The insolence doesn't stop

Mr. Giacalone says he’s running up against a “brick wall.” Or at least a pert coxcomb, eh? But, enough with ad hominem. The only substance in his post is this: “Bert Foer is not saying that all economic rules and all market forces are the product of government institutions.” Okay, but what Foer wrote was “Markets are not the product of Mother Nature. They are embedded in institutions and are at root political creations.” Now, if Foer overstated what he meant to say, then that’s fine, but those sentences mean that markets are the product of politics; that they are “creations” of politics. I said that that was not true—that the rules of supply and demand can not be overcome by political means, and that inflation is a prime example of this fact. Mr. Giacalone’s response to me was not to show that I am wrong, but to call me all sorts of names and finally to say that Mr. Foer did not say what he plainly did say.

It is certainly true that taxes pay for roads. It is true that roads help people to get to work. But it is not true that the government creates the market. Markets are the result of supply, demand, and limited time. These are rooted in human nature, which is prior to the state. Mr. Giacalone has had several opportunities to rebut this argument. But all he has done is throw a tantrum, accusing me of “[w]hining,” and of dogmatism and of being adolescent and a brick wall and so forth—and then to say that I am the childish one. That is just pathetic.

Incidentally, in my previous post I said that under Mr. Giacalone’s logic, one would end up (absurdly) claiming that censorship is necessary to have free speech. In his reply, he says “the body politic can endorse a broad freedom from censorship without doing unnecessary harm to itself.” That’s an interesting way of putting it. Freedom of speech, you see, is not something to which all people have a right, it’s a permission granted by society and revocable whenever that speech does “unnecessary harm” to society. In other words, freedom of speech is not a product of Mother Nature, but is embedded in institutions and is at root a political creation. To think of it as something the government may not violate even when it does “unnecessary harm” to society, would be “adolescent.” Well, when I was an adolescent, I learned that pejoratives are not arguments. Perhaps Mr. Giacalone was absent that day.