Wednesday, May 26, 2010

The Sun from which we kindle all our suns

Empiricism in Economics is madness masquerading as science. It is the chosen method of Central Planning and Keynesianism (and the two are related). The opposition in Parliament call Chacha and his CONgress party "pseudo-secular." I would prefer to call them "pseudo-economists." Don't believe in inflation and growth rate forecasts - they are nonsense… My advice to all of you is to read Human Action beginnning at the beginning, paying special attention to the discourse on method.]

[Beware of Social Engineers from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux
Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) described civilization – including each component part, such as language, law, and the economy – as being “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” (An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Part Third, Sec. II, Para. 7) 
Failure to understand not only that undesigned social orders are real, but also that these undesigned orders are superior to any arrangements that could be consciously designed and engineered, is perhaps the greatest source of tyranny and disorder of the past 200 years. Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux]

Deleuze got it wrong. In his "Postscript on Control Societies," Deleuze speaks about the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies:
But discipline would in its turn begin to break down as new forces moved slowly into place, then made rapid advances after the Second World War: we were no longer in disciplinary societies, we were leaving them behind. We're in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement-- prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family.” (Negotiations, p. 178)
However, there has been no generalized breakdown of sites of confinement and spaces of enclosure. Quite the opposite, we have seen a generalized expansion of sites of confinement… (I suggest Julia Sudbury's edited volume Global Lockdown for more on this last issue)…
Consider this post a reminder that disciplinary power hasn't gone away, and that the problems and issues raised by that concept have only increased since Foucault's Disipline and Punish. We need to keep such issues at the forefront of our political thinking and work.]

I have no idea how to solve the problem so I just wanted to see if you had a solution.  The businessmen will not commit capital without subsidies or ROI and the govt does not have the money to do everything.  Its just the nature of the game.  We are evolving in a bootstrapping manner and we have to accept some imperfections.]

Benthamite reasoning is hard to escape.  Everyone relies on it when making decisions in everyday life, whether it be voting on a job candidate or buying one car rather than another or putting a bus line on one road rather than another.  Even a lot of the arguments for following rules rely on an ultimate Benthamite judgment about good vs. bad consequences…
Benthamite reasoning is inescapable, though it is a big mistake to make cardinal utility the only relevant value.  We're all pluralists now, but cardinal utility should be a major part of the relevant pluralist bundle.]

The ontological implications of “undesigned orders are superior” points to the direction of “A conscious beingno larger than a man's thumbstands in the centre of our self; he is master of the past and the present... he is today and he is tomorrow.” [TNM]

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