tang20The first paragraph is a glorified “but who will build the roads?” argument, which can be disproved by many examples of private infrastructure projects. Secondly, it is not the market which emerges from government, but it is government that emerges from markets and economic prosperity. There was simply no government before there was civilization, which is brought about by division of labor and private property.
Second paragraph: again a big “who will build the lampposts?” argument. He’s just spouting the religious dogma of statism. The statement “there is no way such [public services] would be provided” is contradicted by cities such as Wenzhou in China.
http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/15/chinas-black-market-city
Third paragraph is a non sequitur. What does the history of the economics profession have to do with actual economic history? That said, markets are NOT perfect. They can “fail”, depending on how you define failure. Any numerical measurements based on mathematical models that may try to expose this “failure” are flawed because of the subjective theory of value. We can’t measure subjective value, but we KNOW that voluntary trades are the ONLY trades where both parties gain in value.
Fourth paragraph, Tom Woods has debunked the idea that deregulation caused the financial crisis. The rest of the paragraph is incomprehensible. The last sentence is a doozy. First, Rothbard has shown that the financial crisis leading up to the Great Depression was caused by credit expansion and gool ole’ ABCT.
Next, what does that have to do with WW2? The “principal factor” of WW2 was the fact that the Treaty of Versailles included -massive- reparations. The reparations were needed because Britain and France still had large amounts of -war debt- owed to JP Morgan. This drove Germany into hyperinflation which caused the economic problems that allowed Hitler to be voted in. I’m sure the historians here know much for of this than I.
The very notion that free market forces are to blame for World War II is utterly farcical (he didn’t say it, but I bet he thinks Black Tuesday was caused by the “free market” as well). At the head of every war or mass murdering dictatorship there is a government, and probably a banker.