I recently mentioned on LR that writer Jacob Weisberg of Slate is claiming that people ought to blame libertarians for the financial crisis we now face.
In this column today, Sheldon Richman of FEE hands Weisberg his head. Read it and savor the auto-da-fe.
The intellectual case for Weisberg’s proposition is so absurdly weak — as Richman observes, Weisberg presents no evidence and tries to carry his position with nothing but assertions — that you have to wonder: is he just being a dutiful soldier in the great campaign to see that no voter connects congressional Democrats with the crisis, or does he really believe that free markets are so inherently bad that libertarian thinking must somehow be at the root of everything that goes wrong? Is he acting in the capacity of those odious political spin doctors who tell their candidates, “Yeah, this crap is not true, but you just have to say it to avoid losing ground, and besides, most voters are too dumb to find out the truth”? Or he is acting like one of those vicious Red Brigades kids who happily carried out Mao’s purges of intellectuals and property owners because they KNEW that those class enemies were ALL BAD PEOPLE?
