트럼프·김정은 회담이 몰고올 파장
조약돌(조갑제닷컴 회원)


  필자의 관심사항은 트럼프·김정은 담판이 열리는지 여부가 아니다. 회담이 무산되거나 결렬되면 트럼프 대통령은 보이스 피싱과 같은 김정은이 획책한 범죄에 연락책으로 가담한 문재인 정부에 대해서도 그 책임을 물을 것이다. 분노한 미국이 대북 군사작전을 결행할 때 촛불을 든 한국인들이 광화문에 집결하여 미 대사관을 포위하고 몇날 며칠을 '북폭은 아니된다'면서 들고 일어나지 말라는 법은 없고 필자는 이런 날이 오지 않을까 걱정스럽다. 미국이 대한민국 종북 정권과 반미 촛불 세력뿐만이 아니라 미국을 신뢰하고 사랑하는 애국 세력까지 도매금으로 대한민국은 반미국가로 낙인 찍고 한미 FTA를 파기하는 등 가혹한 경제 제재를 가함과 동시에 무자비한 대북 군사작전을 펼친 후에, 한반도 운명을 한국은 젖혀놓고 중국, 일본 등과 일방적으로 결정하는 가혹한 징벌을 한국인들에게 내려서 한국인들이 끔찍한 시련을 겪어야 되는 것은 아닌지 전율하는 것이다.

  우리에게 엄중하고 어쩌면 운명적인 계절이 기다리고 있을지도 모른다. (발췌)
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KBS에는 양승동같은 거짓말쟁이밖에 없나
문무대왕


 양승동은 방송인이기 전에 위선자다. 세월호 사고 당일 해운대 센텀시티 노래방에서 밤 늦게까지 술마시고 노래부르며 신나게 놀아났다.그것도 법인카드로 술값을 지불하면서.

  KBS 법인카드는 술값 지급이 금지돼 있다.그것도 야당 의원들의 질문에 그런 사실이 없다고 잡아 떼다가 카드사용 사실이 밝혀지자 사과하는 등 도덕성에 문제가 제기됐다, 또 자신은 일개 PD로 별 끗발이 없었다고 했지만 KBS 부산총국 편성제작국장이란 자리는 방송의 편성제작권을 행사하는 최고책임자이다. 이런 막강한 권한을 가진 방송 고위간부가 일개 PD라고 신분을 속인 것은 양심불량이다.

  그리고 세월호 행사장에 나타날 땐 노란 리본을 달고 나타나는 이중인격자다. (발췌)
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부역자중 최고 악질은 김씨왕조 부역자들
부산386(조갑제닷컴 회원)                  


종북집단은 다른 말로 표현하면 ‘김씨왕조 부역자’들이라고 불러야 한다. 남한 내 김씨왕조 부역자들은 부역자 중에서 가장 惡質이다. 일제시대나 6·25 전쟁 때처럼 피치못할 사정이 있는 것도 아니고, 북한 주민들처럼 진실을 모르고 있는 것도 아니고, 同族인 북한 동포에 대한 처참한 인권유린과 범죄행위를 다 알면서도 애써 외면하고 김씨왕조를 위해 헌신하면서, 결과적으로 고통받는 동포를 배반했다는 점에서 가장 죄질이 나쁘다.

  이들은 누구의 심판을 받아야 할까? 그 답은 북한 동포다. 천안함·核·그리고 정치범수용소 등에 대해 저들 김씨왕조 부역자들이 언론인·정치인·시민운동가의 자격으로 했던 말과 쓴 글을 하나도 빠짐없이 기록으로 보존해야 한다. 훗날 진실을 알게 된 북한 동포들이 남한 내 김씨왕조 부역자들의 심판자가 될 것이다. 김씨왕조 부역자들이 진실을 알고 난 북한동포들에 심판받는 그 날이 민족사의 정의가 완성되는 날이다.
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대학 캠퍼스의 <거울 속으로>에 들어가면, (좌파들의) 다양성이란 결국 이데올로기적인 단일성이라는 것이 드러난다.


사실과 이성을 신경 쓰지 말라. 만일 우리가 상대의 말을 듣기 싫다면, 우리가 알아야 할 모든 것은 단지 그 필자의 성별과 인종이다.
---->상대의 말이 합리적이라면, 좌파들은 그가 남성우월주의자이고 인종차별주의자라고 공격한다. 그러면 거기서 논란은 끝이 난다.
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책의 요점은, 현실 세계에서는 윤리학을 한편으로 지식과 또 한편으로는 실천 능력으로부터 분리할 수 없다는 것이다.

실패의 부담을 다른 사람들에게 전가하게 되면, 학습이 일어나지 않는다.

시스템은 불량 부품을 제거함으로써 학습하는데, 결국 삭제를 통해 더욱 똑똑해진다.

스킨 인 더 게임이 없고, 언제나 보상을 제공받는 사람들은 쉽게 해결될 수 있는 문제조차도 복잡한 해결책을 찾으려 한다.

 

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

 

February 27, 2018

 

Walter Clemens

 

Life is paradox: As Aesop noted, dogs enjoy greater security than wolves, but lack freedom. Wolves have more freedom than dogs but may be eaten by even stronger denizens of the wild.

 

We encounter things never imagined, such as Black Swans. What appears strong turns out to be fragile. People in high places may feel insecure. Well paid assistants to corporate presidents may fear to speak out lest they lose their privileges.

 

The way to create social equality is to compel corporate and political leaders to have skin in the game. They should not enjoy big profits unless they suffer the consequences of bad judgment. Terrorists should not be allowed to blow up innocents trusting that their families will be spared punishment for their brutal deeds.

 

“The entire point of the book is that in the real world it is hard to disentangle ethics on one hand from knowledge and competence on the other.” There are asymmetries of power, but if you inflict risk on others and they are damaged, you need to pay some price for it.

 

To use two cases not cited by Taleb: George W. Bush made horrendous mistakes that brought great suffering to peoples of the Middle East and the United States, but won a second term and, having retired, enjoys a new avocation—oil painting. As of 2018, the new U.S. president has used his office to enhance his business interests while fostering rules and laws that harm the commonweal—without, as yet, alienating most of his base.

 

Interventionistas like those who argued for changing the regime in Iraq and Libya fail to consider the second- and third-order consequences of their acts. Complex systems do not have obvious one-dimensional cause-and-effect mechanisms. Given the opacity of such systems, it is wise not to intervene.

 

One cannot compare a third-world dictator with the prime minister of Sweden; one must consider the real local alternative. One cannot forecast the evolution of those one hopes to help by attacking. The principle of intervention, like that of healers, should be first do no harm.

 

In ancient times most leaders were warlords—warriors who risked death in battle. Societies were run by risk takers, not risk transferors. America’s large banks, however, have been run and coddled by leaders with no skin in the game. If their bets paid off, they won big; if the banks teetered, the public bailed them out—what Taleb calls the “Bob Rubin trade.” Transferring the pain of risk in this way impedes learning.

 

While individual leaders are often slow to learn, sometimes the system learns and supplants those individuals. Systems learn by removing parts, via negativa. It is safer to remove a bad component of the system than to add a new component, due to unseen, complicated feedback loops. Systems get smart by elimination.

Hammurabi got it right: “If a builder builds a house and the house collapses and causes the death of its owner, the builder shall be put to death.”

 

Isocrates, the Athenian orator explained what Taleb calls the Silver Rule: “Deal with weaker states as you think it appropriate for stronger states to deal with you.”

 

Kant’s universalism (the categorical imperative) ignores the problem of scaling. It refers to the abstract instead of the particular. Universalism conflates the micro and the macro. It misses central but hidden elements of a thing in turning it into an abstract concept, then causing a blowup.

 

But risk and ruin are different things. It may be good for your health to jump from a bench to the floor but not from the top of a skyscraper. It can be smart to take a lot of risks that don’t have tail risks but offer tail profits. One can love risks but shun ruin. In a strategy that entails ruin, benefits never offset the risks. Rationality seeks to avoid systemic ruin.

