Know your source: Cato is an advocate for libertarianism, at least as envisioned by its funders, founded in part by Charles Koch, and still heavily funded and controlled by him (and I think by his brother).
I don't mean that in a partisan way; you might love them, hate them, or not care one way or the other, but it's always useful to know who is talking.
The internet has made it very easy to shield ourselves from the arguments of people with differing views. Disclaimers such as this are just another way for us to filter what we read and further isolate ourselves ideologically. Who cares who said it so long as what they said has merit? Conversely, a healthy skepticism is always valuable, regardless of the source.
Because who is saying something colors the merit it brings. And as a healthy skeptic, knowing the direction to look for potential bias _does_ help orient my skepticism and find potential ulterior motives within the infinite space of "all ulterior motives". I certainly was asking myself "I wonder who was backing this" while reading it.
(Don't take me the wrong way, I absolutely agree with you with respect to not filtering our input, I go out of my way to find people biased against my topics to see how they look at things and for me at least the labeling _assists_ with gathering a more diverse viewpoint, and understanding the true motives at play)
The claims being made are objectively true or false entirely independently of any personal attributes of the person making them. In other words, who is saying something is entirely irrelevant to the merit of what they are saying.
The ad hominem fallacy is simply a guideline to evaluate the logical consistency of an argument.
It's not a magic spell you can use to discount a premise. Indeed, blind use of "fallacies" is just an appeal to ancient Greek authority!
For non-expert HN commenters, we have to use authority, preexisting bias, and past actions of the speaker to give us more information without fully delving into the article. Unless you're willing to spend hours or days evaluating the accuracy of every data point mentioned in the article, it's expedient to use available information. In fact, even if you completely evaluated the accuracy of the study, it would absolutely be of interest who is making the article.
>The ad hominem fallacy is simply a guideline to evaluate the logical consistency of an argument.
Precisely. So an argument is not logically consistent if it's just attacking the messenger instead of the content. Here's a hint: if your argument in any way relies on discounting the messenger, it's pretty weak and you should not make it.
How many times have you been swayed by someone that says, "Well I would disregard this study because it's been done by a liberal."
If you find that you don't have the time to evaluate an argument based on its merits, don't evaluate it at all. Otherwise your 'gut reaction', which is all an ad hominem is, is just dead weight on the discussion.
>>Precisely. So an argument is not logically consistent if it's just attacking the messenger instead of the content. Here's a hint: if your argument in any way relies on discounting the messenger, it's pretty weak and you should not make it.
When a statement is challenged by making an ad hominem attack on its author, it is important to draw a distinction between whether the statement in question was an argument or a statement of fact (testimony). In the latter case the issues of the credibility of the person making the statement may be crucial.
The statement that Cato Institute is a libertarian organization is a statement of fact, and may indeed be relevant when judging their credibility.
I still find it useful to know about the person or organisation saying something. Some people and organisations have a history of being deceitful or irrational and it's pretty safe for a non-expert to just disregard their ideas with no consequence.
Eg Ken Ham/AiG, Donald Trump, all conspiracy theorists.
The claims may be objectively true. But I can easily make many objective statements which are true and which are either meaningless, or seem to point out things that need more context to understand. Depending on which side of the argument I prefer, I can choose only the true sentences that seem to support that side and ignore everything else. This is done by media all the time. That's why it's worth to know the bias of the author - even if they don't say anything false, they may ignore a lot of facts and larger context of the issue.
For example:
- Only criminals smoke weed in the US. (true by definition, federal law doesn't allow it)
- Looking at prison population, black people commit more crimes than any other race in the US. (true, missing context of who gets to go to prison, and race ratios in population)
- Obama introduced the best patient protection and affordable care act in the history of the US. (true, but also the only one)
- In the US there are more people who brush their teeth who have cavities than those who have never brushed. (true, because only tiny fraction never brushed their teeth)
All these are examples of claims that are misleading because they're misleading, not because of who is making the claim. You can of course read the claims made by the article with a more critical eye, but identifying the author doesn't automagically lift the responsibility of coming up with a refutation.
