DavidOdden

A further question should have been addressed. Which is worse, mandating display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, or public schools? I say the greater evil is public schools, not the Ten Commandments. The particular law is limited to governmental schools including schools receiving funding by the state, and therefore does not impose any religious requirements on purely private schools. In the original bill, there was a simple commandment to display the document which was only directed at public schools. I surmise that there was some discussion of whether this law would pass higher judicial review, which resulted in two economic hooks, the expansion where it includes schools receiving state funds, and the limitation that no school is compelled to spend its funds to purchase a display. I believe that the economic burden argument would have ultimately doomed the earlier version in the courts, whereas the current law encourages the good citizens of Louisiana to donate displays, in case some school has in mind using the economic burden as a justification for non-compliance. In comparing evils, it is hard to choose between Hitler, Stalin or Mao, but seemingly easy to choose between any or all of those three vs. Kant (did Kant actually kill anyone?). Yet I would deem Kant to be the greater evil, in that the harm caused by his philosophy includes all of the above mass murderers, plus public schools. Public schools are likewise a broader and less-obvious evil compared to allowing or requiring expressions of religion in “public spaces”. To effectively argue against such a law, you have to address and overcome the First Amendment rights of The Religious (which are abridged by prohibiting religious expressions in public spaces). The expressive rights of the many cannot be be sacrificed for the sake of the contrary expressive rights of the few (very few in Louisiana). Appeal to separation of church and state is a cheap and weak argument though probably the only one that stands a chance w.r.t. judicial review. The proper moral argument is, simply, directed at the evil concept of public schools. I see tadmjones made this identification also, while I was laboring over my screed.

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force? Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed. Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit. Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount? At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

Indeed, because of the First Amendment, the only realistic path to a hate speech law would be a political change where Kamala Harris and those like her hold the reins of power and appoint a majority of SJW justices who are able to devise a new interpretation of The Constitution where prior case law on hate speech is swept away, analogous to the reset of the right of privacy obliterated by Dobbs. That took a half-century and clearly it could not happen any time soon. Of course, a new constitutional amendment could create an exception, but the US is nearly unique in how difficult it is to amend our constitution. A close runner-up w.r.t. hate speech laws is Norway, which has a little-enforced law against hate speech. I was surprisd to learn that Estonia actually has no law against hate speech, and they are is being “prosecuted” by the EU for not enacting an anti hate-speech law. In Estonia, it would take a mere act of parliament to sweep away that exception.

Knowing the existence of, and disregard for, noise is the fundamental achievement of Galilean science. “Noise” is essentially the epistemological filter that stands between God and man, necessary when dealing with vast amounts of unknown such as molecules in a gas. Only God can do the computation with infinite precision. Man can handle smaller amounts of data in circumstances where we know the relevant data, which we don’t always, cf. Neptune and Pluto. The classic perspective is that the laws of physics are absolute, and not statistical approximations ± some degree of randomness, although more-practical laws dealing with large-scale structures such as the ideal gas law are approximations. Not because the universe is inherently “non-deterministic”, but because it’s impractical to construct a particle-physics level model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment. Non-determinism was classically an epistemological problem, not a metaphysical one. Things changed with Heisenberg’s argument that God plays with dice. I never really understood the leap of reasoning from “we can’t predict” to “there is no law”, until I thought about what physical laws are. It is generally held that the laws of physics are a fundamental aspect of the universe, that they are real and not just human conveniences. Objectivism interjects an important distinction between epistemology and metaphysics, saying that there is Existence, and has a definite nature independent of consciousness. A grasp of Existence – by a consciousness – gives rise to “fact”, a perceivable aspect of Existence. There is a commonplace observation in anthropology that classification of existents into natural types is seemingly random cultural influences. As English-speaking westerners we feel that our concept “snake” is absolutely correct, there really is a universal snakeness to snakes which we perceive. But other cultures and languages have different principles of classification, where a certain animal is also “a type of snake”, e.g. Ophisaurus which are not taxonomically snakes, but in many cultures are lumped together with snakes; or certain species of Typhlops which are snakes but in some cultures are classified as worms. The cultural aspect that yields these differences of classification is focus. Standard Western classification focuses on evolution of species, but local folk taxonomies focus on immediately-perceivable morphological similarity or utility. The “laws of nature” are epistemological by nature, in that they grasp the nature of existence. The error that arises in discussions of ‘determinism’ is not being clear on what ‘determinism’ is. Determinism, properly understood, is a claim not about existence, it is a claim about Man, that we have the capacity to fully grasp every fact. I’m not opposed to that premise, I just think that it is important to say more precisely what “determinism” is. Non-determinism refers to aspects of existence which we cannot know. Of course, the other half of the discussion is being clearer about what “free will” is.

