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Here’s another argument against this:

“Argument 2: 2nd amendment advocates claim the law is intended for people to resist a tyrannical government. As argued here, these people claim that the people have the right to use the same kind of weaponry as the government. But nowadays the government has vastly superior weapons, including tanks, missiles, airplanes, and nuclear bombs. Do we want to live in a world where citizens also have access to these kinds of weapons?”

which they’ll hate, hate, hate, and try to rule out-of-bounds, not because it’s a bad analogy but because it’s a good one:

When the 1st amendment was written, they had no concept of modern media and education. In today’s world government and their affiliates, including education and major media, have the big megaphones. They compel people daily to violate their consciences, thus rendering moot the free exercise clause. People’s livelihoods are threatened and even lost for expressing the wrong ideas in public. You think you can fight all that with a few liberty-oriented blogs and a facebook page? No, it’s time to treat the first amendment like the questioner wants the second to be treated: not to bother to even make the effort of repealing it explicitly, but just treat it in practice as a dead letter, let government tell us what the limits are; but keep the pretty paper the amendments are written on because it’s in that government’s interests – the only interests that functionally matter – to maintain the pretense that it is a constitutionally legitimate regime operating within the rules in the eyes of its subjects.”

[porphyrogenitus]

Both arguments rest on the premise that “we” (meaning: central authorities in the government) get to decide for the rest of us what is appropriate to have. (When in doubt, always – always – reject their premises and substitute your own. Control of underlaying assumptions/premises/assumptions is how the other side steers things to their conclusions. Not that the “man on the street” thinks of it this way – they just adopt, and reflect, the narrative frame that comes from the top; they also often think of themselves as “questioning authority” when they accept the establishment’s narrative frame).

Put it to them this way – it’s one thing if the ‘we’ in question is a group of friends discussing things but leaving each other free to make their own decisions. It’s another if the “we” in question is a government deciding for the rest of us the definition of our rights.

You can also toss something like this at them – and no, it’s not a nonsequiter. This is a relevant counter-argument for the type of person attracted to this site, at least.

As for the “loose gun laws lead to gun violence” argument, Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s conservative/peace-oriented brother) frequently makes the point – in the context of British debates – that Britain in the period before WWII had virtually no gun control laws: British law on guns, then, make today’s laws in, say, Texas look restrictive. Yet there was hardly any gun violence.

(His books, including A Brief History of Crime are worth looking into; while he’s no libertarian at all, he often makes the point that the increase of law and prevalence of government officials have gone hand in hand with a crime explosion, and these laws are often turned not against combating true crime – violence, fraud, thuggery – but against otherwise peaceful people, especially people who think they have some right of self-defense, because it’s easier for the officials to go after them than tackle traditional crime).

[porphyrogenitus]

Via Tom’s webpage there’s this article by Peter Schiff.

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Well idk because it’s sort of a personal choice.

If it were me, though, I wouldn’t make the Iraq War/last decade my focus, if only because it’s been done to death (if, usually, done badly – it’s not necessarily a defense of Neoconservatism to point out that many people get so wracked up about what they see as the wrongs of the Iraq War that they’re unable to look at the Neoconservatives involved with sufficient dispassion to understand their perspective and present it fairly, even while disagreeing with it).

If it were me, I’d write about the intellectual roots of neoconservatism, it’s early emphasis not just on foreign policy (“cold war liberals”) but on domestic policy, and the reason why what we might term “right liberals*” moved from the camp of the left to the camp of the right; then in the last part of the paper you could touch on why this led them to support an “activist” foreign policy.

That will allow you to get some distance from the passions of current events (which are certainly understandable, mind – if you think some group’s policies led to the unencessary deaths of tens, hundreds of thousands of people, well if that’s not something to get passionate about, then what is? – but the problem is, IMO, those emotions too frequently lead people astray in analysis. Again, it would be appropriate for a polemical paper).

But this suggestion on a narrower topic reflects my own personal, distinct outlook as to what I often find interesting; I like “history of intellectual development/intellectual movements,” so naturally that’s going to be how I recommend approaching it. But I do think it would have merit here, if the overall purpose of the paper is an understanding of a political-intellectual movement.

Plus I find that whole era (60s/early 70s) where so much developed to be fascinating, because it’s still not well understood just why everything unfolded as it did. It’s rather amazing the country went in 4 or 5 years from having one set of norms/cultural outlook to something rather unlike those (this can be seen visually – compare/contrast the typical image or film or tv program from, say, 1965/66 to that of 1970/71). The neoconservatives were a part of that, mostly in how they reacted to it.

