Ray Peat Believes That Libertarian Ideology Is Responsible For The Hatred Of Fructose

[Kyle M]

Of course not. But that's not very analogous to what happens in first world countries.

How do modern first world nations extract taxes? What happens if you refuse to pay? And would you accept a group of people who don't call themselves the government, but otherwise are exactly the same, doing those things?

 

[Kyle M]

@aquaman, I will agree that in some situations, like Russia's in the 20th century, they had some benefits compared to our system of crony capitalism, and those benefits were in biomedical research freedoms. None of that research actually benefitted the people, however, because they had no freedom of enterprise with which to apply them. So it's nice for rich Westerners like you and I to read the papers published by slave scientists decades ago in the USSR, but a fat lot of good it did for them. That is not an argument for our style, or Russia's style, of government, but rather an argument to keep out the crony capitalism we have (so that we can have intellectually honest science) and to keep out the communism they had (so we can apply science to commercial activity and increase the standards of living of the population.

The thing you don't understand is that government, if it is voluntary, is not the state. Yes people pool resources, who doesn't know that? Kids pool resources to buy a pizza after school. Companies pool investor resources. This is all good and beneficial, and most importantly, voluntary. You can "govern yourself," this is a semantic issue. What is morally and practically wrong is the use and threat of violence to take resources, rights or lives away from the population "for their own good." This is where my patience grows thin, because it's obvious you haven't actually read anything by libertarian or Austrian economist scholars.

 

[jaa]

The reason I stay away from consequentialist arguments is that they are a farce. They never actually happen. What does happen is that they are used to justify quite different things. Like the military, people say "we need national defense to protect us from foreign invaders." Ok, but has that ever happened? Andrew Jackson fought the invading English while commanding a Tennessee militia, not a federal military. Other than that, there has never been a ground invasion, but instead the USA military has become the greatest aggressive military force ever seen on the planet (outside of maybe Genghis Kahn, but it's debatable). Not only that, but the interplay of the military-industrial complex has transformed the nature of this nation's economy towards making weapons for war, and the companies that make billions from that buy politicians that then always push for more war and extreme war preparedness.

So the argument that we need a government to have national defense through a central military makes a bit of sense on paper, but look at the results. If you just said no, because government and it's military are immoral, then you would be forced to defend the nation with a voluntary local militia AS HAPPENED IN THE ONLY GROUND INVASION IN OUR HISTORY, SUCCESSFULLY. Consequentialist arguments are tools of thought manipulation.

Other examples: massive use of torture, because we could have a terrorist who knows of a bomb just about to go off
the FDA/AMA: because there could be a snake oil salesman selling therapies that don't work and actually harm people
the USDA and Farm Bill: because farmers could have a bad season, and sometimes prices go down and need to be supported or else we won't have any farmers to grow good anymore...or something

Hold on. Just because people can apply consequentialism using a poor utility function does not mean consequentialism is a bad philosophy. That's like saying the government has a deontological rule that they can't cut military spending, therefore deontology is bunk. It doesn't follow.

I agree that torture is used way too much. But that's mostly because of what we know about how poor the information we get from torture is. The consequences do not justify the actions. If torture produced reliable information, and you had a no torture rule, then there would be cases where your no torture rule lead to horrible consequences and I would consider that decision as monstrous as the decision to use torture as liberally as the USA gov does now given the poor information it yields.

Same thing goes for the FDA. I'm in agreement with you there. I think the consequences of their current policy lead to worse results than a number of less restrictive policies could.

All of these examples line up perfectly with my understanding of consequentialism. And the extreme cases where our deontological rules of thumb don't work also line up with consequentialism. It's true that the waters are muddied and it's not always easy to measure or predict outcomes to base our decisions on (though we could use something like prediction markets to reign that in), but consequentialism does give us a good idea of what's right and wrong. And usually it's in line with basic moral rules of thumb. When in doubt, it's best to adhere to those intuitions. But if you blindly follow those intuitions you can run into cases where you make a horrendous decision if you fail to look at things from a consequentialist framework, where it is clear that you should deviate from your intuition.

 

[aquaman]

Ray to the rescue. I finally found what I have been searching for since yesterday. From Politics and Science Radio show on EVOLUTION. Around the 53 minute mark.

Question was something to do with class warfare. I just typed this down so if there are errors, let me know and I can edit it.


RP: "I think it's a metaphysical problem, essentially, in which .. I think it was about 1870, 1875, that William Morris said "where will this culture end? In a counting house on top of a cinder pile?". That was very close to the way the climate change seems to be leading us: ashes and money.

[comment]

I think it's a, basically a metaphysical thing, if you see the mechanical commitment to the past leading its way in to the future, you end with that cinder pile, and to avoid that you need to change your metaphysics to the Leibnizian or Aristotelian view in which the final cause has to be taken into account.

