The audio of Glenn Beck and friends using a fake southern accent to mock the poor man who didn’t understand that Hayekian free market principles preclude fire departments from just putting out fires….it put me in mind of something about teahadists that doesn’t get enough attention: teahadists view themselves as intellectuals.
Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, alluded to “The Road to Serfdom” in introducing his economic “Roadmap for America’s Future,” which many other Republicans have embraced. Ron Johnson, who entered politics through a Tea Party meeting and is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, asserted that the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration forced BP to set up to pay damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill circumvented “the rule of law,” Hayek’s term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of “personal ends and desires.”
Justin Amash, the 30-year-old Republican state legislator running for the House seat once held by Gerald Ford in Michigan, frequently posts links to essays by Hayek and Bastiat on his Facebook page, his chief vehicle for communicating with voters. “There is no single economist or philosopher I admire more than F. A. Hayek,” he wrote in May. “I have his portrait on the wall of my legislative office and the Justin Amash for Congress office.”
Teatards don’t generally see themselves as “get’r done types”, they see themselves as the only people with the brain power to grasp the elusive truths spelled out by the intellectual giants of yesteryear.
Update. This is a succinct explanation:
Otto: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes, they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.
Midnight Marauder
Best.title.ever.
Davis X. Machina
How ironic. I see myself as an enormous Adélie penguin.
My delusions are more entertaining, I think you’ll grant me that much. Now someone hand me a mackerel.
superking
The Republican approach to national security evidences the same mindset. Cheney et al repeatedly indicated that they thought they were the only ones who actually, fully, completely understood the threat posed by Al Qaeda. We little people could never understood why torture was justified because we just didn’t get the illusive truths.
schrodinger's cat
Classic definition of a fool.
One who knows not what he knows not.
Culture of Truth
I think that’s right, and an interesting point for tea partiers running for office, but I wonder who true it is for the average tea partier in general.
Alice Blue
My brain is still tied in knots over Beck’s “slavery was caused by court decisions and government regulation” comments.
Omnes Omnibus
Otto: Apes don’t read philosphy.
Wanda: Yes, they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.
Cris
As we like to say in the Pandagon comments, I think it’s both/and.
Dave
Republicans love to find the “One Person” and then cling to them. In economics, it’s Hayek. In politics, it’s Reagan. Then you just make them conform to whatever bullshit you decide will be your policy.
Mr Furious
It’s not that simple.
I consider the movement leaders and flame-fanners like Beck to be Teahadists, and I think your description is apt. Beck definitely fancies himself some sort of self-made intellectual who alone has the vision to see behind the curtain.
The morans who show up at rallys with misspelled signs and Medicare scooters are really the Teatards, and I believe they DO think of themselves as the everyman / get’r done-type.
DanF
@Dave: +1
beltane
This is all part of their gliberatrian legacy. A movement that is led by such pseudo-intellectual luminaries as Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck cannot fail to overestimate its serious contributions to political philosophy.
Alwhite
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yup!
kdaug
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s precisely what I thought of. That, and “Don’t call me stupid!”
brendancalling
that’s the strange paradox of the tea bagger: on the one hand, they deeply resent “liberal elitist know-it-all eggheads who think they’re so smart”, while on the other they’re total elitists who think they know something no one else does.
the projection is astounding.
Brachiator
He probably has a poster of Megan McArdle on his wall, too.
Uloborus
This is a classic element of conspiracy theorist thinking, by the way.
Dennis SGMM
This is nothing new. I’m old enough to remember when the nascent tea tards all fellated S.I. Hayakawa and his English Only bullshit.
Zandar
Can’t read the book while it’s on fire #GaltsGulchFD
Adrienne
@DougJ:
Loving the Bun-B/Big Pimpin shout out!! Yes, go read a book you illiterate son of a bitch and step up your vocab… Heh, indeedy.
Kryptik
The Tea Party, sponsored by Dunning-Kruger: ‘Competence is in the Eye of the Beholder’.
Ross Hershberger
There you libruls go with your ‘questions’ and your ‘uncertainty’. Can’t you recognize the truth when you feel it in your GUT?
