Law, legislation and liberty

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1. abecedariusApr 2024
   Downvoters: this is a nice nutshell statement of a thoroughly respectable thesis, relevant to the thread. I like Hayek's Law, Legislation, and Liberty for a long version, if you don't understand how it can possibly be reasonable.
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2. _s_a_m_May 2022
   Science is about knowledge and not about serving the purpose of some people who define "progress" for some political or economic reasons, .. or because they want attention.

   I wished everyone would read "Law, Legislation & Liberty" by Hayek, where he criticizes people who think systems, like economy, work like an organization. That is, that one can through rational planning and arrangement achieve some goal. That is NOT how markets, economy, society etc. works. That is of course an attack on the utilitarian principles.

   Only uneducated minds could fall into the trap of thinking in exploitative utilitarian ways about everything, including themselves by self-abusive through productivity obsession. This discussion could not be more US American.

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3. t0bia_sFeb 2022
   • Friedrich Hayek - Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973)

   • Gerhard Buchwald - Vaccination - A Business Based on Fear (1994)

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4. jacques_chesterJun 2013
   > I do think that without virtue there can be no value, if these are properly defined.

   This is an unproductive line of argument because either of us can just keep moving the goalposts until we're exhausted.

   Economic value clearly doesn't follow any "gut" virtue. Here's how an early moral theorist put it in a notoriously influential book:

       I returned, and saw under the sun,
       that the race is not to the swift,
       nor the battle to the strong,
       neither yet bread to the wise,
       nor yet riches to men of understanding,
       nor yet favour to men of skill;
       but time and chance happeneth to them all.
   

   Generally speaking, attempts to create ranking functions for virtue lead to mismatches with the observed state of the world. You line up the list of virtuous things (curing AIDS, feeding poor people) and the list of valuable things (Ruby on Rails programmers, inanimate chunks of metal) and discover that they just don't line up. At all.

   But if you try to impose a virtuous order, it all goes kerflooie. Because the whole system of production and allocation relies entirely on value. When you take value you away, it stops working. Partial enforcement leads to partial derangement and in general, creates new evils, requiring still further ranking functions ... it spirals out of control thereafter.

   We read this:

       Dear friend, it is not possible for man to avert that
       which God has decreed shall happen. No one believes 
       warnings, however true. Many of us Persians know our
       danger, but we are constrained by necessity to do
       as our leader bids us.
   
       Verily 'tis the sorest of all human ills, to abound in
       knowledge and yet have no power over action.
   

   And imagine ourselves to be men and women both of knowledge and power. But it was always an illusion.

   I'm doing a pretty poor job of explaining all this. Hayek's Social or 'Distributive' Justice does a much more convincing, thorough and erudite job. It was published in the second volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty, also in The Essence of Hayek.

   edit: by the way, your blog about LedgerSMB and PostgreSQL is bloody marvellous.

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5. wolfmanstoutFeb 2009
   Notice that Krugman provides very little hard evidence to completely discard the entire school of thought of the Austrian economists. He even sneers at them using blatant straw-man attacks: "some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors."

   Regardless of whether all the Austrian school's claims turn out to be correct or not, they certainly deserve a seat at the table. Hayek, in particular, was a true polymath, contributing brilliant ideas to everything from philosophy of science to biologically-grounded psychology. Read the first several chapters of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, and decide for yourself if Krugman has any right to sneer at the "supposedly deep Austrian theorists".

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6. barry-cotterOct 2017
   > The absolute minimum of what a functioning state needs to do is pushing back on all illegal activities.

   This isn’t true. The speed limit in the US comes with the proviso +2 or 3 miles per hour, unless the police officer feels like pulling you over, in Ireland the drink driving laws started being enforced with any degree of vigour in the 90’s despite being much older than that, and the Netherlands’ drug laws as written aren’t much different from its neighbours but it’s enforcement is. Law and legislation are not the same. Prosecutorial discretion is totally a thing. When’s 16 year old gets prosecuted for sexting as a producer of child porn that’s monstrous whether the law as written calls for it or not.

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law,_Legislation_and_Liberty

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