It seems to me that the most that one can reasonably do is scrutinize the logic of Sapolsky’s challenge: “What is needed to prove free will: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone’s brain was unaffected by preceding factors”. This is a common fallacy of rationalism, which can only be countered by a counter-challenge. My counter-challenge is “What is needed to prove determinism is: show me your ability to predict the choices made by men”. (Cognitive) determinism is an unfalsifiable pseudo-axiom. What constitutes a proof is not metaphysically given and is not self-evident. A proof is a presentation of evidence and the disposition of counterevidence. Sapolsky does not get to stipulate what constitutes proof, that is an objective question of logic (does all of th evidence support the claim? That is what a proof is). Ordinary observation of humans refutes the premise that all choices are predetermined. To refute that refutation of determinism, it is insufficient to cry out wittily “You were predestined to make that argument”, one (Sapolsky) has to provide an actual model of the universe from which we can compute any man’s choices, and one must provide at least a modicum of experimental evidence to support the correctness of that model of the human mind. Needless to say, nobody has come within a light year of that gauntlet, much less ever having picked it up. The underlying logical premise is based on the law of non-contradiction, which says that being whipped and burned is not the same as not being whipped and burned. The universe exists in a definite non-contradictory state. Alas, certain philosophico-scientists conflate epistemology and metaphysics, believing that if one cannot know whether X is the case or denial of X is the case, then the universe itself has an indeterminate state. More traditionally, existence is binary but knowledge is ternary (or more): we have “true”, “false” and “I don’t know”, but the fact either exist, or it doesn’t. The Sapolsky-style argument is based on flawed burden-of-proof reasoning, that he who makes the claim must prove the claim. I direct your attention to vast amounts of evidence for free will, but the Sapolsky-style argument rejects the evidence because a particular statement is offered as axiomatic, when in fact it is not an axiom. The burden of proof now rests on Sapolsky or his followers and predecessors to provide a model which predicts human choices at the level that ordinary science would hold to “disprove the null hypothesis” (the .05 level, which AFAIK is actually unacceptably lax in physics which I understand requires 99.7% CL to be “evidence” and 99.9999% CL to be “discovery”). Up until 2001, there was no explicit physical model of the fact that bumblebees fly, but nobody seriously doubted that they do. Likewise, there should be no serious doubt that humans have free will, even if we can’t reduce it to an equation rooted in sub-atomic physics.

As far as I understand, a person is not to sacrifice himself to another person sua sponte, he is supposed to sacrifice himself to God. Of course one may believe that what God wants you to do is die so that some other people may live, or perhaps to live and kill those who oppose him, for the greater glory of God. Since God doesn’t have a Twitter account, it’s anyone’s guess what God really wants you to do. Knowledge is hierarchical, including moral knowledge. For the Christian, God is the highest value and all is to be sacrificed for his sake. Self is to be be sacrificed only when commanded by a higher value – God.

