First of all, one of the reasons homeopaths stay in business with their quackery is simple mathematics: Most people who are sick get better. If you have a cold you’ll get over it. If you’ve got a sore muscle it will heal. If you’ve got some strange symptom you’re scared of such as recurring headaches or strange gastrointestinal feelings you’ve never had before, you’ll probably get better. If not, you’ll die, or you’ll eventually be compelled to seek better treatment.
Homeopaths have nothing to lose. They give you water with some active ingredient distilled down to the point where it’s highly unlikely that there’s even a single molecule of it left. And hey presto, you get better. Or you die. Either way no one’s going to hear about the failure.
And if you continue to be sick and you go to a real doctor, by then you’ve probably taken so many quack medicines and shaman treatments that you won’t know who to blame or credit.
But in the end, the one person who gets better will make a lot of noise telling everyone how wonderful homeopathy is, while all the people who felt nothing will be too embarrassed to admit they even tried it. Or even if they don’t get better, placebo effect may make them feel that way for a time and in the end the homeopath either gets the credit or manages to deflect the blame.
As for allowing it… hell yeah. But last time I checked, it was allowed. You’re free to give your own money to anyone who wants to offer you distilled water for 50 bucks. My local pharmacy is full of homeopathic garbage. Go look in the ear drops section of your pharmacy. I’ll bet you half the products there say in fine print, “A homeopathic remedy”.
You’re making both a tactical and intellectual mistake here. Your tactical mistake is allowing your desire for freedom from the FDA push you into defending quackery. That weakens your position and gives your opponents an easy target. Hellestal in particular seems to be enjoying himself.
Your intellectual mistake is that you seem to unquestionably accept things that libertarians or Austrians support. If Ron Paul likes Homeopathy there must be something to it! Because otherwise, he’d be a bit of a crank and that would diminish his standing. But you can’t wish away crankery, especially when it comes from people on your own side.
Also, it’s a mistake to believe in homeopathy because you think it worked for you once. This ignores the weaknesses of self-deception, placebo effect, confirmation bias, anecdotal evidence, and most importantly, the fact that the medicine you think you took is distilled freaking water.
If you want to defend freedom, defend freedom for what it is; a fundamental human right. It’s a mistake to deny that it has consequences. I think this is at the root of your defense of homeopathy - you’re looking for an example of something the FDA won’t certify, yet does good for people. And of course, if it’s quackery, it’s something the pro-FDA people can use against you. Don’t go there.
If you want to be a libertarian or an Austrian, you have to be honest about it. The fact is, freedom is hard. Free markets may result in lots of good things and be on balance better than central command by governments, and freedom is an end unto itself, but freedom does not guarantee a better life for all. Free markets do not guarantee desirable social outcomes. On the other hand, neither does government; it just promises to.
You’re getting a lot of bad information. No, vaccines aren’t perfectly safe; no drug is. Yes, people occasionally die from vaccinations. Very, very, VERY few. But the fact is that public vaccination saves millions of people from death, disease, and crippling deformity.
The only reason you think that you’re safe to let yourself or your family go without vaccination is because you’re free-riding on the vaccinations of everyone else. Libertarians are supposed to be opposed to free riders.
If everyone did what you’re doing and stopped getting vaccinations we would within a few years start seeing outbreaks of all the old diseases that terrorized families for centuries until we learned better.
Vaccination isn’t exactly a big profit center. A lot of those drugs are no longer under patent, or never were. Furthermore, the nature of a vaccine is that you only have to give it once, with maybe a booster shot every few years. No one’s getting rich off of vaccinations.
On the other hand, fully half of the population wants to get an erection every day, or thereabouts. A quarter of them are going bald prematurely. They have an awful lot of headaches and joint pain. They’re stressed, or they’re too inattentive. A lot of them seem to be depressed. That’s where the money goes, and that’s what the pharma companies care about. The big common afflictions that affect the mass of the population, and which have to be taken repeatedly day after day, sometimes for life to have therapeutic benefit.
