I have been openly attacking the Mises Institute’s propagandizing of rothbardianism for two years now. And they have no response to my criticisms (they can’t have one really – they can only adapt to them.)
People invest their self worth in these ideologies to the point which they are not competing institutional solutions but hats to hang one’s self worth upon. It’s only logical that they defend their priors by non rational, non-empirical, largely symbolic and emotional means.
The great thing about Rothbard is that despite being mostly wrong, he’s partly right, and what he’s right about is relatively easy for amateurs to understand.
If people understood my arguments they would grok that I’m completing the ANCAP project by converting it from pseudoscience and kantian rationalism to a scientific argument that’s uniform across biology, morality, philosophy, law, politics and economics.
Which, just in terms of explanatory power is pretty hard to criticize.
But if the end result is preservation of investment, preservation of self image, rejection of the effort and time needed to improve one’s knowledge and a justification of non-contribution to the commons for the because one is rejected by the mainstream culture, then that’s an excuse for one’s behavior not a pursuit of a moral good, a sustainable political order, or an scientific truth about cooperation among men.
Cheers
—“Keep on Curt, Your attempt to create theory of everything in social sciences will be attacked by all sides. People cant even understand difference between man and female reproductive strategies and that is basic for understanding human nature and human state of affairs.”—Matej Lovri?