I wasn’t originally going to leave a comment but the above passage just made me fume: what fucking stupid arguments! Unrealistic and derivatory, designed by a demagogue to fool idiots like this article’s writer. Can I believe it? Yes; after all this is from the same “theorist” that said that the book on The Bell Curve Theory would “stop the government trying to educate such people[blacks and other minorites].”

I can’t believe I put up with people like you to get the “whole picture” of opinions…

I recommend also that you take a look at the links in my last comment sometime (they are all fairly short) – not so much so you can be “convinced”, but because actually understanding and sympathizing with the objections some people have to your ideas will put you in a much better position to explain and defend them when you write.

Presumably your whole goal in maintaining a site like this is to reach the people who are undecided – otherwise you are just preaching to the choir, and there isn’t a whole lot of point in that.
For every one person who strongly disagrees with you and can articulate exactly why, there are a hundred others who will share at least some of the same concerns – and those are the people you might convince.

p.s. Sorry about the multiple posts last time. For some reason I wasn’t getting any confirmation that they were being submitted, at and I was having network problems at the same time, so I thought they weren’t.

-Economic Science and the Austrian Method – explains praxeology as an irrefutable logical-deductive science
-The Voluntary City – illustrates how so-called public goods have historically been provided on the market; including roads, law, courts, police, education, urban planning, and more. A very interesting read.
-Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections – a good, short defense of market anarchism
-Anarchy and the Law – the Motherlode

Ch1, Acting Man, of Mises book begins with “Human action is necessarily always rational.”
This is demonstratively false.
The only irrefutable action axiom is that humans act. It can not be taken as axiom that humans act rationally in their own long term interests, particularly when the optimal outcome requires a level of individual sacrifice.

In game theory, many situations create an incentive for individuals acting in their own best interest to cause a worse outcome for the group as a whole (which of course includes the individual as well.)
For example: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12202559
http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2009/01/06/why-the-secret-to-speedier-highways-might-be-closing-some-roads-the-braess-paradox/

Even assuming individuals acted rationally in any individual moment, they neither take into account the effects of their individual choices aggregated over a large population nor the long-term effects. Because of this, even though as individuals we have the capacity for reason and the ability to make conscious choices, when allowed total freedom as a group we do in fact act the same as yeast.

The tragedy of the commons is a real phenomenon, which holds both in theory and in practice.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/3859/1243
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/284/5412/278
Pricing alone does not solve the problem, because it does not take externalties (such as pollution or a finite rate of resource regeneration) into account.

Then again, it is very easy to show that individuals do not even act rationally in the simpler terms of their own personal best interests either. Look at the success of casinos.
It goes far beyond gambling however:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

Again, something which is purely logical-deductive is not science. It is philosophy at best, and faith at worst (since any deductions must be founded on assumptions about reality – in this case, the ultimate rationality of individual humans).

If you can find an example of law, local roads, or police being provided both efficiently and equitably purely by a market historically, or even describe a scenario in which it could even hypothetically arise, I would be very interested to read about it.

Now, aside from the dependence on individual rationality for faith in the free market, there are additional questions:
Mise does address externalites, for example injuries to employees
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap23sec6.asp
blaming them on market interference by governments which “allow” them to be unaccountable. However, he fails to explain who, in the absence of any government at all, would enforce labor standards, and how. If the problem is caused by a lack of regulation (or “deficient laws”), how would removing all regulations solve the problem? (Later Mises does implicitly acknowledge that this is neccesarily the role of government: “governments are [in a hypothetical ideal world] devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual’s life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap24sec5.asp).
This then begs questions of the form and structure of said government.

In the same section he makes the exact sort of external valuation of commodities he objects to in the opening chapters (while also showing his own racism) in saying “Many of the richest deposits of various mineral substances are located in areas whose inhabitants are too ignorant, too inert, or too dull to take advantage of the riches nature has bestowed upon them.” This in the context of objecting to government intervention conquest of land/peoples, and claiming war is the result of protectionism.
Even were a government to allow free trade, the dull ignorant natives might still choose not to extract and sell a resource at any price – yet the other nation would still have desire for it, no less than if it were a protectionist policy which kept them from it.
In other words, if a population chooses, for whatever reason, not to utilize a natural resource, it is acceptable, or even ideal, for them to be taken by force by those who would utilize them.

On a similar issue, his solution to the tragedy of the commons is to privatize everything
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap22sec5.asp
Aside from the practical impossibility of privatizing extremely large public resources (the ocean, the atmosphere, a large river (anyone dumping or fishing in their “own” section of river affects everyone downstream of them ) there remains the question of how initial prices of commons are to be set, who they are paid to, and if there is no such entity then how the distribution is to occur.

Mises claims that unemployment (of the employable) would be zero in a purely free-market system
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec2.asp
but offers no evidence, either theoretical or examples, to support it.

