Ray Peat Believes That Libertarian Ideology Is Responsible For The Hatred Of Fructose

[DaveFoster]

The road belongs to a third party. Do you cause a chain reaction?

You do, but the owner has a right to sue.

I stole your car to chase down my wife, who's driving to Canada with my daughter for whom I have custody. The daughter threw a pop can out the window on the way and it cracked someone's windshield. Who's at fault?

No, but it does make libertarians Nazis, at least from an anthropological stance.

Darwin sure was a Nazi.

 

[Such_Saturation]

You do, but the owner has a right to sue.

I stole your car to chase down my wife, who's driving to Canada with my daughter for whom I have custody. The daughter threw a pop can out the window on the way and it cracked someone's windshield. Who's at fault?

Darwin sure was a Nazi.

What if he shoots you for crossing his road?

 

[DaveFoster]

What if he shoots you for crossing his road?

Don't be silly; everyone wears Kevlar 24/7 in Ancapadonia.

 

[Such_Saturation]

Don't be silly; everyone wears Kevlar 24/7 in Ancapadonia.

Dave, you've veered miles from that road since you joined here I'm afraid

 

[DaveFoster]

Dave, you've veered miles from that road since you joined here I'm afraid

Well shucks; that might be the nicest pun you've ever said to me.

 

[Such_Saturation]

Well shucks; that might be the nicest pun you've ever said to me.

Lol, see? Now you can make ME feel bad

 

[Travis]

Nice post!

I don't know who started this fructose hate-campaign, but it is ridiculous. Glucose is converted into fructose in the body. So if they are arguing that glucose is safer than fructose; they need to explain this one.

 

[Such_Saturation]

Nice post!

I don't know who started this fructose hate-campaign, but it is ridiculous. Glucose is converted into fructose in the body. So if they are arguing that glucose is safer than fructose; they need to explain this one.

They claim fructose skips some limiting steps compared to glucose...

 

[aquaman]

Correct, taxes are theft, war is mass murder, and conscription is slavery. When you use the right words for government actions is becomes clear what the morally correct position is towards them.

Every tribe, civilisation or group of humans in history has had a central group which takes actions on behalf of the wider group. Whether that's in small or large civilisations. You're in total fantasy world where you start from time zero again.

Name some examples in history where non-governmental action successfully started building major infrastructure projects for example. Kicked things off.

Your fantasy land may as well say that human impulses and bad actions are taken away, and we have peace on Earth. How would you undo 1000s of years of history and development? Where would you start from?

Like I said earlier, Rothbard has written on air pollution more eloquently than I could repeat his arguments. He uses real case history about how the law evolved and how when the government got involved and removed the ability for average people to sue based on pollution, pollution got worse and a precedent was set for erring on the side of pre-established industrial firms.

Who sets the rules (law) in your fictional world? A central body aka a government? Who funds them? Who elects them?

The problem with the ivory trade is simple, it's ivory communism. The same problem existed in the 19th century vis a vis whales, who before oil refining was invented were killed en masse for their blubber as the primary source of lamp kerosene. We had "whale communism," where you could not own a particular tract of ocean or school of whales (whatever the technological unit would be, we'll have to leave that to whale biologists) but if you managed to kill a whale, you could keep it. Not unlike logging in public land. The incentive, obviously, is to nab every whale you can because if you don't, the next guy will. If you owned a unit of whales, or fish, or a lake, or a logging forest, your incentive is to maintain the value of your capital stock, a value directly opposed to overuse.

Again back to your "very simple" outcomes. Remove government and everything would be fixed etc. Would you scrap all property and start again? If not, then you're not starting from a level playing field since the governments would have been hugely responsible over the last 200-3000 years in determining who got private ownership of certain capital.

Ivory communism? WTF are you talking about. There's a value that people place on Ivory in one country, there's a limited supply of them, the value alive is not equated to the value of them dead and shorn of their tusks, so the profit motive exists to hunt them to extinction. Only some central organisation that can take into account non-economic costs can have an impact here.

