As I
wrote back in 2006, sort-of thinker Michael Lind had already
back then declared ” the utter and final defeat of…the
libertarian counter-revolution.”
But it’s still scaring him witless, this libertarian zombie. Now
Lind at Salon notices something I
blogged about in September 2012—that George Mason University
economist and sometime
Reason contributor Bryan Caplan thinks that its a good
thing for policy that government seems, by some measures, to follow
the opinions (not the interests, which Caplan points out
can be a different thing) of wealthier Americans, since such
policies, Caplan believes, redound better to the liberty and wealth
of most people.
While flailing about at libertarianism in general as the piece
goes on, Lind doesn’t stress Caplan’s more significant
contributions—to
pro-natalism, open borders, or
pacifism,
since those won’t scare his audience at Salon as much, and
never forget the point of these articles is not intellectual
engagement or illumination, but continuing to gin up a two-minute
hate into a two-lifetime hate.
Lind does manage to redig hoary old out-of-context arguments
about Austrian economist and libertarian influence Ludwig Von Mises
being pro-fascism in 1927 (see Donald Boudreaux
taking on that aspect) while never engaging the
possibility—which anyone who ever believed in a human right should
do—that indeed, almost everyone believes there are times when it
might be better for civilization to not have completely unfettered
majority rule over all.
But the part I want to take most exception to is his sideways
insult to Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) founder Leonard
Read as “appallingly dumb.”
Now, as I wrote in my 2007 book
Radicals for Capitalism which tells the story of Read’s
amazing accomplishments in founding and shepherding the first
modern libertarian educational institution, FEE, even many of
Read’s friends and allies would stress that his deep knowledge of
technical economics was lacking; but he was a grand synthesizer and
popularizer of a deep political and ethical liberalism, one of the
more successful ones of the 20th century
Read managed, in his stunning essay “I, Pencil”
to deliver an amazing metaphor to sum up and make vividly and
unforgettably clear a very difficult to grasp aspect of
economics. The essay has been blowing minds and educating and
enlightening people for generations, and was even leaned on by a
Nobel
Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, in helping explain
the unseen wonders of spontaneous order.
“I, Pencil” is, no doubt, one of those most brilliant pieces of
popular social science writing ever. (Not to ruin it for you, it
explains, in the voice of a pencil itself, that nobody can make a
pencil. It’s a killer.)
Lind might not know this; he might not care; he might actually
be “appallingly dumb” to believe that someone can make a
pencil, or that that insight is somehow banal. It is not. One would
gain more important understanding of the way the world works from
that one essay of Read’s than one would get by studying the corpus
of Michael Lind, monklike, for a lifetime.
More on Lind
misunderstanding libertarianism, Ayn Rand division.
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