Skip to main content

And in yet another blatant attempt to blame Libertarians for something they don't believe . . . .

First, The Street sets up the premise--a corporation that has done illegal things:
Reuters probe found that under the brilliant leadership of its CEO, Aubrey McClendon, Chesapeake plotted with its top competitor, Canada's Encana Corp., to avoid bidding against each other, thereby suppressing the prices of land they wished to lease.
Then, The Street blames "Libertarian orthodoxy" for this horrible situation:

The recent travails of Chesapeake Energy and an unrelated but, in its own way, equally hideous company, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters(GMCR_), are the best examples I can find of how the market is simply not equipped to deal with corporate malfeasance, libertarian orthodoxy notwithstanding.
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and Chesapeake don't seem to have much in common. But each has exhibited a collective character flaw that no billion-dollar market cap penalties can even begin to correct. They are the kind of companies for which regulation -- and perhaps law enforcement -- is the only answer.

Here is a wonderful example of the "never let facts get in the way of a good meme or narrative" strategy.

(Challenge to Gary Weiss, author of this travesty:  explain how Libertarian orthodoxy that specifically makes the extinguishing of force and fraud a governmental responsibility is somehow responsible for this mess.)

Conspiring to drive prices down by rigged bidding is not only illegal, it is fraud.  One of the main premises under Libertarianism is that the government does have a major role to play against people or businesses or corporations that engage in the use of fraud or force (I prefer "coercion" myself) against others.

But the flavor of the year is to attack Libertarians as responsible for every societal ill that can be generated, even though it is important to point out that it was a private company (Reuters) investigating the case based on free market incentives (Pulitzers, perhaps, for the journalists and more advertising revenue and enhanced reputation for the news outlet) that broke this case open.

Possibly that's because our own Justice Department was too busy supplying illegal weapons for the Mexican drug trade to notice what was happening.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?