If you go back far enough, every person was born in a run down community. That would be putting it politely for the majority of human history. What caused some to rise above and have the standard of living we have now? Was it the state, or diffuse individual action? Was it central command, or decentral command? What cultures gained wealth faster, the ones that instituted private property and the rule of law first, or the ones that have yet to institute those reforms? College, btw, is a racket that is impoverishing everyone in society except the professors and other profiteers. It's like welfare, the only welfare it promotes is that of the welfare bureaucrats.

As above, major advances were led by a centralised group acting on behalf of the people. Your'e also back on your binary examples - either Rule of Law or Not Rule of Law, like it's not a sliding scale, and subject to change. Also, centralised governments instituted rule of law. The US provided a totally unique example of a genuine clean slate - time zero - but being able to use the history of learnings from 1000s of years of European development right back from Rome to the English system of law. And yet look back on the amount of blood shed and illegal action over capital acquisition. Your binary fantasy world can never exist.

This is a great example of the difference in our moral approaches. I don't think we need property rights because it encourages this or that good thing, I believe in property rights because saying that someone else has a prior right to your body, mind, or the property obtained thereby is evil. I don't think rape is wrong because it could give the women a psychological complex about sex, it's wrong because she owns her own body and has the right to say who can touch her and who can't. You able to keep whatever in your bank account isn't right because it encourages you to work hard and save and improve the economy through investment, it's right because you have the highest claim to it as compared to anyone else. Same reason for you being allowed to keep your organs, decide what you put in your body, etc.

You're confused between capital and cash. Your link between property rights and rape is bizarre in the least. The whole point with owning capital is that you advance far ahead of those without the capital. It's flawed, but necessary. I'm not arguing remotely against capital ownership, I've spent a lot of time in Africa and seen first hand what happens without property rights, but giving absolute advantage to those who happen to come first and stake a claim makes it harder and harder for those to catch up.

I've sort of given up even trying to form sentences in response to your comments, they're so randomly written down without any link to reality.

Statements like "it's clear that...", "it's simple...", "it's obvious..", "taxes are theft" don't help to make your point, they weaken your points. You're 1 or 0 on incredibly broad areas.

Nothing in the world of humans is clear, obvious or simple. Everything is nuanced and grey (gray).

 

[Travis]

I think Kyle M has a decent outlook on the state of affairs.

 

[jaa]

Those tribes were not libertarian, they did not respect property rights. It's true, however, that technology has allowed human survivability to go up immensely, but to pin that on the state is a leap that I think untenable. The places with the strongest states, like the far East and (all of the Ethiopian objections notwithstanding) central Africa, they have lagged behind on technology compared to the West. The thing to understand is that the state is a legal monopoly on the use of force in a given geographic area, and state's war, so when one tribe where the leader is allowed to kill or take or rape whatever he wants, wars with another tribe of the same description, that is not anarchy. If a bunch of individuals who were not conscripted or in any way forced to, fought each other in the jungle and all killed each other, you could blame that on liberty. But what inevitably happens in that scenario is that free human, when presented with the very real chance of death or lose or property, almost always choose peace if a ruler isn't forcing them with the threat of punishment. In order to get war, you have to create a religion, either a mystical one or one about the state, where it is honorable to die and kill for the state, because people don't like to hurt other people and don't like to be hurt themselves. We recoil from it.

I disagree that the strongest states are "failed" states you point to. I'd argue that the strongest states are the ones with the best institutions that best nurture and protect individuals like Bill Gates to ensure their innovation is properly rewarded. I think we're both on the same page with regards to that. And we both agree that current best nation states can do better by leaning a little more libertarian in certain areas. And for the really big concerns like global coordination it's hard to imagine the nations states cooperating either. Though I think a group of nation states has a better chance at coordination than a patchwork of libertarians. And the closer that group of nation states number moves to 1, the more likely we are to solve those global coordination problems.

