*RE: Harmful illusions bedevil ideas about free markets and imprisonment: professor

By Sarah Galer*

In which yet another left wing professor who hasn’t read Hayek, criticizes him (and advocates like myself) while relying upon ‘silly psychology’ to do so. He rails against ‘free markets’. The author (Sarah Galer) is positing a straw man that does not represent these ideas. (and thereby contributing to ignorance). Besides confirming the conservative hypothesis, she’s simply acting immorally by acting in ignorance. I didn’t mention that it’s the jewish wing of libertarianism that invented the silly ideas of anarchism.

My response.

No free marketer actually suggests ‘unregulated’ market, or the abscence of law.

Instead, this is what they say:

  1. Free markets spread peaceful coexistence (smith)

  2. Government employees cannot know enough to regulate markets (mises/hayek)

  3. Insurance companies are better at regulating the market than government (rothbard/hoppe)

  4. That bureaucracies become naturally corrupt and seek rents, and harm markets. (veblen, schumpeter, Sorel, michels, burnham)

  5. That rule of law (rule of the COMMON LAW) is superior to regulation of markets than is legislative and regulatory law. (Hayek, Bastiat)

  6. Economic calculation (dynamic prices and their role in planning), and the natural incentive for self interest, in a division of knowledge and labor (mises, smith)

  7. That regulatory law accumulates to the point of causing market failure

  8. That all monopolies are CAUSED by state intervention.

These are arguments against the PRETENSE OF KNOWLEDGE, and the PRETENSE OF BENEVOLENCE by the political bureaucracy, in contrast to the POSSESSION OF KNOWLEDGE by private actors with market incentives. Therefore, these are not arguments in support of anarchism, they are arguments to privatization in order to avoid the natural tendencies toward corruption in bureaucracies.

Curt Doolittle