[FRIAM] ideas are lies

Mon Sep 28 11:42:06 EDT 2020

Pat's comments are interestingly powerful as a response to EricC's comments. I don't remember getting this sense from the recent thread on meritocracy. But my main objection to the existence of meritocracy is its assumption of linearity/orthogonality, a lack of friction between the various sliding dimensions of life. EricC talks mainly [⛧] about disagreeing with individual sentences, regardless of Fix's compoisitonal *narrative*. And the other thread about economic mobility assumes the same materially open, formally closed, permanent underclass required by capitalism.

It all seems to point to this tendency/ability of libertarians to "separate concerns" ... e.g. one's attendance to a PTA meeting is assumed to be decoupled from one's status as a wage slave ... or the artificial separation between, say, one's ability to vote despite not being able to take the day off. Or even questioning why Joe Sixpack would prefer to watch The Voice and drink Budweiser over inventing mouse traps in his basement, after having spent the last 8 hours being ordered around by someone half his age in a flourescent lit cubicle.

I don't agree that libertarianism is nonsense. But the sense it does make is false, at odds with reality, primarily because reality is replete with cross-terms and couplings ignored by its assumptions.

[⛧] I think the "free-market thinking promotes power relations" is a mere lemma in the argument. The thesis seems to be that free market thinking limits market freedom. That paradox is what makes it so insidious.

On 9/27/20 8:43 PM, Patrick Reilly wrote:
> In my experience, Libertarian ideas when offered at any level above the most basic are almost always justifying the interests of those who control wealth. The key myth of Libertarianism is that those who control wealth on any given day MUST be morally worthy of this control.  Which is nonsense. 
> 
> The model that any action to disempower the powerful, i.e., the wealthy, and redistribute their power, i.e., share wealth that essentially has fallen under the control of a small group of "elites" little regard to justice, is morally bankrupt is advanced only by ideologues who are (often intentionally) blind to actual economic history.
> 
> Just one case in point, the standardization of computer Operating Systems was inevitable. Gates was a clever and hard working industrialist, but the key business opportunity that he rode to billions was almost purely created by his ruthlessness married with both an unforeseen timing of technology development and conditions not of his making.  In other words, if he had failed to be an ambitious and smart creep, he would have been defeated by a smarter creep . . . someone had to end up in the lead position in this "winner take all" nature that we still find ourselves in . . .
> 
> Libertarianism is nonsense.
> 
> ----   Pat
> 
> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 7:51 PM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     This article is absolutely fascinating! I think that if we just took each sentence individually, I would disagree with around 60% of them. That is being generous and assuming the author is accurately reporting what other authors are saying. If you allow for my disagreeing with those cited (while not disputing the citation itself), that could easily bring me as high as disagreeing with 80% of the individual sentences. That is making it very hard for me to assess what I think of the overall argument. It seems quite plausible that "free-market thinking promotes power relations" in a particular historic context, which seems to be one of the main theses of the argument... but the author is covering at least a dozen deep topics that are in no way necessary to make that argument, and is not demonstrating a deep understanding of any of them.
> 
>     Here are some example sentences from throughout the paper that seem confused. Some might merely be massive overgeneralizations, but even that seems pretty problematic in the context of the argument being made:
> 
>       * Free-market ideology claims that to help society, we must help ourselves. If we all act selfishly, the thinking goes, the invisible hand will make everyone better off. So here we have an ideology that promotes selfishness in the name of group benefit. It’s a Machiavellian lie that should be caustic to social cohesion.
>       * According to the theory of multilevel selection, there is /always/ a disconnect between the interests of a group, and the interests of individuals within the group.
>       * So for groups to be successful, they must suppress the selfish behavior of individuals. There are many ways of doing this, but the most common is probably /punishment/. To encourage altruistic behavior, groups punish self-serving individuals.
>       * But while punishing deviance is universal to all social organisms, humans have developed a method for suppressing selfishness that is unique. To promote prosocial behavior, we harness the power of ideas. We /lie/ to ourselves.
>       * According to evolutionary theory, Rand’s Machiavellian lie ought to be caustic to group cohesion.
>       * /power relations/ qualify as a type of altruism. In a power relation, one person submits to the will of another. Bob submits to Alice. By doing so, Bob sacrifices his own fitness for the benefit of Alice. That’s altruism. But if Bob’s subservience only benefited Alice, it would be an evolutionary dead end. The Bobs of the world would die out, having given all their resources to the Alices. Since power relations have not died out, something more must be going on.
>       * On the face of it, freedom and power seem to be opposites.
>       * Business firms, you may have noticed, don’t use the market to organize their internal activities. They use hierarchy. Firms have a chain of command that tells employees what to do. Given this fact, the growth of large firms is as much an assault on the free market as is the growth of government.
>       * To measure the growth of private hierarchy, I’ll use the size of the management class — the portion of people employed as ‘managers’. Here’s my reasoning. Managers work at the tops of hierarchies.
>       * Anthropologists Carla Handley and Sarah Mathew recently found that cultural variation between human groups is far greater than genetic variation. Put simply, this means that ideas matter. What we /think/ probably affects our behavior more than our genes.
>       *
> 
>         The reason is that human life is marked by a fundamental tension. We are social animals who compete as groups. For our group’s sake, it’s best if we act altruistically. But for our /own/ sake, it’s better to be a selfish bastard. How to suppress this selfish behavior is the fundamental problem of social life.      The solution that most cultures have hit upon is to lie.
> 
>       * The alternative is that free-market ideas /do/ promote altruism … just not the kind we’re used to thinking about. They promote altruism through power relations. And they do so through doublespeak. Free-market ideology uses the language of ‘freedom’ to promote the accumulation of power. 
> 
>     Just for a taste of why this all seems so weird: "Free market ideology" is not the promotion of selfishness writ large, it is the idea that people should look for beneficial deals when buying and selling goods. Like, if you could buy a car for $15,000, or get an equivalent car for $12,000, you should buy the cheaper one; but if you are selling, and you could sell for $12,000 or $15,000, you should sell for the higher price. That's it. Free market ideology has nothing to do with whether you should support the local PTA or whether you should invest in your children beyond the time-corrected dollar value you expect them to give you in return. And similarly, my manager's ability to tell me what to do at work has little to do with whether I buy rice in bulk at the asian grocery where it is cheaper.  (And if you want to talk about Ayn Rand as promoting selfishness writ large, then we would need a separate conversation about what "selfish" means in an "Objectivist" context, and
>     how that has only a loose relation with "free market ideology".)
> 
> 
>     Eric C
>     <mailto:echarles at american.edu>
> 
> 
>     On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 5:24 PM ⛧ glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>         Why Free Market Ideology is a Double Lie
>         https://evonomics.com/why-free-market-ideology-is-a-double-lie/
>         "So yes, free-market thinking is a lie. But it’s not the lie you think it is."
>         -- 
>         glen ⛧
> 
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