It makes me angry to have to agree with libertarians. Because I know that before I can step away from them they'll say something breathtakingly stupid about how moral hazard means we shouldn't have public health insurance and the Bear Stearns bailout is not a bailout.
Dave Weigel at Reason (who you should all be reading),
I haven't followed the link, but is he even better than Megan McArdle?
Someone should use Yahoo Pipes to make a feed of the worthwhile bloggers at group blogs.
Yeah, because damned if I'm going to start reading things on Reason. I need the few brain cells I have left.
and the Bear Stearns bailout is not a bailout
It's a natural market correction, except the invisible hand belongs to the U.S. taxpayer.
Megan is a Republican with weak libertarian leanings. Weigel and Sanchez are more consistently libertarian.
Megan by and large is the worst of both worlds -- pro-war, pro-Patriot Act, anti-abortion, and anti-social-spending. If she's still anti-prohibitionist, that's her sole remaining good point.
"Bear Stearns bailout is not a bailout."
I don't get this "they don't believe what they claim to believe, it's just a figleaf for capital" attack on libertarians. There are plenty of libertarians e.g. over at marginal revolution who are very much up in arms about the moral hazard of bailing out Bear Stearns.
The whole wiretapping business has me perplexed. Don't politicians realize that Verizon is allowing an archive of their every conversation? I had thought that J. E. Hoover's abuse of power to ensure his budget had generated a lasting lesson for congress, but apparently not.
There are plenty of libertarians e.g. over at marginal revolution who are very much up in arms about the moral hazard of bailing out Bear Stearns.
In the threads at MR, there have been several amusing mini-crises of confidence, with commenters petitioning Tyler to tell them what the Correct Libertarian View is on state-sponsored bailouts. Kind of "I hate to see markets crash so ignominiously, but I hate the state stepping in to save them, too, so please find me a way to justify the bailout in a way that still allows me to hate political intervention in the market."
10. This is what happens when people get their economic doctrine from the novels of Ayn Rand.
Henley at Unqualified Offering has become, I think, pretty disillusioned with the Libertarians. They always were a hodgepodge, just like the Reform Party.
Even if you don't believe in Libertarian politics, Weigel is worth reading because he has really sharp insight into elections. He's one of those guys where you can name a random Congressional district and he can tell you off the top of his head who is running, what the issues are, who it will probably break for in the Presidential election, etc. He's also good at politician profiles, like this one of Tom Coburn.
(Standard disclaimer that he's a friend, was at UnfoggeDCon, etc.)
10:
Absolutely, but the issue there is their farcically rigid commitment to a highly theoretical and somewhat ridiculous ideology. Attacking this inflexibility seems sufficient to dismiss most libertarian insanity; unsustainable insinuations about motivation is unnecessary.
11: You rape the market, and market likes it.
4 is exactly right. I would love to read two or three of the guys at The American Scene, but there's too much too often. Also some local blogs.
are you saying we should read weigel, or reason?
i used to be a regular at the reason.com blog, but i got fed up with the conservatarian trolls and the ron paul apologists and the general smug bullshit of it all.
julian sanchez is a good writer, and i like his blog - but the writing staff has gone downhill, and the blog commenters are a bunch of regular, modern-day hank morgans; IT-ish people with concealed carry licenses who knock down the liberal-arts strawmen like they're playing whack-a-mole.