*using “liberal” of course in the modern, conventional sense.

[porphyrogenitus]

Oh wow; speak of the rob’t debil, even a blind pig like the NYT can stumble across an acorn from time to time and notice that the regulatory-raj state protects entrenched interests at the expense of competitors.

Of course, the NYT as an institutional whole will learn nothing from it’s own articles on this subject because, as the beacon of entrenched interests, as indeed an intrenched interest itself, it will not want to. But some articles from a ‘reputable’ source to throw at your “government tax policy and regulations protect us from entrenched interest and are our only hope against the inequalities promoted by capitalism” friends.

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His thesis sounds similar to the one referenced here; that racism is wrong, thus we need to talk about how evil whitey (exclusively) is, and tendentiously and mendaciously slant the narrative to present Whitey as uniquely wicked, because that’s how you fight racism. Any comparison of this method of activist historiograpy to that of Streicher in his prime or of Goebbels would, of course, be inappropriate. However I will note that this sort of thing is a prime example of the progressive-as-therapeutic-manager-of-public-opinion rather than historian.

That said I second your interest in how the professors here would respond to your points (1) and (2). I tend to share Kelley Ross’s position on the whole Civil War thing.

[porphyrogenitus]

I did like the one where she stood in front of the Hoover Dam talking about “big things” – I found it lulzy. I mean, I’d love to have taken her up on that. “Ok, lets build some more big dams, how about that? Or maybe 100 nuclear power plants, lets dooo eeet!” – and watch how fast she said “oh, um, I didn’t mean build that, no – it would upset the environment. What I meant is we need more handouts and more subsidies to businesses connected to Democratic donors, that’s the ‘big thing’ I meant – big stimuli programs directed at the friends and supporters of the President.”

Which btw brings to mind something I should add as a caviate to the remarks on the “inequality chime-in” – libertarians should feel no need to defend the current distribution of income and wealth as somehow reflecting market conditions. Indeed, people should consequently point out that the very thing they decry is the *result* of the progressive structure they support.

For example, many, many progressives went on and on about GE not paying any taxes (net). Fine – well, we don’t want anyone to pay taxes, but GE got that status as a result of special favors, given to them by the progressive structure; GE thus gains a relative advantage over its competitors. GE is and has been in tight with government officials, particularly under the current “we want economic fairness” Administration.

GE gets special perks and subsidies from government, and it’s leaders sit on government boards that “recommend” (write) rules and regulations, and they stack them against their competitors and the little guys. Progressive government has always been – right from the start – the systematic empowerment of the big and politically connected interests at the expense of others (this was the case, historically, from the early Progressives, through FDR, to the present Progressives).

Now, one thing that the tax code that progressives are currently trumpeting did was produce the *appearance* of “less inequality,” but it mainly did so by getting people to shift their resources, so that their *reportable* income and wealth looked smaller. But the era that they’re constantly pointing to, now, as the halcion days of equality – the post-New Deal ’50s – was also the day when entrenched industries & interests had the most power; this was the era of the “(liberal) Establishment,” which during the early & late ’60s the progressive left railed against precisely because of how they had institutionalized their power while giving the appearance – without the substance – of equity.

This is mentioned in some of the lectures here, briefly, but more directly addressed in some of the recommended books. It is the inevitable consequence of a powerful government that grants favors and dispenses punishments (in the form of regulations & targeted taxation): inevitably, *BY* *DEFINITION* the politically well-connected will get the benefits of such a system, because those who are not by definition will not reach the attention of those in political power.

If your friends want less inequality, both economically and in the form of political influence, they should favor *decentralization,* not concentration in the hands of a central government dispensing favors (“public private partnerships,” and “investments in x”) to its friends. Remind them that the Dodd-Frank bill, which like the Sarbanes-Oxley bill was sold to them on the promise of “protecting” us from “big financial institutions” actually *favors* the big financial institutions at the expense of their smaller competitors – again, like Sarbanes-Oxley did. This bait-and-switch is endemic (it is what FDR’s NRA & other programs did, as well), and it’s time that the “smart, well-informed” set wises up.

Anyhow, yes; Maddow and her ilk are perfectly emblematic of this system’s spokesmen; the pretense of “challenging authority” when really they’re the Tools of The Man, courtiers “bravely speaking truth to power” by demanding that the authorities be given more power and influence over us.

