http://mises.org/daily/110

This article got linked by Balloon Juice and mises.org lets users tag content, so lulz resulted.
I think my favorite is "Libertarianism discredits itself again based on its obvious inhumanity," though "initially thought was satire" is pretty good too.

Also, fun fact, Michael Levin is yet another Mises.org SUPER GENIUS who is unfairly smeared as being a "racist" by the liberal PC thought police just because he believes black people are genetically inferior to whites.

fly,

Where'd you get that he thinks blacks are genetically inferior to whites?

He wrote a book entitled "Why Race Matters."
Here's a (glowing, natch) Mises review:
http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=117Fun fact about him number #2:
He's Jewish and was selling his book through various white supremacist publications(his core market) and was a regular speaker at American Renaissance's conventions, until he figured out that the white supremacists weren't very fond of his people, either. LOL.

This is not a defense of Levin (I'm not familiar with his work at all), but:

1. Libertarians don't typically go on about the "liberal PC thought police", the conservatives do that.

2. This Levin character is hardly a revered "Mises.org SUPER GENIUS", he has exactly one article on the website (the one you linked to), and it's over a decade old.

1. It's a reference to the various ways "libertarian" posters in this forum bend over backwards to explain away the racism of Rothbard, Rockwell, etc. to defend their favorite Alabama-based blog/think tank. Generally speaking, the go to defense is "that's not racist, what's wrong with saying that people should be afraid of getting carjacked?" and variants.

2. Glowing review on his book linked, he's clearly welcome at Mises.org functions.

fly,

Well looks like from that book review that Levin wrote some incorrect stuff that he is either incorrect about or just another racist trying to hide behind faulty science. I'd be interested to see if he has anything to say on that subject today.

Does this guy tour often with Mises? Looks like he's only got one article on the site as mosdef pointed out.

But we should just quit here. I don't really wanna try and defend mises authors when they are incorrect about race. Because it's silly debate about something that only exists because we really try hard to make it exist.

lol at the "Arbeit Macht Frei" tag at the bottom of the review. Nice.

Fly,

So your claim is that believing that there are genetic factors that influence market productivity automatically makes one a racist?

strawman.jpg

Even though it causes me physical pain to agree with Fly.

Full disclosure: I still hate mises.org and lewrockwell.com. Would love to never see another link to writings on those sites as an introduction to libertarianism.

What do you hate about it?

Aside from formatting and layout issues (less bad on mises.org), I think a large percentage of the writing is polemical. It takes for granted that its readership agrees with the fundamental premises that underlie its political philosophy, rather than carefully explaining them (caveat here for Mises hosting Human Action, which I appreciate) from the ground up. I think the libertarian political movement is at place where acceptance of the most basic ideas is a long way off (cf. "what about the roads?"), and writing pieces for an audience mostly of people like you and Borodog (who probably have enough intellectual investment in understanding the position anyway that you would seek out literature) is largely unproductive in terms of shifting the social understanding of libertarianism (we're not rabid right-wingers who want to sell your baby to Coca-Cola), and gaining traction toward bringing about a truly voluntary society. Yelling at people about how they're evil for supporting the Fed or whatever is not going to help, and that's how a lot of it comes off to me.

Only if you consider the obese to be a "race".

How is asking a question for clarification a strawman? I'm trying to figure out what he's saying, because it sounds like he thinks I'm a racist. And perhaps by whatever his definition is, I am.

Mises.org does explain libertarianism from the ground up. You want this done in every Daily Article they post or something? Otherwise, what exactly are you saying? LRC is the most read libertarian web site in the world. It is written by libertarians for libertarians. So yeah, writers on LRC typically forego a lot of philosophical hand holding.