> All these are examples of claims that are misleading because they're misleading, not because of who is making the claim.
I think you've got it the other way around. Claims like that would not exist in the first place if someone wasn't either ignorant or purposefully trying to mislead you.
> identifying the author doesn't automagically lift the responsibility of coming up with a refutation.
I never said it does. But what it changes, is that once you figure out what their biases are, you know what kind of facts are they may be omitting, or know where to look for opposing opinions.
>you know what kind of facts are they may be omitting, or know where to look for opposing opinions.
No, that's being lazy. If you follow that guideline you would only scrutinize things which fit into your preconceived notion of what the biases of the author would be. You should scrutinize everything rigorously. Just because someone is voting for Hillary doesn't give them free reign to say any negative thing they want about renewable energy since they "aren't biased that way".
Never said you shouldn't look in other directions. Sure, you can look in all the possible places. It's better if you do.
But unless I'm going to write a report and spend a few hours/days doing a complete research, finding opposing views (and opposing views to those views) is a good approximation.
That's a rather pedantic interpretation. To give one counterexample. Claims can have merit in terms of how the long term events that follow. I have certain ideas of what will follow from e.g. a given proposal; but that's often given many assumptions that went unstated in the original source. By knowing the direction of bias I can postulate what might come from the author's assumptions for those unknowns as well, and perhaps see an angle I hadn't or adjust my "internal bayesian function" of outcomes; which absolutely leads to a subjective judgement of merit. (but despite subjectivity is still to my eyes a best-we-can-do-in-absence-of-more-data question of merit; necessary due to the messiness of "real life")
To bring this very hand wavy generalization back to the topic, look at many arguments posed in the anti-marijuana camp (as discussed in this very writeup) being based on extremely pessimistic to the point of unrealistic assumptions in order to derive the conclusions they prescribed; conclusions in isolation that could be seen as terrifying but if you consider author bias can be accounted for more reasonably.
Do read the tail of my prior post. If only we were in a world where logical purism was possible you would be preaching to the choir, I promise you. But given a world with hilariously incomplete information, ESPECIALLY often when having to judge the merits of a decision, one must make a judgement that takes into account aspects outside of literal content. (If you're a CSer at all I would expect this is a very familiar concept from having to do anything from project estimation to architecture in the presence of unknowns)
(Sister post Linkregister says it better than I did, frankly)
Perhaps in a world where everyone always deals in facts and everyone only tells the truth that statement is true, but that is not our world.
People lie and distort facts for their own personal gain all the time.
See for example, the scientists paid by the cigarette companies that produced data showing that smoking was safe.
Knowing who said something (and knowing who is paying someone to say something) allows you to better calibrate your skepticism to see if what they are saying might be biased by their financial or other interests.
You should be equally skeptical of any scientists stating things like that. A scientist has all kinds of motivations to publish novel research. The first scientist publishing that smoking causes cancer had as many motivations to lie as the scientist that published research claiming it didn't. The latter was direct financial support, the former was prestige and fame that would go directly into a tenure package and be considered during grant approval.
If ad hominems become acceptable then you quickly open the door to worthless discussions around things like climate change because everyone can point out that the scientists behind the research are motivated to advance anthropogenic climate change or risk being ostracized.
Evaluate the content, not the messenger. Anything else is lazy.
If you are concerned the content is a lie, ask for the backing data, don't dismiss it.
> In other words, who is saying something is entirely irrelevant to the merit of what they are saying.
Entirely true. The value in pointing out potential biases by bringing up the background of the speaker, however, is in inviting others to consider aspects of the argument (or the argument as a whole) in a critical manner.
I strongly agree that we shouldn't shield ourselves from opinions that disagree with our own, and that the 'bubble' is dangerous ...
...
> Who cares who said it so long as what they said has merit?
But how do we know how much merit it has? I don't believe anyone has the capability to answer that question on their own (unless they already possess the expert knowledge in the field), or the time to verify it.