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Btw, “Jacksonian Americans” – in WRM’s description – towards whom I have a lot of sympathy (probably too much), are nationalists who want to be left alone, but believe in bombing the crap out of anyone who they think is messin’ with them (Ron Paul’s arguments on foreign policy *might* reach them, but generally they think that if someone pokes us in the eye, that’s not our fault – the pokers are agents, too); they’re not too careful about sorting things out; they admire, rather than despise, the tactics of William Tecumseh Sherman (except to the extent to which many, many Jacksonians are Southerners, and don’t like that these tactics were used on their kin – but they’re not unhappy using them on others); the quickest way to end a war with miniumum blood shed of the people they care about is decisively. They do believe in “the big stick” approach. They don’t – generally see that as the source of some of their problems because they see themselves as decent people wanting to do well by others, and are open to appeals along the lines of “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, including here, so if we don’t take X out, X is a threat to democracy here.”

They also prefer to be left alone by government, especially revenuers, but believe in getting a hand up; they’re not against programs that help decent folk in need. Here the best way to persuade them is that they won’t ever be left alone by a government given the powers to “help” you, and we’d all be better off going back to mutual aid.

There’s a good article here on these fine people (and I don’t mean that snidely at all), and this here is basically written from this point of view and attempts to explain the partisan-ideological breakdown not just in America but the West as a whole.

I make a big point of the Jacksonians because 1) basically these were the people the Liberty Movement/Ron Paul movement needed to persuade, and 2) basically these were the people that the Ron Paul movement attempted to persuade, with varying degrees of success.

The (true) Jeffersonians are already liberty-movement people; the Wilsonians and Hamiltonians are basically a hopeless, lost cause, except to the extent to which they’ll hop on the liberty movement if – and only if – it starts to look like the Strong Horse, because there’s one thing Hamiltonians and Wilsonians admire above all, power. Functionally Tom Woods’s books have also been aimed at persuading Jacksonian Americans for the same reason – Hamiltonians and Wilsonians love power over others too much because they are convinced they know better how others (especially Jacksonians) ought to live their lives, so the H & W faction is unconvincable. But Jacksoinans don’t like being manipulated (er, nudged and goaded along) by busybodies, so they can be persuaded of liberty, with the right arguments.

Of course, now that new voting constituencies (Vote Banks) have been imported, the old Jacksonian Americans are diminishing in electoral significance, and being (consciously) marginalized by the Hamiltonian-Wilsonian Alliance. To the extent to which Jeffersonians have supported this in the name of “freedom!” they’ve also taken themselves out behind the barn and shot themselves in the back of the head.

They needed to first create a regime of liberty, and only *then* welcome anyone who wanted to share in that (and, as Hoppe suggests, shun anyone who does not). Instead they tried the reverse, and got self-marginalization (the Hamiltonian-Wilsonian Alliance was much shrewder about what the outcome would be. They started gloating decades ago, and are now able to be openly gleeful about how successful their transformation has been).

But at least voluntarism lives on in some spheres.

[porphyrogenitus]

I’ll take a stab at this. The above is seems basically true.

As for how and why the parties have changed up to our current Republican/Democrat two-party system, political scientists speak of “realignments,” electorial realignments where this or that constituency shifts between the parties, often due to a dynamic process (a party recognizes the potential of appealing to a given constituency that formerly had primarily voted for the other, and adopts policies aimed at appealing to that constituency, or a constituency sees the potential in leaving the former party it had given its allegence to, and ‘taking over’ the other, or gaining influence in it).

People speak of all sorts of re-aligning elections/moments, but really the prototypical one – the one that still shapes the parties to this day – was the election of 1896. I thought that even before I listened to Rothbard’s lecture; this whole series (start at the bottom and work your way up; they’re in reverse order) is really good at explaining the development of America’s political-economy, including the party system. If I remember correctly, this one specifically talks about the shift in constituencies, both elite and popular, and the reasons for them. None of the re-alignments since 1896 that political scientists and historians talk about have really come close to that one in significance; most of them have just represented an extension and deeping of the logic of the 1896 realignment.

Really that’s the “backbone” of America’s party structure to this day; Williams Jennings Bryan and so on gained control of the Democratic Party, but did not win the election. Wilson succeeded in winning. The FDR “realignment” did involve shifts in some constituency groups, but really, ideologically, represented the triumph of the 1896 ideology, “Democrat-wing.”

