What Is This Rothbardian Fetish About Consistency?

By -
On display, for instance, here.

Milton Friedman, for instance, knew that he was not "consistently anti-interventionist." That is because he thought being anti-interventionist in all cases was a bad thing. When he thought interventions were bad, he was against them, and when he thought interventions were good, he was for them.

Imagine boasting that you are "the only consistently anti-rest" ideology, or "the only consistently anti-medicine" ideology.

Being consistently against something is only going to be impressive to people who think that something is always bad. Since Rothbardians are trying to convert people who do not think intervention is always bad, boldly stating that they are uniformly against it only makes them appear fanatical.

Comments

  1. Anonymous4:31 PM

    Behold! A marriage spat as played by two male economists.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous4:37 PM

    BTW, you know that that comment was funny. Keep in mind that I did consider using the word "philosophers" rather than "economists", but it just wouldn't have had the same effect.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Samson Corwell5:05 PM

    They also have the problem with defining intervention. As you pointed out, a network of defense firms constitutes a state, so even they can't eliminate "intervention".

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bob Murphy9:35 PM

    Samson, where is Gene taking you on Valentine's Day?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah1:27 AM

      We are going to the "Statists Paradise" bar and grill, where we will dine on the illicitly seized fruits of others' labor, and sip cocktails of "moral-double-standard" tequila sweetened with sugary "pretense of omniscient" syrup.

      Delete
  5. Lord Keynes4:14 AM

    Excellent points.

    And I would add that the Rothbardian claim to be the only pure, true defenders of free markets is itself untrue.

    Why? Because their view of fractional reserve banking is badly flawed, and once that is recognised it follows that their demand to ban it and eliminate it is nothing but interference in free contract and (in their own language) "evil" "collectivist" violation of liberty.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Bobybuilder12:04 AM

    It's not logical consistency. It's more of a style thing, like insisting that your handbag matches your shoes.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
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.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more