Skip to main content

The only thing you need to know about Laura Stein's sophomoric piece on Libertarianism . . .

. . . (which argues that big government is both awful and oppressive but nonetheless absolutely necessary to civilization) is that her college Anthropology professor convinced her of the old canard that the Iroquois had something to do with the US Constitution.

She knows about as much about Libertarian concepts of governments and markets as she does about, uh, the evolution of government.  Which is to say:  not much about either.

But, again, the fact that so many ill-informed people are attacking Libertarian thought these days is indicative of how many people are starting to become nervous about Libertarian (big and small "L") voters.

Comments

Hube said…
OMG. Another PC dolt who believes the Founders were significantly influenced by the Iroquois Confederation? I'm surprised the Pilgrims haven't been yet transformed into devil-worshiping vampires in our textbooks.
delacrat said…
What an anthropology professor said about the similarities between Iroquois confederation and the Constitution 200 years ago says nothing about what Ms. Stein has to say about Libertarianism today.

For example:

"Saying that free markets can only exist by eliminating "regulations" is akin to saying that we can only have leprechauns if Ireland removes all the fences and hedges in the Irish countryside. No removal of restrictions will enable the existence of leprechauns, and the "free market" is just as much an imaginary entity as they are."

Do the Constitution and/or Iroquois confederation disprove Ms. Stein's contention that "free markets" are as imaginary as leprechauns?

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?