Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Why I think right-libertarians are cute.

The comment thread of a recent facebook post by Cato got me to thinking.

Right-Libertarians have this naive belief that somehow a modern industrialized economy is going to magically reform into a laissez faire economy of small producers who harness perfect information to properly allocate resources allowing price to always meet market equilibrium. 

Corporatism will just magically disappear, humans with vested interests of protecting their profits via rent seeking, regulatory capture, and restricting a free flow of information to the markets so consumers will have all information available will just magically have a change of heart.   The reality is they sound like people who are drinking a strange strand of Hegelian/Marxist historicist Kool-aid in a very subtle way. They probably should keep their Ayn Randian utopia to the fiction shelves and beef up on some behavioral science and sociology.

They'd do a lot for empower individuals and expanding the autonomy of people in a highly bureaucratic society where states and corporations tread on the individual in oh so many (reformable) ways.

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