Liebnitz and Tailhard de Chardin attended a Vernadsky lecture on the noosphere and de Chardin was an archaeologist, anthropologist, priest and he saw this end point as a God consciousness, and that was how Leibniz expressed it, that the end condition was moving towards in some way a fuller expression of God-ness, but however you express the end conditions, Vernadsky didn't have that sort of an end in mind, he described it as a universe of consciousness, the noosphere, in which knowledge and awareness became the governing principle.

However you see the end condition, I think you have to start thinking in terms of the final causes, and get back to Artistotle at least, and once you take that into account that maybe it isn't so good to reduce the planet to ashes and money, then maybe you can work on solutions, part of the solution is to stop thinking about class superiority and racial superiority.

Q: does that mean you have to imagine how you want the world to be and then intend to make it that way?

RP: Yeah, the final cause was the purpose where you mean to go. and by denouncing heliological (??) thinking at any level they said that bottom line is that you want to make your money and you don't care what it costs the other person or the environment, the strict one-directional idea of causality, you work on what is local and what is profitable and disregard the outcome because according to that metaphysics, the outcome is always a matter of degradation, and elimination of what is unsuccessful.

 

[jaa]

How do modern first world nations extract taxes? What happens if you refuse to pay? And would you accept a group of people who don't call themselves the government, but otherwise are exactly the same, doing those things?

I have a written contract with the government in the form of the law. If I don't like it, I am free to leave. I am free to vote. I am free to move to the woods and try to live off the land. The government pays for things like hospitals and schools and what not. It's not the best system imaginable, but it's amoung the best in history. If I refuse to pay I've failed to fulfill my contractual obligations and the government offers to put me on a payment plan. If I still refuse to pay, I go to jail. I am cool with all this because of everything the government provides society with. I also think things can be better, although I think I would choose to live within the state if a libertarian alternative was available. But maybe not.

 

[Kyle M]

@jaa - so do you have an example of when utilitarian/consequentialist reasoning produced a better result than natural rights morality vis a vis libertarian non-aggression principle? Because I have dozens, hundreds, thousands of examples of when it was used to justify the most heinous acts of mass murder and theft we have seen on earth.

 

[Kyle M]

I have a written contract with the government in the form of the law. If I don't like it, I am free to leave. I am free to vote. I am free to move to the woods and try to live off the land. The government pays for things like hospitals and schools and what not. It's not the best system imaginable, but it's amoung the best in history. If I refuse to pay I've failed to fulfill my contractual obligations and the government offers to put me on a payment plan. If I still refuse to pay, I go to jail. I am cool with all this because of everything the government provides society with. I also think things can be better, although I think I would choose to live within the state if a libertarian alternative was available. But maybe not.

When did you sign the contract? Did your kids sign it too? What law are you referring to? Does the government stick to what that law says it can do?

 

[Kyle M]

@aquaman - that's why property rights must be respected. Communism regimes have had the worst pollution record of any industrialized nations. Believe me, I'm well aware of Ray's previous communist sympathy, and although he is not one to come out and endorse this or that system and say his ultimate belief, his more recent writings and talks are much more libertarian. He would come out on my side of this, that the individual owns his body, mind and property obtained thereby prior to the state.

 

[jaa]

@jaa - so do you have an example of when utilitarian/consequentialist reasoning produced a better result than natural rights morality vis a vis libertarian non-aggression principle? Because I have dozens, hundreds, thousands of examples of when it was used to justify the most heinous acts of mass murder and theft we have seen on earth.

When has there existed a group of people living by libertarian non-aggression principles?

And like I mentioned earlier, I don't think it's fair to critique consequentialism just because people are great at coming up with justifications for their shitty actions. I think non-aggression principles would fall under consequential philosophy given the opposite tends to produce such negative results.

Edit: I think this conversation is going off the rails a bit and I don't think it needs to. Especially since there aren't any moral cases we've come up with where we're in disagreement.

 

[Kyle M]

When has there existed a group of people living by libertarian non-aggression principles?

I have a real issue with this point. It's the same as saying "when has there existed a group of people with a zero murder and theft rate?" and claiming that as justification for murder and theft. The state is a predatory organization, and the history of mankind (at least in the Western, more liberty minded cultures) has been a competition between the state trying to control the population to subjugate them, and the non-state population innovating ways around it. Thousands of years ago families would hide their children when the state came around to find military conscripts. Today, Uber has broken the taxi cab medallion cartel that has existed since the Great Depression in many American cities.

And like I mentioned earlier, I don't think it's fair to critique consequentialism just because people are great at coming up with justifications for their shitty actions. I think non-aggression principles would fall under consequential philosophy given the opposite tends to produce such negative results.

