The Two Flaws Of Libertarian Economics

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2009-01-08.html

by bdfh42 • 18 years ago

64 161 18 years ago

For impatient types like myself:

Proposed flaw #1:

That is basically the first flaw of libertarianism: If you shrink the government down to nothing and have corporations in control then you won’t have a rule of law.

Proposed flaw #2:

That leads me to the second flaw of libertarian economics: efficiency. ... economists use the term “efficiency” differently than programmers.

You see, most libertarians think of efficiency as “Fast! FAST FAST FAST!” They think it means lean and trim companies all working to gain the maximum profit with the least effort necessary.

---

Of course, at no point does Mr. Shaw prove that libertarians think this way, but that would put a stick in his spokes, I suppose, and boy, is he riding quickly down the hill of psuedo-political invective.

And as for flaw #1, libertarianism is not in any way, shape, or form, anarchy. Rather, libertarianism preaches that the government should be as small as practical.

Rod5• 18 years ago

You're right. Zed is confused.

Libertarianism is NOT Anarcho-Capitalism. Libertarianism advocates that the government should be reduced to the minimum which is necessary to protect the citizens' rights. Anarcho-Capitalism advocates that corporations should replace government.

halo• 18 years ago

But that can quickly devolve into arguments as to what counts as a 'right': the most obvious examples being food, water, shelter, healthcare and education. That 'minimum' is an arbitrary line.

cchooper8• 18 years ago

Maybe his point is that the amount of government required to protect rights is actually quite large. There's a general assumption in Libertarianism that it would be small, and he's disputing this.

stcredzero9• 18 years ago

If you need proof that Anarcho-Capitalism doesn't work, just play Eve-Online for a year in 0.0 security space.

Prrometheus3• 18 years ago

>"Libertarianism is NOT Anarcho-Capitalism."

Anarcho-capitalists would consider themselves libertarian, and many famous ones are also leading lights of the libertarian movement. Murray Rothbard is clearly a libertarian, and Lysander Spooner belongs to the classical liberal tradition that the libertarians adopt as their forefathers.

The problem is that "libertarianism" is a medium-sized tent. So when you criticize "libertarians" for position X, well some hold that position and some don't.

tjic• 18 years ago

No, anarcho-capitalism does not say that corporations should replace government. Anarcho-capitalism merely says that government should go away.

90% of everything that government does wouldn't get done at all in a free society, and the other 10% would be done by multiple competing firms.

natmaster3• 18 years ago

My thoughts: Most scientists (myself included) tend to prefer models that accurately predict the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfascZSTU4o

What Zed describes is in no way libertarianism. What the following to understand exactly what it is (HINT: It's the opposite of Libertarianism.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticytEUvVhQ

peakok• 18 years ago

There is a hypocrisy in libertarianism à la Mises. When you read his hyper-logical texts (wich should be appealing to the HN crowd btw), he claims that we should remove any sort of ideology from our political and economical systems. Reason and logic only should govern our lives, and it is the duty of economics to aim at this goal.

Sure, sounds attractive !

But there is a big assumption here, and it is that libertarianism is special and different, it's not an ideology like marxism or catholicism. It's THE way. It is the only path to reason and logic and science, because when we reduce the role of the state, we reduce the part of ideology in society. Therefore it must be the less ideological system of all, the most logical, and thus the the right one.

Of course, liberatarians turn out to be just like any other political sensibility. They agree on broad things that makes them look like unite only because they are a tiny minority in the political landscape. But like any other sensibility, you reach a point in the debate where their own camp is split up in two and they will fight each other, etc. It wouldn't be the case if it wasn't an ideology, and they would all agree on core issues like the private/public fire stations, or even health wich should be considered like any other good for some, but not for some others (I can tell because I have some libertarians friends). The above comments about the protection from plagues are very interesting. It leads to the very interesting history of sewers.

Mises is the reflect of his century when we were too optimistic about science, we believed it would soon answer all the questions even in fields that looked like non-scientific, like human organization. It turned out science is indeed good for changing our lives in an indirect way, but unfortunatly not so good outside real scientific fields. It doesn't answer philosophical questions (if such a science existed, then it would be the right one to follow for organizing human societies).

thomasmallen7• 18 years ago

You cite a single author as a representation of a vast political ideology and quickly drop in some fluff that guides the rest of your comment:

But there is a big assumption here, and it is that libertarianism is special and different...

