Deirdre McCloskey

McCloskey Review = Leftist Rhetoric in Tatters

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, History, Liberty, Links , , , ,

Deirdre McCloskey has an excellent review of a new book focusing on the immorality of capitalism. An excerpt:

The poor have benefited the most from capitalism. The sheer, first-act, unanalyzed equality that Sandel advocates would have killed the modern world and kept us in the appalling poverty of the human condition down to 1800. In fact in some countries it did, such as India after 1947, under Gandhi-plus-London-School-of-Economics egalitarianism, the “License Raj” and “the Hindu rate of growth,” as the Indians themselves bitterly described their communitarian economy. When I talk to friends who think like Sandel I worry that their dispositions will kill, quite unintentionally, the only chance for the world’s poor to achieve the scope for a full human life.

[…]

Sandel worries properly that the market can crowd out the sacred. A corporate market in, say, instruction in elementary classrooms can crowd out unbiased teaching about capitalism. Yet Sandel does not tell his own classroom that state schools can crowd out unbiased teaching about, say, the environment.

Do read the whole thing. McCloskey is an expert writer and a prestigious scholar, so be sure to grab a cup of coffee before you settle in. (h/t Jason Brennan)

The Corporate State and High Liberalism: A Love Story

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , ,

I have been following the symposium on “free markets and fairness” over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians with some interest. One of the things that has always bothered me about the Left’s despicable tactics concerning liberty is its demagoguery concerning markets. As a former Marxist who has hung out with the right people in the right places, I can assure you that the Left is not so much concerned with the plight of the poor as it is with the plight of the rich.

Once I began to grasp the basic insights of economists (thanks to Ron Paul’s 2008 Presidential campaign) it became increasingly apparent that less regulations and less restrictions are needed in this world in order to help the poor. What I have not understood about my friends on the Left is why they obstinately refuse to acknowledge the facts concerning how markets and the State work. As Deirdre McCloskey has recently pointed out, the narrative of high liberalism is factually mistaken, but this in itself is not enough to convince the True Believers that control over others needs to be abolished.

Two things stand out to me whenever I argue with Leftists: 1) the thin veneer of helping the poor is often used to cover up the base desire for control over others; the high liberal is an authoritarian through-and-through and 2) the Leftist is often unaware of this authoritarianism until you either scratch or cleave him.

Consider the following example. Continue reading →

Around the Web, Kinda

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , ,

No.  The master narrative of High Liberalism is mistaken factually.  Externalities do not imply that a government can do better.  Publicity does better than inspectors in restraining the alleged desire of businesspeople to poison their customers.  Efficiency is not the chief merit of a market economy: innovation is.  Rules arose in merchant courts and Quaker fixed prices long before governments started enforcing them.

I know such replies will be met with indignation.  But think it possible you may be mistaken, and that merely because an historical or economic premise is embedded in front page stories in the New York Times does not make them sound as social science.  It seems to me that a political philosophy based on fairy tales about what happened in history or what humans are like is going to be less than useless.  It is going to be mischievous.

How do I know that my narrative is better than yours?  The experiments of the 20th century told me so.

This is from Deirdre McCloskey’s blog post over at a new symposium being put on by Bleeding Heart Libertarians. It is probably the best thing I’ve read on the web in a couple of years. You can find the rest of the posts from the symposium here. I highly recommend all of them.

Co-editor Fred Foldvary recently participated in the last symposium that BHL held on Libertarianism and Land. You can find both of his entries here (be sure to read through his responses in the ‘comments’ section, too) and here.