The Two Flaws Of Libertarian Economics
zedshaw.com
zedshaw.com
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.
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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.
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.
In any case, I would say that instead of discussing in rather vague terms whether more government is better / worse than less government, it would be sensible to think of what kind of government.
By principle, I believe that goverment bureaucracy and interference should be kept to a minimum. However, I would rather live under a Scandinavian-like government (even though it's big government) than in a Somalia-like anarchy. We all agree on the goals: freedom, prosperity, etc. Sometimes we disagree on how to get there. I vote for pragmatism over ideology.
Yes, I've totally cut up your point, and I'll take this over Somalia any day. But Scandinavian government (Denmark in this case) couldn't care less about prosperity. Right out of college, you're in the top tax bracket, paying 63% on everything above $64.000 annual income (and just under 50% on everything below). Buying a car? 180% registration tax, and slap 25% sales tax on top of that.
But yeah, we've got worse schools than Portugal and free mediocre healthcare, but most importantly: we have high economic equality.
So no, unfortunately we don't agree on the goals.
Denmark and most of the rest of Scandinavia used to have a very classically liberal (~libertarian) mind set. It is the work ethic that has maintained much of the prosperity. Many of Denmarks large successful export businesses come out of this period.
As I like to say. Denmark is prosperous despite their welfare state and not because of it.
Without a strong focus on wealth creation, instead of the constant preaching to the mediocre and the "good enough", we're not going to have much to show once the Chinese and Indians get started.
In short: Prosperity is not a goal to attain, it's a continuous effort, and we just stopped trying.
On the necessity of wealth creation, I fully agree with you. I think the Germans, Danes, Swedes (etc) will soon find out that they will have to work a whole lot more than their parents to enjoy the same standard of living their parents could enjoy. It's not a pleasant thought, but then, the prosperity that Old Europe has enjoyed over the last few decades is pretty much an historical anomaly.
I could not agree more that prosperity is a continuous effort. I suppose the old Europeans are just a bit blasé and refuse to look at the facts. The world has changed.
http://www.skovgaard.org/europe/denmark.htm
The Danes believe Denmark is the best country in the world, that Danish beer is the best in the world, and that anything they do is better than anywhere else in the world. But however contradictory it may seem, between them, they don't like to see others being successful. Thus, they do everything they can to bring down the brightest amongst them. The communist tax system that has brought the highest overall taxation level in the world is an effective way of doing so.
Most importantly, most parties aren't communist, they are "social democratic", definitely very left leaning compared to anything. There is a general (far from thorough) respect for private property, something you wouldn't expect from communists.
The Seasteading project might result in some anarcho-capitalist societies: http://www.seasteading.org/
What about "the poor"? The classic answer is "you will not be prevented from helping them".
Freedom from coercion, baby. Simple as that.
For a more thorough discussion, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
What libertarians propose is that all coercion be in defense of property ownership. This seems "fair" until you realize that "property ownership" is itself a complex historical object. The feudal system is named after a form of property ownership - the feodum or fief. The colonial system created property for Europeans by appropriating it from natives. The system of slavery was also based on a certain kind of property definition.
Saying "don't use coercion except to defend legitimate property rights" is like saying "don't use military force except to defend against legitimate threats." It seems like common sense, but all the complexity of politics is swept under the rug in these phrases "property rights" or "threats". In my view, no one is born with a "right" to property, property is just a concrete representation of the political equilibrium that exists at a certain time.
Most property in the world can be traced back to an original owner, from whom it was stolen (war, colonization and similar events). That original owner might have stolen it from someone else.
But that is a completely different point, that really has nothing to do with libertarianism, or any reasonably capitalist society, where property ownership is permitted. It's my impression that a symptom of a mature capitalist society is that historical property disputes are settled in a sense that can be considered fair. That someone might not accept property rights is an interesting discussion, and it certainly rules out any form of capitalist system, but it doesn't really apply in this discussion.
Nobody is born with a right TO anything, but rather a right to NOT be coerced. The consequence of this is that you have the right to do whatever you want with your property (which includes your body and anything you do with that, i.e. work), as long as you don't interfere with other peoples right to do the same - i.e. coerce them.
One important distinction between libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism is how to resolve conflicts that will inevitably be over property. A-C doesn't accept any state-like structures like police and courts, but libertarianism does, and the only people that get to coerce other people physically are the police, answering to the courts.
a) Property rights are a form of coercion.
b) 'Property rights' is a wide umbrella under which almost any form of coercion could be justified.
b) If the enforcement of property rights justifies coercion, then almost any kind of coercion can be justified if the prevailing property system is chosen correctly. For example, if a totalitarian state were to have a system where everything belongs to the state, including the citizens, then it would have the right to do whatever it wants with its property, and any assertion of personal freedoms would be theft.
b) If someone is free too coerce anyone he owns, and he can arbitrarily choose who he owns, then he is free to coerce everybody. It's a tautology, but not a very useful one.
b) The point is that the concept of property rights is mostly vacuous unless you specify which system of property rights you are speaking of. cia_plant was pointing out that what one person considers oppression, another might consider fair use of property. Therefore any state can be considered libertarian unless you specify restrictions on what counts as a valid system of property.