 

Taleb is skeptical about pseudo-rationality. People without skin in the game but who are rewarded for their time often seek complicated solutions for problems that can be solved with simple answers. Their scientism is to science what a Ponzi scheme is to investment. Taleb proposes a “BS detection heuristic”: if job applicants seem to have similar skills, hire the one with the least “label-oriented education.” He or she will have overcome more serious hurdles.

 

Similarly, a barbell will make you stronger than a fancy machine. “When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experimental mechanism. They lose their own preferences and submit to what “consultant” sales people recommend.

 

Thus, we come to understand “skin in the game.” It is contact with reality that filters out incompetence. Reality is blind to looks and to Ivy league diplomas. Ronald Reagan was an actor who looked like a president; Obama looked like a president but was also an actor. (Taleb, like Trump, attended the Wharton School but also has a doctorate from the University of Paris.) Taleb approves people who have had some success in spite of not looking the part.

 

“Deeds Before Words” is the title of Taleb’s chapter 11. An assassin or terrorist can control others without words—a dagger in the ground next to a Turkish sultan or a severed horse head in the bed of a Hollywood executive. Historians and journalists sometimes multiply the effect of terror by exaggerating the numbers of its victims, e.g., the 1982 “massacre” of Syrian jihadis by Assad senior.

 

Taleb sums up his life’s work: There is no love without sacrifice, no power without fairness, no facts without rigor, no statistics without logic, no teaching without experience, no complication without depth, no science without skepticism, and nothing without skin in the game.

 

This fifth volume of Taleb’s Incerto series will stimulate most readers to reflect on every aspect of his or her life, and may help them to navigate without great mishaps in its dark woods. It may also make them wonder in the presence of a systems analyst who backs his ideas with algorithms and with references to the classics from Plato to Mahabharata to Immanuel Kant but who often expresses himself not just in popular language but even in three- and four-letter words.

 

He often quotes from the original Arabic, French, Greek, and Latin as well as version of “Brooklynese.” Taleb’s heritage is Greek Christian but his name, in Arabic, means “student.” A glossary defining 24 terms offers a summary of the book’s main ideas. A technical appendix explains fat tails and other terms mathematically.

.

 

 

Walter Clemens is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University. He is the author of more than 20 books, most recently North Korea and the World: Human Rights, Arms Control, and Strategies for Negotiation. His many articles on both domestic and international affairs have appeared in scholarly journals as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers in various countries.

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금융감독원장에 참여연대 출신의 김기식이 내정됐어.
시민단체·정치인 출신은 금감원 출범 이후 처음이야.
김기식은 금융과는 관계가 없는 사람이야.
오히려 한·미 FTA 저지, 국가보안법 폐지, 이라크 파병
반대 등 간첩도 울고 갈 일을 주도했지.

 역대 정부에서도 코드 인사는 있었지만 어느 정도전문성을 고려한 인사였어.
근데 이제는 전문성은 개나 줘버리고 특별한 경력 없는 시민 단체 출신이
임명 받는 세상이 되어 버렸어 ㄷㄷ

[출처] 정신 나간 금감원 참여연대 출신 내정.ssul
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"북한 김정은, 중국에 천연가스 긴급지원요청 가능성...정유시설 대부분 파괴돼"

우태영 조선뉴스프레스 인터넷뉴스부장

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한샨(喊山, 영어 mountain cry)은 원래 葛水平이라는 작가의 동명 소설을 영화한 것이다. 그런데 이 책은 2012년, 그리고 2016년 두 번에 걸쳐 영화화 되었다. 그런데 재밌는 사실은 첫 번째 만든 영화가 적어도 내가 보기에는 더 잘 만들었다. 앞에 잘만든 영화가 있는데 두 번째 영화 감독은 무슨 배짱으로 그보다 못한 영화를 만들었는지 좀 의아스럽다. (두번째 영화의 여주인공이 조금 더 미인이고, 한총 역도 도시적 용모의 조금 젊은 사람이 맡았다.)

 

첫 번째 영화의 제작자들은 다음과 같다.

 

原著：葛水平

 

导演：李彦廷

 

编剧：麻杨扬

 

 

主要演员

 

韩冲：侯岩松 饰

 

红霞：宋梓侨 饰

 

韩爹：刘玉玺 饰

 

腊宏：乔涵 饰

 

영화의 내용은 산골 노총각인 한총韩冲 집에 라홍(腊宏)이라는 사람이 벙어리 마누라인 홍시아(红霞)와 자녀 둘을 이끌고 와서, 그의 집 헛간에 기거하는 데서 시작한다. 얼마후 한총이 동물을 잡기 위해 폭약을 설치해두었는데, 라홍이 그걸 밟아 죽고 만다.

그래서 마을에서 홍시아에게 보상을 해주려 하는데, 홍시아가 아무 것도 원하지 않는다고 답하는 바람에, 결국 한총이 홍시아 가족의 주거와 세끼 식사를 해결해 주는 것으로 일단 타협이 되었다. 그래서 한총과 홍시아가 접촉하면서 노총각인 그와 벙어리 과부 사이에 사랑이 싹튼다. 그런데 어느날 경찰이 라홍을 추격해서 이 마을까지 찾아온다. 알고 보니 라홍은 사람을 죽인 살인범이었다. 그런데 한총이 고의는 아니었지만 그를 죽게 만들었으니 법망에 걸리지 않을 수 없다. 결국 잠깐 동안의 봄날은 가고, 한총은 경찰에 연행되어 두 사람이 헤어진다.

 

 이 사람이 극중의 주인공 한총

 라홍이 죽은 다음 입관한 장면

 벙어리 홍시아와 한총 부자

 두부를 가공해서 기름을 짜내는 장면, 콩에서 기름을 짜내는 장면은 나도 처음 보았다

 연행되는 한총

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조작의 달인 손석희가 2016년 10월 24일 최순실 파일이라며 보여준 파일들이다. 그전까지는 '최순실 파일'이라는 단어조차 존재한 적이 없었다. 그러면 최순실 파일이라는 것이 실제로 존재하였기에 손석희가 JTBC가 최순실 파일을 보여 주었는가? 그러면 왜 그 명칭이 최순실 파일인가? 최순실에 관한 파일이기에 최순실 파일인가? 그러나 거기에 단 한 개도 최순실에 대한 파일은 없었다.

    JTBC 가 최순실 파일이라며 보여준 파일들 중에서 오방낭 사진 등은 JTBC 가 태블릿에 삽입한 것이다. 그리고 국립과학수사연구원의 태블릿 감정보고서 24쪽을 보면 파일의 경로가 확인되는 88개 파일 중에서도 43개는 다운로드 및 이메일 첨부 기록이 발견되지 않음으로써 JTBC 가 임의로 삽입한 파일들이었다는 사실이 드러난다. 이메일 첨부 기록이 있는 파일들도 대부분 이메일 캐시에 들어있는 파일들이다. 캐시 파일이 최순실파일이라고 보도한 손석희가 IT를 논할 수 있는가? 케시 파일은 사용자 모르게 캐시에 저장되는 파일이라 사용자가 인식할 수도 꺼내서 사용할 수도 없으며, 설사 꺼내더라도 파일 크기가 너무 축소되어 사용 가치가 없는 파일이다. 귀중한 문서를 캐시 파일로 저장하는 사람이 이 지구상에 단 한 명이라도 있는가? 그럼에도 한국 국민 대부분이 손석희의 이런 황당한 가짜 뉴스에 낚여 대통령을 탄핵시켰으니 이러고도 한국이 IT 강대국이라고 말할 수 있는가?