Big Pharma would probably give vaccinations for free as a loss leader if it helped keep their customers alive long enough to develop an affection for Pond’s Cold Cream and Oxycontin.
I don’t recall us ever ignoring diet and exercise. Most people won’t shut up about it. In fact, every time I go to my doctor, he tells me to watch my diet and exercise more. Doesn’t yours? The only way we’re ignoring this advice is by being lazy self-indulgent overeaters in denial. Years and years of public service campaigns don’t seem to have changed that much.
As for ‘complementary medicine’, if you’re talking about acupuncture, chiropractic medicine, homeopathy, ‘toxin removal’, cleansing your bowels, or any number of idiotic, unscientific crap treatments, we did try that for thousands of years before we had actual scientific medicine. With less than stellar results.
If someone thinks that having shaman in a sweat lodge wave chicken entrails over him will cure his cancer, that’s his business. But he can pay for it out of his own pocket and he’d better not complain if his insurance company won’t pay for it. And if the Shaman turns out to to be a guy named Joey who may have lied about his entrailing skills, he should be sued out of lodge and home.
Saying so doesn’t make it so. Show me a properly controlled double-blind trial that has positive results within two standard deviations and which has withstood scrutiny by peers and can be reproduced, and I might change my mind. Good luck with that.
Austrian economics brings valuable insight to the table. It provides a perspective sometimes forgotten by mathematical economists and specialists who bury themselves in general equilibrium models and mathematical minutiae.
But Austrian theory isn’t complete. It’s not perfect. And it’s not even a monolothic thing. Von Mises approached the problem of economics by trying to derive it from basic axioms, starting with Human Action. Rothbard followed in Von Mises footsteps. Hayek, on the other hand, was more interested in complexity and information theory. Schumpeter went to his grave throwing up his hands and assuming we’d just have a big economic collapse anyway, because we are too stupid to survive. He may have had a point.
Hayek did not agree with Von Mises on everything. In fact, Hayek didn’t agree with himself on everything. Like Keynes, Hayek’s opinions changed throughout his life. His opinions also changed with the economic circumstances - he was a reluctant Keynesian at a time when Keynesian economics seemed to be working. He flirted with monetarism while disagreeing with the exact mechanism for it. Furthermore, he was willing to admit when he didn’t know things and where his theories were not fully fleshed out. Hayek was also not a libertarian, nor did he believe in a gold standard. He felt that the fed should control the money supply and toyed with a few ways to do it, but never landed on one he felt was acceptable.
The lesson to learn from Hayek is first of all, humility. Don’t assume your opponents are idiots. Don’t lecture them on how much you know lest you become a walking example of the Dunning-Krueger effect. And learn that you will win more minds over with calm, reasoned debate devoid of personal insults than you will demanding that your idiot audience go read a book or sit at your feet while you lecture to them.
Hayek had strong disagreements with many people throughout his life, but remained a gentleman. Milton Friedman carried himself with a quiet demeanor and a smile. Always a smile. You should try it. Milton Friedman championed free markets and business - which his opponents always tried to cast as some malevolent force. Had he been an angry caustic ass he wouldn’t have had nearly the influence on the public that he enjoyed.
Economics is faddish. Schools of thought rise and fall. “The Truth” is elusive, because economics is not a hard science amenable to proofs and mathematical certainty, no matter how much some economists want it to be one. It is a study of human behavior, and humans are tricky things to get a handle on.
It wasn’t that long ago that Keynes had been ‘discredited’. When Keynesianism couldn’t explain stagflation economists ran from it in droves. When tight money broke the back of inflation and caused economic growth to start, the monetarists owned the day. Now monetarism is mired in a liquidity trap and Keynes once again is the White Knight come to save all.
The Austrians have a strike against them: If Austrians are right, then the proper course of action is almost always to do nothing, and let the economy sort itself out. But politicians don’t get elected to do nothing, and economists like Paul Krugman went to school dreaming of the day when they could be the guys to save the world (Dr. Krugman admits this willingly - he became an economist because he was captivated by Isaac Asimov’s econometricians who solved all economic and social problems). Paul Krugman was a Keynesian before he knew who Keynes was, because Keynesianism is the one economic philosophy that advocates that people like Paul Krugman be given the power to run the world so they can set it right. They are simply not going to buy into an economic philosophy that says they are powerless to do good. Ever.
