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 20^th 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.