Since all people need to be cared for until a certain age, all people who survive past the first few days of their lives are born into coercion under a strict meaning of the word. Some would escape by living as hermits in desert land or remote islands that nobody cared to enforce law on. Hell - if you're going to be a pedant why restrict it to human coercion? The weather itself is a form of coercian. As are the laws of physics themselves.
Although in a strict sense you're right, I think you're wasting time. However, I have a morbid curiosity for some things and would be genuinely interested to learn what axe you're grinding.
Well - gravity.
I mistook your motive. I've read the thread a few more times and see you've been quite specific in your responses.
I was born with a right to not be coerced by gravity?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity
What entity is charged with enforcing my right to non-coersion-by-gravity?
Protection from contagious disease falls into this category, for instance.
//not that there's anything wrong with that.
An efficient government is a laudable thing that everyone should want, and so cutting away the fat is a natural thing to do in any sort of political light.
I don't know why libertarians at large seem to claim ownership of this notion.
There are plenty of good people working in the civic media area, so there's a good talent pool to draw from.
In the past, if economists discovered an inefficiency in the market, they would say "and the government should correct this inefficiency with policy X". Public choice economists don't ask if governments should do X, but rather will they do X.
It turns out the incentives facing government actors aren't very good. They have much fewer incentives to act efficiently than market actors. It is possible to have competent officials at the head of a small bureaucracy produce good results. However, I doubt this is possible for the United States, which owns the largest bureaucracy in the world.
So, there are real reasons for limiting the scope of government.
Done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_Sta...
The subsidy programs give farmers extra money for their crops, as well as guarantee a price floor. For instance in the 2002 Farm Bill, for every bushel of wheat sold farmers were paid an extra 52 cents and guaranteed a price of 3.86 from 2002–03 and 3.92 from 2004–2007.[2] That is, if the price of wheat in 2002 was 3.80 farmers would get an extra 58 cents per bushel (52 cents plus the $0.06 price difference).
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Also, please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIC_Program
Roads, defense, control, vaccines... all have significant effects outside of the markets, and thus their price does not reflect the benefit to society.
Where do you stop? Surely you'd have to include financial companies? A financial company that makes up 10% of the financial market will calculate a phony 90% discount on any systemic risk it creates: after all, if the system fails, only 10% of that failure will be realized as a loss.
Killing people and blowing up ships is completely irrelevant. The game could be about planting trees and picking flowers, and the same principles would apply.
What it comes down to is this: is the general populace comfortable enough to engage in open economic activity?
You can see that there is a lot less confidence in the US and the rest of the world, in large part due to various stupid decisions. But this doesn't prove that anarcho-capitalism works. It just shows that corrupt capitalism doesn't work well either.
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.
Me I am definitely a libertarian, classical liberal, randian, anarcho-capitalist and several other labels that I might invent.
But in reality we all have our different ideas of whats important and what isn't. And we do laugh at ourselves about this.
Check out Peter Bagge's great comic about what happen when Libertarians gather...
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.
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
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).
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.
That's totally vacuous without defining those rights. A major one for most libertarians is property, but the distribution of property is based on historic things like taking lands from native populations. Who decides who owns what? How far back do we have to unwind things? Why should heredity determine what property you "start out" with? How does a Lockean ideal of "mixing your labor with the soil" to create "property" somehow mean that because some bean farmer on plot of land X farmed beans for 10 years there, him and his descendants now own all the oil under that land that was only discovered later, and not by them?
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.
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).
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...
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)
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.
"The purpose of argument, should not be victory, but progress."
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.
I think ridicule is a bad idea, because it invariably activates one's ego defense mechanisms. When that happens, your chances of convincing someone that they're wrong (assuming that they're wrong) drop to zero, while the level of polarization goes up. Granted, some people are so hardened in their beliefs that only widespread ridicule may be able to put a crack in their shell (albeit at high psychological cost).
Take global worming there is a manufactured debate on the issue and few people are willing to say, "Ok, smart guy how should we rewrite the laws of physics?" Or, letting people say "Clean Coal" like there is such a thing when they can say, "Ok, I agree that Clean Coal is great let's mandate zero CO2 emissions from coal in 5 years." so they need to say, "Well we don't have the ability to do that."
Exploitation as an effective maneuver is dependent on a society unpracticed and unconditioned in the use of reason. It may be a practical move in the short run, but invariably has terrible consequences in the long. A society that remains vulnerable to such exploits will be swayed by the best exploiters rather than the best arguments (which is how it is now).
