If Richard Posner and the rest of the Chicago Boys are finally coming out of their stupor, Hayek is toast....

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/11/milton_friedman.html

But, perhaps more seriously, Friedman ducked the big questions regarding the relationship between economic freedom and political liberty, and he was com- pletely incapable of seeing that political liberty is both a negative and a positive liberty: freedom from tyranny and oppression but also the freedom and power to decide on and accomplish our common purposes. These are the master ques- tions of history and moral philosophy, and for all his brilliance and hard work, Friedman is of absolutely no help in answering them. As Posner says, Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom "flunks the test of accuracy of prediction . . . [The] view that socialism of the sort that Britain embraced under the old Labour Party was incompatible with democracy [is] extreme and inaccurate." Yet Friedman bought into that Hayekian view. And in so doing, he ultimately led his followers, and tried to lead the rest of us, down a false path.

Brad Delong, Right from the Start? What Milton Friedman can teach progressives.

http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/20070308_108-115.delong.FINAL.pdf

Moreover, Friedman's effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there's an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman's theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there's much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.

Paul Krugman, Who Was Milton Friedman?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19857

Mona, you should read this book:

Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists

http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2004/SO/BR/gill.htm

If it gets as much crap from the AHA as Haynes, Klehr or Weinstein, (our current U.S. Archivist, a Bush appointee), who write "crossover books" not peer reveiwed scholarship, I'll let you tell me the AHA is a "commie" front organization.

http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2004/0405/0405vie1.cfm

Hume's Ghost:

without reading all the comments ....

My apologies if anyone already made this point.

1. Ledeen is a fascist/fanatic. I'm convinced of this.

He's never been hidden about this. (He openly approved of fascist movements in his 1972 book, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928-1936.) It's what distinguishes him from his crypto-fascist fellow-travellers. In his view, the fascist movements were just fine. The problem was with how they governed. As his career so aptly shows, they're still working on it.

I would add that I think that we are seeing a tide turn on this administration. But these people will be back. Ledeen did the same thing during Iran-contra and look how long it took for America to forget it and let it happen again.

The lesson, obviously is that is terrible mistake to go so lightly on the Iran/Contra conspirators.

We should have investigated everything down to the last jot and tittle, impeached the impeachable ones, and thrown everyone else in jail. Better yet, we should have burned the GOP down to the ground after Watergate, and never let Iran/Contra have a chance to happen in the first place.

That's hardly my argument. Rather, it's that the actually existing results of "libertarianism" are authoritarianism. And this contradiction was evident for quite some time.

There are no existing results of libertarianism. The closest was the Founding of this nation, and given that it allowed for chattel slavery and denied the vote to any but white males, it was severely compromised. Libertarians at no time dominated the GOP.

The insurmountable problem libertairainsm may well face is human nature: once people are in power they legislate to favor themselves and their friends, and suddenly lose an interest in limiting power. But government is and always will be the greatest threat to human liberty, because it holds a monopoly on force.

Libertarians would establish neither a prison-industrial nor a military-industrial complex. Nor would we craft a universal health care program that will empower the state to legislate all kinds of private activity in order to reduce the cost to all -- the wrong kind of health care program would make you and the state a stakeholder in whether I eat lots of fatty food, smoke cigarettes, or if men engage in unprotected anal sex.

Libertarians want people left alone to make their own decisions. That is often at odds with egalitarianism. I favor liberty over egalitarianism in most instances.

BTW, you are deluded if you think Stalinism did not besot the left-wing intellectual class in the West, including the U.S., in the 30s and 40s. The notion that there were only 20 such is literally as deranged as any of the "truth" claims of Bill Kristol.

Better yet, we should have burned the GOP down to the ground after Watergate, and never let Iran/Contra have a chance to happen in the first place.

If the GOP can't police themselves, other Americans will have to do it for them. I wonder what things might have been different, if anything, had McCloskey got the nod instead of Tricky Dick.

Laura M... I am a fiscal conservative. I am a social liberal. I tend to identify more with traditional conservatism than I do with traditional liberalism.

You are a liberal.

You used the term "fiscal liberalism". There is no such thing.

Economic liberalism, perhaps, but you seem unclear about what that is also, because that would be Adam Smith.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_theory_of_economics

You might want to check out the wiki entry on fiscal conservatism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_conservatism

To me, a fiscal conservative wants to get the biggest bang for her buck. That's why government traditionally does some things like the military and defense. It's cheaper and more efficient. We are now privatizing our military more than at any time in our history, Blackwater, et al. If health care is better provided to the nation, and at a lower cost, by a system other than the one we have now (anything would beat it), that's fiscal conservatism. To refuse restructuring the system to a single payer provider for all who can't afford it otherwise, (nationalized) on the basis of ideology, even though it's wasteful and inefficient in terms of money services to keep it the way it is, that's not fiscal conservatism, that's subjugation to ideology, like other forms of totalitarianism.