Balconesfault
@Alwhite:
Anyone who has a conversation with these types realizes that there is no real world data one can bring to a conversation that will alter their conviction that they’re absolutely right.
What we need running the country – some guys who never evolved from late night college freshman bullshit sessions.
Dennis SGMM
@Brachiator:
And his fist flies to his lap whenever he contemplates that poster.
martha
Hell, these people don’t even read the Constitution and it’s another thing they quote all the damn time!!
My dear husband entertains himself by going up to these morons and asking them simple questions about this most “revered” document. When they can’t answer (or answer INCORRECTLY, which is typical), he pulls out his pocket copy and reads the actual passage back to them, and corrects them. It’s actually really, really funny.
scav
@Dennis SGMM: I’m only old enough to remember that name as my dad’s shorthand for naps (“taking a Hayakawa”) before they morphed into the classic “taking a Ronnie”.
Zifnab
You know, I’ve read a bit of Hayek (at the insistence of my girlfriend no less) and that guy would have been pillared as a left-wing socialist lib-tard in any modern Tea Party estimation. He had absolutely no problem with funding basic social services and even had a few nice things to say about Social Security.
Hayek’s big beef was against nationalization, a particularly large concern during the 30s and 40s when the government was cleaning up the economic mess made in the 20s. But he is far to the left of any 17th Amendment repealers and Abolish All Government Spending advocates of the modern era.
MikeBoyScout
@16 Brachiator:
The more interesting question is what photos does he keep in that shoe box in the back of his closet of his bedroom.
fasteddie9318
Hayek, Rand, Friedman…they sure do likes themselves some butt-stupid intellekshuul “giants.”
Xenos
Someone here in the last year quote an new truism – that when it come to nonfiction: conservatives read books, liberals (and especially academics) read articles.
Not that there is anything wrong with reading books, but when there is a whole industry churning out misinformation in hardcover form it is easier to steer the rubes into the right kind of reading.
Of course, you can point out this little gem by Hayak:
NonyNony
@Balconesfault:
This.
That’s exactly what I am reminded of every time some “leader” of the Teahadis starts jibber-jabbering. 3am, sitting around the dorm lounge, solving all the world’s problems with a group of people who know as little about the world’s problems as I do. Also, half of them are either drunk or stoned.
chopper
“i only know how to pay people to create new alloys!”
Comrade Dread
I think most people see themselves as better than they are: more handsome, funnier, more powerful, more intelligent, more relevant, etc.
Human beings are masters at self-deception.
It’s a rare individual who knows who he/she truly is and has a realistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. Most of us are likewise assuming that we are that rare individual.
Brighton
I’m surprised he mentioned Hayek. Usually it’s Ayn Rand. Same idea though – god chose me to be rich so everything I think is right.
Loneoak
All immoral things that have ever happened are the fault of Woodrow Wilson and his pinko slave-owning cronies in the Obama administration. The sooner you all realize this, the sooner the Invisible Hand will jerk us off.
Dennis SGMM
@Balconesfault:
The same people who never outgrow Atlas Shrugged.
Zifnab
You know, I’ve read a bit of Hayek (at the insistence of my girlfriend no less) and that guy would have been pillared as a left-wing soc ialist lib-tard in any modern Tea Party estimation. He had absolutely no problem with funding basic social services and even had a few nice things to say about Social Security.
Hayek’s big beef was against nationalization, a particularly large concern during the 30s and 40s when the government was cleaning up the economic mess made in the 20s. But he is far to the left of any 17th Amendment repealers and Abolish All Government Spending advocates of the modern era.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dennis SGMM: I think one of the best things that happened in my political development is that I found Atlas Shrugged unreadable and gave up on it after the first 20 or so pages.
Stillwater
I don’t think this is right. Teatards do see themselves as gitrdone types (hence the non-ironic, straight-faced claims that their government check was earned, unlike other people’s), but they also like the appeal to authority that intellectuals can often supply. Conservatism is an ideology deeply in need of intellectual justification – even the proles on the bottom end feel that. Otherwise their hypocrisy would be exposed, and their hatreds would be expressed by unintelligible grunts and flailing punches.
