Why is the New York Times so silent?

Where is the New York Times when it comes to the testimony regarding Obamacare that was heard yesterday in Congress?

The Story

Associated Press reports that Medicare's "indepedent economic expert," Chief Actuary Richard Foster was testifying before Congress yesterday. He was asked about two of the major selling points that Obama has attached to his health care regulations. Obama has repeatedly told the public that his measures would reduce health care costs and that people would be able to keep the insurance they have. Critics, including this blog, have said that neither of those points are true. They are selling points, political campaigning points, etc., but they are not accurate.

Asked if he could give true or false assessments to these claims the government's own expert said that regarding costs, "I would say false, more so than true." In other words, the health care reforms will actually push up health care costs, not reduce them. As for keeping their own insurance, he said that is "not true in all cases." It certainly isn't. But to be fair no one said that everyone would lose insurance they like. Over time more and more will but certainly in the short term it will be limited numbers. What will happens is that insurance options will be reduced on a regular basis and you will face a dwindling pool of options, making it harder and harder to find one that fits your needs the best. Government is notorious at believing in one-size-fits-all" theories. It does with education, social security, welfare benefits, etc. It really has to since government is like a lumbering dinosaur moving about in a small space, it can't make individual exceptions because it wouldn't be able to move fast enough to make decisions. They would accumulate and backlog the system. So, everyone is forced into tiny boxes.

When You're Good to Mama, Mama's Good to You

The problems with the tiny boxes is that they are designed by special interest groups that most directly benefit by changes in the system. If the pharmaceutical lobby wants to push certain types of drugs, over others, they lobby for coverage for those drugs while others, which may be cheaper, are ignored. Consider the expansion of medicare that Big PhRMA pushed during the Bush administration.

Take an opportunist politician like Billy Tauzin as an example. Tauzin had been a Congressman from Louisiana for years, as a Democrat. When the relgiously-motivated Southerners decided to use Big Government to regulate morality more the South went Republican. So did Tauzin who quickly switched political parties so he could stay in office. Tauzin was a major player in Congress on pushing through the Medicare drug expansion and was co-sponsor of the bill. Before his term in office was finished, but after the "reforms" were law, Tauzin announced his resignation from the House, where his salary was $174,000 per year. He already had a new job lined up with PhRMA which would pay him $2.5 million per year. As USA Today reported at the time, Tauzin, "stepped down earlier this year as chairman of the House committee that regulates the pharmaceutical industry, [and] will become the new president and CEO of the drug industry's top lobbying group."

Tauzin had survived cancer and was recovering when he made the announcement. He said: "The question is what I wanted to do with the new life God had given me. This is the mission I want to take on." I'm thrilled to know that Jehovah—God of the universe —is concerned about lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry.

This illustrates a key fallacy in progressive thinking. Progressives are right on many, many things. They generally want the right results but they simply don't know how to get there and are blind to the institutional failures of big government. They demanded lots of regulations on the pharmaceutical industry and political oversight of the industry. They got it. Then it turns out that the head of the committee, who had been both a Democrat and a Republican, was so much in the pocket of the industry that they rewarded him with a $2.5 million per year position. Tauzin worked for them for five years and then retired with a cushy nest-egg not counting the pension he'll collect from Congress for all his valiant efforts at regulating Big PhRMA.

The sad reality is that the regulatory state almost always ends up in the hands of the people it was set up to regulate. There is a species of businessmen who long ago discovered that they can increase profits more through manipulating the political process, and skewing markets, than they can do in markets that are not open to political manipulation. Right at the birth of the Progressive Era, when these regulations were created, this sort of manipulation was taking place. Big Business was a major funder of efforts to regulate Big Business, because they knew they would effectively write the regulations.

Why Big Business Promotes the Regulatory State

Left-wing historian Gabriel Kolko did an exhaustive study of the origins of the regulatory state in America and says most people view the period as if it were a mirror image of itself. For instance, "it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it." He wrote: "It is business control over politics (and by 'business' I mean the major economic interests) rather than political regulation of the economy that is the significant phenomenon of the Progressive Era." The reason for that is not hard to understand, "regulation itself was invariably controlled by leaders of the regulated industry, and directed toward ends they deemed acceptable or desirable. In part this came about because the regulatory movements were usually initiated by the dominant business to be regulated."