A high Japanese general said during WWII that the American continent could never be successfully invaded. Why? Was it their military? No, his reasoning was that there would be a gun behind every tree. This is the same reason that Switzerland, despite having basically no military, was never molested during the entire bloody 20th century. It's smack in the middle of Europe. It's also the only country that insists every citizen be armed. Private security, as theorized by Rothbard and more recently Robert Murphy, would do better both domestically and to prevent international threats than does socialized security.

That might work for a land invasion consisting of ground troops ala Red Dawn. Would it work in conventional warfare? It seems to me it would be difficult for such a system to defend against missile attacks and other large scale nation state attacks.

Good question, I have to admit that my expertise is not in answering "24-ish" scenario riddles like this. It would be up to the individual to decide, and in a dire situation like that I would probably shoot through the hostage, but I would be legally responsible for that hostages life to an extent. You could, however, make a legal argument that the person using the hostage as a shield holds the full legal responsibility for that life, kind of like someone who pushes a child into a lake, even if no one saves him it's the pusher that killed him, not the people who refused to jump in and perform rescue.

Haha sorry for the 24ish scenario, but you started it and these things can help pinpoint any contradictions or confusion with ones morality.

That answer does not feel very satisfactory to me. Why bring legality into it at all? That just seems like an undefined concept. The consequences seem a lot more clear cut to me.

You may have noticed I don't believe in human rights the same way you do. There's nothing written in the stars. There is just human biology and actions which lead to better or worse results for humankind / all conscious beings. I think human rights serve as great guiding principals, and should not be deviated from without very good reason, which is what I'm trying to get at with these silly scenarios. I'm trying to show that in these outlier scenarios, you would do much better to abandon your notions of rights in order to secure a much better outcome. That's why I'm a consequentialist. In all moral scenarios that I've come across, it's the only system I've found that always leads me to what I believe is the correct result.

Forgive me, but I'd like to set up just one more of these toy examples and would like to hear your perspective on it. It's another doomsday scenario. With organ transplants. A super specialized nuclear physcist has designed the greatest nuclear fusion reactor in the world. It's capable of supplying all the world's energy, but also capable of destroying the world if runaway reactions take place. An extremely rare event (say asteroid + earthquake + hurricane) has disrupted the many failsafes and this physicist is the only one who can save the day. But the physicist is ill, and needs an heart and liver organ transplant to survive. The only potential donor does not want to donate their organs because they don't want to die (it's lost on them that they'll die anyway). Do you think it's immoral for people to kill the potential donor to harvest their organs and save the planet?

I think, while it's horrific, it's by far and away the best choice amoung bad options.

 

[Kyle M]

@aquaman - With the fear of sounding dismissive or arrogant, a lot of your points (especially the historical misunderstandings about how humanity progressed, probably from socialist public schooling) has been dealt with in the literature. These ideas are old and developed, and your questions have been asked for decades, and answered. It's a different perspective of history to see that actually the state and taxes held back human development, rather than allowed it, and requires a lot of reading and rethinking of what you were taught. Remember that the state controls the schools here, and in most other nations.

 

[Kyle M]

Forgive me, but I'd like to set up just one more of these toy examples and would like to hear your perspective on it. It's another doomsday scenario. With organ transplants. A super specialized nuclear physcist has designed the greatest nuclear fusion reactor in the world. It's capable of supplying all the world's energy, but also capable of destroying the world if runaway reactions take place. An extremely rare event (say asteroid + earthquake + hurricane) has disrupted the many failsafes and this physicist is the only one who can save the day. But the physicist is ill, and needs an heart and liver organ transplant to survive. The only potential donor does not want to donate their organs because they don't want to die (it's lost on them that they'll die anyway). Do you think it's immoral for people to kill the potential donor to harvest their organs and save the planet?

I think, while it's horrific, it's by far and away the best choice amoung bad options.

Yeah it's immoral, and yeah I would do it. We are slightly talking past each other here, because you are going from "in this insane, never will happen scenario we would have to violate libertarian principles" (which I am agreeing with) and landing on "therefore libertarianism doesn't work.

