I would have happily stood before said room, and expressed my beliefs without pretense or reservation. No amount of booing, and nothing short of a bullet to my head would arrest me from my position.
Some Thoughts on the TikTok Ban And Liberal Democracy. https://medium.com/@mike.brock/some-thoughts-on-the-tiktok-ban-and-liberal-democracy-ed6b4ce70fd6
So once again, you're just so certain this world of yours will be so much more just and market forces will deliver just outcomes. You're so sure, you just shrug and say these regressions I bring up are not worth thinking about. Neat!
The concept you're referring to is known as "prior restraint".
In an anarcho-capitalist future, what exactly does the poor person appeal to when the billionaire doesn't honor their commitment? What if that billionaire owns the private court for dispute resolution? The obvious problems with this extreme property maximalist view are quite simply not that hard to think about. You're just asserting moral prefepts, and acting with indignance that anyone could disagree.
An economic dominance can never be a form of authoritarianism, because you believe property rights are the highest moral good. Yes, I know all your arguments. And I'll just say, you've just treated my entire critique as irrelevant, because you're so certain of the objective correctness of your views based on a priori reasoning.
I mean, right-libertarians just act as if their first principles ethical stances are self-evidently true. And concerns about things like the problem of collective action are irrelevant. Even more bizarre, is they assume that everyone is going to eventually agree with them and have a moral awakening where they realize "taxation is theft" and therefore we have to get rid of the welfare state.
Basically you're just saying the anarcho-capitalist argument is objectively objectively morally correct. All matters of distribution are just irrelevant because property rights must be absolute. Any claim on the public good is authoritarian. Naturally, I think this stance is both unconvincing and smug.
You haven't really addressed anything I've said here, so not such how to respond. You've merely just restated the case I'm criticizing and not attending to my arguments at all.
I actually got distracted and didn't proof read that. Here is an edited version of what I just said for clairty:
I never said that Davidson and Rees-Mogg advance the praxeological justification. I said the best attempts to justify that kind of thinking do. In fact, that the Sovereign Individual is silent on its normative foundations, and simply tracks a technological determinist argument — that to your point, the incentives leading intractably towards a certain outcome — is the entire basis for my charge of epistemic authoritarianism.
An example of what I’m saying would be the notion that say “the welfare state won’t be possible, even if people want it” in the future that is an intractible logical consequence of the incentive structures. That’s an implicit normative constraint that takes arguments about a common good that isn’t merely a feature of revealed market preferences off the table. Which, I say betrays a very extreme right-libertarian view at the bottom of the whole thesis.
So I apologize if I wasn’t clear enough in the following paragraph to separate the critique of the argument from the praxeological argument for the normative foundations of such a view. But I’d argue, if anything, I am trying to bring my critique against the strongest form of the argument. Which I don’t think Davidson and Rees-Mogg make, by the way.
I never said that Davidson and Rees-Moog advance the praxeological justification. I said the best attempts to justify that kind of thinking do. In fact, that the Sovereign Individual is silent on its normative foundations, and simply tracks a technological determinist argument — that to your point, the incentives leading intractably towards a certain outcome — is the entire basis for my charge of epistemic authoritarianism.
An example of what I’m saying would be the notion that say “the welfare state won’t be possible, even if people want it” in the future that is laid out. That’s an implicit normative constraint that takes arguments about a common good that isn’t merely a feature of revealed market preferences, betrays a very extreme right-libertarian view at the bottom of the whole thesis.
So I apologize if I wasn’t clear enough in the following paragraph to separate the critique of the argument from the praxeological argument for the normative foundations of such a view. But I’d argue, if anything, I am trying to bring my critique against the strongest form of the argument. Which I don’t think Davidson and Rees-Mogg make, by the way.
Technological determinism is a real mind virus that afflicts way too many people in my field. It’s pervasive and has led an incredibly large group of people to make dramatic philosophical errors. The book, the Sovereign Individual, has played at outsized role among many people — especially in the “web3” space — at convincing people of the inevitability of future outcomes. Balaji’s “network states” are really just another revision on these philosophical errors, born of foundationalist a priori notions about moral truths.
The best attempts at defending these moral truths — such as things like praxeology — are completely unconvincing and are just tautologies that assume the things they set out to prove. In particular, property rights as intractable consequences of the moral necessity to enable human action by a fundamental — not social — right to the product of one’s own labor.
These arguments all also boil down to “this future is going to happen whether you like it or not”, which really betrays the epistemically authoritarian nature of this thinking, which denies the possibility for, and the normative possibility of collection action in defense of a common good.
I also have an argument based on thermodynamics as to why I think these arguments are true at a systems level — but I know people roll their eyes on this stuff as it is.
I will also say, this same argument, when generalized brings into question the whole concept of digital contracts as workable at all. The idea of self-executing contracts that can be used to revolutionize everything from property titles to equities trading. But any sane workable system is going to rely on truth oracles that have some social component to deal with disputes. And if that’s true, then we’re probably right back in good old regular law courts.
At which point, the question just immediately needs to be asked: why do we have these digital contracts in the first place?
I actually think this is a completely fatal blow to the entire idea of Web3. The intractable problem is staring you in the face, if you do some philosophical exploration of the people. nostr:note1np9663690xy42xlh6ec9pa9mjxxttsa5ue6retld7ckc58lnfzgqw93ejf