Libertarianism is a slightly more detailed political idea than convervatism. It represents the desire for smaller government that only acts when necessary. Another core tenet is that you're free to do as you please until your actions infringe upon the rights of others.

jmtame• 18 years ago

The best solution I've heard proposed was Socially Responsible Libertarianism. Which means the public is held responsible (not the government).

So basically when pollution problems arise, for example, it is the obligation of the general public to boycott or pressure the corporation to change (instead of the government fining the corporation, which ultimately may pay for the people in office to carry out the litigation in the first place). Another downside is that the government can easily be inflated with lobbyists to carry out a corporation's dirty work.

Libertarianism by itself is flawed because many corporations will establish monopolies or duopolies, stop innovating, raise prices, and call it a day.

corentin4• 18 years ago

> Libertarianism by itself is flawed because many corporations will establish monopolies or duopolies, stop innovating, raise prices, and call it a day.

Whereas with big government, they'll never ever hire lobbyists to ask for bailouts, subsidies and protectionist legislation...

justindz• 18 years ago

This is where you attempt the defense that such activity is "initiation of force." The ability to make many varieties of libertarian philosophies practical hinges on how broadly you can handle interpreting initiation of force and the government's responsibility to stop that. Monopolistic behavior could be considered initiation of force in the sense that it unfairly and aggressively limits someone else's success or freedom for gains without right.

Then, of course, you get to decide whether drunk driving is initiation of force, whether very noisy neighbors late at night are initiating force, and so on and so forth.

This is not a critique of libertarian philosophies. Pretty much every philosophy is made practical through interpretation and compromise because life is more complicated than policy (and even poetry).

gaius4• 18 years ago

This sort of thing always happens when people who know a bit about computers stray outside their area of expertise.

hc• 18 years ago

this sort of thing is known as argument ad hominem.

gaius4• 18 years ago

Dude has just made up his own definition of a word in order to have something to rant about. What would you call it?

tome• 18 years ago

Not really: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376670

corentin4• 18 years ago

It's quite obvious that the guy has no idea what he's talking about (e.g. "Money was very quickly given to corporations with no government oversight. Exactly how libertarians would want it.")

stcredzero9• 18 years ago

Actually, it fits a pattern that's been around since the Usenet days. We computer guys are masters of our digital domains. We often think that we can instantly understand anything that's well documented. The result is that the Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Economics guys are often annoyed at the stuff we post.

Dauntless• 18 years ago

I would just like to point out that Enron pushed for deregulation and always blamed government regulation of the market for the huge price rise that followed the deregulation, even though it was made on purpose by their corporation. Check out this documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the..., it's nice to learn from history. I agree that government regulation can be as dangerous as out of control police force, but libertarians (similar to communists) are completely oblivious (sometimes on purpose) of how absurd their idealistic word is and lack basic understanding of human nature. It's better to have an open, accountable, public police force than nothing at all.

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

There's nothing like attacking something you are oblivious to.

I think I have a new maxim for the internet: Never have so many people said so much about that which they knew so little about.

(And yes, I count myself in that)

walterk12• 18 years ago

> There's nothing like attacking something you are oblivious to.

This is why, when it comes to rejecting a particular ideology, I believe you need to have adopted that ideology to the point that you genuinely grok it. If you can't replicate the mental operations that allow a subscriber to make sense of the world, what its problems are and how to solve them, and the ways they derive comfort and validation from those operations, then you're guilty of being uncharitable to their worldview. And if you're uncharitable, you're unlikely to develop an argument that demonstrates how an ideology is flawed given its own values and assumptions, or how that ideology actually conflicts with one's pre-ideological values and assumptions.

The ideologies that survive are always more resourceful at countering counterarguments than a non-grokker will expect. Which is as good a reason as any to actually try it out, first.

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Absolutely agree. Which is why the goal of any net conversation should not be to persuade, but to understand how the other ideology deals with arguments against it. That can sometimes sound like bickering, but the real goal should be understanding, not to "win" or "lose".

Retric3• 18 years ago

One of the problems with that viewpoint is reality is harsh. Pollution is a classic cases of the tragedy of the commons and all successful forms of government need to deal with this and thousands of other issues. Maximizing prosperity is something with many local minimums over the short and long term. IMO saying X is correct when you are wrong should lead to ridicule lest others assume it's a reasonable argument.