My guess is that Obamacare will end up dominated by a few big insurance companies who will continue to tweak the system to shut out smaller competition. While the insurance industry appears competitive it is largely illusionary in that, in regards to health insurance, individuals are forbidden to buy from out-of-state insurers, which dramatically limits the options given the consumer. Limiting options is what the insurance industry has demanded and what the politicians want. Sure, the industry will scream and holler during the forging of the regulatory chains but that is to help guarantee the chains will quite profitable for themselves while restricting the movement on smaller competitors. Regulation, in reality, leads to de facto cartelization, which is why I support depoliticized markets instead.

Foster said that around 7 million Medicare recipients who are in private "Medicare Advantage" programs, will have to find other coverage because the new policies will raise premiums and causes some insurers to drop coverage completely.

So Where is the New York Times?

This is a major story in regards to Obamacare, so precisely who is covering it? We had the Associated Press report, which means it went out on the wires to the major media outlets of the country, yesterday. A conservative columnist at the Washington Post blogged about it. The Tucson Citizen didn't actually report on it, but they did link to a blog talking about it on their own blog. The Boston Globe did run a truncated version of the AP story. However, the story was not run in the main news section, or even under the politics section. It was isolated in the "Home/Lifestyle/Health" section instead.

The so-called "newspaper of record," the New York Times doesn't appear to have anything about the story. An on-line search, at their own website, indicates that "Richard Foster" has not been mentioned by the paper in the last 30 days. The Associated Press story was yesterday so clearly they decided NOT to report to the public that two major talking points of Obamacare were wrong. The Los Angeles Times ran the AP story saying: "The landmark legislation probably won't hold costs down, and it won't let everybody keep their current health insurance if they like it." So did the San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald. But no matter what search terms I use, the New York Times site shows nothing about this important testimony.

Reality: It's a bitch.

Previously I mentioned that I was at the Atheist Alliance International meeting in Burbank recently. As expected a good number of people were dyed-in-the-wool Lefties of one statist variety or another. But a goodly number of people were libertarian—which is what I would expect.

In the course of the conference I meet and talked to dozens of people and have previously recounted some of the arguments I heard from the Left. But there was one argument I wanted to leave for a discussion by itself because it was so interesting. And, actually, it wasn’t really an argument, just a statement.

The discussion began with our Left-leaning friend saying that we need stringent government regulation of, well just about everything, in order to protect the Little Guy from rapacious Big Boys with lots of power. To do this we had to give the State lots and lots of power to counter-balance the Big Guys out to hurt the Little Guy. It’s a pretty standard argument from the Left.

My reply was what I would call Libertarianism 101. Simply put, I argued that history has shown that when the State is given such powers it is rarely used to protect Little Guy. Instead Mr. Politician conspires with Big Guy to use the new fangled powers in order to make life for Mr. Politician and Big Guy better at the expense of Little Guy.

As I’ve repeatedly said, the concentration of power does not help the powerless but those who already have power to grab the new power. Politicians need the support of powerful people, not little people. So they automatically turn to the Big Guys for financing. Senators don’t go out and have dinners at McDonald’s with the local gardener. They go to expensive restaurants with corporate executives and work out the “new” legislation that will protect the Little Guy. Since Big Guy and Mr. Politicians need each other, and the Little Guy only has to be fooled at the ballot box—which is a relatively easy thing to do—the end result is not favorable to Little Guy.

At this point my nemesis presented a very sad reply. And I don’t mean sad as in pathetic, I mean sad as in depressed or despondent. He actually looked sad as well. His voice got soft, as if he didn’t really want to say what he was about to say. He sort of shook his head slightly and lamented: “Yes, but it shouldn’t be that way.” And that was the end of his discussion. He bid me farewell and moved on. “Yes, but it shouldn’t be that way.”

