Les Leopold commits an egregious non sequitur with his post over at The Huffington when he claims those who support free markets must also support the current corporatist economy. He also adds a dash of strawman and a pinch of ad hominem to flavor his off-the-mark propositions. [1]
And he is wrong when he claims this Mises Institute article by Richard J. Maybury is a rewrite of history — the article is history, through and through.
But none of this is to say that Leopold missed completely. He correctly identified the source of our ills, he just got its name wrong. [2]
Note:
[1] The strawman and ad hominem arise when he posits an entity called the Tea Party. The Tea Party is nothing more than a movement of individuals whose political and economic views run the gamut from neocon statist to libertarian.
[2] The ill is the corporatist economy, which Leopold incorrectly calls the free market.
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Typical nonsense one would expect from a website like the Huffington Post. Pure quackery. I couldn’t even finish it.
Who?
Nothing new. Pretty much everyone apart from Austrians/anarcho-capitalists is thinking of fascism when they use the word capitalism. They cannot imagine a society without the state, therefore they assume that those who are in economic power will and do buy the statist politicians.
What I try to tell anti-capitalist’s is that you can hate specific corporations and not have to be against capitalism in general.
Is it possible to remove tags from articles? I’ve noticed that this system has been abused. For example, check out some of the tags on that article by Richard J. Maybury. Nobody should be permitted to tag articles as “retarded.” This issue needs to be fixed, especially as this site becomes ever more popular and thus an ever larger influx of closed-minded anti-libertarians.
On the other hand, you could then zoom in on the most hard-hitting stuff by searching for “retarded”….
I have to agree. I’ve seen the same abuse on many of the articles concerning healthcare reform.
The one’s for George Reismann’s particular article on the subject are vile.
Free market economics is always targeted by anti-capitalist because they lack understanding. The tea party has been stigmatised by the media as a lunatic fringe and now anything that people disagree with, they label as being associated with the tea party. Similar to the way “conspiracy theory” was labelled on to everything and anything that went against what the government and media said occurred. It is just a way to marginalise opinions in order to not have to deal with the logic or reasoning or truth that has been brought forward for consideration.
In some ways I do not blame people for being anti-capitalist because it was their (state) education and the media indoctrination that has established their opinions. Admittedly I was kind of anti-capitalist before I found Austrian economics.
How about this HuffPo posting to the above mentioned article? I wonder where in Europe this lost paradise is supposed to be. Maybe if you are state employee:
Paul 12:00 PM on 11/24/2010 116 Fans
“The number one priority for the future of America is to restore the political power of the middle class.
We need a party that can articulate a system of social democracy similar to that in Europe where the standard of living has been maintained in spite the exact same global forces at work in the US.
The platofrm should be:
Full employment
Health care for all – unbundled from employment
Better public schools
Mass transit
35 hour work week is full time
six weeks vacation.
I’ll vote for that.”
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