So what is this rule or law to which Hume refers?
Cheers, kr hanly
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Hi Jim & Ken:
>
> Jim wrote:
> >For what it's worth, I agree with you totally on this. BTW, when my
> >10-year-old son saw your name, he excitedly said "Yoshie!" in
> >reference Nintendo.
>
> I'm happy that you agree with me. But I don't get the reference to
> Nintendo (in fact, I've never played any video game -- perhaps I
> shouldn't mention this here, in case Justin thinks I'm a
> Rousseau-like fan of Sparta).
>
> >Hayek's position -- so ably put forth by Justin -- seems to be (a)
> >in order to avoid market rule, there needs to be a God; but (b) God
> >does not exist; so (c) market rule is inevitable. But then he
> >assumes that God exists in the form of the Invisible Hand.
>
> In this regard, we can think of Hayek's position as a reworking of
> Hume's objection to the Levellers:
>
> ***** In a perfect theocracy, where a being, infinitely
> intelligent, governs by particular volitions, this rule would
> certainly have place, and might serve to the wisest purposes: But
> were mankind to execute such a law; so great is the uncertainty of
> merit, both from its natural obscurity, and from the self-conceit of
> each individual, that no determinate rule of conduct would ever
> result from it; and the total dissolution of society must be the
> immediate consequence. (Hume, "Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
> Morals") *****
>
> No God, no alternative to the market for Hume, as you summed up!
>
> Ken wrote:
> >But how do you determine
> >if that is any more wasteful then having entrepreneurs guess what might sell,
> >competing and going bankrupt, or advertisers spending milliions trying to
> >ensure there is a preference for pet rocks?
>
> Hayek doesn't have an answer, and as many noted he was uninterested
> in empirical work of actually comparing the cost of information
> gathering for a planned economy with transaction costs &
> externalities in a market economy. A Ronald Coase he wasn't.
>
> >Would von Mises or Hayek really
> >claim that we do not know our needs and desires without participating in a
> >market?
>
> What Hayek claims is that the price system brings about "the taking
> into account of conflicts of desires which would have been overlooked
> otherwise [i.e. under planned economy]," chiefly through "the
> accounting of costs." Prices are for Hayek "signs which enable him
> [a producer] to contribute to the satisfaction of needs of which he
> does not know, and to do so by taking advantage of conditions of
> which he also learns only indirectly" (Hayek, _Law, Legislation and
> Liberty_). In a move that anticipates postmodernism, Hayek basically
> says that we can't have direct knowledge of what we really need &
> want & of how we should satisfy our needs & wants, unless we are
> mediated by the "sign system" of prices. Prices as "signs" function
> for Hayek as the symbolic order functions for Lacan. Failures are
> not anomalous but essential in Hayek's economy of a "sign system":
> "It is one of the chief tasks of competition to show which plans are
> false." In other words, Hayek implies that truths are only
> differentially revealed to us when set against market failures (false
> plans), just as those who are influenced by Saussurian linguistics
> have us conceive of the dichotomy of true/false in language as
> chiefly differential, de-emphasizing or bracketing altogether the
> role of reference in our language use. Further, just as the
> Saussurian linguistics is synchronic, unlike the diachronic
> conception of language in philology, in the Hayekian ecnonomy, "The
> current prices, it must be specially noted, serve in this process as
> indicators of what ought to be done in the present circumstances and
> have no necessary relation to what has been done in the past" (Hayek,
> _Law, Legislation and Liberty_). If Hayek had adopted psychoanalysis
> (some version of which says an individual's unconscious can never be
> made fully transparent to himself), he would have been _the_
> forefather of postmodernism before the letter! Economy is a
> discourse of desires in perpetual conflict of which we are only dimly
> aware, not a historically determined ensemble of social relations
> which we may consciously & collectively transform!
>
> Needless to say, I think that Hayek's textualization of economy is
> highly misleading (since it directs our attention away from the role
> of the competitive market as *compulsion* & of prices as *alien
> power* that heteronomously determines our lives, severing our means
> from ends), and I add once again that Hayek doesn't explain why we
> can't use planning as a democratic procedure of discovery through
> trial and error, figuring out how to meet existing needs and to even
> find out & develop new needs & desires.
>
> Yoshie