What surprised was the lack of willingness to defend his fundamental argument that centralized power could be beneficial to the poor and the powerless. Instead, he just lamented that life is not the way he would like it to be and said, “It shouldn’t be that way.” He was acknowledging that it is that way; just saying it ought not be so. Which is like wishing to fly, despising gravity, and then stupidly flapping your arms in the hopes of getting airborne. He did not seem willing to abandon his premise that state power can be used in the way he thought would be good. He just lamented that reality is not the way it ought to be. If wishing were sufficient we’d all live in Candyland, walking streets of gold and be young, good looking, wealthy and smart. But reality loves to interfere with our wishes. Wishing isn’t enough.

Creating new powers and controls merely creates new ways in which the powerful can oppress the powerless. These new powers simply won’t be in the hands of the poor or the powerless. It doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t matter what I want, what you want, or what any of us want. Reality is what it is. Today’s New York Times illustrates this point perfectly with two stories.

The first article mentions the astronomical levels of debt that Obama has imposed on future generations of Americans. The new debt for the year is $1.4 trillion. That is equal to 10% of the entire economy. The Times says the debt is currently $12 trillion and that the Feds estimate it will rise by $9 trillion over the next decade. Anyone want to bet it will rise much, much faster than that? In essence, Obama is bankrupting America, just like Bush was doing, only more so.

The second story looks at one major cause of the new debt—the bailout packages. Politicians said they had to have billions in bailouts for Bankers to help the Little Guy --- it’s always to help the Little Guy, of course. But justification for policies and the results of policies rarely coincide. The Times notes that while people are struggling to pay debts and keep their homes “much of Wall Street is minting money—and looking forward again to hefty bonuses.”

The Times explains why: “It may come as a surprise that one of the most powerful forces driving the resurgence on Wall Street is not the banks but Washington.” Ah, excuse me, but YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION. This is NOT a surprise but precisely what I expected. This is the rule of power: expanding power always benefits those who have power already, not those who don’t. Maybe this is a surprise to the staff of the New York Times, as they seem relatively naïve on the role of incentives in politics and markets. But this sort of “surprise” is precisely what advocates of depoliticized, free markets predict will result from such policies. The Times says that the measures taken by the politicians “helped set the stage for this new era of Wall Street wealth.”

And the concentrated forms of wealth on Wall Street are only becoming more concentrated.

A year after the crisis struck, many of the industry’s behemoths — those institutions deemed too big to fail — are, in fact, getting bigger, not smaller. For many of them, it is business as usual. Over the last decade the financial sector was the fastest-growing part of the economy, with two-thirds of growth in gross domestic product attributable to incomes of workers in finance.
Now, the industry has new tools at its disposal, courtesy of the government.

I am sorry the New York Times is surprised that the policies they helped promote had results contrary to what they wanted. Ignore reality at your own peril. The Left does that in economics all the time. I guess the Times would say: “Yes, but it shouldn't be that way.” Yep, reality is a bitch, so maybe you ought to start paying attention to it.

Planning the world to death. Hubris and the New York Times

The New York Times has an interesting editorial regarding the food crisis in the world. And they have come to some important and rare conclusions. I say the conclusions are rare because they are correct. And, unfortunately, when it comes to economic issues, the Times rarely gets it right. Of course, old habits die hard so they do manage to get parts of the editorial wrong.

The very correct point they make is that the food crisis “could push tens of millions of people into abject poverty and starvation” and that it is largely “man-made --- the result of misguided energy and farm policies.”

Let us be a bit more precise. To call the crisis man-made spreads the blame to all of humanity, much the way the “man-made global warming” scare attempts to pin the blame on humanity in general. That sort of interpretation would be incorrect here. This crisis is politically-made. The culprits were elected officials like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Dianne Feinstein. The politicians of the European Union were involved as well.

Politicians intentionally foisted policies that provided them with political benefits but which would clearly result in world hunger. None of this was unpredictable. It was simple economics. This blog has been screaming about these policies long before the Times and the politicians realized there was a problem. And I did so, not because I have some sort of psychic abilities, but because the ramifications of the disastrous policies that the political class was pushing, including the New York Times, were obvious.

Just a little bit of Economics 101 is enough to predict that government policies like biofuels subsidies would push food prices higher globally. The problem is that the Times and the politicians both seemed to believe that if the bureaucrats had “good intentions” they could “rationally plan” the market in ways that abolish basic laws of supply and demand.

