Mimi & Eunice: Let’s Make More Regulations!

Corporatism, Mimi & Eunice on IP
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[Here’s another departure from our usual syndicated Mimi & Eunice content. It’s not strictly IP-related, but it was too good to pass up, dramatizing as it does the simultaneously comical and frustrating disconnect that most people have with regard to problems and solutions involving government. — GAP]

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This is post originally appeared at Mimi and Eunice. View original post.

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Re-Imagining Marketopia: A Reply to Terence Ball

Drug Policy, Libertarian Theory, Private Security & Law, The Basics
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A decade ago Terence Ball wrote a critique of some Frankenstein-like creature meant to represent free market ideology. He robbed the graves of men and women as diverse as Murray Rothbard, Margaret Thatcher, Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand to put it together and came up with something that no libertarian would endorse, I suspect, but which nevertheless is recognizable as libertarian(ish). It may not be the same species, but it is in the same genus. Or at least the same family.

He imagined a country called Marketopia and described how life would be there, with the purpose of showing us that while markets are good for some things, there are areas where they are inappropriate. As he wrote, “why do some (or perhaps all) Marketopian practices make many – perhaps most – of us uneasy or queasy, or worse?” The great problem with his essay is that he never demonstrates to the reader’s satisfaction that he understands what his own argument is. He claims to be interested in three questions: Why do people get queasy at the practices of Marketopia, what distortions of the language would Marketopia produce and are we already headed towards Marketopia.

About the second question I care nothing at all, and about the third… well, watching a statist fretting over how close we are to a Free Market is a bit like listening to a neocon quaking that Iran presents a military threat to the United States. It would be less embarrassing to watch a grown man sleep with a night light to protect him from the Bogey Man in his closet. The first question bears some scrutiny, however, but I wish I could do it knowing what exactly Dr. Ball had in mind.

Is this Marketopia supposed to be what would always happen if libertarianism ever won the day, or is he just demonstrating how market activity is inappropriate for some relationships? If the latter is his point, I would say he came up with a handful of examples where I agree with him, but what does he propose to do about it? If the former, it should be pointed out that many of these activities are legal now but do not occur.

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Amusing Rejoinder to the Communitarian Charge of Atomism

Anti-Statism, Humor, Libertarian Theory, Statism
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Atoms form bonds of varying strengths with other atoms to form molecules. The bonds they form naturally are generally stable, whereas the ones that are forced by men decay rapidly — and give you cancer.

(Embrace it! Own it! :o)

[Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP; HT fellow TLS blogger Robert Wicks for suggesting the second sentence.]

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Jennifer Burns on Ayn Rand and the Classical Liberal Tradition

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Business, Pop Culture, Statism, The Right
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With the recent release of the first part of the film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged (see Matthew Alexander’s review on Prometheus Unbound), the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) — via LearnLiberty.org — brings us this interview with Professor Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, on how Ayn Rand fits into the classical liberal tradition.

In this video, Prof. Burns explains three classical liberal themes in Ayn Rand’s masterpiece Atlas Shrugged: individualism, suspicion of centralized power, and free markets. These themes come to life through the novel’s plot and characters and give the reader an opportunity to imagine a world where entrepreneurship has been stifled by regulations and where liberty has been traded for security. Burns ends by reviving Rand’s critical question: do you want to live in this kind of world?

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A Tale of Two Insights: One Good, the Other Ambiguous

(Austrian) Economics, Libertarian Theory, Statism, The Basics
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In a blogpost titled “Hayek on the Two Orders,” Gene Callahan approvingly quotes the following passage from Hayek and admonishes market advocates not to forget or overlook the important insight within:

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of worlds at once. — The Fatal Conceit

All well and good, and familiar to readers of Hayek. But then Callahan follows up with some commentary and things get increasingly murky:

I think this achieves just the right understanding of the balance we ought to seek between market and non-market orders. The market is a wonderful institution, which can achieve marvelous economic efficiency. Economic rationality, on the large scale, is impossible without markets, as Mises and Hayek so wonderfully demonstrated. And yet, markets can easily crush the “more intimate groupings.” Markets, especially at the local level, must be subject to social control, lest that crushing proceeds unchecked. Market advocates should remember both halves of Hayek’s insight!

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