http://www.slate.com/id/2202489/
So, what do you make of this article. Is the author justified in claiming that it was the political philosophy of Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm and Christopher Cox which prevented them from taking some action which could have prevented the crisis?
I make of it that it is ignorant and that the author is a clueless moron.
-Jon
To darkness I condemn you...
Real libertarians don't believe in central banking.
There is a serious problem here with the name and what it means. What the author describes is not "Libertarian" ...of course we know that and most people browsing this forum know that, but no one else seems to know it.
It reminds me of the term "hacker" and how among hackers it means someone who explores and maximizes technology. A person can be a lawnmower hacker or a windmill hacker or a computer hacker. But it now means someone who does electronic trespassing, theft or vandalism.
Nothing real hackers can do will change the improper use of the word hacker by the mainstream press and the general public. We are stuck having to adapt since fighting it is impossible.
I see the same thing coming down the road with the word "Libertarian" as meaning someone who favors central banking and a mercantilist financial system. Time to switch gears and use this as a term amongst ourselves because we are not going to change the mass definition of the word, no matter how incorrect it is.
http://www.comebackalive.com/phpBB2 Travel, Adventure Travel, Arguments, Recipes.
Don't you have neoliberals in America?
Read the article for a laugh. "These three all-powerful government officials are responsible for the crisis, therefore libertarians are to blame!"
Reminds of the ironic South Park anthem Blame Canada.
Microsecession as a strategy for revolution | Challenge to minarchist | How would a private road system work?
The christians have the concept of blasphemy, which is attributing to the evil deity the works of jesus, and vice-versa. For them, it is the unforgivable sin.
The idiot who wrote the article attributes to libertarianism the failings of all manner of interventionist, monetarist, mercantilist, and corporatist failings.
I found the article so predictable and tedious that I could barely get through it. These days every time something big happens--floods, bank failures, sniper attacks, terrorism, whatever--there is some schmoe who tells that this is the end of libertarianism. Somehow the prophecy never comes true.
someone on this forum should try an experiment and write the same article except saying that this is the end of statism.
Jeffrey TuckerEditorial VP, Mises
Here's my take:
A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching statists scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of not enough government intervention rather than too much. One line of argument casts as villain the Libertarian, who simply request trade occur without violence from the state though don't really have political representation at all. Another theory blames greed and human nature as out of control and in need of more violence in the market in order to reign them in -- but by other humans somehow not motivated by greed (even if they make money and have far less if any risks). An alternative thesis is that past bailouts should just be ignored: this one will work!There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the statist apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right and left, statists are just as convinced that their own government violence has not been given sufficient chance, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already? We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by statist ideas. I don't have much patience with the notion that trying to figure out how we got into this mess is somehow unacceptably vicious and pointless—my own view of Sarah Palin being nominated. As with any failure, inquest is central to improvement. And any competent forensic work has to put the democratic theory of replacing one set of gunmen in the market with another every 4-8 years at the scene of the crime.To be more specific: In 1997 and 1998, the global economy was rocked by a series of cascading financial crises in Asia, Latin America, and Russia. Perhaps the most alarming moment was the failure of a giant, superleveraged hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, which threatened the solvency of financial institutions that served as counter-parties to its derivative contracts, much in the manner of Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. this year. After LTCM's collapse, it became abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to this unfortunately esoteric issue that The Largest Government Bureaucracy in the History of the World posed risks to the global financial system, and that free markets, of which there is only one kind, were advisable. This was a very scary problem and a very boring one, a hazardous combination.As with the government terrorism that made 9/11 possible, causing the crash of '08 was the sin of unending meddling and intervention—less the result of deregulation per se than of the belief that violence against political bugaboos of the month can solve all woes. At any point from 1998 on, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, various members of their administrations, or a number of congressional leaders with oversight authority might have stood up and said to themselves (and not others), "Hey, I think we're in danger and I need to put the gun down." The Washington Post ran an predictably ignorant piece this week on how one such attempt to regulate credit derivatives got derailed. Had the advocates of prudent regulation been more effective, they say, there's an arbitrary percentage of a chance that the subprime debacle would have been put off for an unknown period of time -- whoowee!There's enough blame to go around, but this wasn't just a collective failure. Three officials, among a whole slew of others, have been responsible for causing disasterous regulatory action over a period of years: Alan Greenspan, the oracular former Fed chairman; Phil Gramm, the heartless former chairman of the Senate banking committee; and Christopher Cox, the unapologetic chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Blame Greenspan for being in charge of the evil bipartisan fiat currency counterfeiting scheme that causes business cycles, allows he and his heir Bernanke unlimited political power without being elected, and has essentially hidden the true cost of not only credit expansion but war and government expansion over the US and the entire globe. Blame Gramm for being an ignoramus who has been in both of the two parties, though I hear in the seventies he did produce some porn films (who are we to "whine"?) -- which he lost a lot of money because market fundamentalists recklessly refused to intervene. Blame Cox for championing the SEC, period.Government, in particular, is often accused of being in the pocket of the securities industry. That's not entirely fair; it takes the hands-on position because of their political philosophy, which holds that one group of people that want power and money via guns are in the "public interest" and another, if they used the same rhetoric, would be laughed out of the room and still called the "mafia." They share with Greenspan, who used to hang out with Ayn Rand 50 years ago, a deep aversion to any coherent philosophy. That belief, which some might call nihilism, is the best explanation of how state officials and their apologists avoid working through moral decisions.The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from reality, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic. Those outside of government (at places other than the Cato Institute and Reason magazine) are just as consistent in their opposition to government bailouts as to the kind of regulation that might have prevented one from being necessary. "Let failed banks fail" is what the consumer who does not demand the service from these banks says. This approach would deliver a wonderful lesson in personal responsibility, creating thousands of new jobs in banks that serve customer satisfaction.The worst thing you can say about statists is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading mind-dulling public school textbooks in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's continual and rapid improvement by thanking their lucky stars there is anything left of the market, which makes it so, remaining. Their heroic view of economics and historical perspective makes it easy for them to accept that markets can -- by intevention and interuption of pricing signals -- be temporarily irrational, risky, and misallocate resources and that financial systems with petty government intrusion and capacity for arbitrary and violent intervention constitute a recipe for disaster. Government is and always was bankrupt, and this time like always, there will be more bailouts to serve their own power.
John Ess: Here's my take: A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching statists scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of not enough government intervention rather than too much. One line of argument casts as villain the Libertarian, who simply request trade occur without violence from the state though don't really have political representation at all. Another theory blames greed and human nature as out of control and in need of more violence in the market in order to reign them in -- but by other humans somehow not motivated by greed (even if they make money and have far less if any risks). An alternative thesis is that past bailouts should just be ignored: this one will work!There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the statist apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right and left, statists are just as convinced that their own government violence has not been given sufficient chance, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already? We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by statist ideas. I don't have much patience with the notion that trying to figure out how we got into this mess is somehow unacceptably vicious and pointless—my own view of Sarah Palin being nominated. As with any failure, inquest is central to improvement. And any competent forensic work has to put the democratic theory of replacing one set of gunmen in the market with another every 4-8 years at the scene of the crime.To be more specific: In 1997 and 1998, the global economy was rocked by a series of cascading financial crises in Asia, Latin America, and Russia. Perhaps the most alarming moment was the failure of a giant, superleveraged hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, which threatened the solvency of financial institutions that served as counter-parties to its derivative contracts, much in the manner of Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. this year. After LTCM's collapse, it became abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to this unfortunately esoteric issue that The Largest Government Bureaucracy in the History of the World posed risks to the global financial system, and that free markets, of which there is only one kind, were advisable. This was a very scary problem and a very boring one, a hazardous combination.As with the government terrorism that made 9/11 possible, causing the crash of '08 was the sin of unending meddling and intervention—less the result of deregulation per se than of the belief that violence against political bugaboos of the month can solve all woes. At any point from 1998 on, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, various members of their administrations, or a number of congressional leaders with oversight authority might have stood up and said to themselves (and not others), "Hey, I think we're in danger and I need to put the gun down." The Washington Post ran an predictably ignorant piece this week on how one such attempt to regulate credit derivatives got derailed. Had the advocates of prudent regulation been more effective, they say, there's an arbitrary percentage of a chance that the subprime debacle would have been put off for an unknown period of time -- whoowee!There's enough blame to go around, but this wasn't just a collective failure. Three officials, among a whole slew of others, have been responsible for causing disasterous regulatory action over a period of years: Alan