Ideas Matter

Why Some People are Libertarians

This is refreshing. When someone off camera asks John Tomasi why he's a libertarian, he says: "I value those bourgeois American virtues." Most political philosophers would say something about reason demanding it. One ought to be libertarian because the political form embodies some sort of objective truth about human nature and the good -- right? Not exactly.

Objective Rules for Subjective Values

Here's a great video for the libertarian philosophers among you. The question is: if value is subjective, how can we have a system of objective rights and rules? Aeon Skoble lays it out nicely in this video. And I think for an introduction to the question, this is a tidy talk. I do, however, have some concerns.

Healthcare: Prices Going Up, Quality Too?

I usually agree with the videos that come from LearnLiberty.org. But in the interests of intellectual honesty, we should point out objections when we have them. Allow me to do just that. Consider the short talk from Antony Davies above.

Dorian Electra: Roll With The Flow

Hopefully you've seen this by now. But if you haven't, consider your day brightened.

Dorian Electra has done a fantastic job of communicating the basic lessons of Austrian Economics in, well, a single song. She covers:

• Subjective value - One person's trash is another's treasure.
• Human action (in circumstances of time and place) - Your economic behavior is unique and perspectival.
• Knowledge problem, as well as problems of quantification and measurement - Macroeconomic models are pretty much useless.
• Unseen costs - Big digs and boondoggles mean foregone opportunities for growth.
• Bottom up versus Top Down - The collective behaviors of individual actors on the ground make up the economy (not aggregate demand).

A few crazy libertarians are going to topple Paul Krugman and expose his idiocy -- one video at a time. 

Steven Pinker on Morality

Steven Pinker says that - generally speaking - the golden rule is pretty much the long and short of morality. Interestingly, the golden rule appears in a number of cultures around the world. So as a rule, it's clearly not a bad one. Still, I don't think Pinker is arguing that the golden rule is some sort of moral absolute. I think he is much more tentative -- especially as he thinks our "moral sense" so often comes from a crude mixture of evolutionary baggage and cultural memes that arrive as emotions. The golden rule is but a guide -- often a means of helping us escape our moralistic emotions.

Sam Harris: Fame, Faitheism and Pop Philosophy

Sam Harris has upset a lot of classical liberals with this post on wealth redistribution. I won't critique it here, because other people have done such a good job. Why would Harris wade into this debate? Perhaps fame has helped Harris feel qualified to talk about everything under the sun. He's become one of the big evangelists for atheism, you know. And while I'm not particularly religious myself, I generally find his critiques of religion to be a couple of centuries behind the times.

Subjective Value: How Soon Economists Forget

To this editor, subjective value is one of the most important insights in economics and philosophy. Don Boudreaux's unpacking here is solid. It's interesting how often people forget -- or simply never grasp -- this idea. What Boudreaux doesn't say explicitly here is a fact that can be even more disturbing: there is no such thing as objective value.

Rory Sutherland: Austrian Marketing and Psycho-Economics

I almost never blog about 20-minute-plus talks. Not even TED talks. I don't want to waste your time, nor do I want to waste my time. But every once in a while I find a video that speaks to me.

Jeffrey Tucker noticed the above video the other day, so hat tip to him. We, of course, discovered Rory Sutherland's Austrian sensibilities a while back. Perhaps Sutherland was already influenced by the Austrians at that time. Perhaps he read our post and his intuition penny dropped (right from the work of von Mises). Either way, we hope you both watch and read on.

The Plasticity of Personhood

You might see this as a shameless opportunity for me to drop a really cool video game demo into Ideas Matter. And that is partly true. But apart from playing the occasional Wii game with my little boy, predicting the emergence of exercise-friendly video games like Wii, or being overly optimistic about immersive environments like Second Life -- I'm not really a video gamer. Indeed, I'm less interested in games as amusements and more interested in games as an emerging cultural, psychological or political phenomena. And I think these environments are going to begin challenging our concept of personhood.

Markets in Everything, Bubbles in Everything

Our recent post on subjective valuation in art got some interesting responses, as well as some links from insightful people, who could very well be better positioned to reflect on art than I. Still, I'd like to complicate matters a little and ask you -- with this clip -- to consider the intersection of economics and art.

It's one thing to value something. It's quite another to demonstrate your preference by acquiring it. Of course value and behavior are linked. But the intersection between subjective values and things values is a very interesting intersection, indeed.