Punchy
It’s at this point that I vociferously disagree with you.
MikeBoyScout
Hey Justin Amash!
What did your hero, Friedrich August von Hayek, in that book published in 1944 say would happen to the United Kingdom if they followed the political/economic policies they were implementing? It is 2010, what actually happened?
SiubhanDuinne
@Brighton #33: It will surprise no one here to learn that Hayek was Rand’s favorite economist. (Milton Friedman, also too.)
Austrian School, Chicago School — they were greatly revered in Galt’s Gulch.
Remember November
Amash was born in 1980. These Reagan babies need to diaf, and ironic given the fact their parents were probably pot-smoking hippie freaks.
Ross Hershberger
It’s well known but bears mentioning again: Greenspan + Rand = TLA.
Nutella
Wait, then ‘law’ isn’t the written code? It’s something unwritten? Not in my dictionary!
jrg
@brendancalling:
Somehow they’ve shifted from “I’m an expert because I never bothered to learn anything” to “I’m an expert because I’ve read some things, and I can string it all together with elaborate conspiracy theories and bullshit”.
At least they appear to be moving in the right direction.
scav
Isn’t one possible important distinction that between relying upon texts as revealed truths (however gutted during interpretation) and the effete process of actively reading texts critically and thinking about the whole shebang? It would be easy to go too simply into this line of thought, but I’m catching a glimmer for some reason. I’m also somehow finding myself trying to evaluate the relationship / difference between gnosis, truthiness and other forms of logic.
Dennis SGMM
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’ve always been a voracious reader with little or no good taste in reading matter so when I heard about Atlas Shrugged back in High School I tried to read the thing. I tried my best but, I couldn’t get more than a hundred or so pages before returning to science fiction and “Mad” magazine – both of which were better written and more realistic than AS.
lol
@chopper:
One of the best webcomics ever made.
WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO TILL THE SOIL!
Xenos
@Nutella:
It is natural law, like the Law of the Jungle, written into Nature itself, somehow. The biggest philosophical deus ex machina since the days of Aristophanes.
Omnes Omnibus
@scav: Text as revealed truth fits with biblical literalism as well.
RSA
I tend to get Bastiat mixed up with Basquiat. I wonder if I’m missing anything?
Brachiator
@Xenos:
I much prefer George of the Jungle, myself.
Uloborus
@Xenos:
…holy crap. So Tea Jerkers are now using important terms that already have meanings, like ‘rule of law’, but assigning them completely different meanings?
I mean, seriously. They don’t just have misconceptions of what the law is. They have THEIR OWN DEFINITION for the term ‘rule of law’ that they use without telling you.
Wow.
Bob L
Beck’s always seen himself as something special; one of my friends went to high school with him and said he was a total prick, not to mention stoned all the time. Doubtlessly Beck was flashing back to the ’70s Bellingham and the working class kids he grew up with and didn’t appreciate he was man of destiny and serious person.
georgia pig
@scav: Yep, it’s the authoritarian impulse, conservative “intellectuals” tend to believe they’ve discovered The Answer. It’s what they share in common with fundies, why they love those obstensibly pithy, but ultimately meaningless statements from people like Churchill. One text or thinker, e.g., Hayek or Rand, is the fount of all true wisdom, instead of real, flawed text or person that may have had some good ideas or insights that have their limits, and that also had some really shitty or goofball ideas arising from personality issues or cultural influences. It’s completely sophmoric, and thus comes across as late night bull session nonsense.
Uloborus
@georgia pig:
They get it FROM the fundies. It’s traditional bible scholarship thinking. Find a quote you like, take it out of context, use the authority of the speaker to justify your personal bias.
Dennis SGMM
@georgia pig:
I doubt that they actually read the books of any of their Great Thinkers. Instead, they just repeat a handful of those quotes that they think supports their outlook and rely on the fact that the person’s name is remembered to add heft to their arguments.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
@Adrienne:
I’ve always loved that one.