He suggests that the alternative to the gross inequalities inherent in capitalism is welfare.
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec1.asp
I won’t argue the merits of welfare for the overall benefit of society here, but instead point out that regulations to ensure equality does not necessitate any form of welfare.
It is possible to eliminate (or at least reduce) inequalities simply by taking steps to level the playing field. A major omission is the issue of inheritance. People who inherent wealth do not earn said wealth by contributing something of value to humanity. They just get lucky in which parents they are born to. Similarly, education, living environment, etc are not in an infants control, and these factors incontrovertibly have a direct effect on the individuals access to the means of wealth generation later in life. This itself is an external privilege, no different from the caste system (which he says restricts the market)

“What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume. In endorsing the principle of equality as a political postulate nobody wants to share his own income with those who have less. When the American wage earner refers to equality, he means that the dividends of the stockholders should be given to him. He does not suggest a curtailment of his own for the benefit of those 95 per cent of the earth’s population whose income is lower than his.”
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec3.asp
Actually, that IS what I suggest. The American middle class consumes far more than it’s share of world resources, at the expense of the rest of the world, (upheld only by having a military budget equal to the rest of the world combined).
“Many who are aware of the undesirable consequences of capital consumption are prone to believe that popular government is incompatible with sound financial policies. They fail to realize that not democracy as such is to be indicted, but the doctrines which aim at substituting the Santa Claus conception of government for the night watchman conception.”
Exactly.

“Even those who look upon the inequality of wealth and incomes as a deplorable thing, cannot deny that it makes for progressing capital accumulation. And it is additional capital accumulation alone that brings about technological improvement, rising wage rates, and a higher standard of living.”
I do not deny those. I question whether they are ends to themselves past the point where a society has obtained security in the basic necessities of life, and if they are in fact so desirable to be worth the trade off of gross (unearned) inequalities.
Realize that I accept that inequalities will exist due to differences in how hard a person works or how innovative they are.
It comes down, ultimately, to a moral issue.

And it was morality which the original blog entry was commenting on, not the method by which a society can most raise its average standard of living.

All this time we have been discussing only economics, while you ignored my points on democracy – as much the original focus as economics.

In my first comment I made a simple example: 3 or more people need to work together to get something done. If they don’t come to an agreement, there are negative consequences for everyone. It is not possible to have unanimity in every possible instance. If one or more people agree to go along with the majority consensus, that is democracy. It does not require coercion or threat of force.
This same situation, on the level of a society making large scale decisions, is all true democracy is.
It might be contrary to a maximization of wealth generation that a society collectively decides to enact an economically restrictive law. However, that is their choice.
In fact, in both the group and any true democracy, no one is forced to go along – however, if they do not, they can be ejected from the group because their association by other members is voluntary. As such, if someone objects to the laws of the US, they are free to move permanently to another country.

Again, you are arguing against market anarchy but you evidently have no familiarity with the theory. There is an exceptional body of literature showing how law, arbitration, roads, police, etc. can be (and have historically been) provided on the market.

Case in point, you bring up the old “finite world” canard. But on that, see: Humans ARE Smarter than Yeast

There’s no point in debating with you if you’re unfamiliar with market anarchist theory and economics. It would only be an excessively strenuous and frustrating effort on my part.

Anything which is unfalsifiable by empirical data has a special word: “faith”.

Aristotle used logical-deductive reasoning, and made conclusions about gravity. Newton proved them false with empirical data. Aristotle was a brilliant person, and his theories may have been logical, but when reality differs from theory, real science discards the theory.
Something which is purely deductive is not science. A scientific theory has to be able to make real-world predictions given a set of circumstances, and when implementing those circumstances, the predictions observed.

While linguistically no rule may not inherently mean no rules, in the real world, with no one to make rules, no one to enforce them, and no consequences for breaking them, there can be no distinction. In the real world you will never have unanimous consensus on all rules. If you make rules by general (majority) consensus, then that is, by definition, democracy. If rules are followed voluntarily, then they are suggestions, not rules. Its funny that you should point to that article, since I made the same argument that the one here made: the free market and democracy are incompatible.

Many, perhaps even most, public goods can be provided by the market (although not equitably or universally). There are a few that could not. Public streets and sidewalks in a city in front of everyone’s house and business. The modern economy couldn’t function without them, and there is no practical way to toll every single block independently.
Another is the legal system. A arbitration company has no way to enforce the ruling. A private security force, without any police or law, would be indistinguishable from a mercenary force.

Really, I have a much simpler retort.
Four words:
Tragedy of the Commons

We live in a finite world. There is a finite rate of regeneration of renewable resources. A free market does not regulate its rate of consumption, nor does it take into account externalities.
A failure of intelligent long-term regulation will hasten humanities trail along the wake of the yeast in a beer barrel – drowning in the waste of our own gluttony.

You can disagree with my opinions, even say I am wrong on facts, but it isn’t a matter of ignorance.

Clearly, from what you wrote, you do not understand economic theory. One could be very well read in a false theory, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re ignorant. At first, I was going to point out and refute all the fallacies in your first comment but that would have taken a few hours. There’s no point arguing with someone who’s not familiar with the theories.

In addition to years of independent reading, subscriptions to the Motley Fool and Economist, and unquantifiable internet research, I also happen to have a degree in economics.

Those subscriptions will not teach you economic theory. I’m mildly surprised that you have an econ degree. Usually people drop a lot of these false ideas, even from the statist economic education in the universities.

Economics is a logical-deductive science and can’t be falsified by empirical data. On this, see the work of Ludwig von Mises.

I took a look at a few of your articles, but they suffer from muddled thinking. For example, in Anarchy vs Capitalism, you make the fundamental error of equating anarchy with lawlessness. Anarchy means no rule, not no rules. There are many more errors (especially arguing that public goods cannot be provided on the market) but I’m not going to get into them. All I can suggest is to read up on economics and market anarchy.