{"id":186,"date":"2004-11-27T23:33:30","date_gmt":"2004-11-28T04:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=186"},"modified":"2004-11-27T23:33:30","modified_gmt":"2004-11-28T04:33:30","slug":"cogito-ergo-libertarian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200411\/cogito-ergo-libertarian\/","title":{"rendered":"Cogito ergo libertarian?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that I have lambasted ethics<\/a> and reason<\/a> among other things, one has little choice but to lambast the High Priest himself – libertarianism.
\nThe thing is, and I feel like a catholic in a confessional here, I feel that libertarianism is in some ways intellectual cowardice.
\n
\nMany authors, economists et al have viewed society as an information system. And planning involves optimizing utility to society given all the information in the system. Now information is of two types – <\/p>\n

a. Local information – This information pertains to the individual, his utility\/preferences, etc.<\/p>\n

b. Global information – This information pertains to the society as a whole.<\/p>\n

Now, socialism believes that it can optimize society objectives by looking
\nat global information alone. Laughable. I agree. The government cannot possibly know if I prefer ketchup over mayonnaise (this was a shock when I first came to know about this, but some actualy prefer Mayo. shudder)<\/p>\n

But libertarianism – as a reaction to the all-pervasive socialist mindsets – advocates doing all optimization locally!
\nActually this is not as bad as it sounds, and maybe I am being too harsh in labelling libertarianism as intellectual cowardice.
\nFor it does not shirk the question of global optimization completely. What it says is that due to the intermeshing of individuals in society, all one needs for global optimization is for connected individuals to optimize locally. <\/p>\n

I cultivate pulses instead of rice for its price is high. Many others do that. When harvest comes, the prices of pulses actually comes down as many people have grown pulses, so not that many shall grow pulses the next year. Thus, trade and prices result in a flowing of information that performs the difficult global optimization of the fraction of land to be devoted to pulses over rice.<\/p>\n

Thus, this iterative procedure can slowly lead to global progress. Natural Evolution is one such libertarian system.<\/p>\n

The problem with this is that such progress shall invariably be very slow.
\nIf global information was available about how many farmers plan to grow pulses, the set of all farmers could have been better off this harvest itself.<\/p>\n

The problem with global optimizations is that they frequently derive from heuristics, voices in the head etc. and hence are frequently faulty. Like Hitler thinking he has to exterminate Jews or Stalin thinking he has to exterminate rich farmers and so on.<\/p>\n

But that does not mean we are doomed to the slow method of libertarianism. The amount of information available centrally and the ability to crunch it is increasing by leaps and bounds. Walmart itself has terabytes of data on people.
\nThere are public policy think tanks that make use of statistical data made available from central databases like the Census, to advocate policies. The Govt itself uses such statistical data. We should thus not lie in libertarian inertia, and try to push the envelope in utilizing of central data.<\/p>\n

But I do agree that with any such central planning endeavor, if in doubt about any central policy, one should err on the libertarian side. For that is at least guaranteed to lead one to an optimum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that I have lambasted ethics and reason among other things, one has little choice but to lambast the High Priest himself – libertarianism. The thing is, and I feel like a catholic in a confessional here, I feel that libertarianism is in some ways intellectual cowardice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}