    문재인이 2016년 9월 26일 자기 트위터에 백남기 농민 추모의 글과 더불어 포스팅한 일본 음란물 AV 표지 사진을 예로 들어보자. 만약 손석희가 문재인의 이 트위터 사진은 문재인이 일본 AV 여배우 히토미 마도카 사진을 수집하고 있었다는 증거라고 말하면 그 말은 상당히 일리가 있다. 사용자가 자기 폴더에 저장한 사진만 트위터로 업로드하는 것이 가능하다. 다시 말해 이 트위터 사진은 문재인 컴퓨터에 일본 AV 사진이 저장되어 있었다는 명백한 증거이다. 그러나 우리가 웹을 써핑하고 있었을 때 우리 모르게 캐시에 저장된 그림 파일은 사용자가 사용할 수 있는 파일이 아니다.

    손석희는 IT 전문가를 고용하여 캐시 파일들을 꺼내 JTBC 컴퓨터 속으로 이동해 놓고 최순실이 수집한 국가기밀 파일들이라고 보도하였다. 그런데 이 문서 파일들이 최순실의 소중한 파일들이라는 보도와 최순실이 최순실 파일을 송두리째 버리려 했다는 손석희의 말이 양립이 안된다.

    만약 최순실에게 '최순실파일'이라는 것이 있으면 그 파일은 최순실에게 무엇과도 바꿀 수 없는 귀중한 것인데 왜 버리겠는가? 그럼에도 손석희는 두가지 거짓말을 동시에 하였다. 하나는 '최순실파일'이라는 것이 있다는 거짓말이요, 다른 하나는 최순실이 '최순실파일'을 버렸기 때문에 JTBC 가 너무도 쉽게 거저 먹기로 '최순실파일'을 입수하였다는 거짓말이다.

[출처] 손석희의 국정농단 증거 조작 기법을 들여다 보자

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(( 김진태 성명 - 양승동 KBS사장후보자는 자진사퇴하라! ))
▶️ 양승동 KBS사장후보자가 세월호 침몰 당일 노래방에 간 사실이 확인됐다.
처음엔 발뺌하다가 자유한국당 박대출 의원이 법인카드 사용내역을 제시하자
뒤늦게 시인했다. 정봉주 전의원과 똑같은 경우다.
...

▶️ 양승동 후보자는 카드 사용내역을 허위로 제출했다가 들통이 났다.
세월호 당일 노래방에서 16만원 쓴 것을 뺀 자료를 국회에 제출했다. 이게 더 큰 문제다.
이런 사람이 KBS 사장이 되면 얼마나 많은 조작방송을 하겠는가?

▶️ 문재인정부는 강규형 KBS이사를 해임하기 위해 법인카드 사용을
문제 삼았었다. 애견카페, 음악회 간거까지 탈탈 털어 월 13만원 부당사용했다고 해임했다.
방통위 해임청문회를 주재한 김경근 교수는 '방송은 힘센 놈이 먹게 돼있다, 만만한 교수라서 찍었다'고 말했다. 이젠 '힘센 놈' 에게도 같은 기준이 적용돼야 한다.

▶️ KBS언론노조는 팽목항에서 기념사진 찍었다고 당시 길환영 KBS사장을 물러나라고 했었다. 서남수 교육부장관은 컵라면 먹었다가 두달뒤 결국 경질됐다. 기념사진,컵라면은 안되고 노래방 음주가무는 괜찮다는 건가?

▶️ 양승동 후보자는 최근까지 세월호 리본을 달고 다녔다.
세월호 당일 노래방 가고도 리본 달겠다는 건 본인 자유다.
하지만 그 야비한 이중성에 대해 비난받을 각오는 돼 있어야 한다. 그런 사람이 KBS사장이 될 순 없다.

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[뉴스타운TV] MBC 최승호 사장의 공산주의식 반민주적 만행과 불법을 고발한다 -손상윤의 나 사랑과 정의를 노래하리라 제72회-
MBC공정방송노동조합 이순임 위원장(MBC 예능국 국장)
출연
https://youtu.be/J8E9U3pPUdA
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좌파 교황은 자본주의를 잘못 이해하고 있다.

 

시장은 단지 소비자가 원하는 상품을 제공할 뿐이다. 시장은 소비자가 어떤 상품을 좋아해야 한다든지, 어떤 삶을 살아야 하는지 규정하지 않는다.

시장 경제는 개인의 사익과 사회 전체의 이익이 풍요로운 조화에 이르게 하는 강력한 제도이다.

개인적 자선은 빈자들을 돕는 효과적인 자선 형태인 반면, 정부에 의한 부의 재분배는 비효율적이고 비생산적이다.

 

The Many Ways the Pope Is Wrong About Capitalism

 

 

•David Gordon

 

 

It is hardly a secret that Pope Francis opposes the free market. On what grounds does he do so? Do any of these grounds have merit? What are the sources of his ideas? How similar are his views to those of previous Popes? These are among the questions addressed by the contributors to this important book.

 

The Pope maintains that the free market encourages the false ideology of “consumerism.” People under capitalism want more material goods, but their pursuit ends not in happiness but in futility. Robert M. Whaples, the editor of the volume and Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University, points out that in “[his encyclical] Laudatio si’, Francis argues that this excessive, self-destructive consumption on the part of the rich is partly the fault of markets. ‘[T]he market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, [and] people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. . . This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume.’ The market caters to people’s emptiness. ‘When people become self-centered and self-enclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own, and consume. It becomes almost impossible to accept the limits imposed by reality.’” (pp. 10-11)

 

The Pope has missed the target. The free market is a means by which consumers can satisfy their preferences. It does not dictate what these preferences must be. An advocate of the free market can with complete consistency favor a simple style of life. If people want more and more material goods, the market will supply these; but “consumerism” and capitalism are very different things.

 

Consumerism, the Pope alleges, merits condemnation not only because it leads people astray about the nature of the good life. It also makes people treat with indifference the plight of the poor. In arguing in this fashion, the Pope turns a blind eye to a fundamental point. The rise and development of capitalism has resulted in a massive decrease in global poverty. As Lawrence J. McQuillan and Hayeon Carol Park aptly note, “Wealth must first be created before it can be given to others. Capitalism is the greatest wealth creator the world has ever seen, lifting billions of people out of abject poverty. The pope’s antimarket fervor stands at some distance from the facts.” (p.95)

 

Whaples reinforces this point. “According to economists. . .the numbers simply don’t support this [anti-capitalist] position. Branko Milanovic has traced out the worldwide income distribution in recent decades as people in countries around the world have used markets to expand trading and as technology—largely developed by the world’s profit-driven firms--- has spread to poorer countries. His numbers are stunning and show that the whole world is getting richer.” (p.25)

 

Opponents of capitalism might respond in this way. Even if it is true that capitalism has helped the poor, this fails to prove that capitalists are beneficent. The benefits to the poor arise from the superior productivity of capitalism. The entrepreneurs who drive the system aim for as much profit as possible. Self-interest, not good feelings for the needy, motivates them.

 

This argument is vulnerable at two points. First, even if self-interest motivates capitalists, so what? Would not the poor care much more about their better lives than the purity of the capitalists’ motives? (By the way, why is it taken for granted that self-interest is “bad”?)

