Who Is Winning the Battle of Ideas?

By -
If you read a site like LewRockwell.com that free marketers are winning the battle of ideas.

That must be why support amongst the American public for free markets is plunging.

Comments

  1. ivanfoofoo12:22 PM

    This actually shows the quality of the article:

    "Of course, the “Austrian school” is not a school in the traditional sense of the word denoting a physical structure; the term defines those who believe in pure free-market economics and laissez-faire principles."

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah12:24 PM

    I had the wrong URL for that last link: sorry about that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Elisha1:55 PM

    Gene, do you still consider yourself an Austrian economist? (Just curious).

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah4:30 PM

    My paper "Economics and it's modes," published in The Journal of Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, recommnds a pluralistic approach to economics. That has been my view since at least 2004, when I began working on that paper. (It was first my master's thesis at LSE.)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous2:12 AM

    "If you read a site like Lew Rockwell.Com..."

    Your first mistake was reading LewRockwell.Com.

    ReplyDelete
  6. gcallah2:13 AM

    Ah, but Prateek, I read it for amusement value.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous8:22 AM

    Ah, but of course.

    LRC is one of the wackiest websites ever made.

    I think the people there deliberately want to keep it that way, but...a long pretense creates a reality.

    It's like LRC was made by libertarians to troll on the internet. But their trolling went so far, they started trolling themselves.

    David Kramer, whom acquaintances describe as an otherwise calm and easygoing person, is anything but that when he does his LRC blog posts.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thomas L. Knapp2:18 PM

    Please consider this comment responsive not to the LRC articles, but rather to the implicit notion that "plunging" public support for free markets is an indicator that free marketers are losing the "battle of ideas."

    Facially it seems obvious that that's the case. On the other hand:

    1) The old Gandhi aphorism, "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." It could be that "plunging support" for free markets merely means that more people have made it past the first two stages.

    2) If the mental process of working through economics at the popular level in any way resembles the "five stages of grief," then progress from denial (of the existence of free market economics) to anger (over the tenets of free market economics) is, well, progress.

    ReplyDelete
  9. ivanfoofoo4:25 PM

    Well, the Mises Institute site is a mixture of silly posts and high quality articles, and the main result of that is that they are lowering those articles's reputation. It's a disservice to Ludwig von Mises.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights

By -
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Read more

St. Paul and I Agree...

By -
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Read more

Libertarianism and Violence, II

By -
I decided to move some discussion from this post up to the top level here. Specifically, Watoosh wrote: "Well, if violence is defined as initiation of force (which, of course, presupposes certain property rights), then I think Rockwell is correct..." Well, if we define cats as elephants, then many people keep elephants in their house. More seriously, firstly, violence is not usually defined that way. It's defined as, you know, violence, so that, say, someone may respond violently or non-violently to someone who aggresses against them. Otherwise, it would make no sense to say, for instance, "He punched me, but I did not stoop to violence in response." And, secondly, the libertarian usage of "initiation of force" is very offbeat. If I wander onto someone's meadow, most people would not say I had "initiated force" -- I mean, sure, I used "force" against the earth to push off walking, but that's not force directed against...
Read more