Mighty Thrawn

A blogger who refers to himself as "Thrawn" believes himself to be the all knowing, debunker of libertarian thought. The might of his garden variety arguments is stunting, I mean stunning. This man is as inflatable as the pope, truly. The force of Thrawns logic impells all libertarian ideology, and all of the thought pours out from the hole created by his spear of logic. He has single handedly brought down an entire movement of philosophy, in a single series of blog posts, and did so single mindedly. I am so glad to be cured of my thinkyness, and from now on I will just be following Thrawn and his mighty posts. Praise be to Thrawn!

I think this should kick off my dumb bloggers of the week.

Thrawn Takes First Place.

From his blog

"Unfortunately, some [Libertarians] go too far. “Extremist” libertarians, or – anarcho – capitalists as some have taken to calling themselves – claim that government in any form is “evil” or “immoral”. Here, I present responses to some of their most common arguments for this surprisingly popular viewpoint."

Apparently he doesn't have a problem with libertarian ideas, unless they oppose government. Of course he completely lacks any understanding of libertarians. Libertarians encompass a large group of thinkers. Anarchists of all sorts, and minarchists of all sorts. The basic idea is, yes Thong, government is bad. That is simplistic. The more complex idea is government is flawed, illogical, violent, the product of bad thinking or even lack of thought, and self-serving. It's like starting a church to gain an income and some power. Fooling a large group of followers into believing they need you to lead them to salvation.

"Superficially, this looks like a good idea, and I partly agree with it. “Free society”, taken to mean free speech and other similar liberties, is a very good idea. What isn’t a good idea is an unregulated free market. Don’t get me wrong – I like capitalism. I like to own stuff."

Yes, economic liberties are bad. If a child wants to work, we should go against that childs judgment. If someone wants to work longer hours, he must get approval first. Certain groups should be privileged by the governments when getting hired, patents are great, and lack of a competing currency really finishes it off like an experienced hooker. Oh by the way, manipulation of interest rates has really been great! Banning products that are evil is the best thing anyone can do, like pot which really hurt the californian economy when it was made legal for medical use.

"With any absolute economic doctrine (absolute socialism or absolute capitalism), there are inherent flaws. With capitalism, people best able to exploit others succeed the most. Needless to say, exploitation is a bad thing. With socialism, motivation is lacking. There are also issues with resources, but we’ll pretend we actually have enough for now. Soviet Russia, notably, overcame this lack of inherent motivation through widespread use of the AK 47."

This is simply an argument for libertarianism, and he doesn't seem to realize this. What Thrawn argues for, because soviet Russia is mixed markets. A good combination of both socialist politics in a capitalist market. This however is the current state of things. Thrawn mis-understands the term free market. It simply is a place of trade, unregulated. "Oi Vay! Not unregulated, isn't that how we got into the financial crisis we are today?" The financial crisis we are in right now, is a result of bad business, extremely low manipulated interests rates, which led to faulty investment, and duh the housing bubble was a result of these things. Companies making loans to people they knew wouldn't be able to pay it back is only one cause. The investment banks were punished for this by the market, and thanks to government intervention, they were pulled out of their almost certain demise. Their punishment from the market, had been replaced with a reward from government. Almost a trillion in bailout funds. How logical! Add this to Fanny May and Freddy Mac, which were giving loans to just about anyone with at least a penny in their pockets, and artificially low interest rates from the one and only Alan Greenspan, which suckered people into investing in homes in the first place, and you get what we have now.

We should have said "Bye Bye wall street, you brought yourself down, maybe you can dig yourself up." But no We dug them up, under Mr. Wall Street himself, Barrack Obama, and now the National debt is up to almost 12 trillion dollars. I love intervention!

"It’s common for libertarians to argue that the “free market will stabilize the economy”. This is a blatant falsehood. There is no magical free market fairy to swish her wand and take back all the money from the naughty corporations, and tiny imbalances in the economy would refill their pockets in short order."

It's called a depression, and it moves liquidity back into the market. When a company practices bad business, or when a company is propped up and given unfair backing by the government, they go under, and we almost saw it happen this past year. The magical fairy did show up however, and protected the bad companies.

This is part one of five rebuttals to Saint Thrawn.