Libertarian Gosplan
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 16 years ago, in 2008, on the World Wide Web.
Here’s Keith Halderman, supposedly replying to an argument by Roderick Long, to the effect that short-term success for the Ron Paul campaign might come at the cost of damage to the longer-term prospects for a fully free society:
Your argument that the Paul candidacy works against a libertarian society is ridiculous. Fourteen hundred meet-up groups with over 80,000 members being exposed to libertarian ideas, many for the first time, say so.
Yep. Let’s all measure the inputs to the allocation process, rather than the outputs. Judging from the inputs, we are on track to exceed liberty production quotas by 75%. Long live Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution!
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Charles, you only write these sarcastic remarks about Ron Paul because you are evidently just another CosmoLifestyleOrangeBeltwayKochtoLibertarian, since you are “Sponsored by” the Kochtopus (those Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Libertarian Internships).
[all in jest ...]Ideology vs The Lives of Half A Million Iranians
I guess ideology wins, and in that, your priorities are remarkable, to say the least.
I think your argument assumes part of what it needs to prove.
I’m not in favor of throwing $5 into a wishing well in order to stop a war on Iran, either. But you couldn’t reliably infer from that that I think the $5 is more important than the lives of half a million Iranians. The idea that there’s some kind of trade-off involved between the alternatives can only get off the ground by adding an auxiliary causal premise. One which has basically no empirical evidence in its favor.