Therefore, to a great degree we must trust the authors, so it helps to know who is speaking. No author is without bias; it helps to know their biases. Some authors are more honest than others and some more accurate than others. If an author has tried to deceive me before, I won't trust them again. If I've seen an author be diligent about accuracy, I'll trust them more next time.
...
... and so I do want to filter dishonest and inaccurate arguments, for obvious reasons. And for a less obvious reason: I don't have time to read all the exceptionally well-informed, highly accurate, honest, brilliant arguments out there; I resent someone wasting my time with their bullsh*t.
Understanding the ideological underpinnings of an organization can help to provide context for that organization's statements, especially when those underpinnings are not included in those statements.
In order to fully understand politicized writing—its assumptions, its impacts, its expectations and its motivations—it can often be necessary to have that context. Writing that isn't even consciously propaganda can often be heavily influenced by jargon and premises that are not apparent to the reader, but being familiar with the ideological background can help clear up that cloud.
The study seems to be making a sincere effort to be objective and evidence-based, with proper citations and such.
In my opinion, it largely succeeds. The fact that it was partially funded by someone I may not like is irrelevant (the ad hominem fallacy).
That's the entire purpose of the scientific method -- to bypass the ad hominem arguments you have made, to seperate the data and the claims from questions of whether we happen to like the person or group making the claims on a personal level.
> The study seems to be making a sincere effort to be objective and evidence-based, with proper citations and such.
Without commenting on this particular study, I'll point out something I've learned from long experience reading think tank material:
Some think tanks are created to provide 'intellectual cover' and credibility (in the eyes of people like you and me, who care about the things you listed) to whatever ideas their political masters desire, regardless of the ideas' true legitimacy. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but a well-known (in political circles) tool in the political toolkit. And they do it in exactly the ways you identify, by appearing to make "a sincere effort to be objective and evidence-based, with proper citations and such." Unless we have time to check the citations and expertise to evaluate the quality of the citations and the arguments, we have little chance of detecting it.
Other tools are used to persuade other audiences: Anonymous, slandering robocalls are used for some (probably not you and me), blog posts for some, newspaper op-eds for some, astroturfing on Internet forums for others; some think tanks (not all) are just another tool for another audience.
Sometimes a heavily biased source is the only one that is willing to discuss an issue, or bring it forward. Consider it the opposite of an appeal to authority argument, but bias of a source doesn't necessarily discredit the argument.
Libertarianism, as envisioned by the Koch brothers, is AMAZING when you're rich. You simply remove all government functions that protect the poor from the wealthy, and re-create feudal Europe. What's not to love???
Now I agree that on some issues they do want to remove government functions that I would prefer remained in place. But that's not the sum total of what they're doing, and while I disagree with them rather strongly on a lot of their views and preferred policies I agree with them quite strongly on some others. As does the ACLU, and our current president, for that matter.
There are equally strong objections to their attempt to dominate the political system by spending billions of dollars, from the local to the national level on an extensive range of elections and organizations.[0] At one point, they were planning to spend approximately as much as the Republican Party on this election cycle (they don't seem to like Trump, so maybe they backed off a little, but I don't know).[1]
Why should two voters have so much more influence than 310 million others? It's anti-democratic.
I also think this the parent post presents an overly-moderated depiction of their views - but I'm too busy to look it up myself right now.[0] Certainly the existence of a few things I agree with among their extensive activities wouldn't mean much.
[0] Wikipedia, which I wouldn't put much faith in:
> Why should two voters have so much more influence than 310 million others?
Our political funding system is broken, I agree. So is our general electoral system: elections are _way_ too long, which makes them more expensive, of course.
> I also think this the parent post presents an overly-moderated depiction of their views
By no means am I saying that everything, or most of, or a large part of, what the Koch brothers do or think is good. I'm just saying that the claim that all their political activity is guided by the basic principle "let's see how much we can screw poor people" is a caricature, and not a terribly accurate one, and providing one simple counterexample.