I am indeed, but linguists aren't word-mavens. Nevertheless since these are not expressions used by My People, I don’t really understand how Other People use them. Which is why it is useful to ask a person who uses one of these expressions what they intended, especially the details. The issue that I was addressing is not just about blogs, which I don’t like in the first place. It is more generally about the withdrawal of Objectivism from public fora, and the shuttering of Objectivist fora. Maybe fear and the increase of viewpoint-intolerance in society does explain it. Perhaps I should be more fearful, but at least so far, I find OO to be a useful venue for reasoned discussion.

Even though I’m a native speaker of English, there are tons of expressions which I don’t really understand, like “gaslight” or “run the table”, which I only have a vague idea about the meaning. Best I can tell, “run the table” means “dominates” or “accounts for a majority of”. If that’s what you mean, it certainly seems to be true that most posts here are Gus’s rebloggings. Which then raises another question: why has this befallen OO? Not the fact that Gus produces a daily blog, but that there is very little else happening here. And, incidentally, anywhere else. Something has changed, but what?

We have some concrete national averages of total commissions from three sources that bother to give concrete numbers: 5.49%, 5.8%, 5.57%, which averages out to 5.62%. The usual ballpark cited is “between 5%-6%”, which sort of meshes with the actually-computed means. If this government intervention is actually effective in reducing net commission paid, we expect that in a year, the average rate should be about 0.5% lower (or more). I will set myself a reminder to come back here in about a year to see if commissions went down as a consequence of this antitrust action. The leftist Brookings Institute promulgates the observation that “steering” contributes to high commission rates, as well as higher prices. Seller publishes the commission split on MLS, information that is available only to agents, not to customers or non-agent real estate professionals. Buyer’s agents also have an incentive to steer customers away from low-commission deals, consequently sale prices on low-commission properties is lower. They had been able to get away with this because MLS was private unregulated property, thus the rule that MLS information is members-only. Following an earlier antitrust case MLS became more of a “common carrier”, though that action did not seem to have ameliorates the commission "problem". NAR still recommends commission percentages, and apparently that practice is the target of the current legal action, one example here where part of the relief sought was permanently “enjoining Defendants from continuing to require sellers to pay the buyer broker and from continuing to restrict competition among buyer brokers”, and the current settlement purportedly requires NAR to get rid of the Participation Rule, which is part of the license to use the service.

I don’t know what would be rightfully low if it is forced. Rates are regulated in a number of countries (Austria, Greece, Slovenia, France, UAE and Italy under municipal ordinance). A major difference across countries is whether sellers pay the commission (the majority practice e.g. US, Turkey, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Montenegro, Latvia, France), rarely buyers (UAE, Slovenia – most of the commission), or shared (Italy, Greece, Croatia, Germany in some cases otherwise shouldered by the buyer). Real estate brokers are generally government licensed as in the US, the UK situation being exceptional. Reports of average total commission are highly variable (the number is set by a state commission in Germany, by the local chamber of commerce in Italy). In fact, Americans do not pay 6% except in Alaska, West Virginia, Wyoming, but also the lowest state average in the US is around 4.9 in Utah. US is certainly on the high end for civilized countries, but France is even higher. I would certainly like to blame the government for everything, but I just don’t see the evidence that that is correct in this case. Agents are typically licensed by law, licensed agents are not required to be members of NAR in the US, regulated rates can be high (France) or low (UAE). There does seem to be a relation between low rate and whether the burden is not entirely on the seller.