In order to grasp the liberty philosophy, you need to know a few things. One is that law, our legal tradition, English Common Law, did not come about through legislation like many people think of law now. It was legal precedent set in diffuse courts across the English countryside, and there were even professional jurors who understood the law. The thing was, the jury could nullify law, as you are supposed to be able to do here (Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 by Madison and Jefferson, respectively). So for example, if you were arraigned for weed possession, and the prosecutor proved to the jury you did in fact possess the weed, the jury could just say "yeah we find them not guilty because the law stinks" and that's that. Would they do that for a proven murder? Of course not. Why? Because just about everyone wants to live in a world where murder is illegal, as is theft etc., but no one outside of the state gives two shits about weed. The state had to conduct massive misinformation campaigns about drugs like weed in order to even get their shitty Unconstitutional legislation about drugs passed in the first place. That is the kind of law tradition our nation was founded on, and legislation is something entirely different.

Now there are many more historical points like that, that help distinguish between law (natural rights) and legislation (state violence), and other topics that force a different perspective of history. When you have that perspective, it's hard to see it any other way than there has been a constant struggle between power and market (as Rothbard puts it) where humans create and trade and try to come up with institutions that protect property and their ability to do so, while antisocial humans try to use violence to involuntarily extract resources from people who are producers of value. When those violent extractors get together, form a bureaucracy, and set up permanent camp inside of the producer settlement, now you have a state or government. Then the religion sprouts up around it, that the reason why the producers have it good like they do is because of the extractors, that taxes are the price of civilization, that those other tribes are evil so your children are needed to die in wars against them, that they know best what you should be able to put into your body or how big you can build your house and who you can marry. And by this time in history most humans on earth have a Stockholm syndrome where they argue on the internet defending that mythology, rather than seeing the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, market and power, and realizing that all good things in this world come from the former, not the latter.

 

[aquaman]

@aquaman - With the fear of sounding dismissive or arrogant,

Don't worry, I find you purely comical. You're suggesting a ludicrous fantasy world that has never and will never exist, and talking as if there is some historical basis for your argument that taxation and some form of central provision of infrastructure has held back development when there is no example of a society without government and therefore no single piece of evidence you can point at.

 

[Kyle M]

Don't worry, I find you purely comical. You're suggesting a ludicrous fantasy world that has never and will never exist, and talking as if there is some historical basis for your argument that taxation and some form of central provision of infrastructure has held back development when there is no example of a society without government and therefore no single piece of evidence you can point at.

Must be nice to know something without having to do any research about it. I wish I had that trick in science. One example, although I've read certain periods in Ireland and Southeast Asia have had stateless areas: Medieval Iceland and the Absence of Government
Of course it's a matter of degree, compared to North Korea we are basically stateless, and in many ways (economic) compared to the US, Singapore and Hong Kong are nearly stateless. They have social controls, however.

Why not more stateless societies? Could it be that parasitical humans are loath to give up their gravy train? By your logic, the pharmaceutical industry of today is good, because it exists. It doesn't exist because of a coordinated cartelization and misinformation campaign that involves the state bribing researchers and doctors, protecting the established firms and outlawing competing therapies and modalities of research. Since it exists, that means it's a viable, good system, and since the pharmaceutical industry Ray Peat would like to see doesn't exist, it means he's purely comical and suggests a ludicrous fantasy world that has never and will never exist, talking as if there is some scientific basis for his argument that the current biomedical field has held back development in human health and wellness when there is no example of a society without a centrally planned, cartelized medical system and therefore no single piece of evidence he can point to.

 

[jaa]

Yeah it's immoral, and yeah I would do it. We are slightly talking past each other here, because you are going from "in this insane, never will happen scenario we would have to violate libertarian principles" (which I am agreeing with) and landing on "therefore libertarianism doesn't work.

We kind of got sidetracked, and in my mind we were having two conversations (though I failed to make that explicit): 1) about libertarianism and 2) about moral philosophy. The two are related, but that wasn't the reason for me talking about the latter, and I wasn't trying to use it as a knock down argument against libertarianism. In my defense of consequentialism, I thought it would be fun to walk down that moral philosophy path a little further.

