And Now for a Different Perspective

How do you respond internally to this kind of criticism?

Mike Huben is the editor of the website, and author of that article among others.

He used to be a regular commenter on the David Friedman’s Ideas blog, but not anymore I think.

When I first heard of libertarianism (when the Ron Paul hurricane happen ), Mike’s website was the first stuff I started to read. It was one of the first google returns and I wanted to start by reading what the critiques had to say about libertarianism.

Bryan Caplan’s article was one of the most well reasoned I found there. (I had pick up a micro book by then, and was getting into econ.) It made me skeptical about Austrian economics (which Ron Paul publicized a lot), but then I was surprised to find he was a hard-core libertarian.

Most of Mike stuff didn’t impress me, neither did his comments over David Friedman’s blog. I found it particularly funny how in a blog post about libertarian paternalism, Mike to be against paternalism and in favor of complete liberalization. (“You may only need to “nudge” a few cattle to send the whole herd to the slaughterhouse.”) But in the very same comment, he argues how libertarians view of people being rational is nonsense. He never replied to people who pointed out how absurd his position was, so I think his initial comment was only his typical knee-jerk reaction to libertarianism.