I disagree with, Appeal to inescapable assumptions. My specific reason is that I think it would insulate physical materialism from the main type of argument you can make against it. I see empiricism as a huge, impenetrable fortress built on assumptions that are reasonable but not necessary.

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Appeal to inescapable assumptions - ...the idea that you need some assumptions and therefore everyone is free to choose whatever assumptions they want.

Where does that preclude criticizing assumptions? (I presume this is your quarrel) In fact, the next line endorses the criticism of assumptions:

In the realm of physical reality, reality is one way or another and you don't get to make it that way by choosing an opinion, and so some "assumptions" are right and others wrong.

Furthermore, claiming that other shipping methods are crowded out implies that Wal-Mart's founders would have been helpless about handling that environment

I don't understand where this implication is coming from

Usually when economists use the term "subsidize" they only mean a government action that benefits someone - since that's all that matters for economic analysis.

edit: note the point of Chronos' original post: that the IHS crowds out other methods of shipping goods. This is true even if the IHS only subsidizes shipping by truck in your "trivial" sense.

I'm no Hayek scholar, but this looks like a straw man.

First of all:

Of course his definition of "central economic planning" includes every single corporation employing more than one person...

Straight from Hayek's seminal article:

The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about "economic planning" centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.

So by "central economic planning" Hayek means... the government planning all economic activity.

This is what I take Hayek's main points to be (largely from reading The Use of Knowledge in Society, linked above)

• aggregating information is hard, especially for very large organizations
• markets do a good job of aggregating information, relative to alternatives

That's pretty much it, at least that relates to this discussion. Yes, this means there are diseconomies of scale. No this doesn't mean that there aren't economies of scale that are large enough to counter the diseconomies.

note that on my reading, your point about Wal-Mart is a point in Hayek's favor. Wal-Mart, though large, is part of a larger market.

btw, I won't vouch for those who think Hayek justifies extreme libertarianism. He doesn't. But he does rule out central planning ala The Soviet Union.

Do you have any counterexamples in mind where the two approaches give different answers and the difference can't be resolved by noting that they aren't answering the same question?

Well, no, but but proponents of F may disagree.

You're right, so far as it goes, but I don't think it gets you very far. My point is that this dodges what the debate is about. Proponents of F say that it should be used for doing inductive inference while proponents of B say they're wrong, B is what should be used. If you're not answering that question, you're not settling the debate.

Now if you're not trying to settle the debate, then we have no argument.

Sure, B and F don't directly contradict each other, but which one should we use when reasoning under uncertainty?

edit: better statement of what I was getting at

I'm not sure that Hanson was being original. Libertarian leaning economists have been making this argument for some time.

I wasn't aware that there was such an even split on the minimum wage, thanks. (One of the citations in the ejw article you linked to below provided the evidence)

I tried to pick items that I thought there was a general consensus on in the profession. Apparently I was wrong about the minimum wage. Looking back on my list, I would also be worried about insider trading laws (I'm sure it's controversial), the capital gains tax, and probably the post office. I was intentionally vague about which subsidies economists would dislike because they aren't necessarily bad (and economists don't necessarily dilike them), but ethanol is one there is probably some agreement on. Tariffs and the income tax I'm also pretty confident in. Fannie and freddy I'm less confident in, but still pretty sure about. Note that the ejw article you linked supports my assertions about tariffs and the ethanol case of subsidies.

You seem to have no clue what insider trading laws are. Company employees and executives can purchase stock. However it is illegal to act on information that is not public.

My point is that insider trading makes nonpublic information public.