Again my response is too long. Part the second:

'> Do you see that this here is an appeal to outcomes that I object to as well?

'What you think is a good "outcome" might not be what someone else wants.'

I'm not sure why you quoted what you did. If your sentence above is a response to the quoted bit, you seem to be missing my point.

I said that, at base, I care about outcomes - and my respect for certain rights derives from that. You said, "If at base you care about outcomes instead of rights, there will be bad outcomes." Do you not see that this
is restating my reason for respecting rights? The only difference is that I have some justification for which rights need to be respected in ways that aren't simply appeals to what sounds good.

'If you impose your will on him anyway, you've got issues. Stalin had good outcomes in mind, and pursued them regardless of anyone else's objections. In fact, if anyone objected, Stalin just killed him. But if all you're thinking about is "outcomes", you might not even see anything wrong with what Stalin did.'

Killing people is an outcome I object to, whatever the longer term plans. Partly first-order, and partly because it violates rights that themselves help steer us to better outcomes.

"Basically you want Good Things for everyone, right? But then you declare that if achieving Good Things requires doing Bad Things to other people, that's alright because the end justifies the means. Do you really not see the problem here?"

I really don't see the problem with what I said. "The end justifies the means" is not a statement I would typically make, because of associations. There is a sense in which rejection of it is good guidance, and a sense in which it quite clearly holds. Ends obviously justify means in that
everything is necessarily on a single ledger - we have to make decisions and forcing lexicographic preferences (rights before any amount of anything else) leads to weird outcomes (doubly so if our genuine preferences aren't actually lexicographic). If there is a terrible thing,
and the only way to prevent it is to do a bad thing, then that bad thing probably should be done.

There are several issues with that, when moving from theory to practice, however.

First, you should be damned sure the bad thing is better enough at preventing the terrible thing, compared to other options, to balance out the badness.

Second, there are some known failure modes of human cognition that can lead to systematically underweighting certain kinds of badness and overweighting certain kinds of goodness. "I need to do violence to others to get (or retain) power in order to accomplish good things" is a particularly strong example of such.

Third, it is important to recognize all the kinds of harm being done - including indirect harms casued by the violation of certain kinds of norms. Maybe I believe the world would be better if Josh died, but if I kill him then everyone else needs to worry a bit more that someone might decide that the world would be better if they died,
and that is itself quite a bit of harm.

Respecting these caveats, the ends justify the means.

"But you know, throughout history, where ever there's been a freeish market, it's produced widespread prosperity. Take the early United States, for example. A minimal government, and massive wealth."

From what I've read, that's not very accurate at all. There certainly were some periods with phenomenal growth, and some of these where when we had a relatively minimal government, but most of our early history - when our government was most minimal - we weren't a terribly wealthy
country even despite the tremendous natural resources available to our comparatively small population. The periods where we saw the biggest growth, following the industrial revolution, also saw tremendous consolidation of power in the hands of a few individuals. It's true
that economies can be overregulated in ways that stifle growth and innovation and that can be a big problem, but "too much is bad, ergo none is best" is not a reliable principle.

'That's your "good outcome" right there. When you get out of the way and let people produce wealth, they'll just go ahead and do it.'

And to the degree that I believe that to be the case, I agree that somewhat more laissez-faire governance is appropriate.

'http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL05A07B2585EC9019&feature...

Lots of cherry-picked examples from an Austrian economist justifying his positions. Not the work of a serious historian actually exploring the issues. Not terribly convincing, and not much mentioned that I wasn't aware of (though I disagree with the framing applied to more
than a few of them).

"> [Austrian economics] My objection is that it is not actually seeking truth by any mechanism likely to arrive at it.

"And you know this by.. never even looking into Austrian economics?"*

Yes, of course, that's exactly right. I was born with an innate... no, wait, government bureaucrats came by and informed me that Austrian Economics is silly, and of course I believe them because they're the government!

No. I know this because I did a fair amount of more credulous reading of primary sources in Austrian Economics some years ago and came away with mixed feelings; more recently someone whose reasoning and judgement I've come to trust on other topics pointed out the fundamental rejection of evidence going on, and that seems correct from what I had read and what others have said in support of Austrian Economics.

"Watch this and you'll see how delightfully practical Austrian economics is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL0C620AECA6617E2E&feature... - you'll have a hard time disagreeing with what they say."

I disagree with little of that, but that's unsurprising - mainstream economists would also disagree with little of that. The repeated attribution of strawman positions to mainstream economists is something I disagree with - it's almost entirely basic microeconomics.

I do disagree with some pieces.

He presents the fact that you cannot compare valuations between people as a devastating blow to centralized decision-making, but then ignores the fact that it applies equally well in decentralized decision-making. If person A has greater need for something than person B, asking what
they'll spend is one way of measuring that utility as compared to their other options but their other options may be entirely unrelated. If I'm stinkin' rich, and you're barely getting by, my preferences may be satisfied to the point where my whims are valued more highly
than your survival. The market economy doesn't solve the problem, it ignores the problem; I don't think it's clear that - in principle - assigning each person's preferences equal weight regardless of the magnitude of preference/dispreference is horribly worse than assigning each person's preferences weight according to the resources they already have at their disposal. I think that markets work better than central planning mostly for other reasons (especially proximity of information and experience to decisions).

The assumption that there are deliberate human actions in pursuit of goals is entirely valid, of course. The assumption that all human actions are deliberate is not established - and the notion that individual humans
have an individual agency is shakey.

I think there were one or two other points I wanted to raise, but I'm not recalling them. Incidentally, if you can favor text to youtube videos, that would be appreciated. With video it's hard to quickly review or
to quote.

"See the above video for some of the fundamentals behind Austrian economics. But feel free to tell me about those assumptions you bemoan, and tell me why they're wrong.

"(Or feel free to accept the obvious, practical reality of the fundamentals of economics when Mr. Herbener explains it to you)"

I raised some points above, but let's flip it around - what points in the video would mainstream economists reject? The above isn't really "Austrian Economics", it's mostly economics that overlaps several schools (except Marxist, but LTV is nuttier than anything the Austrians come up with), and of course I mostly accept it.

'The point here is that it's important to understand that maximal freedom produces maximal prosperity for everyone, ie. the best "economic outcome". Voluntary exchanges benefit both parties, and so, the more of those happen, the more instances of people being better off will occur. Voluntary exchanges are maximized by maximizing freedom. In other words, getting out of the way and letting people trade and markets work.'

Voluntary exchanges benefit both parties to the exchange, but "both parties" aren't always all parties involved. You're ignoring externalities, which can often be a significant issue.

"> [Keeping the US government in check] Honestly, it's been working out okay.

You're either not paying attention to anything around you, or you know that's not true."

Overwhelmingly, people are able to live reasonably happy, reasonably productive lives and get on with things. There are absolutely abuses and things that need addressing, but I've been paying a lot of attention and I stand by my statement. There are a lot of examples of problems
because we're huge, but per capita very few people die from violence compared to places and times with minimal government, and that's a good thing.