I’d recently read Fast Food Nation, by recommendation from a few intellectual academic frinds. I dove into the book without even reading the notes on the back of the book. I’d ignorantly assumed that the book would simply be a wakeup call for people to watch what they eat, or better yet, an entertaining history of fast food. Before finishing the first chapter, I realized that it was just more corporate-bashing, from a new angle, but with the usual flowery language and the same paternalistic government pleas. I pondered the ability of the masses to choose their own food. And if they cannot choose their own food, then how can they choose their leaders, or hold any position on governmental policy? The solution: Schlosser knows what’s best for us and can coerce the market not to hurt us all.
My question is this: why do so many intelligent people find this rhetoric so appealing? I know that they are “economically ignorant,” but when I propose to some of my friends that the free market could prove to be the most efficient solution to the “obesity epidemic”, their eyes sort of glaze over. The reponse is always a very passionate “yes but…X people die per year because of Y.” I believe that these people understand economics, and that there must be some deeper explanation of their socialistic thinking. Any thoughts?

Nathan,

The entire point of forced public schooling is to create the habit of dependency. The vast majority of people WANT to be told “it’s not your fault”, and will pay good money to have that responsibility lifted from their shoulders.

Unfortunately, these same people vote away other peoples money too in order to remove from themselves the feeling of responsibility.

I recently saw Supersize Me and it was actually good. It did bash McD’s to an extent,but not because they make so much money. More because they try to act like what they offer is not dangerous to our well being.

It deals quite well with the issue of Americans making poor food choices. He went in to public school cafeterias and showed what kids were eating, and what their choices were: pizza, french fries, doritos, canned soda etc. It was like a freakin’ Sheetz or something.

Then he went to this school that was for all the kids who had got kicked out of regular school for being bad. The admin at that school made a decision to get rid of all the vending machines and they served REAL FOOD in the cafeteria. Green beans, salads, baked potatos, chicken breast, corn. Looking at these kids in their classes and in the cafeteria, you would have thought you were looking at a private school, minus uniforms.

Amazing what a difference a diet can make.

I highly recommend it over fast food nation and nickel dimed. My friends have to read it for school, one is a Social Worker grad student. I had to explain all about min wage laws etc to her so she would know the book is a piece of junk.

sorry that went up twice, i tried to make a correction in the second one. oops!

Another great article by Tom DiLorenzo in defense of capitalism! In my opinion, he’s fast becoming the best economics commentator in the country.

I posted the article on the Free Republic website in case you care to read other comments. It generated over two hundred views in the first 20 minutes.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1251128/posts

Does anyone know what book Thomas eventually did recommend? I’m curious what reading material actually made it past the school’s intellectual gatekeepers

The books Dr. DiLorenzo summarizes are contemptable and, tragically, pretty standard fare in academia today. Two thoughts about this occur to me.

First, Leonard Peikoff explained in his great book “The Omninous Parallels” that the philosophical dominance of contemporary Western intellectuals by the Platonic-Kantian metaphysical outlook explains why “intellectuals” feel free to sling mud at capitalism and businessmen, without evidence or conscience. Plato and Kant shared an unproven vision of reality as comprised of a duality: the world of particulars, or the phenomenal realm, versus the world of forms, or noumenal realm.

The first realm is held by both philosophers to be a shadowy, ever-changing, contradictory world that we perceive with our senses, and attempt to make sense of through the exercise of reason, which is itself supposedly limited and prone to distortion. As such, this realm is less real, and of necessity, is morally tainted, because it is actually a very imperfect “reflection” of the second, superior realm of ideals.

This second realm, the “true” and “perfect” reality, is, as luck would have it, not accessible through man’s puny attempts at reason and concept formation, but must be somehow “discerned” through non-rational meditation by Philosopher Kings according to Plato, and by religious revelation, according to Kant. This realm contains ultimate truth about existence, morality, the true nature of man, and god. Kant wrote that the “evidence” for the truth of this claim about metaphysics and epistemology stemmed precisely from its logical absurdity.

