I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb

Re:I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb by _delirium on Friday November 01, 2013 @07:48PM (#6657355)

I put it down to the poor state of our mathematical education. The naive understanding of economic systems libertarians display is actually fairly similar to what you see in introductory dynamical-systems courses. You can, with great care, construct some "well-behaved" systems where you present a set of rules, and the expected thing happens: you push lever X and Y happens. Raise the minimum wage and unemployment rises!

But of course, most systems are not so well-behaved, so that is only a lead-in to the real examples, where you change the setup slightly and suddenly analysis grows more complex. Now what happens when you push lever X depends on what region of the state-space you're in! And sometimes pushing lever X can change the region of the state-space you're in, too! There is feedback and internal dynamics. I see very little libertarian economics that displays even a 101-level understanding of any of that.

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Re:I Bought An Apartment To Rent Out On Airbnb by lambdaphage on Saturday November 02, 2013 @05:08PM (#6660815)

If you keep treating your intellectual opponents like this, you're going to get trounced the next time you run into a smart one.

To be very brief, you seem to think that libertarians believe, roughly,

(1) "the world is simple, so we should have simple rules."

Instead, you suggest:

(2) "the world is complicated, so we should have complicated rules."

But this claim is entirely unresponsive to:

(3) "the world is complicated, so we should have simple rules."

which is what most libertarians I know actually think. If you respond to (1) when your opponents are arguing for (3), you will not have productive conversations.

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