Thomas E. Woods, who has a good book out about the recent financial turmoil and the bone-headed reactions to it, has this excellent piece on the sort of nonsense written about the supposed villains of this story. As he notes, when a leftist author cannot even be arsed to spell FA Hayek’s name properly, you tend to suspect the author has never read the person he is attacking. Or maybe they think Salma Hayek is an economist. (Great excuse for a gratuitous link, Ed).
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Right and I think President Clueless thinks Winston Churchill and Ward Churchill and one and the same.
“Meltdown” is indeed a good book (as indeed are all T.W.’s other works).
However, as I can not spell myself, I will not attack the lack of spelling ability of leftists.
Ouch, Millie. In all seriousness though, I doubt the big O is clueless at all. At least not about things he deems important.
Jonathan: I agree that the least a person citing a writer can do is actually read his writings, but I hope you don’t think that if any of the real leftists read Hayek or anyone else for that matter, it would change their outlook. I haven’t read him, neither have I read Keynes, but I know where my sympathies lie from observing the utterances and actions of their followers. My point is that most of us are somehow either predisposed towards a system of control from the top down, or against it. All further reading and study will do is help us dig our ideological heels even deeper, and give us new tools to defend our position. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, come to think of it. As to the undecided, they are normally not among those engaged in professional punditry, much less among those making the actual decisions, although I suspect there are exceptions.
An enjoyable article. I found it interesting that the Thom Hartmann Huffpo piece which Mr. Woods is criticizing lumps together with Messrs. Mises, Hayek, Friedman, etc., as being among the progenitors of the current economic crisis, both Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. I’m not sure either of those two worthies would appreciate the association. Both served faithfully in the Clinton White House, and Summers is now working in the Obama White House. Neither is what anyone knowledgable would refer to as a free-market enthusiast. Just one more illustration, I guess (if one is even needed), that Hartmann is totally clueless and is simply making stuff up out of his ass.
When I saw The Most Holy, The One, The Obamessiah (peace be upon him) referred to as “The Big O,” I think I frightened the dog.
Laird:
Thom Hartmann is full of shit, in general. At work I used to listen to his show on Error America, when the alternatives were Dr. Laura or “Gunny Bob” Newman. He made Randi Rhoads look honest, and Howard Stern look like an intellectual.
Last year, I submitted an SQOTD of some Alaska pol named Mike Gravel claiming that “freedom is participation in power.” (Memorable, because I mistakenly called him the governor, which was really rude to the actual governor, who is both far more attractive than Gravel and whose IQ is roughly 133 points higher than his.) But anyway, it was on Hartmann’s show. And Hartmann’s response was the sort of flaccid ass-kissing normally reserved for authors on book tours on NPR rather than the “WTFO?” that I thought more appropriate.
Sunfish when I first went to college (back when the terrible lizards walked the Earth) the first year introduction to politics was the “moderate” Labour party person Bernard Crick’s “In Defence of Politics” – and he defined freedom as participation in the political process.
Yes they really are that weird. “Politics is freedom” to these fruit bats.
It is worse that “freedom is having lots of nice stuff” idea (as freedom is about “having choices” and “the more wealth one has the more choices one has”) the mutation of “positive freedom” idea (originally “positive freedom” meant control of the emotions by one’s reason – self control), by the American Pragmatists (and others).
At least a Pragmatist was not saying “you have to be involved in politics” (like some “active citizen” from the French Revolution) he was just saying “more government may mean higher living standards and thus more freedom” (although that is rather sick also).
Oddly enough the most famous of the Pragmatists, John Dewey, seems to have repented of a lot of this.
Not only (unlike so many other “liberals”) did he not fall in love with Soviet Russia or Fascist Italy, he did much like the New Deal.
Sure, unlike Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy, there were still free elections and so on (although with very biased radio coverage), but the government was still ordering people about.
And John Dewey came to see (or at least half see) that government ordering you about (even supposedly to increase living standards) reduces your freedom – and that this is a bad thing.
Sunfish, in case the dog wonders: this is not what I was referring to. It’s more like the other big O.
A small error can change the meaning of a whole comment – “it is worse that” should be “it is worse than”.
Paul:
This is certainly not what freedom is about at its core, but there is no denying that there is much truth in that sentence. And come to think of it further, I like the idea that the freedom to gain wealth is also the freedom to gain more freedom.
As you know Alisa – the “Pragmatist” (or “Progressive” or “Liberal”) argument was as follows:
“By increasing the size and scope of government we are not making you less free – on the contrary, this will make you more prosperious and therefore more free”.
The point of view of such people as President Wilson with his “New Freedom” (and of his henchperson E. M. House).
Such economic polices actually make people LESS (not more) prosperious over time – than they otherwise would have been.
However, even if the Progressives had been correct in thinking that their policies would make people better fed, clothed (and so on, and in better health, they would not have been correct about freedom.
They would not have been making people more free, they would have been making people less free – although with higher material living standards, and a longer life.
They misunderstood (or pretended to misunderstand) what freedom is.