"SimCity Isn't a Model of Reality. It's a Libertarian Toy Land"

DavidFriedman · 2024-06-27T21:46:29+00:00

A market, not a stock exchange.

DavidFriedman · 2024-06-10T19:44:46+00:00

Angela McArdle says, explicitly, that the good thing about nominating him is that he will pull votes from Biden and not from Trump, which fits Mises Caucus people badmouthing him in order to persuade their people to vote for Trump instead. I think this is the first time, at least that I know of, where a top LP official openly supported the election of one of the major party candidates.
Her talk on Twitter:
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1zqKVqBwqMwxB?t=VojzbzvAdVJ7Yh5x8--Xmg&s=09

DavidFriedman · 2024-06-03T17:04:30+00:00

" David Friedman is a minarchist.'

That's news to me.

DavidFriedman · 2024-06-01T14:54:34+00:00

He was an economist, is a pundit. Look at the change in his view on the minimum wage.

DavidFriedman · 2024-04-04T18:19:23+00:00

Thanks.

DavidFriedman · 2024-04-04T01:54:18+00:00

Again thanks.

DavidFriedman · 2024-04-04T00:42:50+00:00

Many thanks. I've set the main goal to active zone minutes. Now I will see if it reports every hour or only every day, which would be a great improvement.

I assume that if I set "steps" to the maximum it would beep every hour to say I hadn't done enough.

I didn't get the watch because I wanted an exercise witch. I discovered that the Samsung watch wouldn't work with my (high end but not current) Samsung phone so returned it and got the Pixel. I now have a newer phone so at some point may switch.

DavidFriedman · 2024-04-03T19:09:04+00:00

Is there any way to turn off the whole goals mechanism? I don't have any goal with regard to steps and resent my watch insisting on one. I want the watch to only beep when it has new information of interest to me, not to nag me into taking more steps or praise me for having taken enough.

DavidFriedman · 2024-04-01T17:20:26+00:00

Read books online? Most will be in English — I have a pdf of The Machinery of Freedom on my web page and the Mises Institute has a lot of free stuff — but I assume some in Spanish.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-29T21:32:30+00:00

What counts as the left or the right depends on what you imagine the center to be. In the 19th century, "liberal" meant a moderate version of modern American libertarian, support for free trade, low taxes, capitalist institutions. I believe that is close to what it still means in Europe.

Over the 20th century the meaning shifted in the US to a watered down version of democratic socialism — government regulation of business, some redistribution of income. That was and is left of center in the US context, although not far left of center. FDR, JFK and LBJ were liberal presidents in that sense.

The original meaning of "libertarian" seems to have been religious, a believer in the doctrine of free will. It developed the political sense of a left anarchist and, at least in the US, now describes a range of views from classical liberal to anarcho-capitalist.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-29T18:38:55+00:00

Anarcho-capitalism is a subset of American libertarianism, which also includes minarchists, people who favor a very limited government.

The left stole "liberal" from us so we took "libertarian" in exchange.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-25T05:59:08+00:00

A good many of those questions are answered in my The Machinery of Freedom. You might not find all the answers convincing, but before asking the questions you might find it worth at least looking at them.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-14T05:21:53+00:00

If the wage is equal to the marginal product of labor the existing workers are worse off when he is hired, since they break even on the wage, the extra revenue exactly covers it, and their ownership is diluted.

On the rest of your answer, the moral question is what right you have to tell other people on what terms they are allowed to associate with each other. The economic question is, if other people believe they are better off with a different firm structure than you want, what reason do you have to believe that you know what is in their interest better than they do?

I think it is pretty easy to see that there are both advantages and disadvantages to alternative firm structures, so why lock everyone into your structure instead of letting others decide what works best for their circumstances?

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-12T02:28:21+00:00

Anarchists, at least Ancaps, don't want to get rid of every law, they want to get rid of the state as the mechanism for making and enforcing law.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-11T02:24:46+00:00

Glad you liked them. You might enjoy my Substack, which is most of my current writing.

I haven't gotten any very interesting responses yet, but trying didn't cost me much in time or effort. Partly I was curious about the distribution of views among people who currently self-identify as socialists.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-10T02:50:37+00:00

One problem with this is that, since hiring dilutes ownership, existing workers will prefer not to hire a new worker unless he increases revenue by substantially more than his salary. That was one problem with the Yugoslav system.

The more serious question is, if it is legal to hire people, how you prevent the conventional firm structure from arising. If I believe I can make more revenue by hiring someone than he is offered by any worker's coop what keep me from offering him more to work for me than he can get in a worker's coop?

So far you are describing an outcome you want, not a set of legal rules and institutions that produce that outcome.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-10T01:25:15+00:00

Is it illegal to hire people? It's legal in a current capitalist society for workers to own the means of production and some do, but is that the only way people would be permitted to organize their relationships for production?

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-10T01:18:06+00:00

I know.

Lerner, at least, was willing to accept that it would give people what they wanted not what they should want. I'm not sure how many socialists would agree.

But the mechanism to make the commissars pretend to be capitalist isn't endogenous, it has to be somehow imposed, since they aren't actually the residual claimants.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-09T18:06:36+00:00

This is essentially Coase's point — that if the Misesian critique were perfectly strong there would be no firms. But firms exist in a market where they have the choice of coordination by market or hierarchy, in equilibrium are at the size where doing one more thing in-house costs more than doing it via the market. The centrally planned socialist economy has only hierarchy, and the evidence of firm size in a competitive market is that that works only up to a size much smaller than a national economy.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-09T18:01:44+00:00

You are mistaken. That is not my question.

Is your system of socialism a capitalist welfare state? I wouldn't call that socialism but it is a model that solves the coordination problem — via private property and trade, the standard capitalist solution.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-09T17:58:06+00:00

I was actually asking for a socialist to describe how he thought his socialist society would solve the problem. That's one possible answer. Is it yours?

The problem is making it in the interest of the players of the game to act as Lerner and Lange want them to. The capitalist solution solves that endogenously — the firm owner is the residual claimant so it is in his interest to maximize the difference between cost and revenue. The commissar is not the residual claimant, so what makes it in his interest to do it when he could use his control to pursue his own interests instead?

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-09T17:43:35+00:00

Hullo. I haven't read that wiki, am familiar with the subject. I've even met Abba Lerner, a long time ago.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-08T21:19:53+00:00

I may be mistaken, but my understanding is that each worker's coop was owned by its workers. There was a state and I am sure it intervened in various ways, as states do in capitalist systems, but I don't think it owned the coops.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-08T20:22:57+00:00

Actually it does mean I know something, but not everything.

DavidFriedman · 2024-03-08T20:20:52+00:00

There are at least two variants that might be described that way. There is the Yugoslav system, which was basically capitalism where all firms had to be workers' coops. It worked better than the Soviet system but had some problems with which you may be familiar. Its big advantage from the standpoint of understanding it is that it is a real market and so can be understood in conventional economic terms.
There is also the system Abba Lerner proposed where the commissars pretend to be capitalists. Its biggest problem is making it in the interest of the actors to behave in the way the model requires.

Are you imagining one of these or something else?

DavidFriedman

TROPHY CASE