tasting the whole worm

Here's The Quaker Economist on the PBS television show, The Commanding Heights.

I wasn't wild about the show. It conflates classical liberalism with neo-liberalism, Austrian School with Chicago School, Misesian economics with Hayekian economics with Friedmanite economics ...

It gave Milton Friedman yet another opportunity to slander Ludwig von Mises with his "You are all a bunch of socialists!" story. (Friedman changes the details, timing, and location, depending on the telling, and no one else backs him up on its accuracy. Still, if Mises had said something so undiplomatic at some neo-liberal gathering, he would have been justified, if indelicate.)

But I was amazed that PBS put out anything remotely market-friendly. So I own the DVDs.

Someone wrote me about an email from Jay Hanson's DieOff.com attacking the series. Here is my reply, slightly edited:

Subject: Re: Hanson
Date: December 6, 2005 1:01:51 PM EST

what's you're read on where's he's coming from?
Do you see him as part of what you regard as "left"?

Well, yes and no. The left/right labels are limiting obviously. You can't accurately use a single dimension to designate multiple issues. I tend to equate anti-market and anti-economic ranting with the Left, but then people like Pat Buchanan are clearly on the Right, and he's no friend of either markets or economics. Rothbard wrote quite a bit on conservative anti-market sentiment.

I had my own reservations about the Commanding Heights series, as you know. The leftists and libertarians sound the same sometimes in our attacks against neo-liberalism, but they're angry at the liberalism (and I can't even tell if they understand the meaning of the "neo" prefix) whereas we are angry that the neos are sullying both liberalism (which the Left already did, of course) and now markets as well.

But I'm grateful in a sense for the term neo-liberalism. Leftist morons may not follow the importance of the prefix, but at least they're not leaving it off entirely. Marx may have popularized the term 'capitalism' but as I've said elsewhere, he at least started by defining it in a way that its supporters would agree with: free markets, free trade, private ownership of the means of production -- laissez faire. But then Marx and the Marxists go on to conflate laissez faire with political privilege, making it next to impossible to discuss laissez faire capitalism with anyone coming from the Left.

The difference between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism is exactly the same. The original was about less government. The newcomer is about more. At least we've moved past using one word to designate both meanings.

Anyway, I subjected myself to a few of Hanson's rants a few years ago. I found nothing valuable in them. He doesn't know economics and he doesn't know history. He is all noise. I don't need to taste the whole worm to know what it is.

laissez faire,
bkmarcus
www.bkmarcus.com

The slight editing involves my inserting "taste the whole worm" for something more impolite.

By the way, some linguistic geek trivia for those who didn't catch it:



Professor Spooner (no relation to Lysander, as far as I know) originally chastised his class, "You have tasted the whole worm!" when he meant to say that they had wasted the whole term.