Making fun of the irrational faith people put in the Constitution just never gets old for me.
Note that I have an equal number of pirates as I have ninjas. This is not arbitrary. It is crucial that we increase the number of pirates in the world in order to combat global climate change. I know this is just a fictional pirate but I’m reasonably confident that those count, even though I have no scientific evidence to support that.
Why no mention of money?
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That’ll have to wait for part 2, I suspect.
H. Rearden,
Money is a funny thing. A Gold Certificate is made of paper and often accepted as money. They are very useful for large transactions, but I wouldn’t recommend them for small change. However unbacked paper, such as Federal Reserve Notes, are ultimately destructive and should not be used as money.
If I were making a transaction of $10000 before the fed was started I would rather have one Gold Certificate than 30 lbs of gold to carry around.
It has more power than you might think, though certainly less than most people believe. The effect of committing words to paper and signing names to affirm it may be purely psychological, but the psychological effect is real.
In particular, a formal declaration of rights establishes a Schelling point (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Property/Property.html), and changes people’s expectations of acceptable behavior. The average citizen is more likely to stand up for her natural rights if they have first been committed to paper.
Do you imagine that any amount of political writing, of any quality, will make humanity as a whole start behaving rationally?
People are irrational. We should accept this as a fact and work with it. It is neither an obstacle to be overcome, nor a problem to be solved.
Rat pirates! I love it!
Trifith
The original FRN’s were backed by gold and silver. In the past one could walk into a bank and exchange gold for FRN’s and vice-versa. If you have FRN’s that you do not want please consider giving them to me.
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Excellent!
Why is that guy’s butt sparkling? It’s so shiny! … as if it has been buffed.
Because it’s so CLEAN!
Even rat pirates would triumph over ninjas!
http://bbs.freetalklive.com/index.php?topic=30512.0
What Pavitra says has merit, but I think the Constitution plays a smaller role than other things. For instance, I think the reason we still have SOME rights the government hasn’t infringed is because we still have SOME guns in private hands. Also, our Enlightenment-heavy history has helped quite a bit I think and is partly responsible for the re-emergence of anarchism.
BTW, I just discovered this site–love what I’ve seen so far!
H. Rearden
I will be happy to exchange all of my FRNs for gold at the original 1913 rate.
Damn, I was expecting 1 on 9/11
I completely agree with Darren. The usefulness of the Constitution is largely as a guide to ethics for private gun owners (it’s certainly useless as an ethical guide for police gun use).
I often see gold used as the standard of decentralized, privatized exchange — yet it has relatively little intrinsic value. It has a certain nonzero practical value as a high-quality electrical conductor, but most of its utility to a given individual in practice comes from its aesthetic desirability, and from the barter value that derives from that. It is only an accident of cultural context that makes gold more “valuable” than other similarly rare substances.
Yes, in practice the market seems to hold the value of gold roughly constant, and as a consequence it makes a useful reference unit of exchange. But I dislike the implication that gold equates to “real” value. Real value, in a moral and ethical sense, should be measured in time, hours or years of human life. This pot took X hours to make; this vehicle will save you Y days of travel time; this medicine will give you Z more years to live.
When seen in the proper perspective, talking about the 9/11/2001 attacks is a little like talking about the 6/28/1914 assassination. They were significant mostly in that they enabled various governments to rationalize to their citizens doing what governments do best.
Huh, it didn’t retain my use of double blank lines. There were supposed to be three separate thoughts there: the first paragraph; the second and third paragraphs; and the fourth paragraph. This was clearer with the original formatting.
Pavitra:
First, I can see the formatting you describe, so maybe it’s an issue with the way that your computer displays this particular website.
Second, the fact that gold has little utility value is precisely why it makes a good medium for exchange. The old adage is a farmer going to market with apples, but eating some along the way: he arrives at market with less than he left the farm with. If you are using your medium of exchange for utilitarian purposes, it’s value will fluctuate more than if you are using it solely as a medium of exchange. Gold, additionally, is less valuable than any denser metals, which eliminates the incentive to make hollow coins out of a denser, gold-plated metal – the only things you could replace the gold with, are more valuable than the gold they would be replacing, so there’s no incentive towards forgery.
Third, value is, indeed, derived from the fact that people expend time/labor to obtain it (the fact which brings it within the moral sphere, to begin with). However, there’s no way to denote value in that way. The value of any given item is whatever someone will pay for it. I might have to work ten hours to buy a widget, while my neighbor might have to work 20 hours to buy the same widget, and my other neighbor might have to work only five hours. Our labor is worth differing amounts. If, however, we all value a given item (say, an ounce of gold) at a certain level, then we can trade amongst ourselves, without trying to calculate varying exchange rates – we each simply figure our own exchange rate when we trade labor for gold. I don’t have to worry about how much my neighbor’s labor is worth, because that transaction was between him and whomever paid him for his labor. Now that he has gold, I only have to concern myself with the value of his gold, respective to my labor.
