The Price of Eggs

We're into a little F. A. Hayek today. Try to keep up.

There is a generic critique of market economics making the rounds these days, that goes something like this: a free market is no guarantee that, at any given moment, things will be priced correctly, and therefore, we need government intervention to 'nudge' things - and people - back where they ought to be. The acme of examples for this notion is health care, primarily due to the fact that health care is unarguably a critical need for everyone, and its cost has wildly outpaced the ability of most people to pay for it without financial ruin. It is clear that something needs to be done about health care, and it must be done now, and the only solution that makes any sense is to spread these costs among everyone by spreading the wealth around and government is the best way to do this … because socialism.

Well, let's back up a second. Is it true that the free market is not a guarantee of correct pricing for goods and services? The naysayers cite complex economic theories and studies of distorting influences on markets, things like friction, sticky-ness, monopolies, oligopolies, and plain old fraud and greed, to make their case. But this line of argument depends on one big unstated assumption: that we can establish what the 'correct' price is independently of the market. But what independent criteria are they referring to? This reminds of the original mistake of the blessed Adam Smith, when he put forth his theory for the correct price of labor in his classic book, The Wealth of Nations. His argument was simple and straightforward and makes eminent sense. Labor is performed by human beings and human beings need to earn a minimum amount to buy food and housing, so therefore, any employer that paid less than that minimum amount would soon have no more laborers. This established a floor to wages that could be determined without regard to any particular local market forces - one need only total up the costs of the minimally necessary food and housing, and divide that by the hours a typical laborer worked, and voila! That's what employers must pay.

As I said, this argument was simple and straightforward and made eminent sense, but it had one problem. It purported to establish an objective value - a value independent of market forces - for something as fundamental in economics as the value of labor, and thereby took that science down a long road of error for close to a 100 years.

In truth, employers do (and always have) taken into account their employees need for a living wage, for the simple reason that they want them to come back tomorrow. But the real correlation of wages is with productivity - employers will pay a living wage so long as it is equal to or less than the revenues he will get from the effort of the employee. If not, then the employer will not pay the employee anything at all; he will not hire him in the first place.

This puts the price of labor squarely within the dynamic of the free market, unhitched from any other criteria to establish a value. This, of course, bothers many people, who believe a living wage needs to be imposed on the market regardless of any other considerations. But, again, they give us no serviceable objective criteria (beyond a spleen induced moral outrage) outside of the market that can serve to guide in assessing the 'correctness' of the market value of labor.

And here is the reason why they cannot furnish an appropriate objective criteria, which also answers the question whether free markets can guarantee the correct pricing of goods and services: because there is no objective price to anything until the market discloses that particular data point. Or, to put it another way, a market price is information about the price of goods and services at this contemporaneous moment, but not the future price, and the future of any system as complex as the market and prices remains uncertain at any given point in time. Or to put it still another way, they have their causation backwards: market pricing is not caused by the value of goods and services, but instead is the cause of their value, in the sense that it discloses the value, moment by moment.

For example, take eggs. I can buy a dozen eggs today for less than a dollar. But two years ago, they were more than $2.00. Which is the true, Platonic, price of eggs that I will see tomorrow? Well, I certainly want the price to be less than a dollar, but I can't offer any reason why except that I am cheap and prefer to reserve my money for other things than eggs. And this is what everyone else is doing as well, and producers of eggs with their hard working hens are wondering why they are busting their literal and metaphorical tails to give me eggs when I value them so little. So, more people are buying the cheap eggs, while at the same time producers are cutting back on eggs and furnishing more material to Chick-Fil-A for sandwiches, and the upshot will be - the price of eggs will probably rise, maybe not tomorrow, but at some point.

CONTINUED …

The Will, Gracefully Free

Salvation through grace and grace alone. This is a bit of Christian orthodoxy that remains a stumbling block to many an otherwise good Christian. It remains an impossibility for them for the same reason Erasmus, the original Humanist, argued that to permit so weighty a matter as the eternal salvation of the human soul to depend only on God would deprive human beings of any worth or value. Without some decisive participation in the transition from mortality to immortality, mankind becomes nothing but automata, as little involved in their growth and development as a rock or stone. In essence, it is argued that  instead of inspiring men to become the very image of God, Christian orthodoxy annuls the greatness that man can be heir to, as well as the responsibility that may, if he is not diligent, consign him to judgment and death.

