Elderly Randian forced to grow up

[james_davis_nicoll]

Greenspan said that he had found "a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works."

Comments

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

Well, he's one up on the neocons, in that he can actually admit he made a mistake.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

He's a twit.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

God, what a perfect subject header.

There's one response to virtually everything in that article.

[phanatic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, right.

And in case you couldn't tell I was being sarcastic.

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

Good god, you mean the man actually had to wait until this reductio ad absurdum farce of a crisis to see the gaping bloody hole?

Geebus, to think we used to think this dude's brain had some purpose more than keeping his thinning hair out of his neckhole.

Committed Libertarians over the age of 4 make Darth Hello Kitty sad and confused. And when Darth Hello Kitty is sad and confused, star systems die...

[amberite.livejournal.com]

Stay good, Darth Hello Kitty! Stay good!

[(Anonymous)]

I admit some confusion. In order to become a Randite, or laissez-fairiste in the first place, don't you have to accept that sometimes shit happens and people take one in the 'nads, and that's a good thing?

Isn't that what market discipline is supposed to be about? People make bad choices and the market punishes them, because the market knows all and sees all, Hallelujah, Amen? Greenspan seems to have been insufficiently committed to the Cause, if a little thing like this can shake him.

- Ken

[brooksmoses]

Well, one problem is that there's a layer of indirection. People make bad choices for what a company should do. The market punishes the company. This may or may not transfer into a punishment of the person.

Another problem is that this theory doesn't account for timescale. Sacrificing short-term stock price for long-term company well-being is a thing that's arguably against the current stockholder's interests. (I think the free-market theory is that it is impossible to do that, because improving the company's long-term well-being will make the stock price go up; however, this theory appears to be patent nonsense in practice to the point where I would think even a committed Randite would see it.)

Actually ...

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

... that aspect of the accountability mechanism was basically broken back in the 1920s, with the invention of the mutual fund. The true investors, which is to say the unit-holders in the mutual funds (via RRSPs and your American 401k thingies), have precisely zero say -- and the institutional investors who slosh the equities around in miscellaneous ways and at various rates, are largely uninterested in corporate governance as such, merely in market valuations of the stocks.

Which means that stock markets long ago (> 60 years) ceased to be a strong feedback loop for insightful investors to be rewarded for shrewd guesses by hefty profits, or to be punished for stupidness by the loss of the principal -- and became some sort of giant game of chicken-slash-musical-chairs, instead.

[sethg]

The "capitalism" idealized in Atlas Shrugged is a system where Good People always profit handsomely. Nobody in Galt's Gulch talks about going bust because of a bad harvest or similar bad luck, nobody is a true believer in capitalism and yet incompetent as an entrepreneur or inventor or artist, and when one character speaks of being put out of business by a competitor, he says it in the kind of tone people use for describing a lost golf game. In Randworld, when Good People take it in the 'nads, it's because of the eevil collectivists.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Don't they have tar and feathers in Washington then?

For some reason ...

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

... the first two times I read your post, it registered in my feeble and decaying brain as "Don't they have a tax on feathers in Washington then?" So, let's hear it for third readings! (Yay!)

(I suppose if they did, it would be a tax policy that's for the birds, eh?)

[eyelessgame.livejournal.com]

Yah, it's always a little embarrassing when someone reaches his age and still believes in the laissez fairy.

Well, here's the problem ...

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

... there never really is Laissez Faire.

For example, critics of Laissez Faire will often point to the "deregulation" of energy in California in the 1990s and thereabouts, which led to miscellaneous brownouts and bankruptcies, with lot's of hurtin' all around -- moral, say the fans of "regulation", being that we shouldn't ever "deregulate" -- except that the deregulation of California power companies, in the minutiae and guts of its "deregulation", forbad those companies from passing on any cost increases to certain classes of consumers, with the result they couldn't pay for their own costs, and that's what led to the bankruptcies.

So, if you go hunt among the bull-rushes at the swamp's edge for a Murray Rothbard or a Peikoff (or the like), they will argue, not without merit, on the basis of that and other examples, that "the" problem is that we've never genuinely deregulated.