MikeJ
@Dennis SGMM: That’s probably true of the books that are great in the wingnut ghetto, but almost certainly true of the books that are universally considered important that they try to claim.
If any of them ever actually read Wealth of Nations they’d call Smith a commie.
DonBoy
In my brief check-ins on right-wing radio, I can’t help noticing how often the hosts reassure the audience that they ARE TOO smart people.
WereBear
Yes, this puzzles me, because I thought they were contemptuous of book larnin’.
However, they are remarkably inconsistent, so then it doesn’t.
Davis X. Machina
@Dennis SGMM: Spells need to be uttered correctly, not understood, to be efficacious. Ask your neighborhood shaman.
We’re dealing with some very old brains here.
Omnes Omnibus
@WereBear: You need enough book larnin’ to read the sacred texts, but not enough that you begin to question them. Does that clear it up?
El Cid
Don’t forget Glenn Beck in the same discussion mocking the notion that somebody with cancer ought to be able to get insurance to pay for treatment.
That’s just unfair to the insurer, so why don’t you fucking die already you cancer-ridden peasant?
[As he was saying the freeloading house fire guy pattern is the same as ‘Obamacare’, which is all about forcing everyone to pay for the freeloaders. Poor, poor insurers.]
Cris
All these mentions of the name, and Google AdWords still isn’t serving up photos of Salma Hayek.
aimai
@Davis X. Machina:
Davis X. Machina please marry me. Now.
Actually this whole Hayek worshipping thing reminds me of Steven J. Cannell’s “Wiseguy” series–specifically the Mel Proffitt arc where the drug kingpin is obsessed with a fairly commonplace misreading of Malthus. As he lectures his henchmen all about Malthus and how this has influenced his criminal empire they finally intervene and lecture him about the anti entropic and extremely profitable ideas embedded in “vertical integration.” A little learning is a dangerous thing.
aimai
Cat
Slow day, so I was a googling Hayek:
“In the book [ The Road to Serfdom], Hayek writes that the government has a role to play in the economy through the monetary system, work-hours regulation, and institutions for the flow of proper information. ”
…
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. “
Dennis SGMM
@Davis X. Machina:
And thus we get, “Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.”
Jill
Now I see how these death panels they keep talking about work. Having the fire department determine whose house to save and whose to let burn down, based on who can/cannot pay a $75.00 fee, sounds a lot like a death panel to me, doesn’t it?
Jager
In college we had a required course called “Man and Ideas” the class was a over view of philosophy, one of those classes you could sneak by or invest a little time and learn something. The first paper we had to write was on Plato and after the papers were reviewed we had a class discussion on them. A young woman in my class had been lugging around “Atlas Shrugged” for a month. When our bearded, rotund and sloopy prof got to her paper, he said.
“your paper prompted me to review the reading assignments for this class and I couldn’t find anything by Ayn Rand so I’m puzzeled why you have attempted to contrast Plato’s ideas with Rand’s objectivist ideology. I’m giving you an incomplete, you have 2 weeks to turn in a new paper and please confine your reading of fiction to your personal time”. I’m sure she is still smarting from the brush back from a “liberal elite” and is at home today ginning up support for the tea party.
TheNickronomicon
Somebody over at Edroso’s place nailed it: Conservatives are authoritarian followers. Libertarians are authoritarian followers who think they’re authoritarian leaders.
Phoenix Woman
Oh, he did read a book. The problem was that it was Atlas Shrugged.
Seriously, the dude’s a hardcore Randroid. He has just enough brains to know that he can’t be openly atheistic and retain the megachurchers and McMansioned white-flighters that swarmed into his part of Wisconsin in the past few decades (aka “the Fucking Illinois Bastards” as the natives call ’em). This was once Les Aspin’s district, but the union voters that kept him in office went away when the local manufacturing jobs did, which was just about when the white-flighters came in from Illinois.
EconWatcher
Hayek wrote some interesting and illuminating stuff. His essay on The Use of Knowledge in Society is very much worth reading: He explains how prices in a market economy can succinctly convey a lot of information that helps coordinate the activities of numerous actors toward efficient ends. He also has provocative things to say about how the collective knowledge of many dispersed actors can create superior decisions, when compared to those of single central decisionmaker. It’s genuinely insightful and helpful, regardless of whether you’re a social democrat or a libertarian.
