Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections,talk.politics.misc
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 21:04:18 -0400 
From: Conrad Poelman <cp2w+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Libertarians & Butterflies (Was: Re: Causes of the "Cultural Elite")
	<Brqw5u.L72@apollo.hp.com>

Excerpts from netnews.alt.politics.elections: 21-Jul-92 Re: Libertarians
& Butterfl.. Peter Nelson@apollo.hp.c (6567)

> >being made clearly at all.  For one thing, isn't the interesting thing
> >about chaos theory that tiny perturbations in an initial condition can
> >have huge effects on the resulting system?  Well, the government is not
> >a tiny effect, nor is it an initial condition - it is part of the
> >equations modelling the system's behavior. 

>   But it's also a result.   Don't forget that one of the defining features
>   of a complex system is that it's full of feedback loops, locally,
>   globally, everywhere.   You can't change one part without effects 
>   rippling through the whole system.

I think I'm beginning to see your point, especially with the Saddam
Hussein example and from one of your other posts.  By including every
individual in the world in your system model, so there are basically no
external inputs, you are basically saying that the world is so complex
that no one can predict the future.  On that I agree with you.  But I
think you are exaggerating its relevance to a discussion of political
systems.

When you choose a political system or a system of government, you cannot
absolutely predict what the country will be like as a result of your
decisions in 20 years, or even in 10 years.  It is possible that,
because of some peculiarity of your system, some frustrated art student
will manage to come to power and radically alter the system in a way
harmful to most people.  It is also possible that under a dictatorship,
some really nice and magnanimous person will come to power and dictate a
better life for everyone.

But what we have to base our decisions on is what we *expect* to happen.
 This is usually based on past experience - we see certain systems
producing certain results, and if the pattern persists we assume that
certain results are the products of certain systems.  There is no
guarantee that this will always be the case, but we form some sort of
statistical likelihood estimate based on past experience.  So I think
it's being rather harsh to criticize someone who says "things will
better if..." based on the simple fact, which everyone acknowledges,
that no one can predict the future with absolute certainty.  Their
statement is based more on statistical expectation.  It's certainly
reasonable to debate that statistical expectation by examining past
history, of course.

>   It is impossible to posit different behavior on the part of the government
>   without first positing a different underlying culture and different behavior
>   on the part of the individuals which comprise the culture.   THAT is
>   my central message.

I agree with this as well.  If you could somehow change the government
overnight, but people still had the old expectations about what the
government should do for them, they would pressure the government to do
those same old things.  Getting back to the specific discussion about
libertarians, we basically had a libertarian government upon the
formation of the country, and it somehow "wandered" to where it is
today.  I doubt any of the Founders ever would have predicted that
government spending would account for such a large sector of the
economy.  Over time, peoples' expectations about government changed,
parhaps as a result of the way the system was set up, or perhaps due to
some "butterfly effect".  So libertarians should address how, if they
ever re-establish a libertarian government, they propose to keep it that
way.  How can they prevent peoples' expectations from government to
continue to grow?  Or, perhaps they shouldn't worry about that, perhaps
it was just a butterfly effect that couldn't be avoided, and hopefully
it won't happen again?

>   OK then make a prediction.   Not a theoretical one like "if they hypo-
>   thetically did raised the marginal income tax rate to 99% I would predict
>   <X> result".  Take some actual government action, such as the recent Fed
>   lowering of the discount rate, or the proposed 25% cutback in the DoD
>   budget, and predict a testable result.  I'm not saying things that
>   big don't have effects; I'm saying you can't reliably predict those
>   effects.    

I agree that these predictions aren't possible.  Thus predictions of the
future which depend on these predictions are even less reliable, and so
on, and so on.  So no one really knows what the result will be in 20
years of our current DoD cutbacks.  For that matter, even in 20 years no
one will know, because it will be impossible to determine the precise
causes of their situation.

Well, this conversation is *definitely* interesting on a philosophical
and mathematical basis!  However, until mathematicians make interesting
discoveries about how we can make such predictions in amazingly complex
systems, I'll just stick to my "assume that the past will pretty much
repeat itself" heuristic.  And if I mistakenly claim that "the world
would be a better place if people stopped killing each other", please
forgive me - I'm merely making an assertion based on what I know from
history and current events about the general results of lots of people
killing each other.  In fact, who knows - someone might happen to kill
the next Hitler!

--Conrad
Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections,alt.politics.perot