Emissions trading broken?

[Tamas]

Fair enough.

[DGuller]

Pinochet is not an example you want to use if you want to maintain moral idealism.  It is certain that he was a murderous thug.  He wasn't in Assad's or Hussein's league, but a thug he was nonetheless. 

At the same time, it is also nearly certain that Chile under him went in a much better direction that it would've gove with Allende at the helm.  The economy was already in the dumps when he died, and in any case we now know that Marxism is never good news for the economy.

Good luck trying to calculate how much extra GDP is enough to justify a murder of one opposition activist.

[Jacob]

Allende was not a lunatic.  He was a radical trying to further a radical agenda without broad-based political support.

So Obama, basically?

[Tamas]

Pinochet is not an example you want to use if you want to maintain moral idealism.  It is certain that he was a murderous thug.  He wasn't in Assad's or Hussein's league, but a thug he was nonetheless. 

At the same time, it is also nearly certain that Chile under him went in a much better direction that it would've gove with Allende at the helm.  The economy was already in the dumps when he died, and in any case we now know that Marxism is never good news for the economy.

Good luck trying to calculate how much extra GDP is enough to justify a murder of one opposition activist.

I have no desire to use Pinochet as any kind of moral compass. He was brought up as "omg he is proof that Friedman was an evil fraud"

[DGuller]

Pinochet is not an example you want to use if you want to maintain moral idealism.  It is certain that he was a murderous thug.  He wasn't in Assad's or Hussein's league, but a thug he was nonetheless. 

At the same time, it is also nearly certain that Chile under him went in a much better direction that it would've gove with Allende at the helm.  The economy was already in the dumps when he died, and in any case we now know that Marxism is never good news for the economy.

Good luck trying to calculate how much extra GDP is enough to justify a murder of one opposition activist.

I have no desire to use Pinochet as any kind of moral compass. He was brought up as "omg he is proof that Friedman was an evil fraud"

I wasn't addressing you, though I can see how it can look like that since I posted after you.

[Razgovory]

I get the impression that he and other libertarians value economic freedom over political freedom, and really don't care that much about civil rights.  They are concerned about government abuses, but really aren't interested in private abuses.  In fact, if you reduce government who is going defend individuals against other individuals?  Especially when those individuals are wealthy?  Things like the Truck system, peonage, debt bondage, and even slavery are oppressive coercion that happen on the private scale.  Libertarians don't show much concern about such things and are hell bent on the only things that can really combat them.

Those things may "happen" on a private scale, but they couldn't flourish without laws that bolster them.  While I certainly don't want to be associated with his policies in anyone's mind, I have to say that Stephen Douglas was right when he said in the Lincold-Douglas debates that the southern slave system couldn't exist without the slave codes, so even though the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case threw open previously free territories to slavery, in practice slavery couldn't spread there without laws on the books to maintain it.

These things don't require laws to bolster them.  Just people with weapons to keep things under control, and no larger body to prevent it from happening.  I suspect that slavery predated many of the slave codes.  Hell, you have occasion now where slavery occurs illegally.  The human trafficking trade is flourishing and is still quite illegal.

[Jacob]

Yeah, slavery is still a thing today.

Wikipedia says there's about 30 million: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery

[grumbler]

Yes, he does say that in general, but his list of examples all includes government.  If he was also concerned about abuse of economic power, then he might have snuck that in instead of one of the four government-related entities he mentioned.

His main idea, in this snippet, is how, by "removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement."  The whole quote is a mere three sentences long! 

You cannot expect Friedman, in every three sentences he wrote, to list all concerns about abuses of economic power!

[Razgovory]

Pinochet is not an example you want to use if you want to maintain moral idealism.  It is certain that he was a murderous thug.  He wasn't in Assad's or Hussein's league, but a thug he was nonetheless. 

At the same time, it is also nearly certain that Chile under him went in a much better direction that it would've gove with Allende at the helm.  The economy was already in the dumps when he died, and in any case we now know that Marxism is never good news for the economy.

Good luck trying to calculate how much extra GDP is enough to justify a murder of one opposition activist.