PS: Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene works as an analogy for ideologies. They don't need to help their followers as ideology only needs to propagate faster than it's killed off.

pelle4• 18 years ago

I agree as well. Too many people in the US use the term "liberal" or "socialist" without really understanding what that means. The same seems to be very much true at the moment about libertarians. Zed who I have a world of respect for doesn't seem to have the faintest idea what a libertarian is. What he describes is a centrist Republican.

I grew up a Socialist in a Socialist house hold. I spent much of my teenage years in all kinds of "important" positions in a socialist party in Denmark.

Then I became an entrepreneur and my whole world view changed. I didn't read Ayn Rand or any libertarian literature until 15 years later, but my world view changed completely during a year and I became what I later realized was a Libertarian. Most of my opinions are based on observation.

This also frustrates me sometimes with other libertarians (and in particular Republican's) is that they don't understand where socialists come from, so they often have difficulties communicating with them.

I understand all the arguments socialists make because I used to make them. But I also understand that their reasoning is based on absolutely flawed understandings of economics and human behavior.

I would recommend anyone reads Marx's Communist Manifesto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Manifesto as it expresses the basic ideas behind not just Communism, but socialism as a whole and to a somewhat smaller extent the more left wing parts of the Democratic party in the US.

It would also be useful if Republicans, "liberals" and socialist had a quick read of Adam Smith's truly profound Wealth of Nations as this is kind of the libertarian equivalent of Marx's writings. So they would actually have a clue what we believe. PJ O'Rourke wrote a pretty good cliff notes edition of it:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6743689

MaysonL• 18 years ago

To reject an ideology, you need ONLY to know that it is an ideology. Rhetorical fever: the communicable mental illness of humanity.

puzzle-out• 18 years ago

"Greenspan and friends were all major libertarians, and even Greenspan said he was full of shit." Oh well, at least that line made it worth reading.

jordanf• 18 years ago

Greenspan was a self-proclaimed libertarian who used to support a gold standard.

Of course then he gained virtually unlimited power by controlling the entire US economy. Power naturally corrupts, he renounced his views, encouraged every American to spend more than he or she possessed, artificially lowered interest rates and caused the entire housing boom.

Article is a joke. Can't believe this crap gets out there.

zzzmarcus• 18 years ago

This is, however jaded it sounds, is basically correct. Read Greenspan's book (Age of Turbulence) to get it in his own words. While he was running the fed he was definitely not a libertarian.

In fact, I'd argue that that you can't be a member of the fed and be a libertarian, their entire purpose is to artificially manipulate the economy through government... or quasi-governmental intervention.

paddy_m• 18 years ago

The thing for me is, I don't just distrust the government, I distrust large organizations in general (government, fortune 500 companies, religions), I find that they are fairly inefficient. I am not interested in replacing one inefficient system (government) with another inefficient system (corporations). I don't want a corporatist society at all, I do want a strong rule of law.

I would welcome a world where we have an efficient market, not only of companies but of governments. There is a market for governments now, but it has very high transaction costs (moving to another country is expensive and dificult, often requiring years of residency to establish yourself as a citizen). One way to make for a more efficient market for government in america would be to have a less powerful federal government, note I didn't say "and more powerful state governments", at the state level you can break it down to counties and then cities. Ideally you could have (and actually do now) a world where people choose the government they want (not so much by voting but by moving). Voting by moving sends a much more powerful message than voting at a booth.

Here's the thing, if we had a small government, there would be no point in lobbying (rent seeking) because having the government's favor wouldn't get you much. Campaign finance reform attacks the wrong side of the problem, like using insecticide around your garbage can instead of taking out trash to get rid of flies.

Notice also that zed asked for a strong rule of law. We don't have that. The result of a bank becoming insolvent is not known, sometimes they will get a bailout, sometimes they won't. Many of the regulations for financial industries wouldn't be necessary if the companies thought they would be held accountable for their actions, they didn't think they would be held accountable, and they weren't, so given that set of rules they played the game properly.

Zed alludes to a couple of concepts. I think the efficiency that he is referring to is better thought of as maximizing utility.

