prevailing paradigm of "pumps, membranes, and receptors" reflects reality and they've had to retrofit and refine their theses and experimental methods to match. For example:
"After the electron microscope began making pictures of cells, it took some time to find the stain that would produce any membrane at all, and then it took about thirty years to learn to produce a “membrane” image that had a thickness that seemed appropriate for the theory."They are constantly bolting on caveats and provisos to the elegant exterior of the current engine of understanding. Until a new paradigm is created, and we get a beautiful new machine to work with.
Perhaps it could be said that the Empirics borrow models from the Rationalists, but I need to explore that idea further.
IRL obviously it won't work and was never meant to. But even their utopia is horrifying.