Free will is the key. Man must have free will in these matters or he is nothing. According to various doctrines adopted in this context, man might have a little part in his own salvation, with God carrying the heavy load, or a great part, with God sitting happily as his child grows himself up. But always there is a definite and decisive sovereign space for man apart from God that carries him to eternal life.

And yet … the most earnest of those who insist on the reification of man's free will in these matter, many of them some of the most effective defenders of Christianity in a dangerous world, have no problem with other gifts and capacities that they were given.  A powerful intellect, to take one example, that has enabled them to discern and teach some of most subtle truths of the Scriptures. They did not create that in themselves, but instead received the potential at birth, were nurtured by their parents, teachers and mentors. None of this bothers them at all: an undeserved gift, freely bestowed on them, which gave them a full and fruitful life with God.

But, they say, it was them that nurtured this gift with a will to become a better person, and it was this personal act that was decisive, not the initial gifts and help along the way. But this misses the point, so let me repeat it. It is incontestable that a powerful intellect can be a critical aid in living a more fruitful life with God and that in fact many of these people have utilized this capacity in their Christian work. And there are many other gifts of the Spirit that come from God - gifts of preaching, of teaching, of administration, or evangelism - that are similarly critical for many people who are trying to live a Godly life. And all of these gifts, properly received, are manifestly unmerited, transparently undeserved, mere contingencies of our lives that could have been different - except for the loving grace of our Father.

But to the Erasmus Free Will junkies this is all just fine. They are not bothered in the least that just about everything they hold of value in their lives as an actual existing human being is contingent, unmerited, and undeserved, so long as they can hold onto a singular human capacity: the free will, to choose salvation or not.

But, alas, our free will is no different from any other capacities and powers we possess. As we look across the range of human beings, it is clear that some have strong wills and some middling wills and some wills are downright weak or non-existent. This is the way it is in this world; de facto equality of all human beings is, in this context, a myth - or a desperately desired dream, depending on your politics. Our wills are strong or weak depending on many factors, our DNA, our upbringing, education, the wider culture we grow up in, the peers we choose at critical life moments, parents, friends, wives, children … the list is endless as to how and why we have turned out like we have. Because, to put it succinctly, we are contingent beings, born into a world not of our making and further formed by forces not in our control.

The degree of will power we possess is important in how we navigate our time and culture, as are such things as our native intelligence and our degree of sociability with our fellows. But it cannot be the basis upon which admission to Heaven is predicated, for the simple reason that it is limited and contingent just like all else in this vale of tears and Heaven is eternal. You might just as well try to elevate the number 212 to Infinity by some sort of legislative fiat. You can do it; you can issue a proclamation about it; you can organize parades of ecstatics in the street; but nevertheless a finite number will never in all of time and eternity be Infinity.

And we can will as hard as we like, with a will of iron and a purpose adamantine, and we will never be more than contingent finite beings - unless, by the perfectly free and unmerited grace of God the impossible is made possible by His Will.

On Wittgenstein

The question has been asked why I like Ludwig Wittgenstein, given that he has in some measure contributed to the relativism in vogue in some sectors of our society. Feminists for instance, take from Wittgenstein that there are no fixed truths but only language games that stereotype and oppress women. They then leap to the idea that if they can change the language it will change the reality of women in the world; ergo, the Politically Correct Crusade.

Wittgenstein's notion, however, was not really about language creating reality, but that language was a collection of non-interlocking puzzles or games - with emphasis on the 'non-interlocking.' For me, this was reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s scientific paradigm shifts, as well Kierkegaard’s three stages of life. For me, the key insight of all three was the same: that transitions between the separate spheres (however you want to define them) cannot be done logically or via any kind of rational construct.