 

In his failure to take adequate account of this point, Pope Francis ignores a line of thought stressed by the seventeenth-century Jansenists. As A. M. C. Waterman explains: “The market economy. . .is a powerful instrument for bringing ‘personal interest’ and ‘the interest of society as a whole’ into ‘fruitful harmony.’ Jansenists of the late seventeenth century were the first to see this confluence clearly, and their insight was fully developed in the classical political economy of the English School. Jansenist theology was deeply Augustinian. . .The institutions of human society, such as the market economy, are conceived in sin and must always be imperfect. Yet under Divine Providence they may become a remedy for the ‘wound of original sin’ by recruiting self-interest to the common good.” (p.148)

 

The second point at which the response of the opponents of capitalism is vulnerable challenges more directly their main contention. It is false that capitalists are motivated entirely by self-interest. The opponents of the free market ignore charity. In fact, McQuillan and Park note, “There is ample evidence that capitalism and its core institutions---private-property rights and economic freedom---are key drivers of private charitable giving. The link is important because private charity is the most effective form of charity for uplifting the poor, whereas government redistribution is inefficient, largely ineffective, and often counterproductive.” (p.111)

 

Pope Francis criticizes the free market for yet another alleged failure. It despoils the environment. Precisely the opposite is the case, as Robert Murphy reminds us in a characteristically excellent article. ”How can we ensure that unborn future generations have access to tin, copper, natural gas, and so on?. . .The short answer is that so long as there are secure property rights---a condition that rules out the government imposing a ‘windfall profits’ tax when resource prices rise----then normal market operations, especially in advanced economies with sophisticated futures markets, provide an elegant solution to the problem.” (p.209)

 

Murphy answers alarmism about “climate change,” another feature of the Pope’s encyclical. Drastic restrictions on production are defended as “insurance” against an environmental catastrophe. Murphy responds: “Yet if the proper justification for aggressive climate change policies is insurance for unlikely events ‘just in case,’ then it should be clear that the public has been misled all this time. Nobody sells a homeowner fire insurance by saying, ‘We can see the ravages of the fire on your property as we speak!’” (p.218)

 

However well-meaning Pope Francis may be, he has failed to understand how a free economy works. Economics is a science, and to ignore economic law is futile. As Mises trenchantly observes, “it is futile to approach social facts with the attitude of a censor who approves or disapproves from the point of view of quite arbitrary standards and subjective judgments of value. One must study the laws of human action and social cooperation as he physicist studies the law of nature.” (Human Action, Scholar’s Edition, p.2)

 

 

 

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review.

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닐 퍼거슨의 이전의 책은 국가에 반대하는 근거를 제공했던 사람인데, 이번 책에서 더 강력한 국가 조직을 요구함으로써 우리를 실망시켰다.

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책으로, 말로, 돈으로 전수되는 從北
김수진(탈북자)


한국에 금방 왔을 때 대한민국 사람들이 거지꼴인 북한을 동경한다는 게 믿어지지 않았다. 처음에는 일시적인 정신질환인줄 알았다. 몇 년을 살고 보니 만성정신질환이라는 걸 이해했다. 한국 같은 호화스러운 나라에서 살면서 북한 같은 공산독재국가를 동경한다는 것은 인두겁을 썼다고 말하기에는 짜증이 나고 정신질환환자에 비기지 않을 수 없다. (발췌)
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해석학의 학계(學界) 침입

 

해석학의 사전적 정의는 오래된 성서의 해석학이라는 것이다.

하지만 현대 해석학은 창시자 하이데거와 후계자 가다마를 이어, 문학에서 “해체주의”로 이어졌다. 해체주의는 프랑스의 평론가 푸코, 리쾨르, 데리다 등에 의해 창도되었고, 서구에서는 예일대학에 의해 주도되었다. 해체주의와 해석학의 요점은 허무주의, 상대주의, 유아론(唯我論) 등인데, 한 마디로 객관적인 진실은 없고, 또 있어도 우리가 그것을 발견할 수 없다는 것이다. 각각의 개인이 주관적인 감정, 견해, 역사에 사로잡혀 있으므로, 객관적인 진리를 발견할 수가 없다는 주장이다.

만일 우리가 텍스트의 의미를 이해할 수 없다면, 우리는 왜 저자들의 작품이나 철학을 이해하거나 진지하게 고민하려는 것일까? 해석학에서 이해 불가능이란 자기 실현적 예언과도 같다.

막시즘은 진실도 과학도 아니다. 그래서 어쨌다는 것인가? 해석학에 따르면 어떤 것도 객관적으로 진실이 아니며, 따라서 모든 견해와 명제는 각 개인의 감정과 변덕에 따라 주관적이다.

해석학에 따르면 모든 사회적 문제는 사적이고 비합리적인 취향에 귀결된다. 따라서 사회주의가 아름답다 생각하는 사람이 있어도, 객관적인 진리가 없기 때문에 그들을 저지할 수 없다. 필연적으로 막스, 베블렌, 슈몰러, 하이데거, 가다머 등 거의 모든 해석학자들은 좌우를 막론하고 집합주의자이거나 그와 유사한 사상에 경도되었다.

해석학자들은 항상 자신의 견해를 회의적으로 바라보고, 대화에 열려 있다고 주장하지만, 그들은 몇몇 적대적 상대들에 대해서는 상대가 틀렸다는 확신을 갖고 있다.

만일 진실이 없고, 결론이 이를만한 준거가 없다면, 대화에서 결론은 어떻게 나올까? 어쩌면 강력한 권력의지를 지닌 사람에 의해 결론이 내려질 가능성이 크다. 사실 해석학자들은 스탈린이나 히틀러, 폴 포트 등의 권력자에 고분고분했다.

해석학자들은 그들에 대한 비난을 “비학자적”이라고 응수하는데, 여기서 말하는 학자적이란 몽매주의(蒙昧主義)적 단어를 관련 없는 책과 기사의 번잡한 인용으로 둘러싸는 사람이다.

1953년이 밀턴 프리드먼이 쓴 "실증 경제학의 방법 The Methodology of Positive Economics,"은 논리적 실증주의를 경제학에 도입한 결과가 되었다.

신고전주의 경제학에 대한 오스트리아 학파의 반격에 대해, 그들은 프리드먼의 논문을 근거로, 이론이 적절히 예측을 하는 한, 전제의 오류는 상관 없다고 주장했다.

이에 대해 미제스와 하이에크는 인간사는 실험실이 없어서 변수를 통제하고 실험할 수 없고, 인간의 의식, 의지의 자유, 가치, 목표를 선택할 자유 등이 있는 세상에서는 계량적 항수(恒數)가 없다고 반격했다.

어쩌면 해석학의 부상은 실증주의에 대한 복수이기도 해서, 해석학자들은 실증주의자들에게 “만일 과학이 계량적이고 실험 가능한 것만을 의미한다면, 우리는 너희들을 의미 없는 것들로 매장해버리겠다”고 응수하는 것이다.

 

The Hermeneutical Invasion

 

•Murray N. Rothbard

 

 

Introduction

 

In recent years, economists have invaded other intellectual disciplines and, in the dubious name of "science," have employed staggeringly oversimplified assumptions in order to make sweeping and provocative conclusions about fields they know very little about. This is a modern form of "economic imperialism" in the realm of the intellect. Almost always, the bias of this economic imperialism has been quantitative and implicitly Benthamite, in which poetry and pushpin are reduced to a single level, and which amply justifies the gibe of Oscar Wilde about cynics, that they (economists) know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The results of this economic imperialism have been particularly ludicrous in the fields of sex, the family, and education.

 

So why then does the present author, not a Benthamite, now have the temerity to tackle a field as arcane, abstruse, metaphysical, and seemingly unrelated to economics as hermeneutics? Here my plea is the always legitimate one of self-defense. Discipline after discipline, from literature to political theory to philosophy to history, have been invaded by an arrogant band of hermeneuticians, and now even economics is under assault. Hence, this article is in the nature of a counterattack.

 

To begin, the dictionary definition of hermeneutics is the age-old discipline of interpreting the Bible. Until the 1920s or 1930s, indeed, hermeneutics was confined to theologians and departments of religion. But things changed with the advent of the murky German doctrines of Martin Heidegger, the founder of modern hermeneutics. With the death of Heidegger, the apostolic succession of head of the hermeneutical movement fell upon his student, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who still wears this mantle.