As for the public, when people are unemployed and hurting their demand of government is that it DO SOMETHING. Austrians have nothing to offer them, other than to advise government to stop doing things. It’s like going to the doctor because you’re feeling lousy, and instead of magically curing you the doctor points out that you’re fat and overweight, and should really just go home, work out a bit, and go easy foods ending in ‘z’, such as ‘Cheez’.
You’ll notice that these other economic schools became popular and ‘mainstream’ only when the current circumstances gave them the power to ‘fix’ the world through positive action.
I am closest to Hayek in my Austrianism. I think a major problem today is uncertainty and the addition of noise into the information carrying capacity of the price system. I think that Alan Greenspan made a fundamental error when he decided that technology had permanently changed the fundamentals of the economy, and as a result was willing to hold interest rates very low for a long period of time.
That, and other factors such as the Chinese flooding the western world with money due to its intentional savings plan, caused a number of misallocations of resources - predominantly in housing and long-term investments. I think the low interest rates pushed bankers and other financial ventures into seeking ever-higher returns through novel schemes. I think that moral hazards from government protecting people from the results of poor decision-making decimated the savings rate.
The result of all this, plus market distortions caused by government meddling with the tax code and through GSE’s like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all added up to a situation where we were putting our resources in the wrong places, spending more money than we had, and generally throwing a party we couldn’t afford. The crap eventually hit the wall, trillions of dollars in paper wealth vanished, the hidden risks were exposed, and now we’re in a period of retrenchment and recovery. This isn’t a standard business cycle recession, it’s a balance sheet recession. We found out we weren’t nearly as wealthy as we thought we were, and now we have to adjust to that new reality.
Note that government isn’t the only one to blame here. At least, not only the U.S. government. This recession is the cold water in the face of a world that’s been living from bubble to bubble since the 1980’s. It’s not going to be easy to get out of and it’s not going to respond to fiscal stimulus the way the Keynesians think it will.
We had a long discussion of Austrian economics a while ago. And this message is already way too long. But let me say this:
The key Austrian belief I hold is that the economy is far too complex and chaotic to be controlled by central authority. The complex structure of the economy is the result of billions of decisions by billions of people. There are networks, supply chains, labor pools, warehouses, assembly lines, shipping routes, etc. All running efficiently and in the right quantity most of the time. It is an example of emergent order. The idea that it can be reduced to aggregates that can be manipulated without cost by injections of money from the federal government is fundamentally flawed. Every stimulus program, every tax change, every new regulation destroys information, breaks down finely-tuned structures created over long periods of time, and ignores local knowledge that is key to efficient decision-making.
Furthermore, an environment which includes an activist government constantly intervening in the economy creates risk and uncertainty. It makes it impossible for businesses to make accurate long term plans. It is destructive to the economy. Any good that comes out of government action has to be weighed against the potential harm it causes.
So what should the government do now? Focus like a laser beam on stability. That means no jerking the economy around with new government plans and programs. It means a credible plan for attacking both the debt and the medicare and social security crises, because they are scaring the bejeebers out of the business community. Cities and states have to stop regulating businesses into the ground, and have to come up with plans to address their own pension shortfalls. No new stimulus spending, but no tax cuts, either.
Announce a moratorium on new regulations for five years, and put together a panel to do cost-benefit analysis of existing regulations. Axe the ones you can no longer afford.
Pass binding resolution that the government cannot grow by more than GDP growth minus one point until it is down to 25% of GDP. Raise the Social Security and Medicare age. Means-test both programs.
Announce a wage freeze and benefit reduction plans in the public service until those wages and benefits are aligned with similar jobs in the private market.
Then, the government can go off and work on free trade, defense, and running the other agencies that already exist.