Gold is useful as a medium of exchange, but is certainly not the only possibility. In a free market, no doubt there would be a number of substances used.
I checked the page source, and it’s the same “paragraph text here” for all four paragraphs. Is something funky happening server-side, or did I poorly communicate what formatting I intended? Would you upload a screenshot? (http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/7852/snapshot1ed.png)
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The eating-apples example seems contrived (it requires the farmer to be behaving irrationally in order for the argument to work), and furthermore the argument doesn’t work: eating apples doesn’t destroy utility, it extracts and harnesses the apples’ natural utility by providing pleasure and sustenance to the farmer.
That utility, the edibility of apples, is intrinsic, and ensures that the farmer can get value from the apples even if market conditions reduce their barter value to zero. Gold, on the other hand, is dependent wholly on the whims of culture, fad and fashion, for its value. Its only advantage over a fiat currency is that no one person is in a privileged position to create more of it or arbitrarily alter its value. It is essentially a fiat-by-market, a fiat currency backed by the invisible hand.
Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is subject to debate. But I’m not convinced as to *why* it works.
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I agree that different people’s labor is of differing value (especially considering differing valuations of the same person’s labor), but market price is not the same as value. Usually the market price of a good or service is somewhere between the seller’s and buyer’s valuations of that good/service, unequal to either. Various kinds of market failure, notably monopolies, can also skew the price out of proportion to the value of what the good or service might initially appear to be. (Value of Microsoft Word? Close to zero. Value of not being fired for sending your Word-using boss an .odt file? Decidedly nonzero.)
What I see matches your screenshot. Looks to be split into four paragraphs, like you described.
Anyway, the fact that the farmer is behaving irrationally is indeed part of that example. Means of exchange which are also utilitarian are subject to distortion by certain behaviors, often irrational ones. Free markets will favor means of exchange which are least subject to such distortion.
The usefulness of apples is intrinsic, but their value is not. Value is solely set by the market. The value of an item is only what someone will pay for it. If no one wants to buy your apples at any price, their value is zero, regardless of the fact that you can eat them. The value of god is set exactly the same way.
Regarding monopolies as a “failure of the market,” there’s flat-out no such thing. “The market” is a mathematical function, and it never fails. Monopolies, when not supported by government force, are just as subject to market competition as any other business. If I’m the only one who sells widgets and I don’t have the State preventing others from competing with me, the asking price must be such that I can make a profit, but is low enough that no one else wants to bother selling widgets in my area. I’m still subject to the influence of competition, even without any actual competitors.
Some minarchists will even go as far to say, “It isn’t the Constitution that has failed in restraining the state; it’s US. The Constitution is just words on paper. As Learned Hand said, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”
In other words, the Constitution didn’t fail us; we failed the Constitution.”
To which I responded with: “So when Communism fails, it doesn’t fail, the people failed communism.
I’m sorry, but reading that comes off as blatant apologetics.”
To which he responded with: “No, because Communism is not analogous to the Constitution; it’s more analogous to the free market.
It’s like: you hire a security force to keep people from stealing your stuff; they do nothing while people steal your stuff; they’re the ones that failed you.
We the people are supposed to be the ultimate arbiters and defenders of the Constitution. We are the ones who are supposed to hold the politicians accountable when they violate the Constitution. We failed.”
Another Anarchist: “WOW Shane I’m speechless.
Do you not hear how brain washed you sound that you cant admit the constitution is useless?
“we failed the Constitution”
So now we are obligated to the constitution? it wasn’t just suppose to be a mechanism to protect us from the state?
And if the people are the only ones that can limit the state what is the point of having a constitution?
Statism will always end in tyranny.
Constitutions give the state the ideological cover it needs to enslave the people.”
To which the minarchist responded with: “Why do you think a piece of paper with ink on it is able to do ANYTHING? And you call ME brainwashed?”
So how many logical fallacies can you spot in that?
I see special pleading and pleading and red herring.
To continue with my post above, his point about comparing the government to a market activity of hiring private security is a complete red herring. If we had a choice in the matter like we do market activity he might have a point. But he doesn’t as states are, by definition monopolies on force.
He might not know it, but his reply to my point is actually a better argument against the state:
As Stefan Molyneux has pointed out, the problem with the state is the imbalance of incentives. The “ultimate arbiters” only have a few pennies taken from them, while the people in power get millions and a pension. They’ll fight tooth and nail to keep it. But what incentive do the “ultimate arbiters” have?
This is another problem. Is his example, it’s one or a few people paying for a single service. With the state, the cost is collectivized. Why not simply scrap that mechanism of effed up incentives?