http://www.naturalnews.com/026108.html
It would be nice to see someone debunking this argument since this is a website with a good amount of traffic. There is a place at the end of the page where you can put a comment. Someone here who debunks that article could post the link there.
Also, the writer is kind of inclined to austrian economics, and there are many people there inclined to the libertarian ideology. It can be a good chance to spread the message.
Semantical differentiation in definition of Rational.
You might want to explain why and what von Mises definition of rational is, if you use that in an argument.
His article isn't exactly a brilliant critique.
Just, humans aren't perfectly rational (common usage of the term) and that they are wasteful.
You could take so many different approaches to this.(I wont bother substantiating this claim).
For the second argument, Personally, I would argue that a lot of costs are do not exist since current regulation fails in many cases to protect property rights. e.g pollution since the 19th century has been an excusable social cost.Perhaps this accounts for waste in a sense too? It's more cost effective to be wasteful? Yet we don't have a free market economy...
As for the first, you could bring up state intervention, protection, regulation, subsidies, intellectual property, basically all the state interventions that aid large corporations and non competitive markets. And perhaps how they may be the cause behind these exogenous shocks.
I'm not going to hand feed you any studies and ir exact arguments. But the above may be the causes of the symptoms assuming those symptoms are indeed negative.
In addition I'm not going to suggest Rothbards article from "For a New Liberty". It's basically saying the same thing. It's very general and requires faith in free markets. It may work on these people but I doubt it.
I hate when people come up with some blatantly obvious fact such as "humans dont make perfect decisions all the time" and then act as if they found some hidden flaw that none of the thousands of free-market theorists have noticed.
Indeed. I mean, just why do they think we advocate the market in the first place? The fact of human fallibility is one of the strongest defenses in favor freedom.
Diminishing Marginal Utility - IT'S THE LAW!
I like when they reference "Big Pharma" as "free market" because it's definately not one of the most regulated industries.
Actually I would recommend FANL on this, and Rothbard's article on how air pollution should be handled.
To darkness I condemn you...
I'd personally recommend this, written by Rothbard:
http://www.mises.org/rothbard/lawproperty.pdf
just following those rules would pretty much take care of everything.
This interview with Walter Block ("Free Market Economics") is also worth listening to: www.youtube.com/watch
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