So, terrapin's trivial misunderstanding is that if something is not a sufficient cause, it's not a cause at all.

(And the idea that my posts might not have been necessary for yours is utter nonsense and you know it. You even quoted me in a couple for crying out loud.)

Welcome to the world of necessary and sufficient causation.

So my posts were a necessary but not sufficient condition for yours, right?

But you accept that but for my posts you would not have written yours?

Yes. But just to clarify first. Your responses to me just now were in no way caused by my posts. My posts played no part in the causal chain of our communications. Because that cannot happen in your view. Correct?

Is that it?

You said, 'for example'. What else?

Other than decisions (you said 'usually' above) what causes actions?

What's causal to that decision?

What's causal to actions then?

It's alright. You weren't to know.

Regardless of asymmetric NATO power relations, the point stands, I think. I imagine there are some (albeit a minority of) Americans for whom an example of the tables being reversed could be helpful in illustrating how their attitudes are perceived abroad. Trump is one of them.

It wasn't deleted. It was a spam filter false positive and has been restored.

Never mind. Carry on.

And in the latest news, Trump claims that to Israelis he's like second coming of God and any Jew who votes against him is some kind of bad thing. Bleugh.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-news-latest-jewish-antisemitism-king-of-israel-twitter-democrats-a9072951.html



I note that NOSEFART@U didn't answer that question presumably at the fear of spontaneous combustion should he dare admit to even thinking about criticising BRAINFART@U, aka D. Trump (whom I'm now channelling).

So if Denmark proposed buying Florida and demanded that that be discussed in the next meeting with the President, the appropriate response of the US would be what? "Sure, let's chat about it and see what happens"? Or if Trump had tweeted "That's absurd", you'd be criticising him?

I guess he's trying to outdo Trump's attempt to buy Greenland for absurdity. In which case, mission accomplished.

Great article. Thanks for posting. :up:

(https://thephilosophyforum.com/profile/members/staff)

There are some explanatory gaps in your theory. The main one being the explanation.

The economy has done well under Trump. But that doesn't necessarily credit him for two reasons:

1) He was given an economy that was trending positive. As in when you jump on a tricycle rolling downhill, you can expect acceleration regardless of how fast you pedal. Trump is the excited little kid on the tricycle thinking the downhill slope lasts forever.

2) He ballooned the deficit to give an already advancing economy an extra shove. Good for the very short term. Awful for the long term. You're supposed to borrow when things are bad and pay the money back when they're good. Duh. Trump is the excited little kid on the tricycle pedalling madly downhill wasting every bit of energy you'll all need for the next upslope.

To summarize, you've handed your economy to some idiotic little kid on a tricycle. Brace yourself for the inevitable crash

This isn't terribly Philosophy related, and so Baden can delete this post if he feels like doing so. — thewonder

Or any other mod. It doesn't have to be philosophical in the lounge though.

Does anyone think that this theory could be at all credible? — thewonder

No.

This discussion was merged into Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)

Maybe, although I see a door as something built to allow progress through a barrier (such as a wall) making the function of a knob very peripheral. Either way we need some more sauce BeanutPutter.

There are doors without knobs, such as lift doors etc. Maybe expand on your point a bit.

No worries. :up:

This online excerpt is also instructive both on Smith and American Libertarianism (and its internal factions / contradictions):

https://chomsky.info/warfare02/

"[Adam Smith] simply observed in passing, because it’s so obvious, that in England, which is what he’s discussing — and it was the most democratic society of the day — the principal architects of policy are the “merchants and manufacturers,” and they make certain that their own interests are, in his words, “most peculiarly attended to,” no matter what the effect on others, including the people of England who, he argued, suffered from their policies.
...
This truism was, a century later, called class analysis, but you don’t have to go to Marx to find it. It’s very explicit in Adam Smith. It’s so obvious that any ten-year-old can see it. So he didn’t make a big point of it. He just mentioned it. But that’s correct. If you read through his work, he’s intelligent. He’s a person who was from the Enlightenment. His driving motives were the assumption that people were guided by sympathy and feelings of solidarity and the need for control of their own work, much like other Enlightenment and early Romantic thinkers. He’s part of that period, the Scottish Enlightenment.
...
The version of him that’s given today is just ridiculous. But I didn’t have to any research to find this out. All you have to do is read. If you’re literate, you’ll find it out."

Well, as @Terrapin Station has demonstrated the terrain is complicated enough for different types of libertarian to be as much, or more, in conflict with each other on certain issues than their traditional big government enemies embodied in Bernie Sanders etc.

tl;dr The idea that Adam Smith would be against government regulation of the pharmaceutical industry in the context you mentioned is laugh-out-loud ridiculous.