 

The greatest success of the hermeneutical movement has been achieved in recent decades, beginning in the closely related movement of "deconstructionism" in literary criticism. Headed by the French theorists Michel Foucault, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida, deconstructionism in the Western Hemisphere is led by the formidable Department at Yale University, from which it has spread to conquer most of the English-literature departments in the United States and Canada. The essential message of deconstructionism and hermeneutics can be variously summed up as nihilism, relativism, and solipsism. That is, either there is no objective truth or, if there is, we can never discover it. With each person being bound to his own subjective views, feelings, history, and so on, there is no method of discovering objective truth. In literature, the most elemental procedure of literary criticism (that is, trying to figure out what a given author meant to say) becomes impossible. Communication between writer and reader similarly becomes hopeless; furthermore, not only can no reader ever figure out what an author meant to say, but even the author does not know or understand what he himself meant to say, so fragmented, confused, and driven is each particular individual. So, since it is impossible to figure out what Shakespeare, Conrad, Plato, Aristotle, or Machiavelli meant, what becomes the point of either reading or writing literary or philosophical criticism?

 

It is an interesting question, one that the deconstructionists and other hermeneuticians have of course not been able to answer. By their own avowed declaration, it is impossible for deconstructionists to understand literary texts or, for example, for Gadamer to understand Aristotle, upon whom he has nevertheless written on at enormous length. As the English philosopher Jonathan Barnes has pointed out in his brilliant and witty critique of hermeneutics, Gadamer, not having anything to say about Aristotle or his works, is reduced to reporting his own subjective musings — a sort of lengthy account of "what Aristotle means to me." Setting aside the hermeneutical problem of whether or not Gadamer can know even what Aristotle means to him, we push back the problem another notch. Namely, why in the world should anyone but Gadamer, except possibly his mother or wife, be in the least interested in the question of what Aristotle means to him? And even in the improbable event that we were interested in this earth-shattering question, we would in any case be prevented on hermeneutical principles from understanding Gadamer's answer.

 

Deconstruction and hermeneutics are clearly self-refuting on many levels. If we cannot understand the meaning of any texts, then why are we bothering with trying to understand or to take seriously the works or doctrines of authors who aggressively proclaim their own incomprehensibility?

 

Incomprehensibility

 

Indeed, a crucial point about the hermeneuticians is that, for them, incomprehensibility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a colleague of mine ruefully told me: "I have read everything on hermeneutics I can lay my hands on, and I understand no more about it than I did when I first started." Even in a profession — philosophy — not exactly famous for its sparkle or lucidity, one of the most remarkable qualities of the hermeneuticians is their horrendous and incomparably murky style. Stalactites and stalagmites of jargon words are piled upon each other in a veritable kitchen midden of stupefying and meaningless prose. Hermeneuticians seem to be incapable of writing a clear English, or indeed a clear German sentence. Critics of hermeneutics — such as Jonathan Barnes or David Gordon —are understandably moved to satire, to stating or quoting hermeneutical tracts and then "translating" them into simple English, where invariably they are revealed as either banal or idiotic.

 

 

At first, I thought that these German hermeneuticians were simply ill-served by their translators into English. But my German friends assure me that Heidegger, Gadamer, et al. are equally unintelligible in the original. Indeed, in a recently translated essay, Eric Voegelin, a philosopher not normally given to scintillating wit, was moved to ridicule Heidegger's language. Referring to Heidegger's master work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), Voegelin refers to the meaningless but insistent repetition of a veritable philosophical dictionary of phrases as the Anwesen des Answesenden ("the presence of that which is present"), the Dingen des Dings ("the thinging of the thing"), the Nichten des Nichts ("the nothinging of the nothing"), and finally to the zeigenden Zeichen des Zeigzeugs ("the Pointing sign of the pointing implement"), all of which is designed, says Voegelin, to whip up the reader "into a reality-withdrawing state of linguistic delirium."

 

On Gadamer and the hermeneuticians, Jonathan Barnes writes:

 

 

What, then, are the characteristic features of hermeneutical philosophy? Its enemies will wade in with adjectives like empty, vapid, dreamy, woolly, rhetorical. Gadamer himself tells an uncharacteristic story. At the end of a seminar on Cajetan, Heidegger once startled his devoted audience by posing the question: "What is being?" "We sat there staring and shaking our heads over the absurdity of the question." Quite right too, say the enemies of hermeneutics: the question is perfectly absurd. But Gadamer has only a frail sense of the absurd, and his own readers ought to react as he once — but alas, only once — reacted to Heidegger.

 

Barnes goes on to say that Gadamer admits "that his thought has sometimes been less than pellucid." He further quotes Gadamer as saying:

 

 

Certainly I sometimes spoke over my pupils' heads and put too many complications into my train of thought. Even earlier my friends had invented a new scientific measure, the "Gad," which designated a settled measure of unnecessary complications.

 

Barnes adds that:

 

 

Some may prefer to this self-congratulatory little story a remark which Gadarner makes of his younger self: "Despite my title of doctor, I was still a 22-year old boy who thought rather murky thinking, and who still did not really know what was going on."

 

Barnes adds: "Did the boy ever grow up?"

 

At this point we may cite Sir Karl Popper on G.W.F. Hegel, who counts along with Friedrich Schleiermacher as at least a great-grandfather of hermeneutics. What Popper lacks in satiric gifts he makes up in the vehemence of the scorn that he heaps upon the legion of his philosophical enemies, real or imagined. After denouncing Hegel's "high-flown gibberish" and "imbecile fancies," Popper quotes with obvious relish the attack on Hegel by his contemporary Schopenhauer as:

 

 

a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before.

 

Why this enormous acclaim and influence exerted by mystifying nonsense? In addition to noting its establishment in the interests of the Prussian state, Popper offers the following explanation:

 

 

For some reason, philosophers have kept around themselves, even in our day, something of the atmosphere of the magician. Philosophy is considered a strange and abstruse kind of thing, dealing with those mysteries with which religion deals, but not in a way which can be "revealed unto babes" or to common people; it is considered to be too profound for that, and to be the religion and theology of the intellectuals, of the learned and wise.

 

For a final citation on the incomprehensibility of hermeneutics, let us turn to the witty and devastating demolition by H.L. Mencken of Thorstein Veblen, another early protohermeneutician and an institutionalist opponent of the idea of economic law. In the course of an essay featuring the "translation" into English of Veblen's indecipherable prose, Mencken wrote that what was truly remarkable about Veblen's ideas:

 

 

was the astoundingly grandiose and rococo manner of their statement, the almost unbelievable tediousness and flatulence of the gifted headmaster's prose, his unprecedented talent for saying nothing in an august and heroic manner.…

 

Marx, I daresay, had said a good deal of it long before him, and what Marx overlooked had been said over and over again by his heirs and assigns. But Marx, at this business, labored under a technical handicap; he wrote in German, a language he actually understood. Prof. Veblen submitted himself to no such disadvantage. Though born, I believe, in these States, and resident here all his life, he achieved the effect, perhaps without employing the means, of thinking in some unearthly foreign language — say Swahili, Sumerian or Old Bulgarian — and then painfully clawing his thoughts into a copious and uncertain but book-learned English. The result was a style that affected the higher cerebral centers like a constant roll of subway expresses. The second result was a sort of bewildered numbness of the senses, as before some fabulous and unearthly marvel. And the third result, if I make no mistake, was the celebrity of the professor as a Great Thinker.

 

Collectivism

 

Marx, in fact, has been hailed by the hermeneuticians as one of the grandfathers of the movement. In 1985, for example, at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Las Vegas, virtually every paper offered in political theory was a hermeneutical one. A paradigmatic title would be "Political Life as a Text: Hermeneutics and Interpretation in Marx, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Foucault." (Substitute freely such names as Ricoeur and Derrida, with an occasional bow to Habermas.)

 

 

I do not believe it an accident that Karl Marx is considered one of the great hermeneuticians. This century has seen a series of devastating setbacks to Marxism, to its pretensions to "scientific truth," and to its theoretical propositions as well as to its empirical assertions and predictions. If Marxism has been riddled both in theory and in practice, then what can Marxian cultists fall back on? It seems to me that hermeneutics fits very well into an era that we might, following a Marxian gambit about capitalism, call "late Marxism" or Marxism-in-decline. Marxism is not true and is not science, but so what? The hermeneuticians tell us that nothing is objectively true, and therefore that all views and propositions are subjective, relative to the whims and feelings of each individual.

