http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/01/24/eric-s-raymond/sticking-up-for-capitalism/ Big Ideas for a Better World Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:24:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 hourly 1 http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/01/24/eric-s-raymond/sticking-up-for-capitalism/comment-page-1/#comment-234 Hispanic Pundit » Quote Of The Day Sat, 11 Mar 2006 11:44:42 +0000 http://www.cato-unbound.org/?p=81#comment-234 [...] “No real-world market is perfect. But market failure is only grounds to deprecate markets when we have reason to believe non-market allocation mechanisms can do better. Otherwise, the only aim and effect of the deprecation can be to replace an imperfect market with something worse. (Usually the “something worse” is a committee of bureaucrats.) Can you propose a non-market allocation mechanism that would rescue academia from its present disgraceful state? Good luck with that. F. A. Hayek and David D. Friedman, among others, have shown that even a bureaucrat-god with perfect information and infinite computational capacity cannot outperform market allocation through price signals (the most accessible proof I know of this is in Friedman’s Price Theory, which I recommend)”. –Eric S. Raymond, responding to David Gelernter’s critique of capitalism Filed under: General, Economics, (modern day) Liberalism, Academia by HispanicPundit | [...] [...] “No real-world market is perfect. But market failure is only grounds to deprecate markets when we have reason to believe non-market allocation mechanisms can do better. Otherwise, the only aim and effect of the deprecation can be to replace an imperfect market with something worse. (Usually the “something worse” is a committee of bureaucrats.) Can you propose a non-market allocation mechanism that would rescue academia from its present disgraceful state? Good luck with that. F. A. Hayek and David D. Friedman, among others, have shown that even a bureaucrat-god with perfect information and infinite computational capacity cannot outperform market allocation through price signals (the most accessible proof I know of this is in Friedman’s Price Theory, which I recommend)”. –Eric S. Raymond, responding to David Gelernter’s critique of capitalism Filed under: General, Economics, (modern day) Liberalism, Academia by HispanicPundit | [...]

]]> http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/01/24/eric-s-raymond/sticking-up-for-capitalism/comment-page-1/#comment-233 Hispanic Pundit » Quote Of The Day Sat, 11 Mar 2006 11:44:21 +0000 http://www.cato-unbound.org/?p=81#comment-233 [...] “More generally, the political culture of the West is only now beginning to recover from the memetic damage done to it from 1920 on by Soviet propaganda and Soviet agents of influence (see, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives : Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals). This memetic attack followed the prescriptions of Antonio Gramsci and other Marxist theoreticians, and was determinedly (even brilliantly) executed for over fifty years. Part of the resulting damage is manifest in what you aptly describe as the pervasive “wacko leftism” of the academic/educational world. Where you see in humanities and social-science academia resentful victims of a system that fails to reward them properly, I see an academic establishment that swallowed not just Stalin’s bait but the hook and the line and the sinker as well (multiculturalism, postmodernism, and “world system” theory), and in doing so rendered itself largely incapable of teaching anything of value. Their economic troubles are not the cause of their political fecklessness, but its completely inevitable consequence”.–Eric S. Raymond, responding to David Gelernter’s critique of capitalism Filed under: General, Education, (modern day) Liberalism, Academia by HispanicPundit | [...] [...] “More generally, the political culture of the West is only now beginning to recover from the memetic damage done to it from 1920 on by Soviet propaganda and Soviet agents of influence (see, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives : Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals). This memetic attack followed the prescriptions of Antonio Gramsci and other Marxist theoreticians, and was determinedly (even brilliantly) executed for over fifty years. Part of the resulting damage is manifest in what you aptly describe as the pervasive “wacko leftism” of the academic/educational world. Where you see in humanities and social-science academia resentful victims of a system that fails to reward them properly, I see an academic establishment that swallowed not just Stalin’s bait but the hook and the line and the sinker as well (multiculturalism, postmodernism, and “world system” theory), and in doing so rendered itself largely incapable of teaching anything of value. Their economic troubles are not the cause of their political fecklessness, but its completely inevitable consequence”.–Eric S. Raymond, responding to David Gelernter’s critique of capitalism Filed under: General, Education, (modern day) Liberalism, Academia by HispanicPundit | [...]

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