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Storms of Stupidity

I’ve got a piece up at TCS on the surreal claim that the tragedy in New Orleans was the result of “limited government” and “economic libertarianism.”

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Storms of Stupidity”

  1. Bill Korner
    September 11th, 2005 18:08
    1

    Libertarians and their opponents need to enter into a non-proliferation treaty of sorts.

    Lets call it the IGLT —

    Ideological Generalization Limitation Treaty.

    Right wingers will agree to stop talking about “free markets”, “limited government”, and “individual freedom” IN THE CONTEXT OF SERIOUS POLICY DISCUSSIONS. In return, liberal columnists will stop trying to score points by irrelvantly degrading these to-vague-for-use concepts.

    Then in the face of the Katrina tragedy we can focus on real questions such as Hillary Clinton’s:

    “Would FEMA have performed better if it were an independent agency as it was before it was subsumed in the Department of Homeland Security?”

    Hell, we can even consider absurd libertarian rhetorical bromides such as:

    “Would there have been poor people without cars in New Orleans if it weren’t for welfare?”

    Let’s just leave sickly vague rhetoric about the “free market” to philosophico-economic analysis.

  2. Bill Korner
    September 12th, 2005 12:14
    2

    I was less careful than I should have been in that comment:

    It’s not that the generalizations should not be discussed in serious policy discussions and should be in philsophico-economic analysis.

    Rather, its that IF we’re going to use them in policy discussions, they need to be put conspicuously in service of the actual problem at hand. Instead they are usually trumpet blasts to rally ideoligical supporters and alarm bells to warn ideological opponents. This is WAY counterproductive and trivializes the importance of the actual issues.

    Also, on reflection, I think that the risk of ideological communication breakdowns in the use of these concepts is even greater in scholarly analysis than in policy debates. The law that 90% of everything is crap (whatever its called) applies with full force to these literatures. In fact its probably more like 97%.

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