I find it weird that you think it's immoral and would do it anyway. Though maybe it's not that weird and maybe I'm getting tripped in with semantics. I would be horrified if I had to make that choice, but on paper it seems clear cut. And while I would agonize over my decision after the fact, I don't think I would ever consider my action immoral. I have difficulty understanding why you want to clutch to your notion of universal rights so tightly when the action you think is best conflicts with your rule of thumb.

On further inspection, this really seems to be at the heart of our disagreement. You are a deontologist and I am consequentialist. I think for like 99.99%+ of situations, we would be in agreement about the course of action one should take. And even though our preferred governing systems seem at odds, in practice we would agree on a similar % of policy issues.

In order to grasp the liberty philosophy, you need to know a few things. One is that law, our legal tradition, English Common Law, did not come about through legislation like many people think of law now. It was legal precedent set in diffuse courts across the English countryside, and there were even professional jurors who understood the law. The thing was, the jury could nullify law, as you are supposed to be able to do here (Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 by Madison and Jefferson, respectively). So for example, if you were arraigned for weed possession, and the prosecutor proved to the jury you did in fact possess the weed, the jury could just say "yeah we find them not guilty because the law stinks" and that's that. Would they do that for a proven murder? Of course not. Why? Because just about everyone wants to live in a world where murder is illegal, as is theft etc., but no one outside of the state gives two shits about weed. The state had to conduct massive misinformation campaigns about drugs like weed in order to even get their shitty Unconstitutional legislation about drugs passed in the first place. That is the kind of law tradition our nation was founded on, and legislation is something entirely different.

That's interesting. It seems like much more adaptable legal system that's based on ideas of the day.

Now there are many more historical points like that, that help distinguish between law (natural rights) and legislation (state violence), and other topics that force a different perspective of history. When you have that perspective, it's hard to see it any other way than there has been a constant struggle between power and market (as Rothbard puts it) where humans create and trade and try to come up with institutions that protect property and their ability to do so, while antisocial humans try to use violence to involuntarily extract resources from people who are producers of value. When those violent extractors get together, form a bureaucracy, and set up permanent camp inside of the producer settlement, now you have a state or government. Then the religion sprouts up around it, that the reason why the producers have it good like they do is because of the extractors, that taxes are the price of civilization, that those other tribes are evil so your children are needed to die in wars against them, that they know best what you should be able to put into your body or how big you can build your house and who you can marry. And by this time in history most humans on earth have a Stockholm syndrome where they argue on the internet defending that mythology, rather than seeing the distinction between voluntary and involuntary, market and power, and realizing that all good things in this world come from the former, not the latter.

While I don't agree with everything the state does, I don't hold quite the same pessimistic view as you. For example, taxes provide value. A thief does not steal your money and use it to upgrade your kitchen. And you are free to move out of your current state.

Growing up in Canada I haven't got the message that other tribes are evil (not to say the governments past or current history is squeaky clean). I haven't felt I need to go to war to protect the nation against the other. I did not have religion jammed down my throat, and I don't feel like the government is repressing my freedoms. That's not to say the system is perfect. There's lots of work to be done, mostly moving towards the individual freedom you profess. And it's a feature of the system that change happens slowly.

But I also think we're on the right path. I would like to see the nation states of the world move towards more coalition, less war, and less personal oppression. Eventually culminating in something of a global government for resolution of the big coordination problems and issues that would arise, and something like small government where nation states currently exist that adhere to many libertarian values.

 

[Kyle M]

If a thief knocked you down and stole all of your money, than put an addition on your garage with 20% of it, is that now ok?

