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Live by the sword, die by the sword
Who could guess that when push comes to shove, libertarians discover that in the real world not all economic decisions are frictionless.
I've been watching the blow-up over the Koch Brothers trying to buy up the Cato Institute, a libertarian institute that really falls on the intellect scale below the term "think tank", with interest. Alex Pareene describes the battle at Salon
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Since Cato is about hardline libertarianism that holds that regulation is always bad, and true freedom starts with the free market, I fail to see why they're upset. Getting upset over being pushed from being a relatively independent thinker into a right wing propagandist strikes me as "freedom" by their measure. After hearing for weeks that "freedom" should mean your employer gets to vote on your contraception usage by blocking female employees from accessing their full coverage, I'm really not interested in hearing libertarians moan and groan that the free market means their boss gets to dictate what comes out of their pen. Which is why Jonathan Adler's complaint about all this is just silly
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Meh, "principled" libertarians should, above all things, live by their own principles. Since their primary principle is that an employer's control over employees is sacrosanct and absolute---they justify this by claiming that employees can always quit if they don't like the terms offered by employers---then they should either quit without complaining (even if jobs for intellectually vapid libertarians are thin on the ground otherwise---tough cookies, John Galts!) or cheerfully take on their new roles as Republican propagandists. Claiming that there's some higher principle than the free market, a principle such as intellectual integrity, is blasphemy.
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/live-by-the-sword-die-by-the-sword
...
Since Cato is about hardline libertarianism that holds that regulation is always bad, and true freedom starts with the free market, I fail to see why they're upset. Getting upset over being pushed from being a relatively independent thinker into a right wing propagandist strikes me as "freedom" by their measure. After hearing for weeks that "freedom" should mean your employer gets to vote on your contraception usage by blocking female employees from accessing their full coverage, I'm really not interested in hearing libertarians moan and groan that the free market means their boss gets to dictate what comes out of their pen. Which is why Jonathan Adler's complaint about all this is just silly
...
Meh, "principled" libertarians should, above all things, live by their own principles. Since their primary principle is that an employer's control over employees is sacrosanct and absolute---they justify this by claiming that employees can always quit if they don't like the terms offered by employers---then they should either quit without complaining (even if jobs for intellectually vapid libertarians are thin on the ground otherwise---tough cookies, John Galts!) or cheerfully take on their new roles as Republican propagandists. Claiming that there's some higher principle than the free market, a principle such as intellectual integrity, is blasphemy.
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/live-by-the-sword-die-by-the-sword