TheAgitator.com
Norberg vs. Kuttner
Friday, September 12th, 2003Kuttner’s pulling out the old “libertarianism is a cult” line of argument. He begain his last entry with “arguing with you is like arguing with a religious fundamentalist,” and ended it with, “get off of your cloud.”
Eep.
UPDATE: Over at the excellent Catallarchy group blog, Micah Ghertner has more.
Personally, I love it when the “(insert ideology here) is a cult/religion” argument comes out. It usually means that all other arguments have been exhausted. Also, the arguments that follow tend to provide a lot more entertainment!!
Nasty vocabulary tactics aside, would it be soooo difficult for the letter posting to run from top to bottom instead of bottom to top?
I also find it funny that Kuttner’s main examples are Enron and Prescription Drugs. Both have very little, if anything, to do with globalization and world capitalism. The first is simply a case of corruption in the US. And we all know the goverment is quite capable of similar corruption. And the second has to do with protecting property (patent)rights. It doesn’t have to do with tariffs, fair labor, or corporations moving over seas.
Perhaps Kuttner will get some better examples in the days ahead.
Reason number one for why the right is gaining and the left is sinking:
One of them has figured out that how you argue is at least as convincing to outsiders as what you argue. And the other is Kuttner melting down and exploding in a shower of nuts and bolts here…
Likewise, I wonder how many people were convinced by “Bush=Hitler” signs– to favor Bush’s side. (I always meant to join a march with a sign that said “Bush=Hitler, Saddam=Churchill.”)
Mr. Norberg is just not doing a very good job of countering Mr. Kuttner. Since Mr. Kuttner is so obsessed with the empirical evidence, which he thinks is on his side, Mr. Norberg needs to focus more on that instead of his “thought experiments”. Somebody like Thomas Sowell would have chewed up and spit out Robert Kuttner by now.
Matt–
I think you may be on to something; Johan did actually collect an enormous amount of empirical information for his book, so he really should be able to do just that. I hope we see that in the next round.
In the context of such debates most of the time “religious” means “deeply held, pre-rational beliefs with great emotional appeal.”
All of us of can be said to be guilty of having such beliefs. Indeed, it might be argued that we need to have such beliefs as a necessary requirment for emotional stablity.
It’s usually easy to spot these beliefs even in people who regard themselves as free of them. For example, ask the average secular modernist liberal to defend the rationality of egalitarianism.
Where it gets creepy is when people start denying that they are arguing out of such a basis when they clearly are; i.e., when they are clearly closing their eyes to reality in an untoward fashion in order to hang on to emotionally appealing core beliefs.