No one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

A state where the above is true is known as a pareto optimal state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

Sorry if this was rambling, just my thoughts.

eru2• 18 years ago

The EU (or more specifically the Schengen agreement) eases migration in Europe --- making voting by moving easier. Unfortunately they also tune down the competition between regimes by making the differences smaller.

alexandros2• 18 years ago

What most people do not see is that libertarianism is against big corporations as well as big govrnment. In fact bigcos can not exist without government support. Reducing government and allowing the market to work should result in smaller, not larger organizations, a dinosaurs to mammals transition.

nfg• 18 years ago

"In fact bigcos can not exist without government support"

That is a mighty big claim which flies in the face of practical experience.

likpok5• 18 years ago

Not that I necessarily disagree, but you could argue that in the time there have been corporations, there was also government support.

michaelkeenan2• 18 years ago

alexandros might be referring to the argument was made by Roderick Long in Cato's lead essay in November: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-long/corpora...

He points out that government funding of highways acts as a de facto subsidy of Walmart and similar chains by partly socializing the costs of shipping, making it easier to compete with local businesses; and that regulations (which large companies can more easily understand and comply with than smaller companies) provide barriers of entry to industries.

He concludes: "In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous"

(I don't have a strong opinion on this. It sounds plausible but it's a bit anecdotal for my taste.)

omouse• 18 years ago

GM? Ford? I know IBM, HP, etc. get government contracts or at least did and those count as government support. Don't forget Microsoft which was supposed to be broken up but wasn't. Also, Bell and Rogers (in Canada) who are basically allowed to have monopolies over the phone and cable lines.

Lockheed Martin and Boeing couldn't be as huge as they are without defense contracts either.

anthonyrubin2• 18 years ago

Some ways in which the government helps large corporations:

Subsidies, government contracts, regulations designed to increase barrier to entry, a legal system which favors those with more resources, beneficial legislation which can be bought through legalized bribery (lobbying and campaign contributions)

alexandros2• 18 years ago

I am sorry, I had very little time to post and did not hedge my claim appropriately. I am glad that others have stepped in and filed the gap.

The issue is that the government increases complexity and barriers to entry and therefore raising the Coase ceiling of how large an enterprise can become before being less efficient than a coalition of smaller rivals.

ngvrnd• 18 years ago

And, perhaps someone has pointed this out, but once gov't begins to regulate economic activity, the existing corporate players inevitably start to game the system. Who was it who said that truly free trade is great because it's the only ways to keep the capitalists in check?

jules• 18 years ago

Why? Intuitively I would think that this would lead to bigger corporations.

pelle4• 18 years ago

Bravo, right on.

Historically big cos use government to keep smaller competitors out.

Just look at internet businesses. They are fairly unregulated and while there are short term market leaders, these are constantly being challenged and eventually replaced by smaller more innovative competitors (90's .com vs. Google vs. yc)

Look at regulated businesses such as banking, auto and telecoms. These are examples where the bigcos itself has lobbied in most of the regulation. They have grown bigger and bigger and are now so big that "they can't fail" even though they actually did.

A truly free market (as libertarians believe we should have) in banking, auto and telecoms would have killed off citibank, gm and att years ago just as Excite, Netscape, AltaVista and others were in our business.

alecco• 18 years ago

>First off, the unstated goal of most libertarian doctrine is basically the following: > > 1. Corporations are more “efficient” than the government because of the > “natural selection” of our capitalist system. > 2. Corporations are therefore better than the government at everything. > 3. Corporations should be the government, or at least in control of it. >

and >> But that means that the only way to get government out of business is to get business into government.

>> There's already a lot of money in Libertarian think tanks; it comes from business. The explosion of dedicated Libertarian volunteerism necessary to transform the United States has yet to materialize, even though the Republican Party has harnessed an explosion of socially conservative volunteerism in the service of the same business interests that benefit from Washington's "Libertarian" bullshit factories. Money from business interests provides the only real political pressure pushing policy in a Libertarian direction.

Yes, the libertarian "movement" in USA is quite undefined. Very often statements by referents get out of the core of the concept. For example:

* Privatization of large public sectors, but not making a proper market and destroying regulation, therefore placing monopolies or oligopolies (e.g. Enron's abuse of pricing.)

* Keeping a systems of taxes and special bailouts or credit lines to large corporations that never reach small business or individuals.

* Keeping the system of immunity of owners of corporations for the behavior of the organization (something that appeared after Adam Smith, and is more aligned with his economic rivals.)

* The backers of US mainstream (alleged) Libertarians (save Ron Paul) are mostly backed by the US military-industrial complex, an industry completely against free market and almost exclusively based on tax-dollars supplied by a gigantic war-mongering government.

And the list goes on. I'm sure there are true good Libertarians but the masses seem to be enchanted , yet again, by large anti-free market interests.