But the notion that Hayek provided some kind of bible for us to follow in structuring our society is just silly. All the shades of gray, all the hard choices are still there.
scav
@Omnes Omnibus:
anybody order a dose of Constitutional Originalism to go with that?
lacp
Sounds like the TPers have Hayek confused with Mises….damn Austrians all look and sound alike….
Sly
@Omnes Omnibus:
I dunno. Apes can probably understand Hayek. At least the Road to Serfdom.
Omnes Omnibus
@scav: No thanks, I’m full.
scav
@Omnes Omnibus: good call, it can be a little indigestible. . .
kommrade reproductive vigor
Wait, I thought that innellecyouall stuff was for sissies.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sly: Do not question the sacred text! I quoted it; it was in context. No more need be done. Hell, by teahadist standards, the fact that it was in context was overkill.
fasteddie9318
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
It don’t take no faggy brain smarts to just vomit up whatever piece of bullshit received wisdom Glenn Beck just told you about.
Angry Black Lady
Wow, nice title.
Big pimping, indeed.
eyepaddle
@Davis X. Machina:
I LOOOOOVVVVEEE Adelie Penguins! Have you been down to the Ice?
Angry Black Lady
@El Cid: i really loathe glenn beck. i don’t loathe a lot of people, especially people i don’t know. i loathe glenn beck because he is taking advantage of the brain dead, the weak, and the scared, and he’s doing it for his own self-aggrandizement. i swear, he’s like the jim jones of the aughts.
if you see kool-aid stock shoot through the roof, trust me, it ain’t that a bunch of black folks just got thirsty all of a sudden.
it would be funny if kool-aid was on the nasdaq or whatever the hell that thing is with the weird acronyms. (i don’t understand the stock market and i don’t really ever want to.) i will keep my money under the mattress, thankyouverymuch.
JD Rhoades
Teatards don’t generally see themselves as “get’r done types”, they see themselves as the only people with the brain power to grasp the elusive truths spelled out by the intellectual giants of yesteryear.
I’ve seen this phenomenon over and over, and it really does seem to be most prevalent among the hard core Randroids. One of the most frequent and obnoxious commenters at my local paper’s website is a Randroid who opens pretty much every one of his long winded posts by either accusing someone of being too dumb to understand him or of lying about what he’s said, and ends up every one demanding to know when someone’s going to “engage him in rational argument.”
Of course, the one time I used to word “redneck” in reference to another topic I got a long and typically verbose lecture on ‘liberal elitism.”
El Cid
@Angry Black Lady: I realize this is a personal preference, but the people who inspire the most bile in me are Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin. Glenn Beck is mean and dangerous, but he’s got a clown element to him, like O’Reilly.
Hannity’s nothing but a mean, empty cipher, willing to flat out repeat whatever Republican high command says in the most arrogant, bullshit faux-common-sense insulted patriot. Malkin doesn’t need explaining.
I once heard Hannity reverse his opinion within the same sentence given the reaction of one of his right wing guests whom he was kissing up to. That is an achievement in toadery.
Max Peck
So they use facebook to talk to followers and therefore don’t need the media or debates?
pseudonymous in nc
Austrotology is pretty much contemporaneous with Scientology, and has many common “fifties cult” characteristics. It has an esoteric set of core scriptures that are apparently incomprehensible to nonbelievers — or, they complain, always misinterpreted by them — but at least it doesn’t make you pay stupid amounts of money to read them.
batgirl
Well, my sister-in-law, the “constitutionalist” and teatard extraordinaire thinks Nancy Pelosi is so powerful that, “FYI, Nancy Pelosi can override any veto.”
The stupidity, it burns.
Maude
@eyepaddle:
A bunch of them moved farther down the coast. They were sick of the tourists bothering them. No one knows how many places they migrate to for the winter. They are wondrous. They eat krill.