In any other field they would be laughed out of office for doing that. Imagine them thinking that rational, central planning could reduce the effects of gravity. But economics, more than the hard sciences, has the ability to attract charlatans who believe in the economic equivalent of alchemy.

We saw a concerted effort a few years ago to push for biofuels. That policy taxed consumers to redistribute wealth to farmers and big energy companies. The energy companies got the millions to produce biofuels which were worse for the environment, more costly to produce and which needed food, like corn, in the production process.

The European Union, the British government, the US federal government and many of the state governments, set up subsidies and mandatory requirements that companies produce these biofuels. In a short period of time those companies were getting rich producing a product that consumers didn’t want and which had to be subsidized to be competitive. They also purchased tons and tons of food. The more food they purchased the less food on the market and the higher the prices went.

The fat cats with political pull were living easy off these politically-created, artificial profits. The environmentalists were thrilled that a “clean” energy source was being used and many lobbied for greater subsidies. Big energy was thrilled as they were making record profits from the subsidies. The politicians could buy votes in the farm regions, while claiming to be concerned about global warming everywhere else. All in all that would increase their votes. They also got nice contributions from the big energy companies who were rolling in subsidized profits: just ask Obama and Hillary how much they got.

The Times, and many of their reporters and editorialists, has always had a disdain for free markets. They have preached the gospel of economic interventionism for as long as I’ve been alive -- and longer. They have believed that politicians, and the political process,, should take control of the vagaries of the market and manipulate things through various policies, in order to get politically-acceptable results. Market economists have long noted that such policies and plans always come with unintended consequences. What is particular shocking is that these consequences are not necessarily hard to predict.

But there is a hubris on the Left, or perhaps I should say among politicians in general, that they can somehow, through the sheer force of their own “innate goodness”, will, and government force, manipulate markets so that the results are politically desirable without bad consequences. Over and over they try to accomplish that, and over and over they create disasters. Their current disaster is resulting in millions of people starving to death because politically-planned markets don’t work.

Make no mistake about it, the current food crisis is almost entirely the result of political planning. The Left-of-center British newspaper, the Guardian, recently wrote that: “Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% -- far more than previously estimated -- according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian."

They say the report is “based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far.” They also note that this contradicts the claims made by politically bodies. For instance, the US government pretends that their policies are only responsible for “less than 3%” of the rise in food prices. But a report for the British government apparently backs up the World Bank study and says that biofuels played a “significant” role in the food crisis. This report challenges a central plank of the Labour Party’s environmental agenda. So there is no surprise that the release of the report to the public has been delayed by the government.

One idea of how major an influence these political-boondoggels are in regards to the world food market is that “over a third of US corn is used to produce ethanol, while about half of EU vegetable oils go towards the production of biodiesel.” The UN World Food Program has been arguing that these policies were pushing 100 million people into starvation.

What is particularly sickening is that the very politicians who tend to portray themselves as advocates for the poor, are the leaders in the campaign for the policies that are killing millions of poor people. Can anyone say Hillary and Obama?

The root cause for this is hubris, their belief that they have the ability to second guess markets and plan massive economies. That is what the socialists have been advocating for centuries. It is no accident that the first nations to adopt these short-sighted energy and agricultural policies were the Left-wing welfare states. In the US the Democrats have been the major proponents. In the UK it was the Labour Party. In nation after nation the Left-of-center parties have been pushing central planning in the name of protecting the environment.

We saw centrally-planned economic policies regularly produce famine. Political planning under the Soviets killed millions of Russians, Ukranians and others, as food production was destroyed. The socialist planning ideals of Mao led to massive famines in China in the late 50s and early 60s. State regulation in India was responsible for widespread hunger. Yet, when China allowed markets to work, the hunger ended even as the population grew. When socialist Vietnam stopped centrally planning agriculture, food production turned around and the nation became a food exporter. When India undid their socialist controls, and allowed markets to operate, they too became a net exporter of food.