As such, both Plato and Kant believed that things of “this world” were metaphysically inferior to the world of ideals, and people who dealt with the things of this world–most especially profit-seeking businessmen–were morally inferior. Recall for example that Kant believed that moral conduct always and everywhere required the willing sacrifice of one’s values to some greater cause, for the sake only of self sacrifice.

Contemporary intellectuals are almost completely dominated by the philosophical context of political collectivism that logically extends from the renunciation of reason, and the embrace of one or another form of mysticism. This is why they are shameless in smearing and denoucing businessmen: they don’t require evidence, since facts are slippery and can’t be trusted, they believe; and anyway, they already “know” that business people are slimy and low because they represent the essence of “this world”.

The second thought that I’d like to express is that DiLorenzo’s experience bears out Tibor Machan’s insights about the hazards of “value-free” economics in his very important book “Capitalism and Individualism: Reframing the Argument for a Free Society”. (less than 200 pages).

Dr. Machan explains that most free market economists deny the existence of objective values, partly because they erroneously think that ackowledging and defending the objectivity of some values would compromise the whole of economic science; and partly because they believe that if objective values can be proven to exist, that statists will use this as a platform from which to attack and regulate individualism.(These comments are not directed at Dr. DiLorenzo, since I have no idea what he thinks about this subject.)

However, as Dr. Machan points out, free market economics clearly implies the objective value of individual prosperity and liberty: von Mises’ paragraph at the end of Dr. DiLorenzo’s article demonstrates this pretty clearly. Just as the science of medicine presupposes the moral value of human health, the science of economics presupposes the moral value of man’s material well-being. However, only economics explicitly denies that objective values can exist!

Moreover, Tibor Machan demonstrates that when economists deny objective values, they do not thereby deny a moral platform to statists. Instead, they wind up denying that capitalism has ethical standing that ought to be defended. A brief look at the way economics is presented as a branch of knowlege–by economists from Mises to Hayek to Friedman–makes this fairly clear.

“Economic man” is held by all to be a utility-maximizing being, actually a preference-seeking machine, rather than a thinking, choosing being of volitional consciousness. (Mises did not discuss volition versus acting man; Hayek and Friedman both came close to explicitly embracing determinism.) But these free market economists don’t set up “economic man” as an artificial construct for the purpose of tracing through cause and effect in commercial transactions. Rather, they characterise “economic man” as the best depiction of man’s nature that modern science can establish.

Moreover, they view economics, not as a branch of science that sets forth the natural laws and regularities of commercial behavior in the marketplace, but as an “imperial” (Machan’s expression) discipline that explains ALL of man’s social experience, and provides all of the answers.

Herein lies the problem. For “economic man” is false as to facts, whatever its usefulness in the narrowly-focused discipline of analyzing man’s commerical behavior. This concept of man is false, first, because a strong case can be made that man has volition; and second, because a strong case can be made that objective values do exist. By denying both of these crucial aspects of man’s experience, economists who want fervently to defend free markets instead unwittingly promote the idea that individualism boils down to crass, exploitive materialism, devoid of the moral principles of loyalty, honor, wisdom, courage, truthfulness, etc. Such a system, many people believe, is not worthy of defending, whatever its capacity to create conditions for the production of wealth. For although nearly everyone desires a life of material abundance, most people implicitly realize, or sense, that prosperity is not the only objective value, or even the most important one.

Ultimately, Tibor Machan points out, political philospohy is concerned with issues of ethics: how people ought to treat each other as they live together in society. To rule normative values as “prescientific” (another Kantian insight) and out-of-bounds intellectually only makes economics impotent in defending liberty to non-libertarians.

“the science of economics presupposes the moral value of man’s material well-being. However, only economics explicitly denies that objective values can exist!”

