From an anarcho-capitalist and Austrian perspective, the attack of these subjects is severe. The core criticism is that welfare economics often dresses political value judgments in mathematics and presents the result as scientific optimization.
The Austrian objection starts earlier than the libertarian one.
There is no measurable quantity called âoesocial welfare.â
You value a steak dinner. I value the money more. We trade. Both reveal, through action, that each prefers the new situation.
Economics observes the voluntary exchange.
Now a welfare economist writes something like:
Social welfare = Aliceâ(TM)s utility + Bobâ(TM)s utility + Charlieâ(TM)s utility.
The Austrian response is: what units are you adding?
Utility is ordinal. You prefer A to B. This does not mean your satisfaction is 17.3 units and mine is 12.8 units.
You cannot scientifically establish that taking $1,000 from one person causes less lost utility than giving the money to another person creates.
You can support redistribution as a moral or political position. But calling the resulting calculation a social welfare function does not transform the moral judgment into an objective measurement.
âoeSociety choosesâ is dangerous language.
Individuals choose. Individuals act. Individuals own things. Individuals bear costs.
âoeSociety decided to spend $10 billionâ usually means a political process selected an expenditure and taxpayers were compelled to finance it.
From an anarcho-capitalist perspective, aggregating millions of people into a fictional decision-maker hides the essential question:
Who decided?
Who pays?
Who benefits?
Who refused?
What happens to the person who says no?
Social choice theory deserves some credit here. Its own results expose serious problems with turning individual preferences into a coherent âoewill of the people.â
The Condorcet paradox shows that majority preferences can cycle. Arrowâ(TM)s theorem shows that no general ranking system satisfies several attractive conditions simultaneously.
The anarcho-capitalist reaction is almost sarcastic: you spent decades proving mathematically that there is no coherent social preference ordering, then continued discussing how experts should optimize social welfare.
Pareto efficiency is much narrower than political rhetoric suggests.
Pareto efficiency has a legitimate analytical meaning. The trouble starts when economists move from voluntary exchange to hypothetical compensation.
Suppose a regulation gives Group A benefits economists estimate at $100 million and imposes costs of $60 million on Group B.
Some welfare analysis says the policy produces a $40 million net social gain.
The libertarian response is simple: Group B lost $60 million. Did anyone ask them?
If A gains $100 and B loses $60, saying âoesociety gained $40â treats separate people as entries in one accounting ledger.
An anarcho-capitalist rejects the premise. A benefit to one person does not cancel an imposed loss on another person merely because an economist performs subtraction.
The knowledge problem destroys the fantasy of optimization.
This is the Austrian argument associated especially with Friedrich Hayek.
Economic knowledge is dispersed. Prices contain information produced by millions of independent decisions. Preferences change. Local circumstances change. Resources have competing uses.
A central analyst does not possess the information needed to calculate the âoeoptimalâ allocation.
A market does not require one person to know everything. Prices coordinate plans without a central mind directing the entire system.
Welfare economics often asks, âoeWhat allocation maximizes welfare?â
The Austrian response is, âoeYou do not know the relevant preferences, opportunity costs, entrepreneurial discoveries, future alternatives, or counterfactual prices required to answer your own question.â
The calculation problem is worse without genuine market prices.
This is the argument strongly associated with Ludwig von Mises.
A bureaucrat deciding whether resources should produce railways, hospitals, housing, batteries, or server farms needs meaningful prices for capital goods.
Those prices emerge from exchange, private ownership, profit, and loss.
Without genuine market pricing, planners are not optimizing. They are allocating according to administrative rules, political pressure, historical budgets, lobbying, and guesswork.
A spreadsheet does not solve the economic calculation problem. More computing power does not solve a missing-price problem.
âoeMarket failureâ analysis often compares reality with an imaginary perfect market.
This is one of the strongest libertarian criticisms.
The usual pattern is:
Real markets have imperfect information, transaction costs, externalities, monopolistic tendencies, and unequal outcomes.
Therefore, government intervention might improve the result.
The missing step is institutional comparison.
Government officials also have imperfect information. Regulation has compliance costs. Voters are rationally ignorant. Agencies seek larger budgets. Politicians respond to concentrated interest groups. Regulations create unintended consequences.
The relevant comparison is not:
imperfect market versus perfect government.
The relevant comparison is:
imperfect market process versus imperfect political process.
Once you make that comparison, many clean textbook conclusions become much weaker.
Social choice theory accidentally supplies ammunition to libertarians.
This field is less inherently collectivist than welfare economics.
Social choice theory demonstrates that collective decision mechanisms have deep structural problems.
Majority rule can cycle.
Agenda setters can influence outcomes.
Strategic voting changes results.
Different voting systems produce different winners from the same underlying preferences.
There is no neutral mechanism for converting individual rankings into a single collective preference under all desirable conditions.
A libertarian conclusion follows naturally: if collective choice is structurally problematic, reduce the number of decisions imposed collectively. Leave more decisions with individuals, families, firms, voluntary associations, insurers, cooperatives, charities, and contractual communities.
Social choice theory often asks, âoeHow should everyone collectively choose one option?â
The anarcho-capitalist asks, âoeWhy must everyone choose the same option?â
That question cuts much deeper.
The deepest conflict concerns consent.
Mainstream welfare economics often focuses on outcomes.
Anarcho-capitalism focuses heavily on means.
Suppose forced redistribution produces a statistical improvement under some selected welfare function. The anarcho-capitalist still asks whether coercion became legitimate because an economist assigned weights to different people's utility.
From this perspective, the central problem with much welfare economics is not bad arithmetic. The problem is a category error.
Economics studies choices, scarcity, exchange, prices, production, and consequences.
The moment an economist says, âoeThis distribution is socially better,â a moral judgment has entered the analysis. The economist should identify the ethical assumptions instead of presenting them as a technical output.
The harsh Austrian verdict would be this:
Welfare economics starts with subjective individual preferences, admits they cannot be directly measured or meaningfully added across people, constructs a mathematical social welfare function anyway, inserts political judgments into its parameters, and then announces an âoeoptimalâ social outcome.
Social choice theory is more interesting because much of its best work demonstrates why the phrase âoesociety prefers Xâ is often logically unstable.
The anarcho-capitalist alternative is less ambitious and more disciplined: voluntary exchange, private property, freedom of association, decentralized decision-making, and liability for harms. Instead of trying to maximize an imaginary aggregate welfare number, allow people to pursue different goals and coordinate through consent.
The strongest criticism is not âoeall welfare economists are socialists.â Many are not. The stronger accusation is that the framework gives technocratic politics a scientific-looking vocabulary. Words such as optimization, social welfare, efficiency, and compensation criteria often conceal the real political questions: whose property is taken, who decides, who pays, and whether refusal is permitted.

