OT - I don't _hate_ McMansions

[Andy Bradford]

Thus said Levi Pearson on Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:05:10 MDT:

> You've  got a  distrust of  government that  borders on  paranoia, and
> apparently a pretty  narrow view of political  and economic philosophy
> as evidenced  by your repeated  contrast of pure capitalism  with pure
> socialism.

How about a  bit of Aristotle. You assume that  capitalism and socialism
are at  opposite ends of  a scale and that  somewhere in between  is the
virtue. This is necessarily incorrect. But  rather than hear it from me,
and since you indicated that you prefer reading:

http://mises.org/story/3014

> There has  been important  economic philosophers besides  Friedman and
> pals since Adam Smith and Karl Marx, you know.

Indeed there have. Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, F. A.
Hayek and  dozens more. Clearly  John Maynard Keynes has  been extremely
influential, but that doesn't necessarily mean he was correct. Would you
care to add to the list some of your favorites?

> There's  also  the  fact  that  there  *aren't*  any  pure  capitalist
> societies and plenty of successful regulated capitalist societies that
> are currently very successful.

That's not a hard statement to make given that there aren't any ``pure''
capitalist societies period. Again you are working from a framework that
is flawed. Please  read the linked article above and  feel free to point
out any flaws you might find with it. If you would rather not read it, I
can easily explain it instead.

> Instead of insisting that the world  needs to change to fit your image
> of economic  utopia, you ought to  lay off the kool-aid  and deal with
> reality for a while.

Of course, that's it. Bring out the kool-aid strawman.

> Chile, for  example, became far more  prosperous, if you just  look at
> GDP, but  the economy was not  terribly stable and most  of the wealth
> ended up in  the hands of a few without  helping the impoverished very
> much. There  was gross  pollution, etc.  All the  sorts of  things I'd
> expect to see with unregulated capitalism.

Hogwash.  This  has   nothing  to  do  with   libertarianism  much  less
capitalism.  If  there was  pollution  it  certainly wasn't  because  of
unregulated capitalism,  it was due  to lack of enforcement  of property
rights and protection of life.

> Anyway, I  suspect we're  just going  to have  to disagree  on grounds
> of  economic  philosophy.   You're  never  going  to   convert  me  to
> libertarianism, and  I'm never going to  convince you it might  not be
> all it's cracked up to be.

Doesn't matter if you  agree the the philosophy or not,  the fact of the
matter is  that people that  disagree employ the  force of the  state to
impose  it upon  those  that would  rather  have it  another  way. Am  I
correct, or not?

Andy
-- 
[-----------[system uptime]--------------------------------------------]
 10:25pm  up 23 min,  1 user,  load average: 1.11, 1.12, 0.90