FlipYrWhig
@JD Rhoades:
Yup. It’s a type. And this year we’ve got two running for the Senate, Rand Paul and Joe Miller. The internet libertari-douches are all growed up now.
Mike G
Let me guess that this corporatist tool failed to mention Hayek’s substantial warnings about the concentrated power of big corporations being as much of a threat to the individual as big government.
Funny how they always leave that part out. Similarly, they quote Adam Smith as some kind of government-hating libertarian, although Smith’s philosophy concerned private sector economics and left a substantial role for the state.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mike G: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!
eyepaddle
@Maude:
I used to get a kick out of the Adelies wandering up to you and just GAPING at you…you could tell they were trying hard to figure out what the hell you were, but couldn’t quite do it.
There’s a lot of irritating stuff in McMurdo, but the Adelies were not it!
Ahhh, Adelies!
scav
I distinctly remember sitting in an hospital waiting room in Peoria and hearing a woman proclaim she preferred one particular version of the bible because it was so unambiguous about what to do in all instances. It was at that exact instant that I recognized that A) there were people I could never ever possibly have any point, nay scintilla, of communication with as that was so clearly missing the big clue in the situation as described and B) I really needn’t feel bad about failing to communicate with them.
Brachiator
@Angry Black Lady:
I hate them all. This saves me a lot of time that would otherwise be spent in trying to distinguish between the layers of BS that these people spew.
Scott
I’m starting to think they pick their ideological influences the way normal people pick their sports heroes.
“Randy Moss plays for my favorite team, and ESPN says he’s great!”
“Hayek has been quoted by people in my party, and Fox says he’s really great!”
At least sports fans watch sports. I’ve got my doubts that most of Hayek’s fans have actually read his books. Takes too much time away from watching FNC…
J
@El Cid: and Angry Black Lady.
I think this issue might deserve a thread of its own. To be sure, I hate, loathe and despise them all. It seems one ought to be able to leave it at that, but I find that, like El Cid, I make distinctions; I hate some more than others and in different ways. For some reason that I can’t specify, great as my hatred for other right wing nuts is, I most detest the man–I’m blanking on his name Orville, Norville??–who makes the jokes about drowning the govt in a bath tub and bipartisanship being like date rape (implicitly comparing his team to the racist).
Perhaps we could have a vote who is the most hateful of them all?
geg6
@Ross Hershberger:
This is an interesting comment and something I was mulling over as I was washing my coffee pot this morning. The tv was on and braindead idiot Keith Rothfus, running against Blue Dog Jason Altmire (D-BARF) PA-04, had commercial running that said something along the line of “Nancy Pelosi and Jason Altmire have lost jobs for Western PA and Keith Rothfus will create them. And you know that you just FEEL that Republicans have your back.”
And it struck me quite forcefully, that “FEEL.” They don’t want anyone actually finding out the facts, just go with your gut or your feelings or emotions. Pay no attention to facts! Feelings are much, much, much, much more important.
And I have to hand it to them. They are right. Because if they actually went and looked at the facts as to whether or not Republicans have created jobs, no one would vote for a Republican. And though Altmire has been marginally better on local jobs than anything else, any Teabagger would actually love the guy for his actual votes. He’s the furthest of rightwing Blue Dogs, making Ben Nelson look like Abby Hoffman. Even their own people would swoon at Altmire’s real voting record.
geg6
@georgia pig:
So Churchill’s little commentary on the charms of a famously slutty female aristocratic contemporary might explain their obsession with screwing around on their wives?
“Caroline Lamb. God damn.”
Oh, wait. There WAS actual meaning there. And perhaps Beck’s Black Robe Regiment of Doom might not approve.
Never mind.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal
I’m going to join the group defending Hayek, and reinforce what EconWatcher said in #73. This is not to say that I agree down the line with Hayek. I don’t. However, in addition to being a damned sockulist, in tea bagger terms, he did have one very important and correct thing to say: Prices must equal costs.
What someone pays to get something has to be the same as what it cost everyone in the supply chain to get it to him. (I agree with Hayek that ‘cost’ should include some profit.) If you start subsidizing things, such that people pay less than what it costs, all sorts of bad things happen. The same is true if it costs them too much.