The Reagan Era saw a partial re-alignment, but really it was a shift of some constituencies, but not a ideological shift. I may get in a bit of trouble here, but the impact of neoconservative intellectuals on the conservative movement is, in this respect, often overblown. Rather, they were influential because as Scoop Jackson/JFK Democrats, they were the intellectual wing of the “Reagan Democrat” voter. The typical Reagan Democrat was not convinced of small government/Washingtonian Foreign Policy. They remained “Jacksonians” (in Walter Russell Mead’s breakdown of the four types of American policy views). (Note I know some people here won’t like WRM, but his breakdown still has analytical value, IMO).

“Jacksonians” were as described in some of the America Since 1877 lectures here – particularly the ones on the Vietnam War: they turned against the war because it did not seem that we were willing to do what they believed it would take to win it, but they despised hippies and “peace activists” (many of whom were, lets be honest now, really “victory for the other side” activists). They were not convinced militarism was wrong, they were just convinced that the Democrats were no longer a home for people who believed in a “Big Stick” foreign policy.

Similarly, they despised the excesses of the Great Society…but they were never convinced that small government and mutual aid societies were the way to go in general; they just disliked programs for the undeserving poor, but felt programs that “helped the common man” were just fine – they even liked medicare for grandma, social security, and the “social safety net, just not the hammock.”

In addition, there were the “values voters” who were turned off by increasing Democrat secularism and anti-virtue campaigns, which culminated in this election where the Democrats explicitly endorsed the slut vote. They saw the New Left Democrat Party as deliberately aimed at destroying their social and cultural structures. And they were not wrong (many libertarians – not Tom, I think – but many – think that people should ‘de-emphasize” social issues; but it is the left which has always been the aggressor in the “culture wars,” while the right has simply been trying to defend itself and its institutions from these aggressions, which, again, culminated in the “gimmiedat or you’re waging war against me” election memes). However, the unfortunate thing is that many, many of these voters do not see the connection between non-agression on social/cultural issues and non-agression on economic ones; in fact, many of them are on the left economically (just read most of the posts that touch on economic matters at, for example, What’s Wrong With the World to illustrate this point).

So Tom Woods et al look negatively at, say, Reagan, for his actions not following through on his better rhetoric of small government. And they have a point. And people have a point about how worthless and counter-productive the existence of the Republican Party is. But they’re not leading people down the garden path. Neocons aren’t manipulating an electorate that otherwise would not be militaristic and would not support FDR-TR style government programs. Neocons et al are just the intellectual spokesmen of that view. The 1980 Electoral Realignment just represented the Republican Party taking on the role of the pre-New Left Democrats, while the Democratic Party continued it’s shift towards the Progressive Ultras. Reagan himself embodied this shift in the phrase “I didn’t leave the Democrats, the Democrats left me” – and millions of voters looked at things the same way. (the Overton Window has continually shifted Left throughout this century.*)

What would happen if, say, the Republicans of today were to follow the “wise” advice many are giving them in the wake of this election? That they de-emphasize social issues and emphasize libertarian economics? That they drop, say, opposition to abordion and don’t make a big point of churches and private people being forced to pay for Sandra Fluke’s lifestyle choices? Well what would happen is a large constituency would either not vote at all, or would decamp back to the Democrat Party, because the reason they are Republicans has nothing to do with a sound grasp of economics, but with opposition to what they see as infanticide and cultural degeneration. So the Republicans are locked in a vice.

Now, it is true that the Ron Paul movement, IMO, does represent the way the freedom movement should go: it is able to reach a large number of young people, by being frank and honest. But it does that by being persuasive. People – at least some of them – will listen to the message. So one of the failures of the Republican Party in our time (the last generation or so) has been that it lacks people who use the platform available to them to speak persuasively about freedom in all facets of life. Rather they are dominated by drones with their fingers in the wind, who are at best apologetic about the beliefs they supposedly stand for, and at worst don’t really hold those beliefs themselves but think they have to utter them in order to appeal to their base (most if not all of the apparatchiks – campaign managers et al, fall into this category; they hate having the electoral base that they have, which is an embarrassment to them at cocktail parties in DC, NYC, LA, and other circles of the fashionable. Indeed, the idea that Progressivism represents “the people vs the powerful” is and always has been a cruel joke; it’s not hard to tell which beliefs are fashionable in high social circles, and have been since at least 1896. And those beliefs aren’t Jeffersonian-libertarian. Oh-ho, no. It’s also a cruel joke, a mockery, to believe that the Democrats are somehow ‘anti-big-business’ – they never have been; indeed, the biggest businesses are generally Democratic, the biggest financial houses are generally Democratic; the moderately-big are generally Republican, but really both parties have their big-business supporters, it’s just that it’s one faction vs another, rather than “we’re sticking up for the little guy and sticking it to the rich” – it’s a cruel mockery to write a book, like one historian recently did, “FDR – traitor to his class” – portraying him as somehow for the working man, when really he was just the exemplar of one class of wealthy progressive elitists, using power to enrich his allies and crush his opponents).

