newerspeak comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong

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

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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.