The part a lot of liberals fail to recognize is that, while redistributive policies are desirable, they are subject to the same rules about prices as anything else. This can be seen in the objections on Matt Yglesias’ blog whenever he talks about congestion pricing on roads, or charging market prices for parking. Immediately, the hue and cry starts up that such policies are regressive, and therefore forbidden. Yes, in isolation, they can be regressive, though I’d want to see a lot of evidence before concluding that subsidies for driving cars are actually progressive. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t also destructive. The proper response isn’t to say that we should continue to distort transportation prices. It’s to ensure that people have enough money to pay for the things they need, including market priced parking spaces. If they find that they can do without that parking, say by walking or taking the train, THEY GET TO KEEP THAT MONEY TO SPEND ON SOMETHING ELSE.
Conservatives make the mistake of ignoring externalities. Implicit, and occasionally explicit, in their arguments is the idea that the direct costs to the supply chain of supplying a product constitute the entirety of the cost, and thus the price should reflect that. They’re wrong, as there are costs that the production and usage of goods impose on someone else who can not directly charge anyone for them. Pollution is, of course, the classic example, but there are a lot of others.
Hayek was not so blind:
It should also be noted that Hayek was different from the tea baggers in another important way: he wasn’t motivated by hypocritical self-interest. He not only believed that his positions would benefit society as a whole, it wasn’t impossible to get him to change his mind, either. In the 1930s and 1940s, the idea that nationalization would lead to tyranny wasn’t that crazy. Look at the examples available to them at the time. In retrospect, I think he got the causal relationship wrong, and that in those cases, the tyranny preceded the nationalization rather than the other way around, but that’s with the benefit of hindsight.
I agree with him on is that the nationalization of most industries is a bad idea, including health care. (I, like Hayek, think that single payer is the best option.) It turned out not to be as destructive as Hayek predicted, but let’s not forget what a mess Britain was by the late 1970s.
geg6
@aimai:
This reference to Wiseguy and, specifically, Mel Profitt and this specific scene from the Profitt arc makes me love you beyond all possibility.
Can we be virtual lesbian lovers?
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: It was Byron, not Churchill, and she is the one who described Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
Rabble Arouser
@Angry Black Lady: You have money? AND a mattress? Elitist!
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus:
Churchill, in several pieces of correspondence, uses it himself in the same context about a contemporary. I only know this because I did a term paper on Churchill using only primary sources in my undergrad days.
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: One could argue that Churchill was quoting Byron if one wanted to be that kind of person.
NRH
Basically, conservatives adopt a shallow, flawed, and contradictory interpretation of some moderately intellectual premise, then assign that interpretation the status of ‘religious truth,’ a dogmatic belief that cannot be challenged. When someone points out the flaws in that interpretation, conservatives then prefer to assume that the challenger does not understand the premise because the other person is starting from the original document while the conservative is starting from the premise they have conflated with the original document. Conservatives are fundamentally incapable of examining their own positions and accepting that they are wrong.
Conservatives who examine their own positions and accept the possibility of being wrong stop being conservatives, because they figure out that conservative beliefs are in fact unsupportable under a real-world practical, moral, or ethical system. This blog features a rather prominent example of one such conversion.
Jeff W
Exactly. While Hayek was hardly a master historian, and the title of his most important work is completely laughable (serfdom implies feudalism, which arises in the absence of strong central government), he did have many good points to make, and he was writing in reaction to a frightening historical trend of his time. As far as I can tell, most nutbaggers have not even read their Hayek, and if you can trick them into discussing it, they are easily crushed.
jonas
As several people point out, this fetishization of Hayek (and von Mises, Friedman, et al.) by people who have never really read nor understood him is rich with irony. Hayek had no problem with social insurance or public health care, for example. What he critiqued was the idea of a centrally-planned economy (such as that of the Soviet Union) that limited individual choice.