It's sort of the way that Marxists will explain away the implosion of the USSR, etc., on the grounds that it couldn't have been "real" Communism -- given the USSR had a (relatively) very wealthy governing class (the Nomenklatura with their Crimean Dachas, etc.), their plaint, too, is not without merit.

So: you go and press the local Ayn Rand groupies to tell you how much "deregulation" is "enough" to meet their litmus test for sufficiency.

And they'll tell you, that they still want Governments around to do stuff like define and enforce property rights, uphold contracts, and so on.

Which, unless I'm not understanding the plain meaning of English words, would be, um, regulation, right?

So, does "deregulation" even exist? Does the concept have any meaning whatsoever? At this stage in my progress toward senility and decrepitude, I've come to the conclusion that, no, it doesn't.

It's sort of the way Religious types (the kind who prattle on, on Sunday morning radio, or put on tall hats to make declarations about Morality from the immediate vicinity of Vatican City, etc.) always gas on about how we mustn't succumb to "materialist" beliefs.

So, what's a "materialist"?

Someone (who ?, where?), who apparently believes that "the world is made only of matter". Which, on the plain meaning of the actual words used, would mean a person who obviously doesn't "believe" in time, energy or information. I am unaware that any such person ever existed.

I think a lot of "debates" would just go away, if the participants were forbidden to ever use basically meaningless words (like "deregulation" or "materialist").

Re: Well, here's the problem ...

[grimjim.livejournal.com]

It's scientific materialism (or, perhaps more accurately, materialist monism) versus dualism in that context. It's the monism they object to, rather than the materialism per se.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026793.000-creationists-declare-war-over-the-brain.html

Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul.

Bloody hell.

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Great. Now they're coming to fuck up my field as well...

Re: Well, here's the problem ...

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

First of all, thanks for alerting me to these two -- hadn't yet heard of this particular pair, even though I have wrestled with creationists in the past, ... only to discover, that there's no refuted -- by their own admission -- argument, that they will not recycle, if they think they're with a "new" audience that hadn't witnessed the demolition, whom they might still dupe with it. They don't actually care about The Truth, only about persuading people to join the Jeebus movement, as they imagine it.

Which is to say, they are not honest people with a differing understanding of the world, they are dishonest people -- but, I digress.

You write, "They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial".

I anticipate (without knowing it is so -- consider this a hypothesis to be tested by an experimental reading of their blathering) -- that they must do so by implicitly constructing a straw-man "brain".

A straw-man "brain" which rhetorically is material-atomic, but which is not material-electrical (i.e., gloss away the energy).

One which is material-achronous -- so scratch the relevance of time and memory.

One which is not actually fully synaptic -- hence, skip the connectivity, and therefore the information content.

Also, I imagine they'd be quite dismissive (or utterly ignorant) of all we know of Ramsey Theory and of Complexity Theory (viz., of emergent properties).

In other words, I predict they construct a conveniently refutable neuroscientific "materialism" that is not genuinely the point of view of any actual neuroscientist, living or dead.

They will then (I hypothesize) demolish this straw man, and climb the nearest hill in order to ululate this supposed triumph to the Moon.

(You know, there was a time, a one or two centuries ago, when Western religion at least tried to be an intellectual enterprise, rather than an anti-intellectual one. I'm not sure what forbidden fruit it ate, when, since then, but it certainly is in a fallen state by comparison, now.)

Re: Well, here's the problem ...

[avram]

I thought that what led to the California brownouts and bankruptcies was Enron manipulating the energy market to force California power companies to buy on the spot market.

Which, I guess, just reinforces your point. More regulation could have prevented the problem, by (say) not having deregulated to begin with. Less regulation could also have solved it, by not having the prices capped.

Re: Well, here's the problem ...

[tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :^)

I wish I could have put it that succinctly, instead of rambling on as I did.

You understood me exactly.

Cheers.

[ertchin.livejournal.com]

Not nearly as embarrassing as someone who serves as the Federal Reserve chairman and still claims to believe in laissez-faire. You don't have to come down on any particular side to realize how insanely contradictory those two positions are.