I feel bad because I’ve been to Knoxville a few times and I like the town. But the brought this on themselves (at least to the same extent that Americans brought Donald Trump on ourselves).
It will be helpful in the long run to have a libertarian hold office and attempt to put their theories into real world practice. Knoxville will now serve as a demonstration of why libertarianism doesn’t work.
Sure, Kane did use the Tombstone, but that was always more of an Undertaker thing. As far as Kane goes, I always preferred his diving clothesline anyway.
Kentucky has mayors for entire counties? Today, Mayor of Knox County; tomorrow, the world!
It’s Tennessee not Kentucky. But the title does seem strange. The City of Knoxville is located in Knox County but there are parts of the county that lie outside of the city. The city and the county have their own separate governments. The head of the county government used to be titled the County Executive but it was changed to County Mayor in 2010; apparently the title reflects what areas of administration the county has control over. Meanwhile, Knoxville also has a Mayor; the current one is Madeline Rogero.
“The subject matter of economics, in the Austrian view, is the causes of economic events, not the correlations existing between them. The study of those correlations is the subject matter of economic history, and will never reveal fundamental laws of economics, since, as Mises points out, “No… constant relations exist in the field of human action…”
You can continually change your math models to make them reflect reality, but how is that helping you explain how the world works? That is simply you trying to catch up to shifts in individual preference that you are doing nothing to understand.
I could think of some ideas, but idk what Jacobs has in mind.
Yes there have been several “libertarian” office holders, but not too many executives.
Oops, sorry Kentucky. Or, sorry Tennessee, whichever is appropriate.
It seems like Kane has read more than one book. I’m willing to bet he could explain the Krugman view better than any Mayor in North America. Believe it or not, Austrians know about Keynesians, Friemanites, MMTers, mercantilists, socialists, communists, Georgists, institutionalists, fascists, and a whole slew of schools that have come and gone. Not only that, they have responded and critiqued all of them because they have survived them all. Kane mentions Henry Hazlitt, I am sure he’s read he standard Economics in One Lesson that every libertarian has read. But maybe he picked up his Failures of the New Economics, a chapter by chapter refutation of Keynes.
That doesn’t really answer my question. And I can quote stuff, too.
“Scientific modelling is a scientific activity, the aim of which is to make a particular part or feature of the world easier to understand, define, quantify, visualize, or simulate by referencing it to existing and usually commonly accepted knowledge. It requires selecting and identifying relevant aspects of a situation in the real world and then using different types of models for different aims, such as conceptual models to better understand, operational models to operationalize, mathematical models to quantify, and graphical models to visualize the subject. Modelling is an essential and inseparable part of many scientific disciplines, each of which have their own ideas about specific types of modelling.”
The whole point of science is to predict the future. If I drop a penny from a skyscraper, how long will it take to hit the ground? If I inject someone with flu vaccine, will they get the flu? If Knox County cuts taxes, what will happen? You can dismiss “mathematical models” all you want, but if they predict what will happen then they’re doing what models are supposed to do. And we should use them until better models come along.
So sure, let this guy try to put his theories into practice. If he thinks he knows what the results will be, then guess what, he’s using a model. But if he doesn’t get the results he wants, then all his explanations of how the world works don’t mean shit.
There were, however (during his wrestling career, presumably), numerous collisions.
Meanwhile, I read up a bit on the Wikipedia page for Rothbard, but I quit when I got to the part where he apparently rejected the scientific method as having any application to economics. Sorry, OP, but you are promoting the ideas of a crackpot.
But you don’t have to believe me; let’s see what sort of utopia has been fashioned in Knox County in three or four years time.
You can use them all you want. That doesn’t tell you anything about how the world works. It tells you correlations. Not the causes. Mathematical models are fine for explaining phenomena in what we call the hard sciences. Once human action is involved and individual agents are making decision, that is not the realm of hard science.
“According to the popular way of thinking, the criterion for the selection of a theory should be its predictive power. So long as the model “works,” it is regarded as a valid framework to assess the state of an economy. If the model fails to produce accurate forecasts, it is either replaced or modified. The tentative nature of theories implies that our knowledge of the real world is elusive. Contrary to the popular view, we hold that by means of a fundamental statement that human actions are conscious and purposeful we can derive the entire body of economics. Because the knowledge derived here is based on a fundamental, true statement, this knowledge is not tentative and elusive but absolutely definite. Consequently, we don’t require various statistical methods here to validate the economic theory, which is derived from the fact that human actions are conscious and purposeful. Analysts who rely on statistical methods to ascertain the facts of reality are running the risk of producing erroneous analyses.”