The fundamental flaw in the thinking of the Austrian School is that it has a preposterously naive view of the individual and how economic choices are actually made. Krugman once called it the equivalent of the phlogiston theory of fire. Furthermore, Hayek understood individual rights and freedoms in a similarly naive and one-dimensional way — reflected in Rand Paul’s recent observation that coal mine operators should be left to regulate themselves because if conditions are too dangerous, the miners can just get up and go work somewhere else.
Hayek was not an idiot, but, like Van Mises, he was also a Straussian-style elitist and scion of the old European nobility, with it’s “let them eat cake” mentality. I would encourage people to read “The Road to Serfdom” alongside, say, Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” and then decide how “free” (working) people are in a laissez-faire marketplace.
Lurker
@Angry Black Lady:
FWIW, a lot of my friends feel the same way after the recent crash.
If you ever change your mind, though, please consider Vanguard. It’s client-owned, so it has no incentive to rip off investors with fees/costs/expenses/gimmicks/bad investments.
Kay Shawn
@martha:
That’s how to get shot. Those guys don’t like to be corrected and they DO like the 2nd Amendment.
aimai
@geg6:
Heh. Sure. I’m open, as it were, in a virtual sense. I actually dreamed last night that I was in a lesbian marriage and getting a divorce. In the dream I was worried that I couldn’t figure out whether our children would be losing a mother, or a father, when we were both the same gender? Then in the dream I began worrying that that was absurdly essentialist and inegalitarian of me. Of course, I also dreamt that I was being spied on by a tuft of sentient grass. So take it for what its worth.
aimai
Angry Black Lady
@Brachiator: good point!
geg6
@Omnes Omnibus:
One could, but then the joke would be lost. Whatever else he was, Churchill was a man who loved a joke, especially one that few of the hoi polloi colonials who worship him today would actually get.
geg6
@aimai:
Awesome!
And no worries, I don’t have any kids. ;-)
SRW1
I don’t understand people like that Amash guy. All the truth is in the bible, so what does he need to read that Hayek fellow for.
MarkJ
@Xenos: Proof that they don’t actually read the people they lay claim to as their intellectual forbears. They just think they know what those folks thought because they heard something attributed to said forbear secondhand in the Wingnut wurlitzer.
It’s like a game of Whisper down the lane where the actual ideas get distorted beyond recognition as they get passed from Teahadi to Teahadi second hand. If they’d actually read Hayek they’d be for universal health care and fire departments actually putting out everyone’s fires – not just those who “opt in”.
Andrew
“The Half-learned is adored by the Quarter-learned; the latter by the Sixteenth-part-learned; and so on; but not the Whole-learned by the Half-learned.” (Jean Paul, 1809)
MrQwerty
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal:
Economies of scale and sunk investment cost mean that the first unit will cost more to produce than the last unit. Absent some kind of subsidy, the first unit cannot be sold at the full cost of production for the first unit. While a firm may subsidize the costs of the first unit by spreading it over the subsequent billion units, that does not mean the first buyer is paying the actual cost of that unit.
When a government decides to intervene by providing further subsidies, it is shifting demand curve to increase the quantity that can be profitably produced. In industries which face a chicken-and-egg problem[1], or benefit from network effects in marginal utility[2] that government subsidy has made the difference between an impossible and still-born business model, and the explosive growth in industries which defined the 20th century.
For some products, notably immunization, the first unit sold has no utility prior to subsidized market saturation.
[1] See electricity, radio, telephone, television, etc.
[2] Also see personal computers, immunization, automobiles, etc.
Bubblegum Tate
@Jager:
I;d bet she also did a good bit of complaining to David Horowitz about the how oppressive the liberal bias was in that class.
Nowhere Man
@RSA:
Not really. Studying Basquiat will give you at least as deep an understanding of economics.
tom p
why are liberals so much up in arms about this? This is a classic case of conservatism…. the man gave himself a $75 tax cut and then expected the fire department to save his house anyway.
Geuss what? F**K you.
This is what happens in Libertarian land.
Nick
@tom p:
Because the fact the county decided to do this in the first place is fucking ridiculous
Angry Black Lady
@tom p:
FORK you???
no… funk you!
funk university: bringing the funk since 1974.