 

[Kyle M]

The reason I stay away from consequentialist arguments is that they are a farce. They never actually happen. What does happen is that they are used to justify quite different things. Like the military, people say "we need national defense to protect us from foreign invaders." Ok, but has that ever happened? Andrew Jackson fought the invading English while commanding a Tennessee militia, not a federal military. Other than that, there has never been a ground invasion, but instead the USA military has become the greatest aggressive military force ever seen on the planet (outside of maybe Genghis Kahn, but it's debatable). Not only that, but the interplay of the military-industrial complex has transformed the nature of this nation's economy towards making weapons for war, and the companies that make billions from that buy politicians that then always push for more war and extreme war preparedness.

So the argument that we need a government to have national defense through a central military makes a bit of sense on paper, but look at the results. If you just said no, because government and it's military are immoral, then you would be forced to defend the nation with a voluntary local militia AS HAPPENED IN THE ONLY GROUND INVASION IN OUR HISTORY, SUCCESSFULLY. Consequentialist arguments are tools of thought manipulation.

Other examples: massive use of torture, because we could have a terrorist who knows of a bomb just about to go off
the FDA/AMA: because there could be a snake oil salesman selling therapies that don't work and actually harm people
the USDA and Farm Bill: because farmers could have a bad season, and sometimes prices go down and need to be supported or else we won't have any farmers to grow good anymore...or something

 

[aquaman]

Why not more stateless societies? Could it be that parasitical humans are loath to give up their gravy train? By your logic, the pharmaceutical industry of today is good, because it exists. It doesn't exist because of a coordinated cartelization and misinformation campaign that involves the state bribing researchers and doctors, protecting the established firms and outlawing competing therapies and modalities of research. Since it exists, that means it's a viable, good system, and since the pharmaceutical industry Ray Peat would like to see doesn't exist, it means he's purely comical and suggests a ludicrous fantasy world that has never and will never exist, talking as if there is some scientific basis for his argument that the current biomedical field has held back development in human health and wellness when there is no example of a society without a centrally planned, cartelized medical system and therefore no single piece of evidence he can point to.

You're back with your binary arguments. You're saying that the medical industry is 100% flawed, and to even attempt to have a medical industry is wrong. Further, your point about there being no example of a non-cartelized society is not valid, since it's not binary, you DO (even within the current very flawed system) get many examples of people doing legitimate science over the last 100 years, and it still being published, so there are plenty of examples to support Ray's viewpoint. There are 0 examples to describe your viewpoint of zero government. How do you square it with your ideologies that Ray openly says the Russian medical literature during the time of their ultimate command economy actually came up with some of the best, most unadulterated science?

Of course I think the medical industry is flawed, just like every person on earth is flawed.

I'm not arguing in favour of big government. I'm in favour of some government simply because whatever you call it, humans will always pool resources together with the aim of doing something for the greater good, and will never be perfect, and yet your think that somehow a perfect market with perfect information will come to effectively represent and behave like a government is living in dream land, and there will never be. Of course government is not perfect, it needs to be both big and small - big where needed, as lean as possible where needed. Unfortunately humans are not perfect and never will be, and yet the whole crux of your argument seems to rest on the fact that they will be within Kyle's Fantasy land which has been "dealt in the literature", another binary answer like there could ever be a finite, absolute answer to the most complex problem known to man, one that involves billions of forever moving variables and a value equation that varies according to the person.

I've been lucky to make a huge amount of money through business and I'm exceedingly happy to pay a large chunk of taxes, knowing that the government will necessarily waste some of it, but knowing that society, law, education has allowed me to do it. Running a business of 50 employees is hard enough. Running a business with 300 million people in it is the impossible task, it's simply a task that needs to be done in some form. Again you seem to think once government passes 0 on a scale of 1-100, that it necessitates it being at 100, and therefore it can't go beyond zero.

Your link about Iceland just describes a government by another name, one on a local, small scale with not very large populations to deal with. He talks about groups of decision makers who had to answer to the people. Which is a local government in a village setting. Iceland was clearly such a success in terms of the impact it had on medieval Europe and beyond

 

[jaa]

If a thief knocked you down and stole all of your money, than put an addition on your garage with 20% of it, is that now ok?

Of course not. But that's not very analogous to what happens in first world countries.