The Mises Institute...
absolutely loves to go over the top throwing around terms like "evil" and "heroic." (They even called ME heroic once or twice!) But they're really outdone themselves this time, as Daniel Kuehn notes.
Libertarians, My Libertarians!
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
The title by itself is not really a big deal; severed from anything else, it reads like comic exaggeration. Unfortunately, the contents of the post make it clear that Tucker was not in a particularly jocular mood.
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ReplyDeleteRe "heroic" ascriptions:
ReplyDeleteWithin "free"-market circles, the set-piece affixing of the "heroic" tag to the entrepreneur/tycoon as an ideal type has long amused me. Two aspects stand out here.
1. It's not enough, apparently, to defend the liberties and acquired wealth of businessfolk against their denigration by coercive utopians or the envious. We have to hoist them atop our shoulders and make parade floats of them as well.
2. Such admiration is due them as a pure function of their role within the black-and-white laissez-faire morality play, regardless of the actual cultural/moral content of the goods and services he has sold, toward which as presumably "value-free" social "scientists" we are under strict doctorate's orders to remain silent in purest agnostic indifference.
Until such time, that is, that the formerly *wertfrei* paleolibertarian/Objectivist pauses for a breath...asks "what's that on your shirt?"...changes out of his clinician's hat in the blink of an eye...and launches into a doctrinaire Capitalist Realism lecture on the superior manliness in the defense of Western civilization inhering in, e.g., wool suits, bow ties, .45 caliber penis extensions, Modernist architecture, factory smoke, cigars and whichever brand of distilled spirits are most correct to decant this month, bloody steaks and great car-tipping Flintstones racks of ribs...
It helps, of course, if your motivations in such phenomenological modes are pure, i.e., born of siege-minded culture-warrior resentment rooted in poor toilet training, and above all a desire to piss off "liberals" or "The Left", two mythic phyla the rumors of whose existence I have read much in the Annals of Psychopathia Libertarianis...
Huh? PSH says that "unfortunately" Tucker was not in a jocular mood. How is your comment that "all is well" in agreement with that?
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