I think Machan’s argument goes beyond economics. There may well be something objective about material well-being, but the economic point is that we cannot know how much any individual will value that well-being, just as we cannot know how much any individual will value his or her health.
Thus Machan, and perhaps Rand, too, were talking about values in the abstract sense, and not in the individual sense. Rand, after all, pointed out that individuals can choose anti-life values, and of course, stressed the necessity of conscious volition in human activity to make rational choices.
In short, there’s a logical flaw here, and the trouble comes in making the distinction between the objective and the subjective.
Perhaps objective values are “normative”, while individual valuation remains subjective. Mises based praexology simply on the premise that human beings act to remove some felt uneasiness, but didn’t assume that they automatically chose the best way of doing so. If anything, he made much of the fact that entreprenurial profit could only exist because humans lacked perfect knowledge.
So, in thinking about this as I write, I suspect that Machan is talking about moral and ethical values, which may indeed be objective, but not about economic valuation, which is necessarily individualistic and thus subjective. We can say that a healthy diet is objectively good for the body, and that any rational person *ought to* maintain a healthy diet. However, we cannot say how likely it is that any individual actually will pursue a healthy diet, or how much such a diet means to them.
Just thinking at the keyboard–does that make sense?

Mark,
If I’m properly distilling your first thought, it is that the “intellectuals” to which I had refered are of the second duality, and reject reason. I believe I like Curt’s explanation better, haven given both ample consideration. I’m uncomfortable with man breezily rejecting reason. Man is an inherently reasoning being. To yield authority to mysticism still requires a series of logical conclusions. Their is a framework of logic that collectivists follow, and that is what I seek to better understand.
Summarizing your second point, and not having read Machan, the crux seems to be that: becase “economists” insist on the subjectivity of value (or better yet, VALUATION), then their free-market ideal is devoid of morality. Stated in this manner, it sounds absurb. The fact that value is determined by the individual in no way excludes moral guidance in their valuation process. Also, we need to be very precise when we use the term value. In one sense, it is definitively subjective, in the other it transcends reason. The two contexts are NOT mutually exclusive. One can contend that their are absolute values (right and wrong, as it were), but that people assign value individually. There is nothing inherently MATERIAL about individualism; simply that people behave according to how they value scarce resources, material or immaterial.

” msHmA: Part 2, Chapter X. Exchange within society in paragraph 2.X.5
It is the essential characteristic of the categories of human action that they are apodictic and absolute and do not admit of any gradation. There is action or nonaction, there is exchange or nonexchange; everything which applies to action and exchange as such is given or not given in every individual instance according to whether there is or there is not action and exchange.”

It is false to claim that “the science of economics presupposes the moral value of man’s material well-being”. Economics merely descriptively observes what the specific and general effects are of specific and general causal action. That’s what qualifies it as a science. The opposite of materialism is asceticism, which logically followed leads to non-existence. Suicide and sacrifice are possible choices of human action and indeed have been repeatedly observed to have occurred.

People are either freely trading with each other or they are not freely trading with each other. Economics observes human action whereby people are freely trading with each other and asks why this is? Thus a basic law of economics is established: people freely trade with each other always and only because both parties to the exchange are better off having exchanged with each other. “Better off” is not limited to “commercial” “materialism”. Economics is not limited to exchange involving “money”, it is not limited to “cause and effect in commercial transactions”. What specifically makes any specific individual better off is necessarily subjective by definition of all individuals possessing the faculty of choice.

Thus, economics answers not only the question why does the baker trade his bread to the shoemaker for shoes (presupposing the moral value of walking comfortably aside) but also the question why two specific individuals get married. An objectivist may claim that a man and a woman get married because the marriage of a man and woman presupposes the moral value of procreation. Economics says the quarterback jock married the head cheerleader because they both increased their subjective wealth by doing so. Economics implicitly acknowledges that both the quarterback jock and head cheerleader could have gotten married to different specific people but did not for the subjective individual specific reasons of personal valuation which they had and is the reason why they got married to specifically each other. Thus, it would necessarily be false to claim, as objectivists do, all quarterback jocks get married to head cheerleaders.

