No offense to Ariana Huffington, but having her write on behalf of the demise of free markets is like having Fred Phelps rally for the forces of ignorance and bigotry.
Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism.
It just emboldens people who are on the right side of this issue.
I have a trivia quiz for Arianna Huffington:
Which name will liberal democratic people be reading hundreds of years from now to better understand markets and the economy?
Arianna Huffington? Or Adam Smith?
I'll give you a clue. It's not the washed up Republican who hasn't thought beyond her little toe about how markets function.
I don't have time to go into the longer, extended, and better argument for free markets, right now. I have a book that will be dedicated, in large part, to this project.
But here's one of the more obvious arguments:
Which economies are stronger, create more wealth, employ more people, offer more diversity of products, services, and experience, ensure greater freedom of thought, expression, and conscience, meet more peoples' needs, financially and otherwise support more and better quality efforts to tackle common problems not immediately tied to profit, are more genuinely democratic, and otherwise do better by their people?
Liberal or illiberal? Free or repressive? America or Iran? Great Britain or Cuba? Chile or Venezuela?
The arguments about free markets and mixed economies are more involved, obviously. But Adam Smith believed, as do I, that the arguments for free markets were powerful for exactly the likes of Arianna Huffington who make the argument for taxation, regulation, and giveaways only to swing that door wide open for as much power as they please.
That was Lord Acton's concern about power. And he was right. And it doesn't matter who gets a hold of it. And power being used on behalf of the wealthy to enlarge their own purses, as is happening with these bailouts, was exactly the concern of Milton Friedman.
Arianna thinks she's outthunk Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, Ronald Coase and a million other people committed to freedom and free markets.
I have a message for Arianna Huffington and her quaint little notion that people who are committed to free markets are fundamentalists.
Fuck you, you fuckin' mindless slutty demagogue. You don't know what the fuck you think, nevertheless what I or any of these men and women think.
You are exactly why free markets and political and economic freedom are so precious to people like me.
Because the very little thought that you have put into anything other than your career, you think that you have earned the right to regulate at will the activities of any and all of these people who outclass you in every way possible.
And all the while you fuck who you please, whore your internet smut rag as you please, drink as much booze and smoke as much weed as you please, and make as much money as you please.
The arrogance and hypocrisy of such a position reeks. Not that you've cared to consider that it might matter. As one of my best friends, Brian White, used to say amidst choruses of the Beattle's Eleanor Rigby on a van ride to a speech tournament during my days at Wichita State: Fuckin' liberals. They stink up the joint with their hypocrisy and condescension and don't even have the sense to ask your name when they fuck you. I should know. I spent most of my life as one. I was too young to know the difference, I suppose.
I don't take up for any ideology or damned fool shortsighted notion of the world, anymore.
I'm a liberal of the original sort. When liberalism meant something. Classical liberalism. Liberal as in liberty. It meant societies predicated on the freedom of individual consciences to work on behalf of all sorts of concerns, noble and not-so-noble.
What I respect is people who have stronger arguments and understandings of what they are doing to offer. And who at least try to live a life of something approximating principle.
And you aren't it, Arianna.
And that is why you should be kept as far away from power as possible, you fuckin' dumbshit cheerleader.
Lord Acton might have a thing or two to teach you about that.