I have no desire to use Pinochet as any kind of moral compass. He was brought up as "omg he is proof that Friedman was an evil fraud"

I don't recall saying the words "Evil" or "Fraud".

[Tamas]

Pinochet is not an example you want to use if you want to maintain moral idealism.  It is certain that he was a murderous thug.  He wasn't in Assad's or Hussein's league, but a thug he was nonetheless. 

At the same time, it is also nearly certain that Chile under him went in a much better direction that it would've gove with Allende at the helm.  The economy was already in the dumps when he died, and in any case we now know that Marxism is never good news for the economy.

Good luck trying to calculate how much extra GDP is enough to justify a murder of one opposition activist.

I have no desire to use Pinochet as any kind of moral compass. He was brought up as "omg he is proof that Friedman was an evil fraud"

I don't recall saying the words "Evil" or "Fraud".

Apparently I can better express your thoughts than you can, then.

[Martinus]

These things don't require laws to bolster them.  Just people with weapons to keep things under control, and no larger body to prevent it from happening.  I suspect that slavery predated many of the slave codes.  Hell, you have occasion now where slavery occurs illegally.  The human trafficking trade is flourishing and is still quite illegal.

I agree with Raz. 

Anyway, as a free market liberal (my closest political ideology is the so-called "soc-liberalism" or "social liberalism"), I gotta say that the "invisible hand of the market" myth, despite having been debunked (and constantly being debunked) countless of times, has more supporters than the most popular ideas of Marx and is equally bullshit.

Just as lack of checks and balances in political power leads to tyranny, lack of controls in free market leads to monopolization which is bad for everyone involved (except, short term for the monopolist). Not to mention, it erroneously assumes that economic efficiency is the only sensible criterion of judging social processes, which is also patently untrue. 

[Sheilbh]

Allende was not a lunatic.  He was a radical trying to further a radical agenda without broad-based political support.

So Obama, basically?

Or Thatcher, or almost any other politician.

I don't get the criticism and extreme reaction against Friedman

Having said that I think it's weird that people still find an example in Chile.

[grumbler]

Or Thatcher, or almost any other politician.

  Exactly.  Allende's fate is an example of what happens when one tries to press a small political edge into a revolutionary mandate.  The argument that Maggie fate is the same is an interesting one.

[/quote]I don't get the criticism and extreme reaction against Friedman [/quote]

Ignorance and a desire to "score points," I think.  Classical liberalism is pretty much the definition of the political center, but when tribal thinkers argue about politics, the political extremes are "all of us" and "all of them."  Friedman is one of "them" and so tribal thinkers  lump him in with Marx as an extremist.

Not that I agree with Friedman 100%, but at least I can accept his convincing arguments and reject only those I find unpersuasive.

Having said that I think it's weird that people still find an example in Chile.

Using Chile as an example of Friedman's thinking is an act of desperation.  To the tribal thinkers, Friedman is an extremist without any actual extreme views, so they have to exaggerate something he did say into an extremist position.

[Sheilbh]

Ignorance and a desire to "score points," I think.  Classical liberalism is pretty much the definition of the political center, but when tribal thinkers argue about politics, the political extremes are "all of us" and "all of them."  Friedman is one of "them" and so tribal thinkers  lump him in with Marx as an extremist.

Not that I agree with Friedman 100%, but at least I can accept his convincing arguments and reject only those I find unpersuasive.

I don't agree that classical liberalism's necessarily the political centre. 

But I find the knocking down of a very important thinker because he's not 'one of us' disagreeable.  As you say judge his arguments on the merits and acknowledge his importance and that he has made significant contributions.  There's no point citing him like scripture if it's not part of a wider argument, but I think attacking him with similar zeal is just bizarre.

Edit:  I'd especially dispute that Tamas's version of classical liberalism is the centre.

[grumbler]

I don't agree that classical liberalism's necessarily the political centre. 

I should have noted that classical liberalism was practically the definition of the center of the classical political spectrum.  You are correct that the modern 2D political "spectrum" doesn't have the same center.