Now, mainly in the name of the environment, governments around the world are once again centrally planning markets. Politicians are using carrots and sticks, penalties and subsidies, to force markets to fit their agenda. The result is 100 million starving people. Politicians kill. They don’t mean to kill but they do it anyway. Their inherent need to tinker with, and regulate people, means that they must destroy the private plans of the people and impose their own plans instead.

One of the great myths about central planning is that politicians impose planning where only chaos existed. On the contrary, government planning destroys the plans of millions of people. And those millions of people are planning with information they have which no government has, or can have. They are using the local knowledge of their own situation and conditions to plan for their future. The politicians come in, and smash those rational, individual plans. In their place the politicians impose a political plan, based more on wishes and whims than on reality and facts. The only possible, long-term result of such economic planning is disaster.

As long as people believe that politicians can solve problems, these sorts of disastrous results will keep accumulating. The problem is that, even while these results are staring them in the face, advocates of central planning are ideologically blind. They offer more of the same rot that caused the problem, as the solution. So the Times, while it acknowledges that political planning caused the problem, demands that governments “vastly increase aid to the poorest countries.”

Where does that aid go? It goes to the governments of those countries in order to allow even dumber, more corrupt politicians, to dominate more of the local economy. Anyone who has lived in Africa knows that agriculture is dominated by the State. Many African nations have food marketing boards. Farmers are required to sell to these boards at below market rates. These government boards then sells the food at world prices keeping the profits for the state and passing it around to the political elite. The net result is that many food producers don’t wish to produce for the market, but only for their own personal consumption. Peasant farmers who attempt to sell their products in the open market can face jail.

Robert Mugabe intentionally destroyed the agricultural sector of his own economy and was applauded by the other African governments while doing so. He did much of it with the vast amount of foreign aid he was receiving at the time.

The Times get much of the editorial right. They want the end of agricultural subsidies in the United States, the end of biofuel subsidies and the end of tariffs. They have recognized that central planning didn’t work in the rich nations of the world but created world-wide disaster.

But they seem to believe that central planning in the Third World will solve problems there. Foreign aid creates central planning where it might not have existed otherwise. Aid funds are giving to central governments which then use the money the way governments everywhere use money. On one hand it is used to punish activity the government wants to stop and on the other hand it is used to provide subsidies to projects the government wants to encourage. Somebody has to decide which projects fit which category. Government-to-government aid forces the very kind of central planning on Third World nations which the Times is now condemning in the West.

But the Times dare not see the principles involved. To acknowledge that political planning doesn’t work would destroy the very foundation of their entire political belief system. So they entertain the fantasy that old failed planning policies can be replaced with new planning schemes. They will continue to endorse politicians and policies which thrust government bureaucracy into the market and they will continue to propose the abolition of local, individual planning with central, political planning. The Times, and Left-thinking politicians, will continue to pretend that such proposals mean that they are “compassionate and caring” while the advocates of markets are proposing “a dog-eat-dog kind of world.” And more disasters will follow.

Postscript: As a perfect example of the problems I mention in this piece consider this news from the BBC. Argentina's lower house of Congress has "approved a controversial package of taxes on agricultural exports. ...Argentina is one of the world's top producers of soya, grains and beef and the government wants a bigger share of the profits, it says to fight poverty."

Media bias and the intellectual gate keepers.

I know that conservatives and some libertarians are obsessed with bias at the New York Times. The problem is that they are wrong and right at the same time. There is bias at the Times -- atrocious bias at times. But not in the ways that they think.

I have seen individuals point to bias by pointing to editorials. Except an editorial is an expression of opinion. It is not a news article at all. They conclude that because an editorial is expressing an opinion that news stories can’t be trusted. Newspaper stories do endeavor to be accurate but there is reason to be skeptical.

But the skepticism is not due to bias on the part of the journalists (though that can happen and good newspaper try to weed out those writers). The reason to be skeptical is merely the time frame which newspapers work with. Initial reports of any news events are the most unreliable. The more immediate the report the more likely that inadvertent falsehoods get inserted. Truth takes time and news is often time adverse. When the planes hit on 9/11 people wanted to know instantly what was going on.

