From: pas@anchor.unh.edu (Paul A Sand)
Subject: Re: Causes of the "Cultural Elite"
Organization: University of New Hampshire
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 14:43:24 GMT

pn> == Peter Nelson
ps> == Paul Sand

pn> The problem is that too many libertarians fall into the SAME trap
    [of demopublican/socialist engineering]. They make claims that
    libertarianism will ITSELF produce some predictable result, in terms
    of "liberty", prosperity, etc. It is my understanding that Hayek was
    also guilty of this.

I'm gratified that Peter has shifted his target from his previous one
of `Libertarianism' to `too many libertarians' who are engaged in
fallacies that arouse his ire.  (Let's face it, even one libertarian
doing this dreadfulness would be too many.)

pn> The only intellectually honest conclusion from current work in
    complex systems theory is that NOBODY can predict what the outcome
    will be of a give social policy.

Nobody can predict with certainty, true enough.  Nobody with a smidgen
of horse sense expects infallibility from any prognosticator; sensible
folk realized this a long time before complex system theory; Peter can
stop beating this particular drum, as far as I'm concerned.  However,
simply because predictions fall short of certainty does not make them
worthless. (Good news for TV weatherpeople.) Worthwhile predictions
can be (and are) made from careful analysis and past experience, *even
if* they are inherently uncertain. 

pn> [...] There are a *few* libertarians here who are happy to admit
    that they have no idea whether people will actually be better off in
    some objective, measurable sense under libertarianism. They simply
    prefer it for personal philosophical reasons. This, at least, is
    intellectually honest. But most of the libertarians who post here
    make all kinds of claims about how things would be *better* under
    their scheme. [...]

This is simply a false dichotomy. `Personal philosophical reasons'
aren't simply evidence-free whims with no attachment to reality.  (Or
at least they shouldn't be, and we can easily discount the ones that
are.) Nor can judgments about how one might measure whether one polity
is `better' than another be divorced from one's set of internal
values.

Of course, if we could nab these tricky, albeit anonymous,
net.libertarians who Peter (conveniently) has observed, perhaps we
could question them on the matter.
    
pn> I say there's no rigorous basis for these claims, anymore than their
    is for similar claims by Demopublicans, and for precisely the same
    reasons. A "hands off" policy is still a policy.

A hands-off policy is a policy, but it's not *just another* policy.
Not any more than freedom of the press is just another way of imposing
regulations on the press. Not any more than a prediction of
unexpected-and-probably-dire results from top-down social-engineering
efforts is just another prediction. 

If Peter's observations about `nonlinearities' and `emergent behavior'
mean *anything*, they mean that policies that recognize (for example)
the inherent fundamental ignorance of policymakers are likely to be
superior to those that don't; policies that depend on (for example)
incentives and market forces are likely to be superior to those that
depend on bureaucratic regulation and price-fixing. No certainty here,
of course, but that's the way to bet.
-- 
-- Paul A. Sand           | I learned to put the [toilet] seat down...it
-- Univ. of New Hampshire | makes you look like a warm, caring, sensitive
-- pas@kepler.unh.edu     | human being. (Prof. R. Noble, from r.h.f.)
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