The next time someone tells you that the BP oil spill shows the dangers of a free market and/or the necessity of government intervention, send them to:
- Darian Worden here,
- Sheldon Richman here,
- Gary Chartier here,
- Alex Knight here, and
- Kevin Carson here, here, and here.
Please let me know in the comments section about other good commentaries I may have missed!
On a related note, this sign from an actual BP station is priceless. (The pic below is just a detail; click to see the whole thing.)
This is obvious: since all possible evidence points to the need for totally free markets, so does this evidence, whatever it may be.
So do you have specific criticisms of the articles? Or does your brilliant a priori rebuttal spare you the need to actually read them?
Talk about being in the grip of ideology!
Haha. Mr. Callahan is known for such drive-by shootings in the blogosphere. Hey we all admire a good sarcastic dig, but it must be followed by some yknow EVIDENCE or ARGUMENT.
Great compilation, Roderick
Roderick, don’t you know that “libertarian (in fact, all liberal) arguments are circular in that they assume libertarian (liberal) premises to reach their conclusion” (see )? If not, then you must be a closed-minded ideologist!
By contrast, Gene Callahan has found a brilliant, watertight, irrefutable, knock-down against the libertarian homesteading principle: “I’m saying that because it has nothing to do with what actually happened, it’s meaningless.” Libertarianism doesn’t justify actually existing property titles, therefore it’s meaningless. I hope this will make libertarians “see the shifting sands upon which [they]’ve built [their] worldview being swept away by logic.”
(Rothbard actually
Corrected version:
Roderick, don’t you know that “libertarian (in fact, all liberal) arguments are circular in that they assume libertarian (liberal) premises to reach their conclusion” (see here )? If not, then you must be a closed-minded ideologist!
By contrast, Gene Callahan has found a brilliant, watertight, irrefutable, knock-down argument against the libertarian homesteading principle: “I’m saying that because it has nothing to do with what actually happened, it’s meaningless.” Libertarianism doesn’t justify actually existing property titles, therefore it’s meaningless. I hope this will make libertarians “see the shifting sands upon which [they]‘ve built [their] worldview being swept away by logic.”
(Rothbard actually dealt with the question of how to apply his theory to property titles which cannot be traced back to an act of homesteading, but as non-ideologists, we don’t have to consider them since we know a priori that they must be circular.)
Make that “[…] we don’t have to consider his arguments since we know a priori that they must be circular.)”
Thanks for the round-up.
You might like to note Shawn Wilbur’s piece here: http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2010/06/responding-to-deepwater-horizon.html
Kevin Carson also had this May 12 post: http://c4ss.org/content/2446
You might note that I posted a response at my LvMI blog to Lew Rockwell on May 9, and have a number of follow-up posts here:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/05/09/risk-shifting-bp-and-those-nasty-enviros.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bp
Tom
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Once-a-government-pet-BP-now-a-capitalist-tool-95942659.html
Here’s Darian’s latest.
And another piece from Shawn.