Now, I myself rip the current party structure up and down. And I think there is a bigger constituency for liberty than hacks realize – when it is articulated, and articulated sincerely. But really there’s a lot of work to be done persuading people. Maybe the majority “really does, if they think about things properly, support liberty and oppose statism,” but they need to be persuaded to see things that way and to identify the problem with the things they think they believe work: that they want X, but the way they’re going about it (supporting policies N) do not produce X, but instead produce Y outcomes, which they do not like, and they ought to support policies L instead.

*Yes yes I agree with people who think the left-right spectrum is not analytically accurate, that there may instead be a three-dimensional spectrum, or an up-down spectrum; up being freedom and down being statist control. But for the purpose of this post it is useful to speak in terms of left-right for clarity.

[porphyrogenitus]

The pro-Marxist, such as Chomsky (who calls himself an “Aharchist” but his “Anarchism” is simply Marxian communism under another description) is incorrect in saying it “wasn’t really Marxism.” (Chomksy also tends to think that relatively small mobs in the streets, for example, the occupy movement, represent “the people” and “the workers,” even if they are only a tiny minority of the population. So in actuality, his expressions on this are not a matter of intellectual honesty/consistency, but simply a way to rationalize away past examples of implementing his preferred model).

Remember that under Marx’s thought, what little he said about the development of socialism & communism – one starts out with Socialism, a dictatorship. Blither to the contrary notwithstanding, this will always and everywhere be top-down, led by a “vanguard,” because under Marx’s own theory, people will not hold the correct views once the revolution comes; revolutionary terror (he is very explicit about this, and had only contempt for people who romanticized things) will and must be used to purge the population of people with wrong views, and indeed this is what “permanent revolution” was all about: “the killings just go on and on” as Thompson points out (link below).

Indeed another of the things Marx was explicit about was his believe that the problem with the French Revolution was that the leaders of it lost their nerve, that they didn’t engage in *sufficient* revolutionary terror. Marx’s critique had nothing to do with the hierarchical nature of the revolution as such.

As for the rest, I’ve linked to this FEE lecture by C. Bradley Thomson on Marx and Marxism, and the features within Marx’s theory itself that explicitly lead to precisely the sort of brutal outcomes that Marxism has always perpetrated.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Min – these were not people who somehow misunderstood Marxism, or used Marxist rehetoric illegitimately to impose a dictatorship. They were the best students of Marx, the best exemplars of what his structure demands in practice. Marxism is not some humane system, not some “good idea, it just hasn’t really been tried yet.” It’s not even some humane system that “it’s too bad it won’t work in practice.” It’s a horror show, a deliberate – conciously-outlined – horror show, and while Marx himself would have found people who claim otherwise to either be 1) usefully setting aside bourgeoisie morality regarding truth in order to persuade others rhetorically or 2) romantic dupes who themselves are useful for the revolution but have no true understanding of Marxism, the fact is he held in contempt romanticist communists who refused to admit to themselves the necessary measures that would have to be taken to pound humanity into the new form it would take in order to build communism.

[porphyrogenitus]

I wonder what Professor Woods thinks of this one, where Ron Unz turns Alexander Cockburn for economic enlightenment.

[porphyrogenitus]

I too have been trying to work out why we haven’t seen all the price inflation we might normally expect. Does the significant decline in the “velocity of money” have anything to do with that? (I’m no expert, but looking at what Professor Herbener wrote, I surmise that the decline in the velocity of money is connected to the demand to hold money).

If the velocity of money were to return to the normal trend line* would we start to see price inflation increase?

*Maybe there is no “normal trend line” for monetary velocity anymore; from what I gather it has gyrated since about the mid 80s.

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I just checked; I see what you mean. I think I see the problem – it’s still trying to connect to a live stream, rather than to the recorded session.

The URL probably needs to be redirected.

I *also* notice, however, that VOKLE is announcing an error; their recording system is currently down. I hope it wasn’t down on the 15th. If it was, the problem may be that it didn’t record properly. >_<

I blame saboteurs and wreckers!

