(06-22-2017, 07:57 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(06-21-2017, 02:38 PM)has validity only to the David Horn Wrote:(06-21-2017, 02:18 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: ... I grew up blue, and you don’t have to work hard to get me pushing most blue positions. (Most. Let’s only briefly mention the Second Amendment.) However, there are valid, well though out or deeply set in habit alternatives to the blue. If one labels and thinks of the other guys as stupid, evil, ignorant, insane, brainwashed, etc… it is not the other guys who are ignorant. There is, on both sides, a willful and deliberate effort to not understand, to remain ignorant, to demonize anyone who conflicts with one’s own culture...
Let me add a quick comment. We need to be cautious of too much fairness too. Balancing Position A on equal terms with Position B is fine, as long as both are at least arguable. If either rests on a bed of fallacious assumptions, then balance actually favors lies over truth by giving those lies unjustified stature. So yes, let's avoid demonizing people we disagree with, but let's not give a hand wave to bogus ideas either. If we're fair about calling out the clearly false and only the clearly false, we are less likely to be framed as blind ideologues ourselves.
Although some truth is counter-intuitive, none is contrafactual. Granting equal time to Holocaust denial, young-Earth creationism, or the concepts of a flat or hollow earth as is given to their opposites is absurd.
It is far easier to see the logical fallacies in people with whom we disagree. Galen heavily trumpets the economic positions of Mises and Hayek as if they were absolute, unqualified truth. Yes, even I have found Hayek worthy of discussion because he seems to be right on an issue as few others are. Hayek has a good explanation of the cause of a financial panic in the speculative boom that precedes it. Hayek offers historical evidence and a defensible mechanism for his conjecture. (Speculative booms devour and waste capital that might more wisely be invested in something more useful, if less glamorous and not as promising of quick and easy profits in something highly liquid). Hayek's Road to Serfdom offers a proof (to those who want socialism in the sense of government ownership and operation of productive enterprise) that although the idea of capitalist chaos gets better results than a planned economy in allocating resources is counter-intuitive and that the efficacy of central planning is contrafactual.
But is Hayek an authority beyond criticism? No! There are valid alternatives on much that he says. Many find his idea that economic inequality is a desirable end repugnant. Economic growth that ensures great misery fails my humanist values.
...Galen falls for the fallacy of authority. Authority has validity only to the value of the results that the alleged authority gets. The garage mechanic may have valid authority on solving problems that my car has, but I would not ask him advice on questions on the core realities of the universe. But I wouldn't ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson what to do about an engine knock, either. A good auto mechanic can help me keep a car running over 100,000 miles and not have to trade a car in. (Of course, the car needs oil changes, and those are an inexpensive alternative to trading in one car for another).
If I remember correctly Hayek claimed that the establishment of the British NHS would cause the UK to become a totalitarian hell-hole, that of course did not happen. Yet people like Galen still take his hysterical anti-government rantings as gospel truth, which shows how tenuous the grasp on reality adherents of the Austrian School have. If actual facts contradict their axioms and formulas they will simply ignore the facts.
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