

The Science of Libertarian Morality - cubix
http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/02/the-science-of-libertarian

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zdw
Ever notice how nearly all articles about economic theory immediately gather
the "ivory tower intellectual who has no concept of the real world -
everything they study is in their own thought bubble" criticism?

That same criticism applies to libertarianism - they're interesting ideas, but
not implementable as stated. The number of countries that have implemented
even half of what they propose is a null set.

Not to say it wouldn't work, but you'd think at least someone would try it out
somewhere and we'd have one datapoint...

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RyanMcGreal
Most economic regulations we have today exist because a government was trying
to patch over a market failure. The US has Medicare, for example, because
Americans were appalled that senior citizens were dying because they couldn't
afford health care. Similarly, workplace safety regulations exist because
Americans were appalled that employees were getting mangled and killed by the
thousands in dangerous work environments; and so on.

We can argue over whether a particular regulation was the best approach (maybe
a smart incentives-based approach would work better than a prohibition, for
example); and we can argue over whether a given regulation still makes sense
in changing economic circumstances.

However, it requires a special kind of dogmatic myopia to insist against all
evidence to the contrary that markets are self-correcting, that positive and
negative externalities either don't exist or don't matter, and that the best
way to deal with disasters (like a restaurant poisoning thousands of customers
with e. coli infection due to unsanitary food handling) is to let the market
sort it out.

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yummyfajitas
How is allocating limited healthcare resources to the young rather than the
old a market failure? Did supply not meet demand?

There are real examples of market failure, e.g. the current failure of housing
markets to clear (I.e. prices not reachingg equilibrium). Could you explain
how your examples are market failure?

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RyanMcGreal
Also of interest is Jonathan Haidt's TED Talk on the different moral
foundations of liberals and conservatives:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.ht...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html)

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tomjen3
Okay I hate to do this, but we have had too many political pieces, so I have
to flag it.