I'm not asking you, or anyone else, to like them personally, the sum total of their activities, or any particular activities. All I'm asking for is that we don't jump from "these people are doing a bunch of stuff I disagree with" to "these people are pure evil, so anything they do must be evil, hence anything they are involved in is evil by association and must be fought against". Unfortunately, this last bit of reasoning is far too common in politics recently, all across the political spectrum. Just like the related "This organization is good, so whatever it does must be good" line of reasoning that seems to be so common... and usually indicates that the organization should be terminated before it does some serious harm. :(
I agree, caricatures and knee-jerk reactions are not useful and not informative. It prevents finding common ground, which is essential to democracies moving forward (a good thing - I want my fellow citizens, even those who disagree, to have a say).
> all government functions that protect the poor from the wealthy
Like the police, who, due to smart phones, are finally being held accountable for the brutality they've been getting away with for decades?
Or maybe you mean civil asset forfeiture, which the police use to steal money from people accused of criminal activity, with no effective mechanism for non-rich people to get it back?
Or maybe the current public school system, which encourages mediocrity and is remarkably ineffective for poor students?
Or maybe you mean the current welfare system, which has the long-term effect of keeping entire populations in destitute poverty even across generational lines?
Or maybe you mean gun control legislation intended to target black populations?
Or maybe you mean the PATRIOT act, which I'm sure has been very helpful in "protecting the poor" (and the rich! Great!) from the apparently ever-present and very serious threat of terrorism?
Because the Koch brothers and the Cato institute have done a great deal of work to improve all of these things.
> re-create feudal Europe
Feudal Europe wasn't libertarian at all. Feudal lords had legal privileges that everyone else didn't. Libertarians believe in a legal system that doesn't afford special privileges to anyone, and they generally believe in government functions like a public police force (although typically a very reserved one compared to present day military-style police forces/SWAT/DEA/etc.).
Such a system wouldn't even be sustainable with current levels of technology. Guerrilla warfare is now too effective compared to the kind of military forces a feudal lord could muster up, and global food production is so high that feudal lords can no longer use food production as a metaphorical (or literal, I suppose) carrot.
> Feudal Europe wasn't libertarian at all. Feudal lords had legal privileges that everyone else didn't. Libertarians believe in a legal system that doesn't afford special privileges to anyone [...]
"In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread."
Don't get me wrong, I completely agree marijuana should be legalized. I was simply commenting on the ridiculousness of the Koch brothers version of "libertarianism". It reminds me of the people calling the nordic countries "socialist" (remind me which means of production the state has forcefully taken in Sweden). Words have meaning, and bastardizing them annoys me.
> It reminds me of the people calling the nordic countries "socialist" (remind me which means of production the state has forcefully taken in Sweden). Words have meaning, and bastardizing them annoys me.
Words have meaning, and they also evolve. You'll have a much easier time understanding others' meaning and communicating with them in kind if you recognize that in many contexts:
- Social democracy has largely been associated with the word socialism.
- Communism has largely been associated with the word socialism. (Side-note: this is the association you appear to be making; many communists would wholesale reject the notion of the state seizing the means of production, or for that matter the notion of the state as a legitimate institution.)
- Communism basically doesn't exist in the broader vocabulary, except as an historical marker for the Soviet Union, and a geopolitical classification of countries like China or Cuba; to the extent it can be associated with any word today, it's anarchism and only among self-identifying anarchists.
- Anarchism has always been aligned with communism except in terms of the question of the state.
- Big-L Libertarians are largely an ideological faction of the right-wing/Republicans.
- Democrats and Republicans occupy a narrow spectrum of corporatism (though that is increasingly expanding rightward).
- Small-l libertarians are more frequently associated with the word anarchism, which is resented by pretty much everyone who cares.
(Full disclosure since at least my clarity if not my characterization displays a bias: I am an anarchist, of the communist variety, and I tend to view social democracy as harm reduction.)