[porphyrogenitus]

1) Take good notes during the reading phase. Be especially careful to put author & page number in your notes so you don’t forget where you got it from, not just so you can properly cite it, but so you can refer back to that page directly when you’re writing.

2) Try to form an idea of what you want to focus on in your paper (since no paper can cover everything), but be prepared to tweek it as you go along, till you get a good thesis.

3) Presentation – orderly build your case in as systematic a way as possible. I usually write “stream of consciousness,” but cut & paste is your friend.

4) Presentation II – for academic papers, avoid polemics as much as possible; I know the other side, while saying they don’t do it, likes to put in snide ideological quips, but we can’t get away with that as much. Of course, if you know your audience, a bit can go in as appropriate (I usually can’t resist one or two, but it’s really a vice not a virtue).

5) That said there is no reason for an academic paper to be dry-as-dust; a lot of academic stuff is written in dull, leaden prose, but it doesn’t have to be this way – lively writing, illustrative examples put in a somewhat humorous (appropriately humorous) way, cleverly memorable phrasing, all that is good.

6) lay out the facts supporting whatever your thesis is, but also address the strongest counter-arguments you can think of. It’s often the case that an academic paper for a class will ask you to critique another author’s work/conclusions; address their strongest points, give credit where they make a good point even if you don’t like where they’re coming from, read them “sympathetically” (don’t distort their argument), if they address the type of critique you’re making, be sure to present that fairly and then show why you still think they’re wrong. If they didn’t, try to imagine how someone who agrees with that author would address your critique, then rebut that. In doing this, avoid setting up straw men (again, the other side does that all the time, but 1) it’s a bad practice and 2) we can’t get away with it much anyhow). If you disagree with an author, you need to read them more carefully, not less carefully, than the ones you disagree with. Try not to get blinded by emotional outrage; especially if they’re someone whose perspective fits within the prevailing academic consensus. Your critique needs to be calm, logical, precise, meticulous – advancing step by step. Try to find *something* about them you find likable (maybe they have a clever turn of phrase), and note that. If they’re an asshat, *show*, don’t tell: quote their own words and juxtapose to illustrate their asshattery.

7) No matter how good a writer you are, ask someone to edit your paper before submitting it. An “intelligent non-specialist” – they should edit it stylistically (don’t trust Word!), and comprehension. If they don’t understand something, you probably need to refine that section of the paper. Also, listen to them as much as you can bring yourself to if they say something needs to be cut out. Any writer often has a hard time wanting to part with any part of what they write, but the reader is probably right. (I hate this part because I love my own tangents, and I always know the reason why I think addressing the tangent is important; but remember #1 – you can’t address everything in a paper, anyhow).

8) Some materiel will probably have to be saved for a future paper, even if you never end up writing it.

If you follow steps like these you’ll probably end up understanding the materiel better by the time you’re done, and understand your own position better as well.

[porphyrogenitus]

Ok I thought of an example Kaus might use to illustrate that it isn’t just the market that determines wage levels, public policies and other such – and one that perhaps Austrian-inclined people would not really have any disagreement with. In the U.S. we implemented various tax policies that incentivize (or disincentivize) certain kinds of renumeration, and we’ve also implemented certain laws and regulations – such as 401K savings plans (which I think Kaus likes) and rules restricting “hostile takeovers” of corporations (which I think Kaus would think are bad policies on *prudential* grounds), which have the effect of insulating corporate management (CEOs &tc) from the discipline of the market, and give the employees (at least at upper levels) more control over the company than the shareholders, and thus they choose the boards of directors, the shareholders are often “absentee landowners,” and you have a situation where the firm is being run for the benefit of the employees.

Now, an Austrian would say “this is why intervention of any kind distorts the market, and we shouldn’t have such things at all.” But Kaus’s point would be “the way to fix this would be to change policy, not tax rates. Krugman is focusing on the wrong thing, and his policy prescription is thus bad.”

Like any “Atari Democrat”/”New Democrat,” Kaus never crossed the line into non-interventionism; he never even crossed the line into becoming a Republican. He’s just for “better public policy, one that understands incentives and incorporates them into social/public policy.” Kaus also shares with Krugman a concern with income inequality, he just thinks Krugman is wrong about the sorts of policies that would work to address it, and on how far to go.

Allowing for where he’s coming from, for someone with that perspective, Kaus is very good – indeed, as I said, IMO we can find a lot of good arguments in that article. But he’s coming at it from a non-Austrian/non-Libertarian perspective, so you’re not going to find yourself agreeing with everything he says.

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