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Yvain2 comments on Contaminated by Optimism - Less Wrong
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This is something that's bothered me a lot about the free market. Many people, often including myself, believe that a bunch of companies which are profit-maximizers (plus some simple laws against use of force) will cause "nice" results. These people believe the effect is so strong that no possible policy directly aimed at niceness will succeed as well as the profit-maximization strategy does. There seems to be a lot of evidence for this. But it also seems too easy, as if you could take ten paper-clip maximizers competing to convert things into differently colored paperclips, and ended out with utopia. It must have something to do with capitalism including a term for the human utility function in the form of demand, but it still seems miraculous.
First, policies don't aim, actors with intent do. A journalistic peeve of mine. Newspaper writers generally spend the first 10 paragraphs of a story about legislation psycho analyzing the intent of pieces of paper, and rarely will tell you what the pieces of paper actually say.
Second, I don't consider this a serious pro free market position. It's not that no "possible" government enforced policy would do better, it's that the political process is generally unlikely to yield a better policy.
Unfortunately, many people who hold this position don't know that it's not serious.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Austrian economists.
Well, I think it's a quite accurate depiction of anyone who uses phrases like "a priori science."
(That is, to the extent that Austrian economics is based on a priori reasoning, various claims about types of government intervention really are claims that no possible such government intervention could ever be good for people)
A priori claims can be probabilistic claims.
Are you aware of a broad tradition of such probabilities that I'm completely unaware of?