Liberalism Disproves Free Market Theory

Economic decisions don't occur in isolation from the rest of your life, including politics. Also, rational thought is not turned on and off like a switch. Its always associated with emotions.

I do think your example of pregnant teen-agers is true. The fact is that free-market theory is just not sound.

You got it.

just get the hell out of my country and move to cuba you are a sick pseudo intellectual treasonous peace of crap

I have a new blog up that was inspired by our brief exchange yesterday. Am I correct in surmising that you tacitly agreed that personal responsibility isn't the only cause of what happens to us?

Of course the big leap for conservatives and libertarians is to see that the structure of society shapes who we become to a great extent.

Here you build another strawman. Free market theory flatly DOES NOT say “that all participants will make rational, i.e., not emotional, decisions”. Free market theory (well established as basic reality) says that human beings invariably act in what they perceive to be their own best interests. Because this is the case, overwhelmingly people do make rational decisions in the marketplace (even liberals). That does not change the fact that liberals overwhelmingly approach issues from an emotional (that is, irrational) perspective.

Before you make the erroneous leap, there is no contradiction here. On the one hand, even liberal decision making is not typically clouded by ideology when making decisions about whether to buy bread or milk or where to buy gas or what style of shirt to buy. On the other, the decisions made by liberals in the marketplace of ideas may still be entirely rational and still completely wrong. This is because rational decisions that are based upon irrational, emotional and erroneous premises (such as that government programs work, or that the Welfare state does not increase poverty or that minimum wage laws don’t destroy jobs) yield inevitably poor results. And then, of course, are the decisions that ARE rationally in their own interests (desire for a specific government handout) that are logically opposed by others because they are detrimental to society as a whole (medicare, social security, etc.)

Your column is a perfect example. The logical argument that premise A: all actors in the marketplace behave rationally is incompatible with premise B: ALL decisions by liberals are based on emotion/irrationality is unassailably true. That either is an accurate representation of either free market theory or conservative views in pure bovine fecal matter.