Hi orda,
The thing I find remarkable is that these paper principles have so much staying power, regardless of the evidence against them. As if they are diaphanous in the face of the light of reality.
It isn't that markets are wholly bad, either. It's just there's space between the view that markets are the source of all economic virtue and that they are the source of all economic evil. They can serve useful social purposes, and they can serve only selfish ones. The sensible aim is to manage them so as to get the benefits and limit the harms that markets generate. Or at least to do our best to do so.
For instance, it is not like the concept of negative externalities is a new one, or even that it is controversial in economics. Yet translate this into the political arena and this reality is quite suspended for many adherents to the gospel of "free" markets.
It's quite a weird phenomenon. Libertarianism is really not a form of conservatism. It's a faith. It exists in a zone in which one person's choices cannot harm another person's. It exists in a realm of unlimited resources and no restraints. And yet it is built upon a paradox, as to admit the existence of property rights and to enforce the rules which governs them necessarily implies the existence and force of government.
| 