IMHO, Libertarians shouldn't support any large organization as it would just replace government with similar flaws. And a true Libertarian can't be part of the Republican Party.

demallien2• 18 years ago

Hey! Put some carriage returns in there! You're screwing up the page rendering...

thomasmallen7• 18 years ago

Not his fault that "pg" hasn't implemented something along the lines of:

  pre {
      overflow: scroll; /* currently set to hidden. Why? */
      width: /* something reasonable */
  }

A little CSS goes a long way for usability.

anewaccountname5• 18 years ago

    <code style="overflow: scroll; width: 40em;"><font color="#5a5a5a">  * Privatization of large public
     **snip**
       by a gigantic war-mongering government.
     </font></code>

trickjarrett2• 18 years ago

As stated above, Libertarians are against big government and big corporations. The argument has been made that big government couldn't exist without big government.

tokenadult• 18 years ago

The person who submits quotations that way (as I did once) can fix the problem with a quick edit to remove the leading spaces. The leading spaces indicate (by HN formatting default) a block of quoted code, which will be displayed without word wrapping. Any time you edit a post or comment, you'll see the link to the formatting defaults here (the link text says "help" and appears at the lower right corner of the form for submitting the edit).

michaelkeenan2• 18 years ago

I would like to see a social news aggregation site, such as Reddit and Hacker News, focused on quality debate. Users would tag each submission with its label in Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html).

This submission, for example, would probably be tagged "Level 4: Counter-argument". And, probably, also with "Strawman".

You could filter out all submissions rated lower than Level 5 or 6 or whatever your threshold is.

chasingsparks3• 18 years ago

That would be fantastic.

pauldino• 18 years ago

And we could call it "The Argument Clinic" (Tagline: "The right room for an argument")

walterk12• 18 years ago

I actually think this sort of functionality should be present throughout all forms of online communication. If that happened, the same standards of discourse might leak into offline communication as well.

blergh2• 18 years ago

I like Zed, but this is full of bullshit. Every economist worth the name (fuck that Krugman/keynesian bullshit, read some Tyler Cowen, Peter Boettke, Steve Horwitz) knows that the Fed is to blame for the current episode of the business cycle. They printed too much money, it causes inflation and, even worse, disastrous malinvestments. In short: printing money fucks up the structure of production.

Moreover, the Fed isn't even a libertarian institution. He tries to discredit libertarianism by proclaiming that an airhead like Greenspan is a libertarian. He's not. He might once have said he was one, his actions have proven otherwise. The Fed is a government monopoly on money. And that's a bad thing.

likpok5• 18 years ago

The Fed doesn't print money. It does affect the size of the money supply, but it does this with interest rates, securities, and the reserve rate (or can do this). The reserve rate is generally not touched (it causes shocks in the money supply). The last two generally affect lending and saving rather heavily (make the interest rate high enough, it's not worth it to invest; low enough, not worth it to save).

The fact that the dollar is fiat has little to do with the problems we ran into (printed money is only a tiny fraction of the money supply).

blergh2• 18 years ago

"Printing money" is only a euphemism for "expanding the money supply." I thought that would be obvious. I know the Fed doesn't actually print the currency or mint coins.

waratuman• 18 years ago

Yes, usually I find Zed to be better able to back what he is saying. I don't know what happened this time.

davidw• 18 years ago

> fuck that Krugman/keynesian bullshit, read some Tyler Cowen

Well, there's a clear, cogent, and knowledgeable rebuttal of his points. Even for someone such as myself who is not a libertarian, Shaw's arguments are weak, and yet the best you could do is sling around a bunch of four letter words?

By the way, I do read Tyler Cowen, who is, by the way, much better at elucidating his point of view without resorting to profanity, and most likely has a lot more respect for smart people like Krugman and Keynes, even where he disagrees, and he is certainly not pinning blame on "The Fed":

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10...

mightybyte5• 18 years ago

Usually I agree with you on profanity. But in this case, I think its irony (in light of Zed's recent history) is amusing and actually has a point. In fact I the thought of writing a profanity-laced blog post as a rebuttal to this article actually crossed my mind.