Greenspan, the oracular former Fed chairman; Phil Gramm, the heartless former chairman of the Senate banking committee; and Christopher Cox, the unapologetic chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Blame Greenspan for being in charge of the evil bipartisan fiat currency counterfeiting scheme that causes business cycles, allows he and his heir Bernanke unlimited political power without being elected, and has essentially hidden the true cost of not only credit expansion but war and government expansion over the US and the entire globe. Blame Gramm for being an ignoramus who has been in both of the two parties, though I hear in the seventies he did produce some porn films (who are we to "whine"?) -- which he lost a lot of money because market fundamentalists recklessly refused to intervene. Blame Cox for championing the SEC, period.Government, in particular, is often accused of being in the pocket of the securities industry. That's not entirely fair; it takes the hands-on position because of their political philosophy, which holds that one group of people that want power and money via guns are in the "public interest" and another, if they used the same rhetoric, would be laughed out of the room and still called the "mafia." They share with Greenspan, who used to hang out with Ayn Rand 50 years ago, a deep aversion to any coherent philosophy. That belief, which some might call nihilism, is the best explanation of how state officials and their apologists avoid working through moral decisions.The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from reality, they tend to be highly principled and rigorous in their logic. Those outside of government (at places other than the Cato Institute and Reason magazine) are just as consistent in their opposition to government bailouts as to the kind of regulation that might have prevented one from being necessary. "Let failed banks fail" is what the consumer who does not demand the service from these banks says. This approach would deliver a wonderful lesson in personal responsibility, creating thousands of new jobs in banks that serve customer satisfaction.The worst thing you can say about statists is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading mind-dulling public school textbooks in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's continual and rapid improvement by thanking their lucky stars there is anything left of the market, which makes it so, remaining. Their heroic view of economics and historical perspective makes it easy for them to accept that markets can -- by intevention and interuption of pricing signals -- be temporarily irrational, risky, and misallocate resources and that financial systems with petty government intrusion and capacity for arbitrary and violent intervention constitute a recipe for disaster. Government is and always was bankrupt, and this time like always, there will be more bailouts to serve their own power.
Excellent post, Ess. Would you mind if I posted a link to this post elsewhere (w/ a possible title) ? I feel like this would inspire different thinking in a few people I know.
WARNING: This signature violates Rule 5. Stay classy!
Sure thing and name it what you want.
Twirlcan: There is a serious problem here with the name and what it means. What the author describes is not "Libertarian" ...of course we know that and most people browsing this forum know that, but no one else seems to know it. It reminds me of the term "hacker" and how among hackers it means someone who explores and maximizes technology. A person can be a lawnmower hacker or a windmill hacker or a computer hacker. But it now means someone who does electronic trespassing, theft or vandalism. Nothing real hackers can do will change the improper use of the word hacker by the mainstream press and the general public. We are stuck having to adapt since fighting it is impossible. I see the same thing coming down the road with the word "Libertarian" as meaning someone who favors central banking and a mercantilist financial system. Time to switch gears and use this as a term amongst ourselves because we are not going to change the mass definition of the word, no matter how incorrect it is.
I was making arguments similar to some replies here in some other forum based on my limited understanding of Austrian Economics. But then this article found a favorable mention in Tyler Cowen's blog here and I was under the impression that Tyler is a libertarian himself and had some Austrian leanings too.
John Ess: Sure thing and name it what you want.
Heh.
Slipped it under the radar...
The St. Obama loving site owner might pull it though.
One camp says it's interventionism that has failed. Another camp says it is degulated free markets that have failed. I wonder which side is objectively more correct... does the interventionism outweigh the "deregulated free markets" or does the deregulated free markets outweigh the interventionism?
Some people are so intellectually dishonest it's disgusting.
Yup, first it was the classical term 'liberal', now it is the term 'Libertarian' that is being destroyed slowly, 1984-like.
The Mises Institute was the only one I am aware of that was strongly against the bailout - all other 'libertarian' institutions were strongly for it.
Try and make as many people as you can aware that the term libertarian doesn't mean what most people want you to think it means, and that a number of those calling themselves libertarians are rather war mongering state interventionists.
And why is it that Slate always has a tendency to publish these entirely incorrect criticisms of libertarianism and Austrian Economics? Like the terrible article by Krugman from the late '90s criticizing the 'hangover theory'. These guys are the ones that are entirely uninformed and haven't read the great works of Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Menger, Hazlitt, or any other of dozens of top notch Austrian thinkers.
If they had they wouldn't be spouting such nonsense.
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” –Thomas Jefferson | My site
Ludwig von Mises Institute | 518 West Magnolia Avenue | Auburn, Alabama 36832-4528
Phone: 334.321.2100 · Fax: 334.321.2119
contact@Mises.org | webmaster | AOL-IM MainMises
Mises.org sitemap