conchis comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong

48 Post author: Yvain 12 May 2009 10:09PM

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Comment author: newerspeak 14 May 2009 07:37:11AM *  2 points [-]

In what way is he "poisoning" the discourse?

Taken together, bullet points 2, 3, and 4 are a textbook strawman.

Quite frankly, in my experience with people arguing for libertarianism, it tends to be precisely what he describes-- a lot of bottom-line faux-consequentialist arguments...

To me, this speaks more to the extent of your motivation to find merit-worthy libertarian writing than to the merit of libertarian ideas. It so happens that an entire school of libertarian thought ("policy libertarianism") is dedicated to studying the specific consequences of government action. One interesting claim: "State actors are (made up of) people who are subject to the same irrational biases and collective stupidity as market actors, and often have perverse incentive structures as well."

If you're interested in reading some reasonable libertarians, you might try The Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, or EconLog as starting points.

As a concrete example, by almost any metric European-style socialized health care systems work empirically, objectively better... I can't conceive of any coherent, consequentialist argument against the immediate utility of adopting such a system in the USA.

Really? Respectfully, it seems much more plausible, based on the tone of your post, that you're couching an appeal for your own preferred policy in hypothetical terms than that you're actually suffering from a failure of imagination.

Comment author: conchis 19 May 2009 08:31:59PM 0 points [-]

If you're interested in reading some reasonable libertarians, you might try The Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, or EconLog as starting points.

FWIW, I generally find Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen more reasonable than those listed above. (Yes, I realize Will works for the Cato Institute; I find him more reasonable than his employers.) YMMV.

Comment author: newerspeak 20 May 2009 08:21:46AM 0 points [-]

Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen are more reasonable...

Along with a few others, I mentioned them both by name in an earlier version of that post. I didn't want to get bogged down presenting all the relationships needed to establish that all these people were in fact libertarians:

Arnold Kling, who writes at EconLog, has done a fair amount of thinking about the unique worldview in the Economics department at George Mason University (see here and here). I claim the position he lays out is essentially the same as mine above, with the explicit partisan identification removed. Kling is an adjunct professor of economics at GMU, along with Robin Hanson, Alex Tabarrok, and Tyler Cowen (whose blog cites his frequently). Kling's co-blogger Bryan Caplan has a written a popular book about public choice theory, which presents a thorough critique of government intervention and is supported by a lot of important research and some cool math. Caplan and Kling are both adjunct scholars at the Cato Institute, which also sponsors Will Wilkinson, whose wife is an editor at Reason.

Instead of beating that glob of stuff into something readable, I got lazy and went for the low-hanging fruit instead, specifically the over-the-top claim that there's no such thing as a coherent, consequentialist, libertarian argument against (e.g.) European-style socialzed health care.

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