Paul Kienitz nails the Libertarian scam

[Lao-Tse]

To me, the question is how much power others have over you and how constrained your choice of actions is, not whether the constraint is by public action rather than private action. In the viewpoint of those who hold this fallacy, what matters is how free you are on paper, not how free you are in what choices are actually open to you right now in real life. According to this view, a destitute person with no public support is more free than one who gets some kind of pension or welfare, despite the fact that the latter is the one who can do many things that are closed off to the former

He's quite correct.

Incidently, a person usually gets most of their orders from a boss at
work rather than any government official.

[CookieMonster]

He's quite correct.

Incidently, a person usually gets most of their orders from a boss at
work rather than any government official.

Except the HSE.

[Christel]

[QUOTE=feargach;1960412]Great little essay. "I'm Still Not a Libertarian (so I guess that means I'm opposed to personal freedom)"

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/pk-is-against-liberty.html

He says:

"The first fallacy is one I call the Fallacy of Revolution. It can be found in any movement that seeks to radically revise the underpinnings of society, whether by abolishing money, imposing a theocracy, eliminating undesirable ethnic groups, repealing all law, organizing everyone's diet according to principles of macrobiotics, or whatever other secret of a perfect society any group comes up with. The fallacy can be expressed more or less as follows:

By making these radical changes, we are removing the root cause of all the failures and evils of society as it presently stands. This will eliminate all of the existing problems, and since we have no knowledge of what new problems might arise, we can assume there will be none. Everything will work right, because there are no foreseeable things that can go wrong."

[QUOTE]

I haven't read the whole article, but the above seems common sense to me.
Everything new creates new problems.
Change can only be gradually, or gradually accepted.
We always need something familiar to hold on in which context we can interprete and accept something new. That's basic to human perception and understanding. Because new is only relevant to us, and makes sense, on the basis of what we already know/have experienced.

[Seos]

It will wreck feargachs head when he discovers that neither Mises nor Hayek were Anarchist or Libertarian

You guys are still guilty of the fallacy of revolution though.

[Almanac]

Great little essay. "I'm Still Not a Libertarian (so I guess that means I'm opposed to personal freedom)"

Well worth reading the whole thing. Even better will be watching the contortions of the Libertarians trying to argue against it.

Crude straw men. Equating a moderate libertarian with a Marxist ideologue is just silly. Marxism involves a whole series of assumptions about human nature which are intrinsic to its utopic vision. It assumes that man is solely a material being and that the key to his happiness lies in creating an earthly economic eschaton. Hence the preposterous claims about the fruits of the revolution.

[20000miles]

Well worth reading the whole thing. Even better will be watching the contortions of the Libertarians trying to argue against it.

Crude straw men. Equating a moderate libertarian with a Marxist ideologue is just silly. Marxism involves a whole series of assumptions about human nature which are intrinsic to its utopic vision. It assumes that man is solely a material being and that the key to his happiness lies in creating an earthly economic eschaton. Hence the preposterous claims about the fruits of the revolution.

Good points. I might add that I decided to blog about this critique:

Some Guy’s Critique of Libertarianism Irish Liberty Forum

It's a pretty easy demolition job, didn't need any mental contortions.

[feargach]

Somewhat of a tangent, looking at 20000's site I saw this in recent posts: "Krugman Demanded a Housing Bubble "

Everybody should know that Nobel prize winner and archetypal mainstream Keynesian economist Paul Krugman was demanding a housing bubble in 2001 and 2002.

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

The little problem that the economics profession won’t face up to yet is that Keynesianism has been dead wrong from its very conception. The urgent task for everybody else is to stop these people from inflicting their policies on us for any longer.

It's a famous internet trope that Krugman was calling for a new bubble when, if you read the article and the rest of Krugman's writing on the subject, you see he was wholly against the bubble.

It is obviously not a demand, and is clearly in opposition to bubbles (as nearly all economists are), it is simply an analysis of the Fed's options for fighting the recession and avoiding deflation.

From P. Krugman himself:
"Guys, read it again. It wasn’t a piece of policy advocacy, it was just economic analysis. What I said was that the only way the Fed could get traction would be if it could inflate a housing bubble. And that’s just what happened."

Here's another quote from the same article by Krugman. It is blatantly hostile to the notion of tax cuts in the period concerned, and hardly cosy about bubbles:

"Bear in mind also that government officials have a stake in accentuating the positive. The (Bush) administration needs a recovery because, with deficits exploding, the only way it can justify that tax cut is by pretending that it was just what the economy needed. Mr. Greenspan needs one to avoid awkward questions about his own role in creating the stock market bubble."

Wait, a second, 20000miles has told us that Krugman is for bubbles. Why then, would Krugman, in the very same article he quotes, say that Greenspan might have to face "awkward questions" about creating a bubble. If Krugman is pro-bubble, what's awkward about it?

This is simply another example of the level of intellectual honesty you're dealing with here when you read Misesian posts on here.

[atlantic]

The same Krugman that backs Obammy and his healthcare plan and asked this question.
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPd2i4Jshs"]YouTube - Krugman gets p3wned on Canadian Health Care[/ame]

[feargach]

Well, I would consider the Irish health care system to be terrible, but I think Krugman mmmmmmmaaaaaay have been getting at how much I would prefer to live under the US health care system. And I would prefer to have my fingernails pulled out than switch from any European health care system to the US model.

I wonder whether those Canadians in the audience were planning on migrating South to sample the joys of the US health care system. Or were they planning to stick with their own one, "terrible" though it may be.

[20000miles]

At best, Paul Krugman could argue that he did advocate another bubble, (after all he did imply that the Fed needed to create another one). If Krugman is as anti-bubble as feargach claims he is, why did PK say there was a need for a bubble? Krugman could cling to the less admirable position of having advocated a bubble and then thinking that Greenspan could nip it in the bud. So he was dead wrong on all counts. But let there be no doubt as to Krugman's intellectual pedigree:

“The remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the so-called boom to last. The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom.” [p. 322]

Permanent bubble economy anyone!!??