 

So why should Marxian yearnings not be equally as valid as anyone else's? By the way of hermeneutics, these yearnings cannot be subject to refutation. And since there is no objective reality, and since reality is created by every man's subjective interpretations, then all social problems reduce to personal and nonrational tastes. If, then, hermeneutical Marxists find capitalism ugly and unlovely, and they find socialism beautiful, why should they not attempt to put their personal esthetic preferences into action? If they feel that socialism is beautiful, what can stop them, especially since there are no laws of economics or truths of political philosophy to place obstacles in their path?

 

It is no accident that, with the exception of a handful of contemporary economists — who will be treated further later — every single hermeneutician, past and present, has been an avowed collectivist, either of the left- or right-wing variety, and sometimes veering from one collectivism to another in accordance with the realities of power. Marx, Veblen, Schmoller, and the German Historical school are well known. As for the modern hermeneuticians, Heidegger found it all too easy to become an enthusiastic Nazi once the Nazi regime had been established. And Gadamer had no difficulty whatever adapting either to the Nazi regime (where he was known for having only a "loose sympathy" with the Third Reich) or to the Soviet occupation in East Germany (where, in his own words, he won "the special esteem of the Russian cultural authorities" for carrying out "their directives exactly, even against my own convictions").

 

"Openness" and Keeping the "Conversation" Going

 

Here we must note two variants of the common hermeneutical theme. On the one hand are the candid relativists and nihilists, who assert, with an inconsistently absolutist fervor, that there is no truth. These hold with the notorious dictum of the epistemological anarchist Paul Feyerabend that "anything goes." Anything, be it astronomy or astrology, is of equal validity or, rather, equal invalidity. The one possible virtue of the "anything goes" doctrine is that at least everyone can abandon the scientific or philosophic enterprise and go fishing or get drunk. This virtue, however, is rejected by the mainstream hermeneuticians, because it would put an end to their beloved and interminable "conversation."

 

In short, the mainstream hermeneuticians do not like the "anything goes" dictum because, instead of being epistemological anarchists, they are epistemological pests. They insist that even though it is impossible to arrive at objective truth or indeed even to understand other theorists or scientists, that we all still have a deep moral obligation to engage in an endless dialogue or, as they call it, "conversation" to try to arrive at some sort of fleeting quasi-truth. To the hermeneutician, truth is the shifting sands of subjective relativism, based on an ephemeral "consensus" of the subjective minds engaging in the endless conversation. But the worst thing is that the hermeneuticians assert that there is no objective way, whether by empirical observation or logical reasoning, to provide any criteria for such a consensus.

 

Since there are no rational criteria for agreement, any consensus is necessarily arbitrary, based on God-knows-what personal whim, charisma of one or more of the conversationalists, or perhaps sheer power and intimidation. Since there is no criterion, the consensus is subject to instant and rapid change, depending on the arbitrary mindset of the participants or, of course, a change in the people constituting the eternal conversation.

 

 

A new group of hermeneutical economists, eager to find some criteria for consensus, have latched onto a Gestalt-like phrase of the late economist Fritz Machlup, perhaps taking his name very much in vain. They call this criterion the "Aha! principle," meaning that the truth of a proposition is based on the exclamation of "Aha!" that the proposition may arouse in someone's breast. As Don Lavoie and Jack High put it: "We know a good explanation when we see one, and when it induces us to say aha." Somehow I do not find this criterion for truth, or even for consensus, very convincing. For example, many of us would find the prospect of being confronted with the option of engaging in endless and necessarily fruitless conversation with people unable to write a clear sentence or express a clear thought to be the moral equivalent of Sartre's No Exit.

 

Furthermore, I have a hunch that if someone came up with the proposition: "It would be a great thing to give these guys a dose of objective reality over the head" or at the very least to slam the door on their conversation, that this would elicit many more fervent "Ahas!" than the murky propositions of the hermeneuticians themselves.

 

The prime moral duty proclaimed by the hermeneuticians is that we must at all times keep the conversation going. Since this duty is implicit, it is never openly defended, and so we fail to be instructed why it is our moral obligation to sustain a process that yields such puny and ephemeral results. In keeping with this alleged virtue, the hermeneuticians are fervently and dogmatically opposed to "dogmatism" and they proclaim the supreme importance of remaining endlessly "open" to everyone in the dialogue. Gadamer has proclaimed that the highest principle of hermeneutic philosophy is "holding oneself open in a conversation," which means always recognizing "in advance, the possible correctness, even the superiority of the conversation partner's position." But, as Barnes points out, it is one thing to be modestly skeptical of one's own position; it is quite another to refuse to dismiss any other position as false or mischievous. Barnes points out that the modest skeptic:

 

 

recognizes that he himself may always be wrong. Gadamer's "open" philosopher allows that his opponent may always be right. A modest skeptic may … indeed, in his modest way, regard the history of philosophy as a ceaseless campaign, marked by frequent defeats and occasional triumphs, against the ever powerful forces of fallacy and falsehood.… [W]ith some opponents he will not be "open": he will be quite sure that they are wrong.

 

The most important hermeneutical philosopher in the United States is Richard Rorty, who, in his celebrated book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, devotes considerable space to the prime importance of "keeping the conversation going." In his sparkling critique of Rorty, Henry Veatch points out that, to the crucial question of how can we conversationalists ever know which ideals or "cultural posits" (in the Rortian language) are better than others, "Rorty could only answer that, of course, there can't be any such thing as knowledge in regard to matters such as these." So, if there is no knowledge and, hence, no objective criteria for arriving at positions, we must conclude, in the words of Veatch, that "although Aristotle may well have taught that 'philosophy begins in wonder,' … present-day philosophy can only end in a total conceptual or intellectual permissiveness." In short, we end with the Feyerabendian "anything goes" or, to use the admiring phrase of Arthur Danto in his summary of Nietzsche, that "everything is possible." Or, in a word, total "openness."

 

But if all things are open, and there are no criteria to guide conversationalists to any conclusions, how will such conclusions be made? It seems to me, following Veatch, that these decisions will be made by those with the superior Will-to-Power. And so it is not a coincidence that leading hermeneuticians have found themselves flexible and "open" in response to the stern demands of state power. After all, if Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot enters the "conversational" circle, they cannot be rejected out of hand, for they too may offer a superior way to consensus. If nothing is wrong and all things are open, what else can we expect? And who knows, even these rulers may decide, in a sardonic burst of Marcusean "repressive tolerance," to keep some sort of Orwellian "conversation" going in the midst of a universal gulag.

 

In all the blather about openness, I am reminded of a lecture delivered by Professor Marjorie Hope Nicholson at Columbia University in 1942. In a critique of the concept of the open mind, she warned: "Don't let your mind be so open that everything going into it falls through."

 

There is another self-serving aspect to the hermeneutical demands for universal openness. For if nothing — no position, no doctrine — can be dismissed outright as false or mischievous or as blithering nonsense, then they too, our hermeneuticians, must be spared such rude dismissal. Keeping the conversation going at all costs means that these people must eternally be included. And that is perhaps the unkindest cut of all.

 

If one reads the hermeneuticians, furthermore, it becomes all too clear that typically no one sentence follows from any other sentence. In other words, not only is the style abominable, but there is no reasoning in support of the conclusions. Since logic or reasoning are not considered valid by the hermeneuticians, this procedure is not surprising. Instead, for reasoning the hermeneuticians substitute dozens or scores of books, which are cited, very broadly, in virtually every paragraph. To support their statements, the hermeneuticians will list repeatedly every book that might possibly or remotely relate to the topic. In short, their only argument is from authority, an ancient philosophic fallacy which they seem to have triumphantly revived. For indeed, if there is no truth of reality, if for logic or experience, we must substitute a fleeting consensus of the subjective whims, feelings, or power plays of the various conversationalists, then what else is there but to muster as many conversationalists as possible as your supposed authorities?

