grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

agreed.

also:
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.html

Even though he had some strong socialist leanings, it always seemed to me that he criticized his fellow socialists at least as much as, if not more than, the notional enemy. His eyes were definitely open to the flaws of his own ideology, and that's a kind of intellectual honesty we rarely see anywhere.

Yeah, this is why I'm not even bothering with most economic discussions, anymore. When it comes to markets, twits of every persuasion have a remarkable ability to point to the effects of corruption, distortion, oligarchy, socialism, fascism, etc., call them the failure of the free market, and then pull their own preferred corruptions and distortions out of their sleeves and call them remedies.

And people go for it.

Further, I think more and more "free market" folks are prone to helping out with that process . I'd bluntly caricature some of the arguments I've seen as, "Well, you don't automatically assume that every unpleasant thing X is due to sociopathic capitalists Y, so I'll lecture you about how big corporations can manipulate the government. Also, your objections to unnecessary, unjustified intervention or regulation Z hold no water because corporations somewhere, someday have done bad things."

I think Orwell would have recognized that sort of thing, ideology or no ideology.

Politics and the English Language is the greatest essay ever written on the subject of English usage.

I keep copies at my desk and give them to people who give me badly written reports.

I will tolerate one or two bad pieces, but some reports I get are almost unreadable. They are coming from native English speakers who supposedly graduated from university but who have difficulty writing complete simple sentences. Complex sentences are utterly beyond them; generally, they turn into run-on sentences. They flout the rules of subordination, subject-verb agreement, and placement of modifiers. The usage is laughable, with rampant malapropisms and hack phrases filling the page. Most sentences are in passive voice. I've met ten year olds who spell better.

I am so tired of ugly writing and having to take fifteen minutes to parse one hundred words to decipher its meaning.

If I understand the Bar Mitzvah, correctly, Jewish kids are required to demonstrate the ability to read from the Torah as part of the rite of passage into manhood. It looks to me like a carefully thought out way of keeping morons out of the gene pool.

Actually, although I'm not Jewish, my understanding is that one need so much be able to read Hebrew as to read only selected, set passages from the Torah in Hebrew and that one can effectively memorize large parts of the ritual readings. (The rough equivalent here is Roman Catholic priests' previous need for Latin. Yes, they used to need to know some and especially the Eucharist, but that didn't translate, no pun intended, into a requirement to read Latin generally.) Also, remember that, modern attempts at sexual equality aside, the Bar Mitzvah and its concomitant emphasis on education in general has historically been a boys' club.

That's kinda my point, Jennifer.

And the funny thing is, people who've said nothing of the sort get painted with the same brush.

EDIT: Of course, it doesn't help that to some people, "won't be a problem" means "won't resemble anything like what we see now and will likely be far more resolvable for people experiencing it", while to others it means "won't happen in any way or otherwise inconvenience anyone".

I have basically given up on defending "the free market" in conversation. The phrase "free market" has a bad brand name with a lot of baggage for a lot of reasons. And this is a bad time to defend systems rooted in the private sector.

However, there's another issue: On a fundamental level, I don't know that I can defend something that I don't have a clear vision of. Mostly what I have is informed skepticism of regulation. I don't have a real firm idea of what a free market would look like. Maybe it would look exactly like the dreams of the anarcho-capitalists. Maybe it would be similar to the status quo but more prosperous. Maybe it would look like the all-local economy envisioned by Kevin Carson. I have my own hunch but I don't really know. So I basically argue on the margin: On the margin there is good reason to believe that a lot of regulations will be counter-productive and that a more market-based approach could yield greater prosperity and opportunity. So I argue for that.

Even with drug legalization, one of the few issues where I'm confident that going all the way (or damn near all the way) in a libertarian direction would work out pretty well, I still stick with skepticism in arguments. As long as I talk about the negative consequences of the drug war and how just about any approach would be better as long as it kept this situation out of the hands of the criminal underworld, people tend to agree with me. But as soon as I start talking about drugs being sold in stores or argue that it should be largely unregulated, discussion shuts down.

I'm not saying that I want to concede the argument for regulation of legalized drugs as a way to be "cool" in the eyes of statists, but I do think that arguing for improvement on the margins involves fewer leaps than arguing for drastic improvements. Likewise, arguing against a regulation on the margins plays better than a general "free market" vision or argument.

Which is pretty much why, ultimately, despite the overwhelming utilitarian arguments in favor of free markets, you are almost going to have to resort to a justice-based, rights based response, because we do not know what freedom will look like, and that is ultimately the point. Neither your nor mine nor anyone else's "vision" is controlling. People will be able to follow their own visions, to the maximum extent possible without total chaos.

Thanks, Shem.