mck@ratex.UUCP (Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan) (02/19/85)
When someone claimed that there would be no inflation in a
Libertarian country, Baba ridiculed the idea. My 'Inflation in a Free
Economy?' demonstrated that there indeed would be no inflation in a Free
Economy. Baba may now claim that a Free Economy is unattainable, but this
is a different claim from the claim that a Free Economy would still have
inflation.
In a later article, I explained why Minimum Wage laws and coercive
unions caused unemployment. Baba responded by claiming that technology has
driven the supply-and-demand equilibrium wage below sustenance; I replied
that this hoary claim has been made for centuries and has been false for
centuries. Baba now claims 'I feel that the character of the "second"
(computerized) industrial revolution is different enough from the first
that such fears are well-founded but that we are still years away from a
crisis point'. We are not simply years from a crisis point; we are years
from a time when the equilibrium wage for unskilled labor is below
sustenance. Eventually automation may make unskilled labor unfeasible (so
long as pompous fools like Minsky dominate the field of a.i., this
eventuality will remain far off in the future); which simply indicates that
workers should no more plan to make a living as unskilled laborers than
they would to do so as hunter-gatherers.
It is quite true that a Free Economy can not be attained in the near
future (not, for example, within my lifetime); but, contrary to what the
opposition would lead you to believe, attainment of a Free Economy does not
involve attainment of Pure Competition, Perfect Competition, or an Evenly
Rotating Economy (thus, a Free Economy is not like the model of an Ideal
Heat Engine). People are not immutably evil, and given a large yet limited
amount of time a Free Economy can eventually be attained, albeit not
without a greater deal more effort than most Libertarians begin to realize.
Baba suspects 'that social dynamics prohibit the operation of a Free
Economy', recognizes that 'Political forces seem always to interfere with
economic processes' and that 'People find it natural to make tradeoffs
between economic efficiency and political consensus'. I take it that this
is meant as an argument for government intervention! Similarly, since
there are immediate and theoretical limits to the number of circuit
elements which can be packed in an IC, we should abandon semiconductors and
return to vacuum tubes!?! And we should forget this nonsense of fuel
efficiency, pollution control, and medicine!?! Ad nauseum.
Baba refers to the editorials of Campbell as his 'first exposure to
what is now called libertarianism'. Baba has an inadequate knowledge of
Campbell or of Libertarianism. Campbell's philosophy was a degenerated
form of Darwinism, and he was perfectly in favor of government intervention
when he thought that it would improve the species. Even when Campbell got
to the right conclusion, it was often for the wrong reason (for example, he
favored drug-legalization because he wanted abusers -- whom he regarded as
unfit to live -- to kill themselves).
Back later,
Daniel Kian Mc Kiernan