 

Armed with their special method, the hermeneuticians are therefore able to dismiss all attacks upon themselves, no matter how perceptive or penetrating, as "unscholarly." This lofty rebuttal stems from their unique definition of scholarly, which for them means ponderous and obscurantist verbiage surrounded by a thicket of broad citations to largely irrelevant books and articles.

So why then have not the distinguished critics of hermeneutics played the game on their opponents' own turf and waded through the mountains and oceans of hogwash, patiently to cite and refute the hermeneuticians point by point and journal article by journal article? To ask that question is virtually to answer it.

 

In fact, we have asked some of the critics this question, and they immediately responded in a heartfelt manner that they do not propose to dedicate the rest of their lives to wading through this miasma of balderdash. Moreover, to do so, to play by the hermeneuticians' own rules, would be to grant them too much honor. It would wrongfully imply that they are indeed worthy participants in our conversation. What they deserve instead is scorn and dismissal. Unfortunately, they do not often receive such treatment in a world in which all too many intellectuals seem to have lost their built-in ability to detect pretentious claptrap.

 

Hermeneutical Economics

 

"The hermeneuticians are able to dismiss all attacks upon themselves, no matter how perceptive or penetrating, as 'unscholarly.'"

 

Economists like to think of their discipline as the "hardest" of the social sciences, and so it is no surprise that hermeneutics — though having conquered the field of literature and made severe inroads into philosophy, political thought, and history — has yet made very little dent in economics. But the economics discipline has been in a state of methodological confusion for over a decade, and in this crisis situation minority methodologies, now including hermeneutics, have begun to offer their wares in the economics profession; of course, the practitioners down in the trenches only loosely reflect, or indeed have scarcely any interest in, the small number of methodological reflections in the upper stories of the ivory tower.

 

But these seemingly remote philosophical musings do have an important long-run influence on the guiding theories and directions of the discipline. For approximately two decades, Lionel Robbins's justly famous The Nature and Significance of Economic Science was the guiding methodological work of the profession, presenting a watered-down version of the praxeological method of Ludwig von Mises. Robbins had studied at Mises's famous privatseminar at Vienna, and his first edition (1932) stressed economics as a deductive discipline based on the logical implications of the universal facts of human action (for example, that human beings try to achieve goals by using necessarily scarce means). In Robbins's more widely known second edition (1935), the Misesian influence was watered down a bit further, coupled with intimations no bigger than a man's hand of the neo-classical formalism that would hit the profession about the time of World War II. After the war, the older economics was inundated by an emerging formalistic and mathematical neoclassical synthesis, of Walrasian equations covering microeconomics and Keynesian geometry taking care of macro.

 

Aiding and abetting the conquest of economics by the new neo-classical synthesis was the celebrated article by Milton Friedman in 1953, "The Methodology of Positive Economics," which quickly swept the board, sending Robbins's Nature and Significance unceremoniously into the dustbin of history. For three decades, secure and unchallenged, the Friedman article remained virtually the only written portrayal of official methodology for modern economics.

 

It should be noted that, as in the triumph of the Keynesian revolution and many other conquests by various schools of economics, the Friedman article did not win the hearts and minds of economists in the pattern of what we might call the Whig theory of the history of science: by patient refutation of competing or prevailing doctrines. As in the case of the Mises-Hayek business-cycle theory dominant before Keynes's General Theory, the Robbins book was not refuted; it was simply passed over and forgotten. Here the Thomas Kuhn theory of successive paradigms is accurate on the sociology or process of economic thought, deplorable as it might be as a prescription for the development of a science. Too often in philosophy or the social sciences, schools of thought have succeeded each other as whim or fashion, much as one style of ladies' hemlines has succeeded another. Of course, in economics as in other sciences of human action, more sinister forces, such as politics and the drive for power, often deliberately skew the whims of fashion in their own behalf.

 

What Milton Friedman did was to import into economics the doctrine that had dominated philosophy for over a decade, namely logical positivism. Ironically, Friedman imported logical positivism at just about the time when its iron control over the philosophical profession in the United States had already passed its peak. For three decades, we have had to endure the smug insistence on the vital importance of empirical testing of deductions from hypotheses as a justification for the prevalence of econometric models and forecasting, as well as a universal excuse for theory being grounded on admittedly false and wildly unrealistic hypotheses. For neoclassical economic theory clearly rests on absurdly unrealistic assumptions, such as perfect knowledge, the continuing existence of a general equilibrium with no profits, no losses, and no uncertainty, and human action being encompassed by the use of calculus that assumes infinitesimally tiny changes in our perceptions and choices.

 

In short, this formidable apparatus of neoclassical mathematical economic theory and econometric models, all rests, from the Misesian point of view, upon the treacherous quicksand of false and even absurd assumptions. This Austrian charge of falsity and unreality, if noticed at all, was for decades loftily rebutted by pointing to Friedman's article and asserting that falsity of assumptions and premises do not matter, so long as the theory "predicts" properly. In its founding years in the early 1930s, the Econometric Society emblazoned on its escutcheon the motto, "Science is prediction," and this was the essence of the Friedman-derived defense of neoclassical theory. Austrians such as Mises and Hayek replied that the disciplines of human action are not like the physical sciences. In human affairs, there are no laboratories where variables can be controlled and theories tested, while (unlike the physical sciences) there are no quantitative constants in a world where there is consciousness, freedom of will, and freedom to adopt values and goals and then to change them. These Austrian contentions were dismissed by neoclassicals as simply posing a greater degree of difficulty in arriving at the human sciences, but not in offering a troublesome difference in kind.

 

The neoclassical synthesis, however, began, in the early 1970s, to lose its power either to understand or to predict what was going on in the economy. The inflationary recession that first appeared dramatically in the 1973 — 74 contraction put an end to a 35-year period of arrogant and unquestioned hegemony by the Keynesian wing of the neoclassical synthesis. For Keynesian theory and policy rested on the crucial assumption that inflationary recession simply cannot happen. At that point, Friedmanite monetarism came to the fore, but monetarism has now come a cropper after making a rapid series of disastrously wrong predictions from the beginning of the Reagan era until the present. But he who lives by prediction is destined to die by prediction.

 

In addition to these failures of Keynesianism and monetarism, the blunders and errors of econometric forecasting have become too notorious to ignore, and a wealthy and supremely arrogant profession, using ever higher-speed computer models, seems to enjoy less and less ability to forecast even the immediate future. Even governments, despite the assiduous attention and aid of top neoclassical economists and forecasters, seem to have great difficulties in forecasting their own spending, much less their own incomes, let alone the incomes or spending of anyone else.

 

Amid these failures, there has been a chipping away at the neoclassical formalism of Walrasian microeconomics, sometimes by disillusioned leaders operating from within this ruling paradigm.

 

As a result of these problems and failures, the last 10 or 15 years has seen the development of a classic Kuhnian "crisis situation" in the field of economics. As the positivist neoclassical orthodoxy begins to crumble, competing paradigms have emerged. Sparked also by Hayek's receipt of a Nobel Prize in 1974, Austrian or Misesian economics has enjoyed a revival since then, with numerous Austrians teaching in colleges in the United States and Britain. Recently there have even emerged five or six Austrian graduate programs or centers in the United States.

 

In a crisis situation, of course, the bad jostles the good in the new atmosphere of epistemological and substantive diversity. No one ever guaranteed that if a hundred flowers should bloom, that they would all be passing fair. On the left, the nontheory of institutionalism has made a bit of a comeback, jostled by "post-Keynesians" (inspired by Joan Robinson) and "humanistic" neo-Marxists who have substituted a vague adherence to "decentralization" and protection of all animal and vegetable life forms for the rigors of the labor theory of value. Which brings us back to hermeneutics.