“One example that Mises liked to use in his class to demonstrate the difference between two fundamental ways of approaching human behavior was in looking at Grand Central Station behavior during rush hour. The “objective” or “truly scientific” behaviorist, he pointed out, would observe the empirical events: e.g., people rushing back and forth, aimlessly at certain predictable times of day. And that is all he would know. But the true student of human action would start from the fact that all human behavior is purposive, and he would see the purpose is to get from home to the train to work in the morning, the opposite at night, etc. It is obvious which one would discover and know more about human behavior, and therefore which one would be the genuine “scientist.”
Was Hayek a crackpot? Mises?
I was unaware of the term “anarcho-capitalist” until four months ago, when I was visiting my cousin in Brooklyn. I went to a party in Bushwick on the roof of an apartment building, where I met a friend of my cousin’s who lived in the building. He ranted and argued about politics all night long into the early morning hours, with various people, but he had extreme confidence and he articulated his views reasonably well, so I was fairly impressed with him although I did not necessarily agree with or understand what he was saying.
The next day we went back to his apartment, smoked and hung out for a while, and he showed us his office where he had three gigantic monitors on which was displayed a visual graph of his cryptocurrency investments and the bitcoin market. He explained about the patterns and shapes and “Japanese candles” and so forth, I was too stoned to really understand it. But he claimed to be an anarcho-capitalist. Then he took us out on his sailboat, in Jamaica Bay (from a marina in Rockaway Beach). (Random detail - the mainsail was being repaired or something and wasn’t up, so we sailed just using the jib, and the assistance of the motor on occasion. There was enough wind that we managed to get a decent amount of speed just using that jib.) We talked about a lot of interesting shit and he also gave me a book that he had written and published 10 or so years ago. The book was an autobiographical, Bukowski-esque reminiscence on the author’s own personal life, and had nothing to do with politics whatsoever. The guy is in his late 30s, I think.
Based on this sample of ONE, I would say that in my experience, anarcho-capitalists are cool as shit. But, again, I don’t really understand anything about economics, I haven’t read anything substantial about any economic theory, either the left-wing or right-wing varieties, and economics continues to be one of the big gaps in my general inventory of knowledge.
Rambling reminiscence over.
Was Karl Marx a crackpot?
Anybody can come up with a theory about how economics works, dress it up in scientific terms, and write a book about it. And within the confines of that book, their theory will have all the answers and work perfectly.
In other words, a “model” of human behavior.
FWIW, Kane is generally regarded in the WWE locker room as being a pretty intelligent guy. Daniel Bryan, who is IRL a far-left hippie vegan who’d probably disagree with most of not all of his politics, has gone so far as to describe him as the smartest person he’s ever met.
Whether that intelligence can translate into effectively managing a county government remains to be seen.
No idea. I thought we were talking about some guy named Rothbard.
No Marx was not a crackpot, but he was mistaken. Were his theories rejected because of math models or theoretical critique?
Yes we can critique theories, but just because they are not validated by mathematical models, does not mean they are not true. If someone went out and measured a million triangles, and reported that his model suggests the Pythagorean theorem is not correct, he would be regarded as a crackpot, not a “true scientist”.
You can call it whatever you want, but the fact is the methods are distinct. This appealed to Jacobs, apparently.
They too rejected the application of the scientific method to human action.
Is the scientific method applicable to geometry?
Why are you talking about geometry in a thread about politics? Are you claiming that politics is an abstract mathematical system that follows a finite set of precise rules?
The scientific method is designed to gather and apply knowledge in the real world. You’re confronted with an overwhelming ocean of knowledge. You’re supposed to gather bits of knowledge and see if you can spot a common pattern. Then you’re supposed to test to see if the pattern is true. If you can confirm the pattern is true then you can start applying it to other areas. That’s the scientific method.
You’ll find none of this in the works of Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, or Murray Rothbard. They all just developed theories and then refused to test them in the real world. They wanted their followers to accept the truth of the theory on faith.