The net result of immediate news is a fueling of conspiracist craziness. The conspiracist leaps upon any inconsistency as proof that someone is trying to hide something or intentionally distort the facts. Rumors that get reported in the early reports take precedence over information that was verified over time provided the initial reports back up the theory in question.

Rarely is it the news stories that exhibit the most bias. Bias there exists but is more subtle. There the bias is more likely to be exhibited by who gets quoted. The typical journalist, and having majored in this field in university I can verify it, is left of center. So they often assume that any “expert” saying something they agree with is clearly clued up on the topic and anyone disagreeing is obviously fringe. And that assumption gets through in many stories.

The facts mentioned are usually correct, though there have been notorious counter-examples, as we shall see. What the facts mean is where they almost always go wrong.

Where the real bias comes in is through their editorials and various “opinion” pieces. Again the people the journos find “respectable” are the people who get to write. And “respectable” means that the author agrees with the journos. Typically that means the editorial writers of the paper are pretty much left of center. To balance things out they periodically will take guest opinion pieces from other writers who don’t share their biases. Rarely, however do they get a fair shake. Some papers are extraordinarily fair in such matters and others notoriously unfair.

The worst section is the arts section and it is here that books are reviewed. Often books that disagree with the left bias (it isn’t a liberal bias) are simply ignored. Numerous, scholarly books that showed the greater complexities of the origins of World War II, for instance, were notoriously ignored by the major media. Historian Harry Elmer Barnes referred to that as the “blackout”. To a large degree that blackout lasted from 1940 until A.J.P. Taylor’s more popular treatise, The Origins of the Second World War was published in 1960.

When they do stoop to cover a book outside the “mainstream” they almost invariably give the review of the book to someone who is extremely biased against the book and spends the bulk of the review trashing it. For instance I have a clipping in my files of a review (which I think was in the New York Times) of Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. It was turned over to a sneering and snide John Kenneth Galbraith for comments. Of course no scholar of the stature of Mises, Hayek or Friedman was asked to review the latest Left-wing treatise on economics.

This process, whether intended or not, serves to create intellectual gatekeepers who prevent or hinder ideas contrary to their own from seeping into the market of ideas. Book buyers for book outlets often take their cues from such reviews. So do academics, libraries and others. To be ignored by the major papers, or smothered by derision, is one way that the Left prevents ideas contrary to their own from seeping out. (I should note that this is preferable to that of the Right which has a tendency to call for banning anything they don’t like. And I should note that with new technologies the ability to control the gates is diminishing.)

What brought all this to mind was a review that the New York Times ran of the new book Radicals for Capitalism. I read the review at the time and thought it relatively poor and clearly written by someone uniformed about the facts. I didn’t blog about it at the time because I’ve yet to read the book. But I was troubled by the review. Troubled because it seemed inaccurate to me but without reading the book in question I wasn’t going to try to pick about the review. Thankfully David Boaz at Cato has read the book and the review and he has shown how bad the review actually is. In actuality I suspect he might be too kind.

The reviewer said: “Libertarianism has its roots in the writings of a pair of major 20th-century Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek.” Well, that is simply wrong. Libertarianism predates Mises and Hayek. Sure they were major influences on the libertarian movement of the last century but there were influential libertarians who were writing long before Mises or Hayek made a name for themselves in the US: Mencken, Nock and Spooner are three examples. I can’t believe that the book, written by Brian Doherty, at Reason, had made this mistake. I suspect he hasn’t.

And I also suspect the reviewer, David Leonhardt, only read bits and pieces of the book as interested him and this distorted his review. He certainly complained about the length of the book in a couple of snide remarks he made.

And he catalogues, from the book, “the movement’s failings”. Now I don’t know the context of the book but I do know the context of the failings that Leonhardt mentioned and he has distorted them grossly. He sneeringly refers to “people who claim to love freedom” but “have so often had a soft spot for those who would deny it to others”. But the cases Leonhardt catalogues are, for the most part, false.