I like absolute morality because it doesn't get people thinking in a slippery slope kind of way. Look around you, people aren't that smart in many areas of life. If you teach them that stealing is wrong, many people absorb that lesson and don't steal. Then what happens? They want something, and they skip that first option of theft to just take it, and the second one is to ask for it or trade for it, or work to acquire something to trade for it. Now all of society is wealthier. That concept is lost on the vast majority of the population, and if you taught them that stealing is wrong in this situation because the consequence is bad, but it's less wrong in this situation because the consequence is less bad, and it's ok in this situation etc. you would have a much worse society. That's what's going on in Europe now with the migrants, their religion has taught them that sex before marriage is wrong UNLESS it's raping a non-Muslim woman. Then what happens? Wouldn't the world be better off if rape, theft, murder etc. were considered by everyone, everywhere as wrong? And it is wrong, it's wrong to do those things, people know it's wrong even when they are doing it, and if they don't have that feeling it's a diagnosable mental condition called sociopathy/antisocial disorder.

 

[jaguar43]

@aquaman - that's why property rights must be respected. Communism regimes have had the worst pollution record of any industrialized nations. Believe me, I'm well aware of Ray's previous communist sympathy, and although he is not one to come out and endorse this or that system and say his ultimate belief, his more recent writings and talks are much more libertarian. He would come out on my side of this, that the individual owns his body, mind and property obtained thereby prior to the state.

Unless you have evidence for this with quotes or email exchanges then it pretty much settle at this point that Ray Peat is more aligned with the left sector of politics. Ray Peat in the authoritarianism interview spoke favorably of Marinaleda, a communist utopia in Spain in which collectivization is the main industry. The email exchange in the OP is also pretty clear. The "typical internet libertarian ideology" refers to those who believe the right wing deviation of libertarianism.

 

[Kyle M]

Unless you have evidence for this with quotes or email exchanges then it pretty much settle at this point that Ray Peat is more aligned with the left sector of politics. Ray Peat in the authoritarianism interview spoke favorably of Marinaleda, a communist utopia in Spain in which collectivization is the main industry. The email exchange in the OP is also pretty clear. The "typical internet libertarian ideology" refers to those who believe the right wing deviation of libertarianism.

So ask him. Email Ray that question I set out, about whether the individual or the state has prior ownership of their body, mind and property.

 

[jaa]

When did you sign the contract? Did your kids sign it too? What law are you referring to? Does the government stick to what that law says it can do?

I didn't sign a contract. It's a societal contract I was born into and I am free to relocate to a spot where I don't have to engage in that contract, but I don't get to enjoy the benefits society provides. Most people choose not to live in the woods. If I choose to live in a City, I pay property tax on my home to help pay for some of the services to my home. I am free to move out to the woods and live off the land, and you are too. Most libertarians don't go that route though.

 

[Kyle M]

I didn't sign a contract. It's a societal contract I was born into and I am free to relocate to a spot where I don't have to engage in that contract, but I don't get to enjoy the benefits society provides. Most people choose not to live in the woods. If I choose to live in a City, I pay property tax on my home to help pay for some of the services to my home. I am free to move out to the woods and live off the land, and you are too. Most libertarians don't go that route though.

I don't consider that legitimate. Who taught you social contract theory? What if someone told you that you have a contract with God that you must worship him for the benefits he provides?

The qualities of the state you describe are not what I see in it, in large part due to this essay https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Anatomy of the State_3.pdf
It actually comments on your description of state benefits right in the beginning.

 

[jaa]

I have a real issue with this point. It's the same as saying "when has there existed a group of people with a zero murder and theft rate?" and claiming that as justification for murder and theft. The state is a predatory organization, and the history of mankind (at least in the Western, more liberty minded cultures) has been a competition between the state trying to control the population to subjugate them, and the non-state population innovating ways around it. Thousands of years ago families would hide their children when the state came around to find military conscripts. Today, Uber has broken the taxi cab medallion cartel that has existed since the Great Depression in many American cities.

I'm not saying that at all. It would be great if we lived in a world without it! But we don't. And unfortunately sometimes killing a dangerous person is the best option available. And a lot of times state violence is unjust. And while the tax system isn't perfect, it's one of the most workable systems for providing a lot of the services people want out of a government. Governments take tax money and spend it on things a majority of people would not want it spent on. That's bad. And government's of the past have conscripted sons to fight in wars. That's bad. But that doesn't mean all government systems are bad.

Your libertarian ideals are lofty and I'll reiterate I agree with a lot of them. Your state bashing does not match my current experience in dealing with a state, and it is even farther from my ideal state.