Income tax on companies. That's income that would possibly lead to capital creation/accumulation - and was redirected to other uses by the centralized decision making of the government. I think that counts as "means of production the state has forcefully taken in Sweden".
How so? Libertarianism allows for the control to shift to local governments where citizens can have more power over their society. It's not the absence of government but a framework to protect individual liberty. You'd still have government functions locally.
I've heard libertarian describe many viewpoints to be honest, so people's gut reaction can be quite confusing.
On the one hand, I've heard the term "libertarian" applied to what could also be called a classic liberal position (ala Adam Smith), which favors minimal government interference but recognizes the need for government structure for many things. (In which case, a decentralized government could be part of such a vision.)
On the other hand, I've heard the term "libertarian" applied to what also is called anarchism, which favors no government at all because reasons / The Man or something. I've also heard libertarian being used to describe what I would call fascist-capitalism (if you are the type of "libertarians" who also hates democracy, you possibly fall in this category).
The former I personally find naive, the later I find repulsive, and neither frankly has much to do with the Adam Smith position at all.
It's a general framework with individual liberty at the core. It allows for a lot of different positions. It's not uncommon for libertarians to disagree but for different positions.
Yes there are factions of it just like other parties, but the core is that ideas are good if they don't infringe on other people's rights. Making a law which compels someone to provide a service to another is anti-liberty and most libertarians would not support it. Even then, many might support that measure at the local level because state rights is a big component and democracy is respected.
Anyway, what I like about libertarianism is that it provides a framework which is basically the Constitution at the core. Republicans and Democrats have no framework in how they go about things and we're in a big mess at many levels. There's been very little leadership and vision. If you look at what the two parties have done over the last few decades - they aren't that much different in practice and people are getting frustrated.
There was no hidden agenda. If I was trying to refute the article or the findings I would have. I think the criminalization of marijuana was and continues to be ridiculous. I was simply making the point that the Koch brothers support of marijuana should not give anyone the illusion they're fighting for the little guy.
Are you claiming that regulation exists to help the little guy, and all deregulation is the work of oppressors?
Consider the work of the Libertarian Party to, for example, free people to braid hair without requiring a year of training to get a license.
Or consider that big corporations love regulations as a way to put barriers in the way of competitors. That's the whole point of the economic idea of "rent seeking", and what public choice economists are talking about when they refer to "regulatory capture".
Or for another example, consider that the despite pandering by politicians, economists pretty consistently agree that the minimum wage causes unemployment - the only controversy is by how much. And the origins of the minimum wage came during Jim Crow, when it was first conceived as a way to price minorities out of the job market.
So it's silly to say that libertarian's opposition to government regulation is obfuscation to cover screwing the little guy.
Ha, economists agree is the best troll I have ever heard. There are enough different schools that many economists disagree about anything.
Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government against everyone else via all sorts of lobbying and economical pressure.
Regulation now, that is a good thing, which happens when credible issues are detected.
Drug prohibition is more law than regulation - there was no real issue with abuse of THC originally.
If the issue was, say, low quality or highly addictive drugs, which also damage life, then the proper regulation would be to apply correct scheduling.
THC and likely MDMA should probably barely make it to schedule III. (With additional control due to abuse.) There are known medical uses of those and proper guidelines for dosage.
(Former is used for pain in cancer patients and more, latter an adjunct in psychotherapy and for recurrent migraines.)
Reclassified alcohol would be on the order of schedule II and tobacco as schedule I, with pure nicotine in schedule III.
On the other hand, something like GHB would remain in schedule I or less likely move to schedule II, as there are much better and safer hypnotics. Etc. and more.
Instead of public safety, someone made "potential to abuse" a priority, based on no or scant data, suppositions and politics. Random crisis handling, where no crisis is present.
Making these drugs correctly and usefully regulated should be the main aim of the DEA.
Regulatory capture is a different beast from actual regulation. It is what happens when corporations get to stack the government
No. You do not understand the concept. Regulatory capture can happen even with the purest of intentions.