He mentioned it in the Wealth of Nations once briefly and it had nothing to do with markets and competition.

This is a good summary with more detail:

https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-look-closely-at-what-adam-smith-actually-believed

[Adam Smith] is "usually portrayed as not only an early champion of economic theory, but of the superiority of markets over government planning. In other words, Smith is now known both as the founder of economics, and as an ideologue for the political Right.
...
Yet, despite being widely believed, both these claims are at best misleading, and at worst outright false.
...
The context of Smith’s intervention in The Wealth of Nations was what he called ‘the mercantile system’. By this Smith meant the network of monopolies that characterised the economic affairs of early modern Europe. Under such arrangements, private companies lobbied governments for the right to operate exclusive trade routes, or to be the only importers or exporters of goods, while closed guilds controlled the flow of products and employment within domestic markets."

Sound familiar?

"As a result, Smith argued, ordinary people were forced to accept inflated prices for shoddy goods, and their employment was at the mercy of cabals of bosses. Smith saw this as a monstrous affront to liberty "

Re the invisible hand:

"Indeed, Smith’s single most famous idea – that of ‘the invisible hand’ as a metaphor for uncoordinated market allocation – was invoked in precisely the context of his blistering attack on the merchant elites. It is certainly true that Smith was skeptical of politicians’ attempts to interfere with, or bypass, basic market processes, in the vain hope of trying to do a better job of allocating resources than was achievable through allowing the market to do its work. But in the passage of The Wealth of Nations where he invoked the idea of the invisible hand, the immediate context was not simply that of state intervention in general, but of state intervention undertaken at the behest of merchant elites who were furthering their own interests at the expense of the public."

"It is an irony of history that Smith’s most famous idea is now usually invoked as a defence of unregulated markets in the face of state interference, so as to protect the interests of private capitalists. For this is roughly the opposite of Smith’s original intention, which was to advocate for restrictions on what groups of merchants could do."

And by restrictions, he meant government regulation (only not the type designed by corporate lobbyists: see below). See, the problem is that those who are most likely to invoke Adam Smith are also those most likely to be not just totally ignorant of what he said but to be actively perverting it.

From Adam Smith on corporate lobbyists:

"To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed .' [my bolding]

Link

I'll get more Smith quotes if you need them.

I know you're playing devils advocate, so there's no need to be defensive. I'm responding to what you said, your words, in order to tease out how you would say an American libertarian would respond to my points. If I was sure of the answer, I wouldn't be taking this approach



Adam Smith was a great thinker. It's a pity his ideas are consistently misrepresented by libertarians and others. The invisible guiding hand of the market lie is a good example.

@frank

Inflated prices for medicines lead to higher medical insurance costs which are essentially an additional tax you pay to the pharmaceutical companies for the privilege of having them sell their drugs to you. If the libertarian ideal is that harsher circumstances such as these for the wider population are good for the wider population then why are they so against the governnent raising taxes on everyone directly? If the argument is that it results in more robust corporate entities in the pharmaceutical sphere on the other hand, it can't be because their conditions are harsher, they're considerably easier.

Avoid the discussion of furniture.

Alright: Say the chair tables a motion that the motion of chairs and tables should be considered the tabling of chairs in motion, then rather than chairing the chair in victory we should table him along with the tables in order that that motion should be chaired not tabled.

On conformity and all that jazz. It's precisely the fact that there is a (non-absolute) standard of correctness by which you can be judged to be wrong about usage that makes an individual relationship with the concept possible and not only that but allows for exactly the organic deviations that over the course of time redistribute concepts among the structural relationships they inhabit. In other words, the openness of language only persists in a recognition of the boundaries that bring it into meaningful existence in the first place.

May I suggest we drop chair-gate now and stay on-topic?

but for critical thinking/abstract/empathy skills, it allows you to assume the position of other people; it teaches you subjectivity, knowledge/facts — Grre

:up:

I'm a grazer, jumping in and out of books, articles, this site, fiction, non-fiction as the mood takes me. Not very systematic but I don't feel the need for a plan—probably the most critical character-forming reading I did in my teens and early twenties. So, my (mostly ebook) library is like a buffet and me a lazy diner perpetually spying tasty nuggets to pick at before recycling them with flatulent bursts of literary exhuberance.

Gustatory metaphors aside, reading, and reading well, achieves just the vital functions you've listed in a way that's irreplaceable through other media imho. Not that I'm confident its superiority in this respect will ever yield a deserved proportion of the media consumption market, only hopeful it won't get wholly trounced by less refined modes of leisure and learning.

:lol:

In other words, it's one thing to study the word "tree" and another to study physical objects that can be represented by the word "tree". — Magnus Anderson

Unless my overactive imagination is projecting stuff that isn't there, I think there was more to it than that.