He mentions Rand’s testimony before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Of course he doesn’t say what it was she talked about. Rand never went to HUAC to talk about individuals and whether they were communists. She was not there naming names. Her comments never came close to that. She wanted to talk about ideas and tried to but the HUAC members wanted to concentrate on what life was like in Russian—which she experienced first hand—versus how it was depicted in a second rate film Song of Russia. How that is having a “soft spot” for those who would deny freedom is never explained by Leonhardt. In fact Rand wrote an essay which dealt quite clearly with her views on the matter and she said the only proper way to fight bad ideas is which good ideas not with censorship and state interference. Leonhardt distorts the history of Milton Friedman claiming he “advised” Pinochet. Friedman met Pinochet once and told him the same things he told the leaders of Communist China or the President of the United States. But the Left loves to concoct a Friedman connection to Pinochet that really doesn’t exist.

The one that I found bizarre when I read it was that “Merwin Hart ‘infected his free market thought with anti-Semitism.” This site is vehemently opposed to anti-Semitism and bigotry of a similar kind. But my first thought was that I never understood Hart to be a libertarian. And I couldn’t figure out why Leonhardt was using this as an example. But I didn’t have time to go into the matter so I didn’t write on it. I had heard of Hart and knew he was an anti-Semite I just didn’t remember anyone saying he was a libertarian before. David Boaz wrote about it:

Despite 30 years in the libertarian movement, and despite having read this book, I had never heard of Merwin Hart. But I found him in the index (not always an easy thing; the best criticism of this book, which Leonhardt missed, is that the index is seriously inadequate; the Rand paragraphs on HUAC, for instance, are on page 188, not 150 as the index indicates). Turns out he ran something called the National Economic Council in the 1950s. And why is he in this book? Because he’s a major libertarian figure? Because he’s a minor libertarian figure? No. He gets one line in this book because movement founding father Leonard Read told people to stay away from Hart because, yes, he “infected his free-market thought with anti-Semitism” — in other words, he wasn’t one of us.

Of course any movement has its fringes but do you judge the movement by the fringes or by the mainstream thought within it? Libertarians have fringes that worry me greatly, individuals who are far too comfortable with racism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy and such. Most libertarians aren’t like that. If anything libertarians are too tolerant—that is how such bigots get in to movements in the first place.

But if you look at the major institutions of libertarianism like Cato, FEE, Reason, Heartland, the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute and so forth, you don’t find them cavorting with bigots.

What Leonhardt did is typical of how the gatekeepers work. He distorts the history that the book is talking about. In the process he ridicules libertarian ideas and he gives people a false impression about the nature of libertarians. He implies the book is too long while complaining about what was left out at the same time. The review would discourage libraries from ordering it, bookstores from buying it, readers from purchasing it, and sends the message to the intellectuals that the libertarian message is itself vastly deficient.

I have no doubt there are deficiencies in libertarianism. Just as there are in conservatism, socialism and every other human ideology. That is the problem of not being omniscient, there are flaws. But when stacked up against the other ideologies it actually does quite well for itself. And even if a few authoritarian types smuggled themselves into the movement it isn’t as if libertarians need to apologize half as much as the political Left has to for the tyrannies of Pol Pot, Mao, Castro, Stalin, Mugabe, et al. Nor do libertarians need to apologize to the world the way conservatives do over the coronation of King George.

Sure Rand had her personality quirks and could be a real bitch sometimes. Rothbard did do some strange and odd things but justifying genocide wasn’t one of them—something the Left did repeatedly. And as Boaz points out the New York Times doesn’t have a spotless record on that count. As he notes the notorious Times writer Walter Duranty used the paper to falsify, knowingly, the tyranny in Stalinist Russia. Compared to that the worst temper tantrum of Ayn Rand is nothing.

Murray Rothbard might have voted for Strom Thurmond when he was 22. (He did far odder things than that throughout his life.) But how does that compare to a reporter from the New York Times, Herbert Matthews, who wrote stunningly pro-Castro diatribes for the paper, distorting the facts and helping to create a dictatorship? Matthews bragged: “Many people thought that Fidel would listen to me, and only to me.” Friedman merely told Pinochet the same thing he told anyone who would listen. Matthews was friends and and an adviser to Castro. Friedman met Pinochet once for less than an hour. Friedman never wrote anything extolling the virtues of Pinochet but Matthews did write a book praising Castro even after his authoritarianism was no longer closeted.