It is analogous to the fees imposed on vendors who accept credit cards. Credit card companies charge vendors some amount for their service, which the market has set at about 3% but some companies charge more (hence “we don’t accept Discover or American Express”). In this case, the business can either eat the cost, or refuse to accept credit cards, or charge mor for using a credit card (if legal, otherwise they offer a discount for cash). NAR has the power to enforce terms on members using their services, and 3% per party is fairly standard (was so when we bought our first house in 1987). An agent has the greatest incentive to sell a house that they are the seller’s agent, so as a buyer you can assume that you will probably get shown many houses being sold by your agent: but not exclusively. MLS is the useful tool by which agents gain access to many more houses and buyers. Originally, there was little alternative to paying the “standard rate”, when all agents agree to abide by a certain fee standard. The rates have never been fully-enforceable so the NYT is just lying, no surprise. An agent can elect to forego some of their commission, if they want, but Agent A cannot force Agent B to accept a lower commission. I’ve heard of agents accepting a lower commission but it seems to be rare. Of course there was always “for sale by owner”, where there is a chance that you will sell your house for a good price. The interwebs provided some competition, and there are services which aim to match buyers and sellers for a lower commission. The FTC approach is to force multiple listing services to become public utilities, preventing them from not including discount sales in their listing. Outside of real estate, 3% is a ludicrously low sales commission given the agent's labor, so whiners who object to paying for the service provided by a real estate agent are free to arrange cheaper alternatives. Doing without an agent is an obvious albeit hard-to-implement choice. Shopping for a discount listing service is another choice, depending of course on the nature of the market you are in (i.e. do you need a shark, to make sure that you make the winning bid?). But real estate commissions are not "so high". Government excise taxes on the other hand...

The next step in the analysis is to determine in what way children should be protected from harm (removing the question of the role of government), which therefore means identifying what is harmful to children. Many things are harmful to children, in my opinion. Causing a child to hold false beliefs is harmful, for example, causing them to believe that they are sacrificial animals meant to serve the greater good is harmful, believing in God or other supernatural entities or mystical supposedly axiomatic forces like “climate change” is harmful, causing a child to believe that good is arbitrary and subjective or that it is what is mandated by God (according to whomever) is also harmful. Raising a child so that they will believe that others will take care of them is harmful, similarly not raising a child so that they become independent self-propelling beings is harmful. It is harmful to cause a child to believe that heroin, meth, amphetamines and so on are harmless aids to spiritual development, it is also harmful to enable a child to inflict self harm (supplying them with dangerous materials such as tobacco, drugs or alcohol, also firearms or power tools when not paired with appropriate training). This is just a sample of harmful things, by no means an exhaustive list. Man is not born with a hard-wired moral code, such a code must be learned, and it is primarily the responsibility of the parent to provide a moral code to their child. Of course the child must choose to accept the code which is offered, or to develop their own moral code (ultimately though the choice of higher-level moral codes which rely on more perceptual principle such as “don’t kill yourself!”, “don’t steal!”, “don’t lie!”). The responsibility of the parent is to make an earnest effort to import a proper moral code to the child, and irresponsibility is defined on the basis of a lack of effort, not a lack of success. This is a very thin and under-specified framework for defining the idea of “protecting a child”. Still casting aside the question of proper or constitutional law and the role of government as a means of protecting rights, if a society cannot say what end it is trying to reach and only relies on meaningless slogans like “protect the children!”, I see no hope for bridging the logical gap between that desired end and the proper means of reaching the end. There is an underlying historical / documentary challenge coming from this specific law. Social media has abundant unsupported assertions as to why this law was passed, but those analyses lack concrete evidence. Can anyone locate floor debates or committee reports, or even notes from legislative aids, surrounding the enactment of this law which provides evidence as to the state of mind of the legislators who voted for (or against) this bill? I have searched for any such evidence on the Utah legislature website, to no avail. This is not entirely surprising, since overt discussion of real issues is typically lacking in the official legislative process (discussion of content needs to be via unofficial channels, in order to circumvent the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act – if there’s no record of discussion, there’s no hope of revealing the underlying truth about a particular law). It is not insane to think that most legislators hate social media platforms for being so blatantly leftist in their policies, that is both a standard right-wing meme and an observable fact. However, there isn’t a shred of concrete evidence that this fact caused the majority to vote yes on the bill.

Do you think that parents (or other legal guardians) should be held legally responsible for harm that befalls a child because of lack of parental supervision, including foreseeably bad choices? Or should parents be free from the consequences of their inaction, when action (restriction) is warranted?