In the long run, our best strategy is to cultivate cool, calm, collected, and charitable discourse.
The ability to engage in charitable discourse is simply a skill that can be taught like any other. Parents could be teaching it to their children, but socially and culturally we haven't yet made it a priority. We should.
True, rationality can be pervasive, and it can be taught, but it can never be totally dominant. Our primitive substrate keeps coming out, and that is every bit as pervasive as rationality.
Someone suggested turning that hierarchy of disagreement into tags that people could assign to comments on a debate site, and filter accordingly. I built something of precisely this sort for my master's project, and believe the idea should be implemented for nearly all online communications. It's doable, and an effective way to impress a great many people with the value of rational discourse, to which they simply may not have had enough exposure to appreciate.
And there is, I think, potentially a tipping point or critical mass where a culture of charitable discourse enters a positive feedback loop and makes gains even faster than before.
Whatever the case, I think there are definitely plausible means for improvement. They deserve to be tested.
So who decides what is pollution?
Once someone says CO2 is pollution, government now controls nearly all of your life.
(This isn't a failure of Libertarianism, it's a human failure -- greed.)
AKA CO2 costs 3$ per 1000lb. Every billion pounds you collect 3 million and every American get's their pollution check for 1c. This can still be corrupted but because the government is not spending the money it's more balanced.
PS: IMO the secret is for markets to price the correct information not for some group to tell them what to do.
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
- Republican conservatism (raised in a Republican household) to
- pseudo-communism (some crazy idea I had in high school without reading Marx) to
- Objectivism (a friend gave me The Fountainhead while in college, picked up Atlas Shrugged shortly after, then Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and Peikoff's book on Objectivism) to
- utilitarian liberal (introduced to Mill in a course on political philosophy (along with Nozick, who is unconvincing), studied more utilitarianism in other courses)
Note that I'm a utilitarian first, and liberal by implication of (my) utilitarian logic. I'm also aware of the bevy of criticisms that have been leveled at utilitarianism, some of which are persuasive (the Greatest Happiness Principle does not adequately address the complexity of moral psychology), while others are simply demanding a precision of calculation that's not attainable. In practice, one can successfully apply utilitarian reasoning in a great many situations.
The problem that I have with libertarianism is that I don't buy the "negative rights only" stance (at all), and believe that social interventions backed by force of law are necessary to overcome historically and sociologically entrenched inequalities of opportunity (positive feedback loops of discrimination and decay). That we haven't done it as effectively or efficiently as we would like doesn't mean that it shouldn't be attempted at all. There's room for experimentation, and we're getting better at experimenting. Many of the recently developed entrepreneurial practices (fail early) can be fruitfully applied in this area.
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.
How so?
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.
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.
That is a mighty big claim which flies in the face of practical experience.
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.)
But I think we're shifting the discussion a bit to a "Long Emergency" scenario.
As a bit of localist, I'm more troubled by local governments who bend over backward to bring large retailers into an area. I think these more localized benefits (tax breaks, development dollars, etc) are far more beneficial to, say, Wal-Mart, than the highway system.
(1) And many that can have transformed that land into housing and strip malls.
EDIT: Fixed formatting.
Lockheed Martin and Boeing couldn't be as huge as they are without defense contracts either.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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
Zed has exhibited difficulty with the precise use of terminology before. In the recent talk that was posted, you hear him saying for people not to come up and correct him on his use of terms like "Turing Complete."
http://blog.cusec.net/2009/01/05/zed-shaw-the-acl-is-dead-cu...
There are other terms that he unintentionally abuses in the talk. (left as exercise) Still, I think it's a great talk and agree with a lot of what he says. He reminds me of a coworker of mine. This coworker is hazy on things like the laws of Thermodynamics and some aspects of Object Oriented Programming, but he seems to get things done, and I'd have to say he's a good programmer.
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.
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.
Whereas with big government, they'll never ever hire lobbyists to ask for bailouts, subsidies and protectionist legislation...
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).
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.
pre {
overflow: scroll; /* currently set to hidden. Why? */
width: /* something reasonable */
}
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229095
PG previously added a fix I suggested that, at least in FF2, had the nice quality of clipping PRE areas to whatever your browser width is, while enabling a horizontal scrollbar for the PRE when you moused in.
Unfortunately, this never worked quite right in other browsers, and doesn't work in FF3. In my experiments, the only way to get the same desirable effect in FF3 is with a DIV-based layout. (There might be some DOCTYPE voodoo that would make it work with TABLEs, but I haven't found it.)
So as far as I can tell: the best fix requires a change to the News.YC/arc HTML generation.
<code style="overflow: scroll; width: 40em;"><font color="#5a5a5a"> * Privatization of large public
**snip**
by a gigantic war-mongering government.
</font></code>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.
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.
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?
Maybe he is going to keep that no-rant promise.