KirinDave3• 18 years ago

I suppose a counter-argument to this is that the Fed has been coerced into doing this because the people who run it are best chums (or motivated in other ways) with the banks and lending houses that allowed this problem to spiral out of control.

chasingsparks3• 18 years ago

His article made me angry enough to write a rebuttal post. It can be found at http://justlikejesse.com/2009/01/08/re-the-two-flaws-of-libe... for all two of you that may be interested

awt• 18 years ago

Good point about gov't encouraging home ownership. It is extremely frustrating to hear all the rhetoric about the failure of capitalism and free markets when the markets are anything but free due to government subsidies designed to encourage home ownership.

biohacker42• 18 years ago

Zed's point 3 is fascism not libertarianism.

Fascism the the standard straw man to throw at libertarians.

And because I can't bare to go through this again, let me just say:

Hitler was a vegetarian, and if you're a vegetarian you're a nazi.

Good day and Goodwin!

anthonyrubin2• 18 years ago

I think Zed should stick to Ruby rants.

mightybyte5• 18 years ago

Zed's essay is actually pretty good after applying the following transformation:

sed 's/libertarian/republican/'

Without that transformation, the essay is positively enraging.

I should note that republican here refers to the republican party who at times has espoused libertarian ideas. Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

mmmurf• 18 years ago

Excellent point. There has been nothing remotely libertarian about the Bush administration.

KirinDave3• 18 years ago

This is the first well-written, lucid piece of writing on zedshaw.com in a long time, and it's actually quite good. For those of you turned off by just the name Zed Shaw, put that aside for a second. I'm not sure I agree with what he's saying, but there is no cursing, complaining about mean people, or talking about how unfair the ruby/rails community has been.

Maybe he is going to keep that no-rant promise.

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

Libertarianism is fundamentally about liberty, not efficiency or anything to do with government vs. corporations. The "unstated goal of most libertarian doctrine" is to prevent people from getting bossed around or stolen from at gunpoint. He can't even comprehend such an approach from his "let's tinker with society for optimal outcomes" political vantage point.

Prrometheus3• 18 years ago

Thank you, Zed, for debunking internet-forum libertarianism. To the non-naive libertarians among us, however, you have provided no new information.

If you have the time, you should pick up some Friedman or Hayek. Friedman's "Free to Choose" is a mass market book on libertarian economic policy. Hayek's "The Use of Information in Society" is a beautiful exposition on the function of a decentralized market. But there are plenty others.

You might also benefit from a well-reasoned, economic critique of regulation. "Regulatory capture" is a real phenomenon, as is self-serving bureaucracy. If hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and a multi-trillion dollar budget weren't enough to fix the market, there is probably something wrong with the process. "More rules and money" probably isn't going to fix things.

I can find such writing for you if you don't have the time. Drop me an email.

However, you will find that writings by competent libertarian economists are not so easy to "debunk" when compared to forum posts written by 16-year-olds. Or Misesians. Those guys are crazy.

mhartl• 18 years ago

Or Misesians. Those guys are crazy.

How so?

jpwagner• 18 years ago

See how pointless BSchool is?

logjam• 18 years ago

Zed. There are many more than two.

For starters:

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_libertarianism

Notwithstanding these and the adolescent, Platonic fantasyland in which libertarians reside, it's a source of predictable and endless amusement how libertarians perenially attempt to present (and poorly camouflage) simpleminded greed as supposed societal good.

Odd, that dishonesty. And the last eight years, if not the last three decades, further show the lie of libertarian economics.

Any libertarians celebrate the 24th anniversary of Bhopal (and all the subsequent "market corrections" of Union Carbide) back in December?

natmaster3• 18 years ago

I stopped reading when he misstated everything about Libertarianism: " 1. Corporations are more “efficient” than the government because of the “natural selection” of our capitalist system. 2. Corporations are therefore better than the government at everything. 3. Corporations should be the government, or at least in control of it."

This guy obviously not only misunderstands what Libertarism is, or Austrian economics. But also grossly misunderstands the cause of our economic collapse. I tend to trust the scientists that have models that can accurately predict the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfascZSTU4o

chasingsparks3• 18 years ago

He also misunderstands evolution; That's a greater offense.

natmaster3• 18 years ago

In case you were wondering what this guy is describing. It's basically our current system of corporatism (where corporations control government) - which is not only the very opposite of Libertarianism, it approaches Fascism. More info: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ticytEUvVhQ

sutro• 18 years ago

Zed's political commentary is a ghetto.

wustl07• 18 years ago

Maybe I missed the day where they fed us the bullshit that it all is a zero sum game. You cannot "make a fortune" at the expense of others, but only by offering others a better deal and, thereby, making them richer.

The Two Flaws Of Libertarian Economics

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