Of course, they weren’t the only ones to come up with this insight. Of all the religions of man, it seems to me that Christianity was birthed in it. Leave aside the obvious fact of the eternal mystery of the Trinity, and just take one of many paradoxes at the heart of Christianity: the judgment and forgiveness of sins. So we are really and truly judged sinful and yet instantaneously forgiven? How does that work? Well, it does work, but definitely not as a logical syllogism concluding in an effortless Salvation. Muddle Judgment and Forgiveness together in some kind of logical synthesis and you lose both – and possibly your soul besides.

This is another example of how philosophers down through the ages keep coming up with new names for the same phenomena. Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn each put forth a cutting edge philosophy, only to find that the new distinction discovered was at the very heart of Christianity more than 2,000 years ago. It gives a nice appearance of an advance in thought, I guess. But what it is really is the recovery of ancient wisdom that had faded from the cultural memory, and in that respect, these philosophical reiterations are very helpful.

So that’s why I like guys like Wittgenstein.

And you can’t blame Wittgenstein for the nonsense Feminists might do with his stuff. That’s like blaming manufacturers of a very helpful thing like glue for what teenage boys might do with their product and a paper bag.

Something About Kierkegaard

Continued from here.

A note on Kierkegaard. In his time, the nation of Denmark believed itself to be Christian because each and every citizen could state confidently that he had been instructed on the dogmas of the Christian faith and that he believed them to be true. The primary focus of Kierkegaard's mission was to unsettle the Danes from this notion by making a stark distinction in his authorship between knowing something intellectually and religiously-ethically incorporating that knowledge into one's heart and soul. As far as Christianity was concerned, the former did nothing, was nothing. The latter, however, meant not only a changed heart but a changed life - a new birth, if you will.

 In this mission, Kierkegaard was explicitly working on the assumption that for a changed life to occur as Christianity demanded, work must be done by each individual person within their subjective personality, work that only they could do. Rote following of commands, dogma of the Church, or Kierkegaard's own authority as an eminent thinker in Danish society, would not activate this potential in his readers. So he highlighted in both the structure and arguments of his books and in the plan of his whole authorship to withhold satisfaction from normal reader expectations, so that each reader would begin to do that deep, mysterious human agency thing that was needed.

Whether he was successful or not, whether he was altogether too artful in his production, is for the literary and philosophical critics to say.  But it is not true in the slightest to find in him support for the post-modernist presumption that all talk of faith or morality is groundless or nonsense. Contra Conant, the Postscript was not a work dedicated to branding high philosophical speculation about faith and morals as nonsense; to the contrary, it mapped a road of rationality to its pinnacle of perfection in a Paradox, and said, "No further." In doing so, Kierkegaard was not denigrating rationality or the truths of human reason, but bounding it all within its proper sphere where it is most effective. In this, he was in solidarity with the tradition of Kant, Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato.

Crooked Timber

Okay, Whit, I give. You want to talk philosophy, then let's talk.

Christianity (in)famously describes us all as the crooked timber of humanity.

There is a wealth of philosophy in that phrase. But the aspect I want to highlight is the anthropic angle. This crooked timber idea is not a singular concept because it presumes in the saying something else: what a straight timber would look like. There is no getting away from this, a very common, ordinary observation is built or rests on … something else.

This is a duplexity in human agency that is not a byproduct of something else, an unintended consequence or epiphenomenon, but something absolutely fundamental: the bifurcation within the psyche of how we view the world from our singular peculiar viewpoint. Such a standpoint is utterly unique in the life of Planet Earth - an organism that fashions (in Richard Rorty's paradigm) conceptual mirrors of a world, but mirrors that always reflect two things - that which is and that which has been or will be or ought to be - and somehow make them seamlessly into a single conception about what is going on.

I am reminded for some reason of the mystery of music. We hear notes on a scale, but we don't really hear just the individual notes as they are played because that would be a schizophrenic cacophony. We hear a musical composition, a musical event, because each note has a context within the ones that went before and the anticipation of the ones that will come after. In other words, each note is a duplexity (or multiplexity), both itself in tonal purity and all its brothers and sisters that preceded and will proceed from it.

And we do this naturally; historical anthropology tells us that music is a primeval impulse that has always been a part of us  - almost as if it preexisted  the first homo sapiens.  And if received wisdom can possibly be true, music may even have been that which created us unto what we are and might become.

