Since Walter Block (my most excellent college professor) and coauthors James Gwartney and Robert Lawson put together the Economic Freedom of the World Report fifteen years ago, economists continue to find that economic freedom is associated with many good things. But do these positives come at the expense of bad outcomes such as violence and crime? Sociologists Wenger and Bonomo write that “The relationship between crime and the terminal crisis of capitalism has become the subject of considerable debate….[But] the debate does not concern the role of capitalism in producing crime—to all but the reactionary or the naïve, such questions have long been settled.”
Noam Chomsky also wrote that, “there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard– and if you just read the world that they describe, it’s a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it.” This runs contrary to economists such as Frederic Bastiat or Murray Rothbard himself who argue that the market creates a harmony of interests.
Who is right? In recently published The 2010 Economic Freedom of the World Annual report, John Levendis and I have a chapter that looks at international data and that finds countries with more economic freedom actually have significantly lower rates of homicide. Touché Chomsky!
Not only do classical liberals have well-thought-out theories of why markets increase peaceful interaction, but their theories are consistent with the facts. If the relationship holds, one of the best ways to decrease crime is to move towards laissez-faire. Read all about it in our article: “The Relationship Between Economic Freedom and Homicide.”
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anyone whose politics sits distinctly on the left or the right is full of it. chomsky is no different with his left-leaning views, i personally lean slightly to the right and i think rothbard, bastiat and even ron paul all sit on the right hand edge of the fence too. it seems to me that if you aren’t a little bit hard and a little bit conservative you are inviting the thieves into your house. i’d guess that if you were to put ancient greek philosophy schools on the scale you find cynics and stoics both sit on the right hand side but guess which ones have the highest survival rate? cynics? stoics are heroic but tragically mis-led when they believe that holding a brave face is the key to serenity. being endlessly incredulous, that is much more likely to lead to a reasonable level of comfort, because even the most well meaning people will use ruses to win a little freebies out of anyone. only a cynic can see this. maybe i’m a cynic? the other thing about cynicism is that they don’t expect anyone to be anything other than opportunistic and greedy, is this not the case for misesian/rothbardian/bastiatan type economics? the founding fathers of the USA even incorporated cynical principles into the constitution deliberately dividing the government against itself in order to try and restrain its innate expansionist tendency.
Being a cynic does not mean that you are smarter, it just means your much more likely to be right.
On what basis is Rothbard’s world full of hate? I assume he thinks that everyone is just looking out for their own interests? Some things are not worth bothering to respond to, except as curiosity that someone could hold such views.
Chomsky, for all his fame, is not big on actually reading a full work before commenting on it. Snippets of information seem to be enough for the man to make sweeping generalizations about an entire philosophy.
Indeed. That is why I completely gave up on Chomsky in college. He likes to comment on fairly basic texts, say, Wealth of Nations, sometimes urging people to see the text for themselves. So I did. I eventually came to realize that this guy who seemed like an amazing intellectual hadn’t actually read the book. It was like he bought the Wealth of Nations Cliff Notes, or found some “Quotable Adam Smith” somewhere on the internet. He then based his whole understanding of capitalism on the Cliff Notes. That, and many other shortcomings really wrecked his credibility with me. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that spurs a person to further their own education and not rely on some guy at MIT too much.
Chomsky is an economic illiterate. The only thing he is worth reading, is his foreign policy analysis.
I wouldn’t really say that: It’s just the normal case of experts in one thing thinking they’re experts in everything. I would by no means call Chomsky stupid, if you ever get interested in computer science and decide to start reading into parsing and formal language theory, Chomsky’s name will pop up on nearly everything you read on the subject.
Who Would Be a Free Man? The Political Economy of Noam Chomsky
I hope Chomsky dies of ebola
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