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What Hacker News says
- Interesting that when a criticism which is specific as to associations and reasons is posed, the defence is a belittling ad hom.
Mercatus & GMU an outgrowth of the Mont Pelerin Society of "free-market' economists and propagandists.
<https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mont_Pelerin_Soc...>
Excellent investigations of these groups include
- Jane Mayer, Dark Money: on political influence by the Kochs and others. <https://archive.org/details/darkmoneyhiddenh0000maye_k2o0>
- Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, Merchants of Doubt: on climate disinformation by the Kochs and others.<https://archive.org/details/merchantsofdoubt00ores>
- Oreskes and Conway, The Big Myth: on how "free markets" were sold as an ideological fable, by the Kochs and others. <https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/big-myth-9781635573572/>
- Philip Mirowski, The Road From Mont Pelerin" on the emergence and development of neoliberal philosophy and economics <https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088344>
The Kochs, GMU, Mercatus, the Atlas Network, and many affiliated organisations and individuals are at the heart of disinformation about global warming and challenges on both the resource and environmental impacts fronts, and have been for many decades. Koch Industries itself is a massive oil and gas concern which obviously benefits from rebutting and confounding arguments against usage of fossil fuels, both through scientific investigation and governmental regulation, its two principle bogeymen.
The madness lies on their side, and generally lacks libs.
- > this is a country that guarantees freedom for individuals
It does a piss-poor job of that for the majority of individuals
> Freedom encompasses economic freedom
That's a relatively recent, capitalistic, construction. See, e.g. The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes
- > The Big Myth, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, recounts the coordinated 20th-century effort to instill unquestioning faith in markets above all
There is no positive confidence in markets as such; there is negative certainty that control placed in the hands of the few is a ticket to tyranny, QED with social media.
- Condolences ;)
As Herman Daly has noted: know your enemy.
I've found in particular the rationale around land rents for minerals and extraction, dating to David Ricardo, are an interesting place to poke around. Hotelling's Rule is based on that, though through an intermediary.
There's also the associated legal concept of the Rule of Capture, which is applied to the notion of property rights in mineral resources is also based on some curiously fallacious legal argument. Which also leads me to realise that amongst various categories of knowledge, legal practice seems to be its own animal, based variously on statute, precedent, and persuasion, rather than empirical foundations.
(Other realms of knowledge include revelatory knowledge, commonly in religion; convention and authority, in various fields; communities of practice as with technical arts and some societies; and poetic or literary knowledge, essentially of narrative and record which are passed down but again need have no basis in any external empirical foundations.)
There's the equivocation between economic wealth and accounting profits, which are ... somewhat related ... but divided by the fact that the former includes all accounting of external costs and benefits, whilst the latter does not. Financial systems are cost- and risk-externalising machines.
I've recently discovered Katharina Pistor through the Ezra Klein podcast. She writes on the relationship of property to economics. She is hitting on themes I'd been struggling towards and does some excellent analysis and research. Transcript:
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...>
Book: The Code of Capital (2019) <https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D936D0247CB138F23F157A7...>
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have just published The Big Myth, which looks at the selling of the notion of free markets, specifically in the US. It's an outgrowth of their earlier work on disinformation in the tobacco, CFCs/ozone layer, lead, and oil / global warming disinformation campaigns by major corporations.
<https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/naomi-oreskes/the...>
I've yet to land a copy, but from several interviews the work seems useful though quite probably incomplete, as there was an earlier practice of such advocacy in Britain, as evidenced by The Economist's prospectus announcing in 1843 a new publication "THE ECONOMIST, which will contain— First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day..."
<https://www.economist.com/unknown/1843/08/05/prospectus>
A later editor of the Economist, Francis Wrigley Hirst, was key in persuading Oliver Wendell Holmes of the concepts of free markets and their applicability to the realm of free speech, ultimately leading to the expression "the free market of ideas" in a 1950s US Supreme Court judgement. That draws on (though mischaracterises) John Stuart Mill's writings on free speech and liberty as well.
I've written on that last variously on HN, this seems a reasonably coherent summary:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22850549>
For those interested in more, an Algolia search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Susan Gordon's written on how J.S. Mill's notions have been distorted and misrepresented in "John Stuart Mill and the 'Marketplace of Ideas'" (1997) <https://philpapers.org/rec/GORJSM> (full text on Sci-Hub / LibGen).
Other criticism of the concept, Stanley Ingber, "The Marketplace of Ideas: A legitimizing myth": <https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...> (PDF)
There's more, though this is a good start and seems to be less generally acknowledged even amongst notable critics of economic orthodoxy. Steve Keen, Philip Mirowski, and Mariana Mazzucato would be other good names to read.