What we are and might become - there is the duplexity again. We are both, crooked and straight, and which e'er path we tread depends not on me but Thee.

Objectively Subjective

In the Introduction to Authorship and Authority in Kierkegaard's Writings (2018 Bloomsbury Academic), the editor Joseph Westfall says this:

[James] Conant - following the early Wittgenstein, and relying heavily upon both Witgenstein's and Keirkegaard/Climacus's uses of revocation in these particular works - argues that language, as an instrument for the communication of objective concepts, cannot accommodate meaningful (i.e., "sensical") discussion of those aspects of human existence capable of being approached or apprehended only subjectively, such as faith or morality. Because subjective moods and passions cannot be objectively communicated, and because language is a medium suited only to the communication of objectivity, all language about things like faith and morality ultimately must be shipwrecked on silence, whether by ceasing communication altogether (as in the famous final line of the Tractatus) or in nonsense (as, Conant argues, in Climacus's "objective" account of faith or of truth "as subjectivity").

To those of you not in the circle of Wittgenstein's fame, the final line of the Tractatus is "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Except, of course, when the unspeakable steps forth you may speak to tell others to be silent. Other than that, Ludwig would ask you to keep your mouth shut.

Actually, don't get me wrong, no one has more admiration for Wittgenstein than I do. Both his early and late philosophies are manifestly brilliant, and there is much to be learned from him. But the notions Conant explicates have seeped into the intellectual culture over the last century and spawned a vast network of philosophical and "academic" studies known as post-modernism, resulting in a fatuousness not seen since Socrates had to stay up late a couple of nights to help Philebus and Thrasymachus. And like many before him, Conant simply misunderstands Kierkegaard (and Wittgenstein). I must respond.

Things like 'faith and morality' denote actions in the real, empirical, material world, and as such I certainly agree with Conant that they call for something other than speech. But this is an obvious observation, bordering on the banal. The chief modern exponent of this view can reliably be traced to John Wayne, who often said, "Talk is cheap." Before him you can go all the way back to the blessed St. James in his Epistle written somewhere in the first century, A.D., wherein he proclaimed that faith without works - action - was dead.

So these 'subjective … aspects of human existence' most certainly do not involve speechifying of any kind, and in that sense are sub specie silence. One may talk while practicing faith, but such is irrelevant to the essence of the practice; the practice at its core is a non-verbal action - even when the act of faith is to encourage others in a sermon to have faith - and therefore Conant can safely describe these things as demanding silence.

So far, I am with him all the way. Where I cannot go … Continue

The Importance of Metaphysics

And now for something completely different.

Ilya Somin tells us that

... the enormous diversity of both originalist and living-constitutionalist legal thought is a sign that constitutional theory remains a relatively immature field of study. We have far less agreement among experts than in more developed academic disciplines - not just 'hard' sciences like physics, but even social sciences such as economics or political science.

I imagine you think that now I will get down into the weeds of constitutional theory. But I intend to cast my net a little wider than that, by asking: what is it about the 'hard' sciences that yields more agreement among the experts? I would venture that it is the core consensus about not just appropriate objects of study, but also standard approaches, methods, and procedures - and, I would insist, a common metaphysic. For behind or above or below a hard science is a fundamental theory, an abstract construct, that is for that science the ultimate criteria of what in its field of study is the really real objective reality, and what is mere myth, illusion, or wishful thinking.

This ultimate form, framework, parameter of a science is nothing more than an assumed - not proven - really Real reality (as in, "we mean it this time") above or behind its objects, which in turn provides a substrate of a construct or foundation to the phenomena. This is a metaphysics, pure and simple, the agreed upon encompassing sphere for all activity within any given science. Any experiment or theory that posits a 'reality' outside of the assumed metaphysic quite simply is excluded as being unscientific ab initio. An astrologer will never be permitted in the doors of astronomy because his premises are outside the parameters of honest astronomical discussion. A proponent of intelligent design will not be allowed to debate Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian evolution because he invokes a reality that is not … Darwinian.

But a metaphysics is not just an exclusionary principle, it is the criteria for a positive advance in rational thought. For without these unproven allegiances to a certain fundamental framework of the Real, there is no science possible in the modern sense.