When one of these warlords manages to defeat all the others and establish a lasting monopoly on the use of force, suddenly he’ll have a seat at the UN.

When I read free market anarchists opposing rule by force, I don’t see how they have anything in common with the Somali savages.

Les, what is “hyper-rational”? Are you arguing that one needs a certain level of irrationality?

And then I read several comments here by Les using the term “Randian anarchism.” Ayn Rand made it quite clear that anarchy was the worst form of tyranny imaginable. For an example in today’s world, look at Somalia. Anarchy is an unstable social system in which successively bigger and more brutal thugs murder each other and everyone else, trying to bring stability in the form of totalitarian dictatorship.

Les, you may agree or disagree with this conclusion, but you cannot in any honesty attribute the anarchist view to Ayn Rand! (The Libertarian Party’s support of anarchism is one reason why she condemned them and their founder Murray Rothbard, who at the time was trying to imply that she supported him.)

Rand was against altruism, which she noted was not about helping people but is really a doctrine of self-sacrifice. Altruism switches contexts in answering the question “what is the good?” altruism answers in terms of who the good is *not* for, the actor. It does not explicitly say what the good is, though implicitly it defines the good as trading away a greater value for a lesser value in return: others before self, neighbors before family, country before neighbors, the world before country, and animals before people.

Rand was also against government-enforced altruism.

Your use of terms like “utopia” and “libertine” indicate you are either ignorantly buying into simple-minded stereotypes or deliberately trying to build strawmen to bash. I’m of no use to you if you’re not prepared to engage in a more meaningful dialog.

I can’t speak for all the people who describe themselves as one type of individualist or another (libertarian, Objectivist, etc.). In my experience, many of these people have a shallow understanding and have not fully integrated the basic principles of liberty. Perhaps they’ve read a bit of Rand and are able to parrot some ideas, but are only able to offer muddled counter-arguments in a prolonged debate. Or, perhaps they’ve developed a good portion of their political values independently–only partially influenced by Locke, Rand, and Rothbard–without following a set script. Does that give you an idea of what I mean in my first paragraph?

One more thing: this idea that people influenced by Ayn Rand (who rejected anarchy) want to throw out “civilization” doesn’t make sense. Viewing man as a heroic being and advocating reason over force is choosing the best qualities of civilized behavior, while compromises with collectivists are an erosion of such qualities.

Not nihilistic, realistic. The Free individuals can deal with random head-bashers on a case-by-case basis, I’m just unconvinced that in an anarcho-libertarian utopia like what I hear many Randians in the current libertine movement calling for that such head-bashers will remain random and not group together for mutual protection against reciprocal head-bashing and the like; though communal head-bashing would be only the most extreme of problems such a society would face, collusion being another. This is why Rule of Law (Not rule of Kings, not rule of the Elite, not rule of ‘The Party’ or rule of the group that can bring the most head-bashers together) is so important.

I’m fully on-board with the idea that we need fewer, clearer, simpler laws that intrude the least upon the peaceable actions of individuals and with the most leeway for allowing citizen-enforcement rather than maintaining absolute state monopoly on law-enforcement and maintaining accountability for All those who enforce.. I just have this feeling that Randian Libertarians are looking to toss the Baby of Civilization out with the Bathwater of Statism without realizing it.

i think you mistake “chaotic” for “volatile”. the market is not chaotic right now. internal correlations are running very high. this is one of the reasons were are seeing more volatility. if everything has a high r squared to a couple of variables, that is not a chaotic system.

then clarified:

just to be clear, as i realize i did not state this well-

by “not chaotic right now” i mean relative to usual. obviously, it is still a complex system, but it is being driven by fewer and better correlated variables than usual.

I won’t disagree with you if you substitute “currently has low levels of ‘random’ noise relative to signal” for “is not chaotic right now”. As for using the word “chaotic” to describe the current stock market, I’ll stick by that since what we observe in the market fits what we know about the behavior of chaotic systems. Just the variation in time shifting alone is sufficient to make even dealing with one or two variables complex enough to be considered chaotic, and that doesn’t even take variation in the related amplification factors over time into account. And even with that, you can achieve high R-squared correlations.

I do recognize that the current low level of noise in the market makes forecasting a lot easier to do. Having gone through the historic data, I can identify several periods where the methods that work now would not be effective. The peak of the “Dot-Com Bubble” of April 1997 to June 2003 and the Black Monday Crash of 1987 are very good examples of times when the level of noise in the stock market were quite high, rendering the limited method I’ve developed quite useless for a prolonged period of time.

as a sidenote: anyone who claims to be able to predict the market with a few simple variables should be treated with great suspicion. if it were that easy, loads of people would figure it out which would instantly make it not work anymore. data mining correlations out of past data is easy, but it nearly always lacks predictive ability.

Yes and no. What you’re describing is part of the “efficient markets” hypothesis. There’s a classic joke where two people, one an economist, the other a regular guy, are walking along when both spot a $20 bill on the ground. The regular guy says “Hey a $20! Want to split it?” The economist, believing in efficient markets, says “No. If that were a real $20, someone would have picked it up already.”

If you believe in efficient markets, where let’s say that everyone over time learns and adopts one system for setting stock prices given everyone’s shared future expectations, what you would see would be the lag in the time an opportunity is discovered to when it closes shrink substantially, as markets react as quickly as possible to the new information.

In practice though, where a stock index is concerned, the complexity lies in all the underlying transactions that set the level of the component stocks that make up the composite index. No one can ever know, at any given time, when Company AAA’s bad news will offset Company BBB’s good news (or the other 498 companies in the index), nor can they easily determine how any company’s specific news will affect the index given the respective weightings of each company within the index. Add that to the appeal of competing investment theories or even the nature of the specific news for each company in the index on any given day, and you’ve got quite a lot of play in the system.

But let’s say that there’s no play in the system. Let’s say that everyone buys into that system I’ve described and reacts instantly to the arrival of news to reset stock prices instantaneously. Care to guess where the level of the stock index will be set?

Traders might not enjoy much of an arbitrage opportunity, but people still make and lose money through all the other forms of investing.

For the most part I don’t disagree with the substantive policy positions you advocate in this post. But, trying to convert non-libertarians with “chaos & anarchy” language seems like a poor rhetorical tactic. Maybe this post was just preaching to the choir (which is fine), but I wouldn’t try to use this on a leftist or big-government conservative.

More here.