Presupposing the ownership of self and the ownership of physical property of material things, the use of self and the transfer of material things has only two possible action scenarios: people are freely voluntary exchanging OR people are not freely voluntary exchanging but aggressively violently taking/stealing.

Morality presupposes action. There are only two general broad categories of action from which to label action as moral between and amongst human beings: exchange and nonexchange/coerced exchange. All nonexchange/coerced exchange is of the form of theft, rape, or murder. Whether it can be proved that theft, rape, and murder are morally “bad” or immoral may indeed be important. However, the fact that man reasons and that man acts means that it is inescapable to label that action as either moral/immoral or amoral. Economics rightfully leaves that answer to the field of philosophy just as economic rightfully leaves the effect of impulses and motives to the field of psychology. If one supposes action is of a moral character, there are only two possible choices: theft, rape and murder are immoral OR theft, rape, and murder are moral. Psychology analyzes the impulses and motives that cause action. Economics analyzes the means and ends of that action. Political/moral philosophy analyzes values employed in that action.

I never understood how Objectivists could succinctly show the fallacies of political collectivism stemming from a metaphysical rejection of reason, Plato’s and Kant’s ideals, and then turn around almost immediately to substitute a different form of the exact same “universal objective” mysticism which they just criticized. The use of “objective” value and “moral” value, the use of any and all “value” presupposes man’s existence. Man’s existence as a reasoning acting being is necessary for the existence of value.

“By denying both of these crucial aspects of man’s experience, economists who want fervently to defend free markets instead unwittingly promote the idea that individualism boils down to crass, exploitive materialism, devoid of the moral principles of loyalty, honor, wisdom, courage, truthfulness, etc. Such a system, many people believe, is not worthy of defending, whatever its capacity to create conditions for the production of wealth. For although nearly everyone desires a life of material abundance, most people implicitly realize, or sense, that prosperity is not the only objective value, or even the most important one.”

Economics does not deny that individuals have specific ranked objective valuations, such as honor and loyalty. Indeed they do. Economics claims that the manifestation of specific objective values can be and only is observed from the specific action of specific individuals. There is no valuation whatsoever without action, objective or subjective. As the above quoted paragraph shows, importance is a relative concept. The individual specific subjective ranking of the importance of objective values is just that, an individual specific subjective ranking.

“Remember: economists, when they consistently uphold the premises of their science, do not take the position that moral criticism is inappropriate to economics. They take the position that the fact (supposedly) that we live in a world void of moral principles and human volition makes moral criticism meaningless.”

I just don’t see this, or at least, I don’t see this to the degree that you seem to. While I like David Friedman’s economic analyses of moral situations, they remain unpersuasive by themselves. Rather, I see them as complementary to moral arguments, the pragmatic results that reinforce libertarian principles.
Likewise, I was very interested in Mises’ basic conception of praexology, the idea that all human action could be explained, but Mises’ own writings fall short of delivering on this promise. Sometimes, after all, “a kiss is just a kiss”. The fact that he specifically chose to avoid the psychology of actions, while necessary to give praexology a firm, objective premise to work from, clearly indicates that there are limits to praexology, even if those limits themselves are not clearly delineated.
I gladly read and understand what I can of Mises and other Austrian economists, but that hardly means that I reject my moral and political views, or that I think that economics explains everything. Mises himself was not above having exceptions to his own science, especially where “genius” was concerned.
rtr usually brings in the moral principles in these discussions, showing the very complementariness that is suggested. So perhaps what is really needed is more work on the integration of economics into the larger, philosophical view, an interdisciplinary cross-section that emphasizes the complementary factors.
But before that can really happen, we need a more thorough, wide-spread understanding of economics in the first place, and Mises is still one of the best places for that.

