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 /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