Humans screw up in very different ways. They don't enter intersections and then stop if the traffic signals are out.

Humans can also coordinate with each other when things aren't working. You can't communicate with a Waymo to coordinate, they don't pick up contextual cues from other drivers' behavior, and the way they 'fail safe' really depends on everything else around them working correctly for the 'safe' part .

Having both failure modes at the same time is very likely to be a much bigger shitshow than merely panicky drivers.

They made them capable of easy-mode driving.

Now the engineers need to work on exception handling.

I mean that sincerely. These things only work when things are normal. Power failures, unmapped blockages, a roman candle in the street, even crowds turn them in to traffic blockages themselves.

Just wait until there's an actual mass casualty event - earthquake, terror, something like that, and these all things go comatose in intersections like they did in SF last year.

Oh, let's be very clear - this is completely unsuitable for "The Masses".

This is network nerd territory, overriding a well-functioning system with your personal policy preferences. Doing so is implicitly taking responsibility for any breakage, and The Masses are simply not competent to do that.

Joe Random doesn't know what an autonomous system is, and a tool tip isn't going to educate them sufficiently to make an informed choice. Non-nerds are likely to shoot themselves in the foot doing stuff like this, not realizing some transitive dependency on some random Facebook thing means they're blocking something they depend on.

Put it this way - if you have normal, nontechnical users on your network doing normal human stuff, banning Meta and Alphabet ASes will almost certainly break something they use. I'm a strange old nerd, going out of my way to break social media surveillance. That is... pretty much the opposite of most casual internet users' goals.

What ^^ said, or rolling your own isn't rocket surgery, if you're so inclined.

echo '-i origin AS32934' | nc whois.radb.net 43 | grep '^route:' should get you started if you want to go that route.

Zuckerbook surveillance is opt-out.

You do so by blocking AS32934. Block AS15169 as well and you start getting closer to a decent internet.

that phrase has no meaning, especially in this context. Who is dying of thirst in a desert and is forced to pay a huge premium not to die? Samsung should absolutely get as much money now as it possibly can, eventually the profits will reduce to a trickle, they will need all of this extra fat to survive, good for them. You can build your own memory manufacturing plant if you don't like the prices and think you can sell memory cheaper in this current market, go, do it.

The ONLY problem is that not everyone else has done so yet. Government shouldn't be allowed to tax income and profit.

I will never make an account, so I guess they want me to only access Reddit-posted content through LLMs.

Got it.

Sure. The reason for stupid ideas, like Lysenko, taking over is lack of competition, which is inherent to communism, In a capitalist system people are searching for ways to make money for themselves, so there are enough competing ideas being tried out with private money. If the money runs out before profits are made, the ideas stop. When government can keep subsidizing bad ideas they don't stop, they just keep getting bigger and more stupid.

Now there's a blast from the past.

Those shitweasels caused a lot of pain and cost a lot of money. Darl's reward was picking scraps from the SCO trash heap, bankruptcy and then croaking of ALS.

I wonder what PJ is up to.

You sound angry and jealous.

Pretty much. We use Claude where I work. We are on some kind of budget enterprise plan. So we are judicious on what we use it on. If we hit the limit for the month then we wait or request an increase with justification.

Also good because we keep using our brains instead of outsourcing everything to the robots, and that is going to be critical going forward imo.

Obviously. I am currently looking for a data provider for various IOT devices, talked to all major providers, talking to ton of others. Major providers demand that equipment is approved by their networks, in conversations this is all about keeping cheaper equipment out of the country, that's all.

Sure hope those engineers held out for a nice salary bump that should come out of the executive compensation pool, but won't.