What She Said

This is interesting.

I tripped past Radley Balko's place to see what's shakin' over there, to include whether anyone else had had anything to say on the matter of the brief Sherwin Rosen flap. I noticed the tracking link at the foot of that post, and there appeared to be two of them. So, I went to look at the first one.

Now, it's wrong. It points to the wrong post, which is a fairly bone-crunching affair by Laurel, "The Economistress", describing some of her experience in Hell City. Really: there is aphorism scattered all through it, and I doubt none of it. Pretty good, I thought.

The main thing that caught my mind, though, is in its title: "The Political Is Personal". For many years, now, it's always been crucial to me to take the old New Lefty saw (first scratched-up by the 60's feminists) and put it the other way 'round, just like Laurel did. That's because it emphasizes the fact that the things that those people fool around with in their dizzy "experiments" and what-not always involve singular, individual, human lives. That's something that, for all their professed "caring" & all the rest of it, they actually do not -- and cannot -- see. They always begin with herds, without which they simply do not conceive human life.

It's the thing that proves that they really are hypocrites: if any single one of them happened to go down under the wheels of the power that they espouse, they'd be quick to protest. (For example: notice -- and penetrate to its fundamentals -- how they consider property, but note that they all still own things. They haven't given it all away to the oppressed masses, down to the last knife, fork, mascara-tube and ball-point pen.)

To say that "the political is personal" is to point out that everything they do with the state hurts someone with a real life and dreams and plans and values of their very own.


Beyond all that, I found the post that I was looking for, which addresses the way that "mainstream" (my derision, not Laurel's) academic economists slag the Austrian school.

It's worth a read. I'll only say that I'm not impressed with whether Rosen was a Chicago schooler or not. For one thing, I've never been that crazy about that crowd (for one morer thing: I can't stand a monetarist), but the real beef I had with Rosen was contained in the .PDF that can be traced down through the discussion.

It's an attitude, and I really don't care who wields it, or whether they played it off differently at other times. It's still disgraceful.