As for the grammatical question (although I suspect you’re just being humorous in posing it), how about leaving out both the “what” and the “are”? Hence, “How are we supposed to determine the correct way of divining gods intentions?”.

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/29/on-the-futility-of-arguing-about-hayek-or-whats-in-a-name/

Looky here! We’ve got ourselves a dilemma ain’t either of our ideologies goin’ fix!

What if A hangs around the beach surfing and smoking cones, knocking back work easily available. I know that is possible. I did it back in the day.

But there are problems like distinguishing bewtween criminal justice, where I think it safe to say there will be a strong majority on right and wrong, and social justice, which so often seems a licence for envy and is certainy a very different argument. It is easy to say my punching you unprovoked is injust, but saying I am unjust for not giving you money when you have less is a whole different kettle of fish.

As for inordinate faith in markets, you can only judge the sensibility of that faith by comparing is to the alternatives. I expect some people have silly expectations for what the market can achieve. but that does not matter if the alternatives will be worse than the market anyway.

For the sake of argument, if A has put in place (using swords) the conditions under which B is protected from the tyranny of C (the guy with all the other swords), then such a claim might be defensible. Oh wait, that’s government.

Ultimately it’s a moral question. What claim does A have on the talent, effort and/or prudence of B?

I am all in favour of market based economies but some demonstrate an inordinate faith in the same. Yes, I have known people who even advocate the market is the best determinant of justice. I regard this as a category error. Markets are fine but justice is something else altogether. the free market model seems to make the error of assuming that people won’t consciously interfere with market processes. That is where real big problems emerge. We need to protect against this. Most countries recognise this problem and try to address it.

I think Ingolf’s point is that market processes are best at delivering productivity, innovation and, most of all, customer satisfaction, and therefore should be preferred where the market process is able to achieve the ends sought. Now, a tax and transfer system is not necessarily incompatible with the market working as expected. As long you the tax is not too high. So it is unproductive to attack the market for not delivering “distributional equity” because you can let the market operate and then tax and transfer (with in limits). However, if you want total equality of incomes then the tax regime required would kill market processes by destroying the incentive to bother. The complete alternative to the market is socialism and it obvviously does not work. Thus social democracy.

Obviously some people have problems with the market because they do not like the outcome of freely agreed deals. thus labour market regulation. I think that the government should ditch awards and minimum wages and use the tax and transfer system to put an effective floor under incomes.

Trust in spontaneous order was the assumption of uniformitarianism which appears to have influenced A. Smith’s ideas about the Invisible Hand. It is wrong, open systems do not by default move towards equilibrium. It is surprising though how frequently one finds this assumption lurking in the backwaters of our minds. For example, many people still think biological processes are striving towards equilibrium, the term being “homeostasis”. Wrong again, biological processes are typically highly dynamic and moving through stages of activity. In fact if this isn’t happening, as in cell senescence, chances are death is on the way.

As for the Invisible Hand I only have this to say: My Invisible Hand is better than your Imaginary Friend.

Excellent illustration of Jacques’ point here. Trust in spontaneous order is indeed a useful thing to apply sparingly as a guiding principle, while if you examine it closely as a fundamental principle (and try to apply it as your main principle in policy) it is worse than useless. What was spontaneous becomes quickly entrenched, embedded and defended in any real system. Et voila – feudalism!

Pedro, if I’ve understood you correctly, I think I pretty much agree with all of your comment. Still, even though the ends may often be different, the central tenets of classical liberalism (in particular its trust in spontaneous order) can probably still provide useful guidance as to how state interventions should be structured so as to be most effective.

“I think we should allow a little more experimentation in our political process by trial testing ideas. Maybe Gillards new ed policies should be trial tested and if they fail not use that against her. But what do you think the chances are?”

Good idea, but it begs the question of whether Gillard or any other pollie is likely to admit a big mistake. Isn’t the history of failed programs that the failure leads to demands for even more of the same? Certainly in welfare and public education.

“Were all stuck inside these rather dodgy meat machines; it can be difficult to disentangle ourselves, our beliefs, and the probability that theres an objective reality separate from either.”

Too true. Ingolf is correct about classical liberalism. Nothing will be perfect so the goal is to find the least bad on average. However, social democracy is intended to result in different outcomes from classical liberalism and is better at achieving those goals. A lot of political debate is allegedly about means rather than ends, but I don’t think it really is true that the major players intend the same ends.

As for keeping things simple, isn’t the great virtue of the classical liberal position that it allows and, where necessary, encourages spontaneous order to unfold? Given a basic framework of laws and mores, the distributed intelligence that results constantly works to repair its own bugs.

One could take his (now even better-made) point about ideological systems suffering unforeseen structural problems at higher levels of complexity, without invoking the realities of public decision-making. Unless you truly believe your own ideology to be perfect and complete, you should be able to see examples of what he’s talking about all around you.

And what’s more if you DO believe your own ideology to be perfect and complete, you’re probably simply wrong.

You analogize software in your example and correctly assert that software is similar to ideology in terms of ground up complexities. Fair enough. I never really had much of a problem with that.

However we tolerate the complexity in software more so than we do in other areas or at least I think we do.

I also said that you can end up being paralyzed with confusion when you try to take too many complexities into account which seems to be the case when we’re seeing forms of ideology practiced in the political sphere.

Do we tolerate it in the political sphere? How long was Workchoices allowed to be tested and tried before people felt threatened and gave up with a burning desire to punish the government? About a new York minute?

Two contrasted examples of someone going with his basic ideology in the political sphere and one who is generally considered to be a failure simply because he was paralyzed by complexity are:

Carter was possibly the most intelligent man ever to operate from the oval office and was a failed presidency. Reagan was possibly of middling Prez intelligence, very ideological and was considered a success by and large.

Too Complexity can kill you figuratively speaking.

Another example:

In the commercial world you also hear the adage of keeping things simple. This doesn’t mean you dumb things down. however there is a beauty bringing complex issues down to basic language. Buffet can do it.

I think Jacques is making an honest error in using computer programming as an example. We all tolerate a certain amount of problems in computer programming that we dont in other areas. Look at how we seem to tolerate the bugs in Microthefts programs.

FDB is right — I haven’t communicated my point. I’m not speaking in the sense of “oh, it’s just software, bugs happen”; rather, “logical systems behave analogously, software is a logical system, software has bugs, analogously other logical systems have bugs”.

I mean at the base level of assembling individual AND and OR gates, software is brutally deterministic and incredibly simplistic. Yet it very quickly spirals into impossible complexity as soon as we try to do anything useful. While in theory we could explain and understand every single thing occurring in a modern software codebase, in practice it is utterly impossible. Most of the important advances in software are discovering new ways to manage complexity.

Enter ideologies. Like software they start with very simple first principles. Then come the next layer of implications. Then the next. Suddenly you’re eyeballing the ragged edge where the theory interfaces with reality and it doesn’t quite match up. Where’s the problem? Is it at this level? Is it in our tools? Assumptions? Methods? Is there some fundamental mistake we’ve made 100,000 lines ago? Then, blam, welcome to bug-hunting in large systems.

My argument is that this is not unique to software, rather that software is the first field where it turns up so quickly and visibly, simply because its very flexibility makes software attractive to change and expansion. Then you’re a dozen orders of magnitude from ANDs and ORs and things are nearly incomprehensible.