 

For in this sort of atmosphere, even the underworld of hermeneutics will vie for its day in the sun. Probably the most prominent hermeneutical economist in the United States is Donald McCloskey, who calls his viewpoint "rhetoric" and whose attack on truth occurs in the name of rhetoric and of the eternal hermeneutical conversation. McCloskey, unfortunately, follows the modern path of rhetoric run hog-wild and divorced from a firm anchor in truth, overlooking the Aristotelian tradition of "noble rhetoric" as the most efficient way of persuading people of correct and true propositions. For Aristotelians, it is only "base" rhetoric that is divorced from true principles. McCloskey is now organizing a center for rhetorical studies at the University of Iowa, which will organize volumes on rhetoric in a number of diverse disciplines.

(위의  Donald McCloskey는 여자로 성전환 수술을 받은 후 Deirdre McCloskey로 개명했다.)

   

Much as I deplore hermeneutics, I have a certain amount of sympathy for McCloskey, an economic historian who endured years as a drill instructor and cadre leader in the Friedman-Stigler Chicago school's positivist ranks. McCloskey is reacting against decades of arrogant positivist hegemony, of an alleged "testing" of economic theory that never really takes place, and of lofty statements by positivists that "I do not understand what you mean," when they know darn well what you mean but disagree with it, and who use their narrow criteria of meaning to dismiss your argument. In this way, the positivists for a long while were able to read virtually all important philosophical questions out of court and consign them to the despised departments of religion and belles lettres. In a sense, the rise of hermeneutics is those departments' revenge, retorting to the positivists that if "science" is only the quantitative and the "testable," then we shall swamp you with stuff that is really meaningless.

 

"Our Market Process hermeneuticians should be warned that there may be worse things in this world than mathematics or even positivism."

 

It is more difficult to excuse the path traveled by the major group of hermeneuticians in economics, a cluster of renegade Austrians and ex-Misesians gathered in the Center for Market Processes at George Mason University. The spiritual head of this groupuscule, Don Lavoie, has reached the pinnacle of having his photograph printed in his magazine Market Process talking to the great Gadamer. Lavoie has organized a Society for Interpretive Economics (interpretation is a code word for hermeneutics) to spread the new gospel, and has had the effrontery to deliver a paper entitled "Mises and Gadamer on Theory and History," which, as a colleague of mine has suggested, is the moral equivalent of my writing a paper entitled "Lavoie and Hitler on the Nature of Freedom."

 

It must be noted that nihilism had seeped into current Austrian thought before Lavoie and his colleagues at the Center for Market Processes embraced it with such enthusiasm. It began when Ludwig M. Lachmann, who had been a disciple of Hayek in England in the 1930s and who had written a competent Austrian work entitled Capital and Its Structure in the 1950s, was suddenly converted by the methodology of the English economist George Shackle during the 1960s. Since the mid-1970s, Lachmann, teaching part of every year at New York University, has engaged in a crusade to bring the blessings of randomness and abandonment of theory to Austrian economics. When Lavoie and his colleagues discovered Heidegger and Gadamer, Lachmann embraced the new creed at the 1986 first annual (and, if luck is with us, the last annual) conference of the Society of Interpretive Economics at George Mason University. The genuine Misesian creed, however, still flourishes at the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University and in its publications: The Free Market, the Austrian Economics Newsletter, and the Review of Austrian Economics, which in its first issue included a critique of a quasi-hermeneutical book by two ex-Misesians who claim to have discovered the key to economics in the works of Henri Bergson.

 

One of the main motivations of the ex-Misesian hermeneuticians is that their horror of mathematics, to which they react as to the head of Medusa, leads them to embrace virtually any ally in their struggle against positivism and neoclassical formalism. And so they find that, lo and behold, institutionalists, Marxists, and hermeneuticians have very little use for mathematics either. But before they totally embrace the desperate creed that the enemy of my enemy is necessarily my friend, our Market Process hermeneuticians should be warned that there may be worse things in this world than mathematics or even positivism. And second, that in addition to Nazism or Marxism, one of these things may be hermeneutics.

 

And just as Professor McCloskey's history may serve as a partial mitigation of his embrace of hermeneutics, we may go further back and mitigate the sins of the logical positivists. For, after all, the positivists, much as they may be reluctant to admit it, also did not descend upon us from Mount Olympus. They grew up in old Vienna, and they found themselves in a Germanic world dominated by protohermeneutical creeds such as Hegelianism as well as by the young Heidegger, who was even then making his mark. After reading and listening to dialectics and protohermeneutics day in and day out, after being immersed for years in the gibberish that they were told constituted philosophy, is it any wonder that they — including for our purposes Popper as well as Carnap, Reichenbach, Schlick, et al. — should finally lash out and exclaim that the whole thing was meaningless or that they should cry out for precision and clarity in language? Is it also any wonder that the nascent positivists, like McCloskey a half-century later, should go too far and throw out the philosophic baby with the neo-Hegelian bathwater?

 

This article originally appeared in Review of Austrian Economics 3 (1989): 45 — 59 (available in PDF) and was adapted from a paper delivered at a Conference on Recent Trends in the Social Sciences held by the London Academic and Cultural Resources Fund and the Institute of Philosophy of the Jagellonian University of Krakow at Krakow, Poland, in April 1987.

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   MK Lee

30일자 트럼프 대통령 페이스북, 은혜도 모르는 남한 반미권력에 대해 노골적 경고.

"한국을 보라. 우리는 한국에 엄청난 군인들을 보내 국경을 지켜주고 있지만, 제대로 대가로 지불받지 못하고 있다.
그렇지 않은가?"

틀린 말 하나 없다.

남의 나라 금쪽 같은 젊은이들 수만, 수십만의 희생으로 지킨 게 한반도 남쪽 대한민국이다.
덕택에 우리는 자유와 번영을 누렸다.

그런데 이제는 이 체제수호의 최후 보루인 헌법과 자유민주주의, 한미동맹 근간까지 파괴하려 들며,
오직 인류 최악 전체주의 학살세습수령권력 양아치들과 '우리민족끼리' 만 중시하며
멋대로 우리 혈세로 대북 퍼주기나 재개하려 들고, 사회주의적 개헌 음모나 획책하는 금수만도 못한
배은망덕한 자들이 자신들을 진보와 인권, 민주의 대명사인양 포장하며 국가 권력을 사취했다.
가장 청렴한 애국자들은 온갖 오욕과 누명을 뒤집어 쓰고 부당하게 감옥에 갇혔다.

이런 불의가 계속되는 땅은 마땅히 그 대가를 치를 천벌을 부른다.
우리가 치러야 할 숙명이면 어쩔 수 없다.

타락한 언론, 무능한 기회주의 국회 및 사법부 같은 수명 다한 부패한 제도권과 결탁한
희대의 사기 탄핵, 부정선거 논란의 진실과 촛불혁명권력의 실체가 드러날 날, 상상을 초월할
간첩 명단이 발표될 날이 멀지 않았다.
누가 이기는지, 끝까지 가보자.

[양양가(襄陽歌)]
인생(人生)의 목숨은 초로(草露)와 같고
조국(祖國)의 앞날은 양양(襄陽)하도다
이 몸이 죽어서 나라가 산다면
아~! 아~! 이슬 같이 기꺼이 죽으리라~

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[격동의 한반도-전문가 진단⑪] 이지수 "北, 붕괴 직전 폭풍전야...대화가 상황 못바꿔"

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음식으로 그린 그림

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자서전 작가가 스페인 군인 시절 1920년대 초에 모로코의 사창가에 갔는데, 유태인이었던 포주가 쇠로 된 열쇠를 갖고 있었다고 한다. 그런데 그 열쇠는 1492년 유태인들이 스페인에서 추방될 때, 그녀의 조상이 살던 집의 열쇠였다고 한다. 무려 400년을 넘게 옛날 스페인에 있던 집의 열쇠를 보관하고 있었던 것이다!

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