James Farmelant wrote:
> --------- Begin forwarded message ----------
> From: JKSCHW at aol.com
>
> discussions of Icelandic society in the
> middle
> ages
Hooooop!! libertarianalert!!! This sounds like a pleasantly obscure piece of apolitical erudition, but it's not. Iceland in the Middle Ages is the favourite example among usenet libboes of a libertarian society, with no government units higher than the head of household. Yer actual Icelandic scholars like Magnus Magnusson find this so annoying you wouldn't believe.
My complaint against the L'n'E mob is that their economics is so damnably *bad*. Charles said it right that the "brightness" factor is a very dangerous thing -- it allows them to grasp the general structure of free-market arguments -- stuff which is indeed as Justin said:
>seeing points in a moment that
> take
> other people years
but which are surrounded by caveats and exceptions that take years to get your head round whether you're brilliant or not. Basically, the trouble is that every perfect market is similar -- every market failure fails in its own particular way. So bright people like Posner, with a legal instinct which draws them toward generally applicable rules of thumb and away from particular cases, tend to overestimate the effectiveness of free markets in allocating resources.
Added to that, they absolutely refuse to consider justice in distribution. Having had such intellectual success applying price theory to law, they usually try to assimilate justice more generally to welfare economics. Which is a howler because, as is well known, welfare economics will hardly ever give you an interesting answer to any question. I had a long exchange of emails once with David Friedman (son of Milt, another L'n'E microceleb) in which he repeatedly fell back on the Pareto principle as being a helpful rule to assist judges in deciding who gets what (it isn't). This is how Posner manages to dragoon "the law must not discriminate" into the service of "the goal of law is maximising total wealth".
hey ho hum
dd
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