So do you argue that the age of legal adulthood should be 8, including e.g. the obligation to fulfill contract, provide for your own survival, have sex etc?

There is a recurring problem – here and elsewhere – of asserting an underlying reasoning behind government actions. Whether those supposed reasons are offered by the right or the left, there is never any concrete proof that those are the reasons. Indeed, there is never any discussion of the actual mental state of the legislators or regulators, much less evidence of that mental state. Instead, the analysts will pick up some phrase uttered by some person and say “That is why we have this law”. Poppycock! The real reason why such laws come into existence (and this should be so self-evident that no proof is needed, I admit that this is a lazy argument) is that each law-maker creates a mental image of the political consequences of supporting or opposing any law. This particular law is “about protecting children”, no sane politician would oppose protecting children, end of story. But the real issue is very complicated, and Gus fails to give the issue the scrutiny that it deserves – who has what right? Let’s start with the question of what rights children have: do they have the same rights as adults? For example, can a 10 year old rightfully have sex with an adult, consent to surgery, or form contracts and be sued for breach? If not, why not? Under current law, the answer is no they cannot, because children only exercise rights under adult supervision. In the case of surgery, surgery is possible with the consent of the adult (and despite child opposition), but sex and contracts are strictly impossible for children. It is never legally permissible for a parent to rent out their 10 year old under the guise of “parental approval of prostitution”. The spectrum of “social media sites” out there ranges from various altruistic do-good social-support safe spaces to criminal and sexual Angie’s lists. We might then distinguish unsafe websites from safe indeed good websites, and only restrict access to unsafe websites. But who is the subject of such restrictions? The broadest restriction bans all unsafe websites from existing, as determined by an official government censor. First Amendment strongly says no to that. The narrowest restrictions start by limiting the class of individuals allowed to exercise their adult choices, to, dare I say it, adults. There is a line that can be drawn between engaging in sex and reading about sex, which underlies this law (though we have no idea what the members of the Utah legislature were thinking when they voted for the law). The most-accessible distinction is between the actual sex act (the adult cannot deem that the child reasonably consents) and gaining expressive knowledge of sex acts (or criminal acts, etc) where the adult may reasonably make the consent judgment for the child. Of course a hyper-libertarian can always insist that the choice should be left up to the child for all of their acts, and if you want to seriously argue that children should be treated as adults from birth, I suggest starting a separate thread to advance that argument. How then should the government protect the rights of children, if this ID-requirement is seemed to be morally offensive? The answer comes from that initial question about child rights and the role of the adult rights-custodian. Very simply, the child will do whatever it does, and the adult custodian bears responsibility for the consequences of those actions. The adult is responsible for supervising the child, and should be made to bear the consequences of their actions. What is wrong with this law is not that it restricts children from accessing harmful websites and as collateral damage in protecting rights, some adults are inconvenienced. The problem is that the law sees the platform as being solely responsible for the harm, and not the adult who enabled access in the first place. The Utah law is a pragmatic solution, in that there are way fewer platforms than supervising adults, so enforcement against platforms is much easier than enforcement against supervising adults. This law draws a bright line which distinguishes legal from illegal action, the alternative of post hoc lawsuits by children who were harmed by poor parental judgment is unmanageably vague. There is a third alternative, which is to hold social media platforms (not parents) liable for damage to minors (violations of their rights) that they contributed to. Such a law would be limited to responsibility for damage to those not legally capable of consent. The platform can then decide to take the legal risk and not attempt to vet users, or they can protect themselves by id-checking. Their risk, their choice. Adult users who don’t want to be inconvenienced by providing ID can then take their business to a platform without an ID requirement. In short, this is an extremely complex moral issue, which is not resolved by simply declaring “there should be no restrictions on expression”. The question that should be asked by the libertarians is, what is the nature of the crisis that demands a further infantalization of our society where everyone is coddled in a safe space?