I like absolute morality because it doesn't get people thinking in a slippery slope kind of way. Look around you, people aren't that smart in many areas of life. If you teach them that stealing is wrong, many people absorb that lesson and don't steal. Then what happens? They want something, and they skip that first option of theft to just take it, and the second one is to ask for it or trade for it, or work to acquire something to trade for it. Now all of society is wealthier. That concept is lost on the vast majority of the population, and if you taught them that stealing is wrong in this situation because the consequence is bad, but it's less wrong in this situation because the consequence is less bad, and it's ok in this situation etc. you would have a much worse society. That's what's going on in Europe now with the migrants, their religion has taught them that sex before marriage is wrong UNLESS it's raping a non-Muslim woman. Then what happens? Wouldn't the world be better off if rape, theft, murder etc. were considered by everyone, everywhere as wrong? And it is wrong, it's wrong to do those things, people know it's wrong even when they are doing it, and if they don't have that feeling it's a diagnosable mental condition called sociopathy/antisocial disorder.

Doesn't your muslim immigrant examples show how absolute morality can go awry?

At this point it feels like we're talking in circles. I think you've expressed all you can about the virtues of absolute morality, and I'm in agreement with you for most cases. I understand your concern that consequentialism can be used to justify anything, but I don't think that's a knock down of consequentialism so much as it is a knock down about bad beliefs (e.g. god) and/or utility functions. I think my humanist / conscious beingist utility function produces the types of good outcomes as your absolute morality in standard cases, and produces better outcomes in non-standard cases. I've yet to come across a case where another moral philosophy trumps consequentialism and that's why I'm a consequentialist. If that does occur, I'll have to update my beliefs.

 

[Kyle M]

I don't think you realize how much better the average standard of living would be if we simply didn't have 1) central banks 2) national militaries and 3) government regulation in the economy. It would be like the Dark Ages vs. today. A tremendous amount of capital has been misallocated and/or consumed, and even though you don't know the counter factual material standard you would have, you should realize it would be an enormous difference. How many thousands of years did the Chinese have an impoverished material living standard until they accepted some minor tenets of property rights? Compared to Europeans of that age they had nothing. That's what you should be comparing to.

 

[jaguar43]

So ask him. Email Ray that question I set out, about whether the individual or the state has prior ownership of their body, mind and property.

I would never ask him such a question because one can already see the word magic being used in the argument. Shaping the answer by controlling the question is a great example of someone who is looking for a preconceived answer.


Socialist and Communist don't argue that the state should control the body, mind or property. They believe that the state is a tool of power for certain classes. In capitalism, the state is controlled by the ruling class and is used to oppress the working class for the benefit of the capitalist. This is exactly the case in the U.S. Whether that's buying judges and politicians through campaign contributions, or regulatory capture of certain agencies, or using think tanks ( much like the koch brothers use to promote their libertarian ideology throughout the public school system) to manipulate public education for their interest. It's being able to see the intentions of certain structures of power.

 

[jaa]

I don't consider that legitimate. Who taught you social contract theory? What if someone told you that you have a contract with God that you must worship him for the benefits he provides?

The qualities of the state you describe are not what I see in it, in large part due to this essay https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Anatomy of the State_3.pdf
It actually comments on your description of state benefits right in the beginning.

Well if humans had to give something to God in order to get benefits, then yeah, that seems about right. Otherwise they're freeloaders. If you don't consider it legitimate, move. By living where you do you implicitly agree to the social contract.

 

[Kyle M]

Well if humans had to give something to God in order to get benefits, then yeah, that seems about right. Otherwise they're freeloaders. If you don't consider it legitimate, move. By living where you do you implicitly agree to the social contract.

You're right though, at a certain point these conversations can't go anywhere anymore, which is why it's kind of pointless.

So if the mob sets up shop in your neighborhood and tells everyone they need to pay protection money, they are legitimate and you can move if you don't like it? That essay is really useful for getting past the social contract mythology.

 

[jaa]

I don't think you realize how much better the average standard of living would be if we simply didn't have 1) central banks 2) national militaries and 3) government regulation in the economy. It would be like the Dark Ages vs. today. A tremendous amount of capital has been misallocated and/or consumed, and even though you don't know the counter factual material standard you would have, you should realize it would be an enormous difference. How many thousands of years did the Chinese have an impoverished material living standard until they accepted some minor tenets of property rights? Compared to Europeans of that age they had nothing. That's what you should be comparing to.

I agree that some of those policies are draining. Especially the American military. That's another example of a coordination problem go awry. I'm not convinced libertarianism resolves that. We haven't run the experiment of setting up two libetarian groups with a power imbalance adjacent each other. It's nice to profess non-aggression. I can do that with my idealized state too. Making it work in practice isn't so easy. I have a feeling that a libertarian group would find itself in need of building up defense similar in magnitude to typical nation states depending on what geopolitical area it occupies.

Anyway, I fully support giving a chunk of land to libertarians and letting them do their libertarian thing and watching how it plays out. And if it's successful, great! Let the best system win. But I can't just go along with your assumptions that it will solve all these societal woes because words.