The problem is that for effective regulation, you need experts. Where are you going to get experts, if not people who have experience in the industry? The problem with this is not that they may try to corrupt the process, favoring their former employer or whatever (although that is also a potential problem, but that's outright corruption, not "regulatory capture").
The thing about people from the industry is that they have a set way of looking at things - they're going to have a hard time "thinking outside the box", and because of the very fact that they spent so much time gathering their expertise, they're going to have a world view in which that area is more important than it probably is to the rest of us. With people that are used to thinking about the system in a set way, and who think it's more important relatively than other things, the flavor of the output regulations is going to tend to be to reinforce the way the industry does things, you'll rarely get something that really pulls the industry out of problematic ruts.
From what I've read, the Navy actually recognizes this problem in their nuclear fleet, and so refuses to use nuclear experts from the power generation industry. Being the Navy, they can afford to train their own experts, but this obviously can't scale to every place in our lives where regulation shows its face.
I agree, the Koch brothers are not motivated by compassion for the poor. However, they are motivated to act in opposition to some of the activities of government that are massively harmful to the poor.
I don't think we need to accept the _entire_ agenda of the Koch brothers in order to appreciate that sometimes they're doing the right thing.
Feudal Europe was feudal Europe because it was a Malthusian state. Economic growth was quickly eaten by population growth. Libertarianism doesn't seem any more likely to increase the rate of reproduction relative to the rate of economic growth.
The comparison comes from how, recently, economic growth has largely been captured by an increasingly small subset. The who/what of the eating of the economic growth matters less than its being eaten.
Sure. But the reason the lot of the average person was bad was because of the Malthusian equilibrium. Because economic growth was eaten immediately by population growth basicly everyone was at subsistence; elites capturing a disproportionate share of the resources didn't decrease average welfare. It moderately decreased the population, but the rest lived at subsistence. As the elites created the science and economics that allowed us to escape, however temporarily, from the Malthusian condition, I find it very hard to begrudge them for actions that didn't even decrease average welfare.
I don't think that, in the context of moving to a libertarian-as-pitched-in-the-USA state, "didn't even decrease average welfare" would hold true.
A massive amount of publicly funded services would be cut. So if we take as a given the ability of these elites to capture the cost savings of that for themselves, you end up with the average worker receiving no more money (since it's been captured) yet receiving fewer services (since the public ones were cut).
All the leverage[0] is in the hands of the owners, not the workers.
[0] excluding leverage such as "there are more of us so we can outvote you" and "there are more of us so we could revolt" - the first is presumed to have not happened, for whatever reason, by the assumption of the existence of this libertarian state, and the second would be a violation of the property rights that USA-libertarians hold so central.
Honestly, I think the poor had more rights (or at least had an easier time of having their rights honored) in the Middle Ages than they would under libertarianism. Look up _Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages_ or _A History of Private Life_ if you're curious.
No, in the middle ages (and it's returning now) there were debtor's prisons, which libertarians are very strong opponents of. That in and of itself is huge.
Looks like that's true; I hadn't come across the early history of debtors' prisons, and had always thought of them as an early-modern thing.
It looks like Reason.com argues that pay-for-service modern law is equivalent to debtors' prison, but I haven't heard of libertarians supporting the restoration of proper debtors' prison (where the state imprisons someone for failing to pay a debt to a non-state contracting party). Of course, there's no canonical list of libertarian principles, so I'm sure some do support that...
As for the Middle Ages, I'd still recommend the books I mentioned; they make a number of interesting references to village law, and the right of peasant farmers (both serfs, who owed labor service, and freemen, who owed rent) to self-regulate.
_A Farewell to Alms_ mentions that farmland in the Middle Ages returned 10% per annum at basically zero risk in England and relatively little on the Continent (the only risks being war and bad harvests); if libertarianism wants to return to that economic arrangement, perhaps with the US government selling bonds returning 10% adjusted for inflation, then perhaps it has a silver lining.
I don't mean that in a partisan way; you might love them, hate them, or not care one way or the other, but it's always useful to know who is talking.