The fact that virtually all Austrian free marketers uphold and explicitly defend an ethos of individualism is true.

However, that fact does not contradict the point I am trying to make, which is that free market economists cannot defend an ethical outlook without also giving up their arguments from economics that their science, and all the world, are void of human volition and objective values. For the concept of “economic man” that is essential to neo-classical economics A) denies volition and the existence of any provable, objective values, and B) is held up as an accurate and “scientific” representation of the nature of man, not just within the context of economics, but for the purpose of discovering any and all knowlege about man as a social being.

This is why Tibor Machan’s observations about the unfortunate implications of the scientism of Mises and Hayek, Friedman, Stigler and Buchannan, make sense. Machan explains that if free market economists give up their philosophical scientism and their view of economics as an imperial discipline, that most of the valuable insights of free market economics would stand intact. This is why economists need to redefine their discipline, so that it can take its proper place in the hierarchy of knowlege, as a specialized branch of the philosophy of ethics. (Recall that Rothbard defined economics as a branch of philosphy.) In truth, economics is the elaboration of the proof of the conditions necessary to acheiving and sustaining a particular moral value, namely material well-being.

Rothbard wrote that, ultimately, proving the value of freedom is a challenge for ethics, which economics–being allegedly “value-free”–could not prove or address. That is why Rothbard wrote his book on Ethics.

But if the intellectual defense of liberty requires ethics, then one had better be able to prove ethical claims. Why? Because unproven, competing claims are a dime a dozen that convince no one other than certified true believers. Moreover, if moral principles have objective existence, then, of course, they must be capable of proof.

I am not familiar with the ethical insights of Rothbard, Hans Hermann-Hoppe, or David Friedman, or if they make good arguments. (Actually, I do know that Rothbard made a bad argument about the source of self-ownership, which in no way diminishes the power and brilliance of his insights about economics.)

If anyone wants to understand more about the nature and meaning of moral principles, Tibor Machan’s insights and arguments about this subject are powerful, persuasive, and I think, meet the standard of proof. I also think that Ayn Rand’s insights about moral values, even though suggestive rather than complete, were original, radical, and monumental.

Just to summarize, it precisely the fact that trade increases the subjective wealth of both parties to an exchange that society is even and only possible. This has also been refered to as the division of labor or Ricardo’s law of association. Economic reasoning has established the why of why society exists.

All action which is coercive nonexchange is anti-societal action and fully and totally consists of the form of theft, rape, and murder.

Ethics and politcal philosophy have failed to establish the why of why society exists precisely because they have erroneously assumed and in futility repeatedly attempted to prove non-existing universal ethical principles such as the golden rule. All of these arguments have explicitly rejected reason and embraced mysticism (ala Kant and Marx, all religious “faiths” inlcuding Christianity, Islam, etc., and of course Ayn Rand’s Objectivism).

It is the wonderful accomplishment of economics that it has shown that “the ethical ought” is not necessary to prove the possibility of peaceful cooperative existence in society. In fact, the definition of society is peaceful cooperative coexistence. This is only possible through peaceful voluntary exchange, economic trade. A call for anything else is necessarily a call for the non-existence of human society and civilization. Without the existence of acting mankind, ethical principles do not exist, or at a minimum the possible existence of ethical principles is impossible without the existence of mankind.

This *knowledge* has been brought to you by *economics*. Political and moral philospohy has brought nothing but unproven mystical claims and collectivist warfare.

Economics *proves* why trade occurs and why society exists. Politcal/ethical philosophy proves…..nothing. Thus, all collectivist arguments, logically followed, are a mystical call for the non-existence of mankind. This is not to say that collectivist arguments do not attempt to proceed logically. They do attempt such, for Kant, Marx, and Rand did not merely make audio recordings of monkey noises. They all attempted to use reason. It is the job of economics and reason generally to show where and what fallacies were implemented in their arguments.

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