The "Gully Foyle Bashes Libertarianism" extravaganza.

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Things I have learned from this article:

1) Education is bad. Indeed, Mass Education is very bad because it is "inefficient" and should not be given to "workers". Indeed it would be better off if Sweden and Denmark had stupider/less educated people working the trains like the United States (and it would save more in taxes too!). The only reason people get educated is to work and get a high paid, non-menial job; workers like the train tickets seller (of course Brian wasn't polite enough to ask for his views) shouldn't actually be educated at all as that would violate THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE OMGZ!!11. . . .

2) The purpose of life is apparently work and to make money (why else should people with skills not take up unskilled or semi-skilled jobs?) and indeed the use of one skills should be headed towards that job. Not notion of even social worth or utility here. Yay! For Monotous Materialism.

Show me where Caplan makes any of those claims. I read and re-read his blog post, and couldn't find those startling views anywhere.

[A18]

Caplan does indeed suggest that people of less competence—those on welfare—should be doing the unskilled labor. That I don't deny. He also assumes that skilled workers would prefer to do more challenging work—a claim that may or may not be correct.

Re-read your post; you made far more sweeping accusations.

The word "menial" is completely absent from his post, and the word "useless" is used only in an unrelated context.

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His blog entry does indeed use the word "menial"; don't know how I missed that. It doesn't, in any case, affect the substance of my post.

This guy is basically suggesting that education is "welfare", that welfare is inherently bad, and that people should be less educated in order to perform unskilled labor.

Re-read Caplan's words; that's not what he states at all. Indeed, nowhere does he say that even a single person is "too educated" per se. Rather, he suggests that some people are "too educated" to be performing unskilled labor.

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My point is a modest one: Caplan's blog entry does not make the cartoonish argument Gully has attributed to him. I don't know, and don't claim to know, what the problem in Sweden is—if indeed there is a problem.

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Caplan's claim was that the lack of unskilled workers is a consequence of the unskilled population's being on welfare.

The thread is indeed about the economist and his ideas—or more precisely, about using the economist and his ideas as a springboard for (illogically) trashing an entire political movement that he's affiliated with. As it turns out, some of the ideas being attributed to Caplan are based on a strained and implausible reading of the blog entry at issue. That's all I'm saying, and I don't see how it can plausibly be characterized as "off topic."

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The language you quote was in response to Snowguy. My response to you is two posts up.

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Well, if the unskilled population is kept on welfare—which is Caplan's theory—then that will naturally tend to drive up the working population's average skill level.

Not sure why you insist on putting scare quotes around the term "libertarian."

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Anyway it has occured me that Libertarianism is the bizarre ideology, completely contrary to even basic intutions or life experience, that if everything did everything that they wanted

Libertarianism is the doctrine that Lockean property rights are absolute or near-absolute, and that the repeated and systematic invasion of them is properly criminal.

"Austrian Economics is a giant joke whose entire purpose is to reassure its thinkers that the profit motive is in fact a moral cause." If emphasis were enough to prove a point, you would be safe in resting your case. But your reasoning is sloppy; it consists of listing a few positions of some Austrian economists (your link doesn't work, BTW), assuming that they're wrong, and then using amateur psychology to discern their "real" motive for believing what is (supposedly) patently false.

I don't have any problem with critiques of Austrian economics or its leading thinkers, but your criticism is just silly.

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Lockean property would here mean "those things regarded as property in Lockean philosophy" (which is not to say that Locke was a libertarian).

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His work is nuanced enough that a complete description would be impractical, but here is a very rough outline:

1. The world has been given to mankind in common.

2. If universal consent were necessary, "man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him" (§ 28).

3. As this would be absurd, there must be some way that a single individual can take something out of the common lot and make it his own—that is, his property. Locke reasons that because a man owns his labor, by mixing his labor with some unclaimed portion of nature, he acquires legitimate title to it.

4. A person is not entitled, under first principles, to take more than he can make use of before it spoils (a vague but not meaningless criterion). The introduction of money changes the picture: "But since gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men, whereof labour yet makes, in great part, the measure, it is plain, that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out, a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one; these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor" (§ 50).

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I am aware of Locke's broad definition of property (and have occasionally alluded to it on this forum), but in the context of Gully's question it seemed proper to focus on material objects.

I don't claim that Locke believed property rights were absolute or near absolute. As you suggest, Locke clearly believed that they were qualified by a social contract. By "Lockean property rights," I had in mind bodily integrity and homesteading-based claims to physical objects. I was not referring to a "Lockean" legal framework, taken as a whole.

I disagree with your claim that Locke saw property rights as being held by virtue of the social contract. He saw them as being qualified by the social contract, to be sure; and he certainly saw civil society as being essential to their protection. Nonetheless, he makes it clear that they exist even in the state of nature: "If man in the state of nature be so free, as has been said; if he be absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body, why will he part with his freedom? why will he give up this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and controul of any other power? To which it is obvious to answer, that though in the state of nature he hath such a right, yet the enjoyment of it is very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasion of others" (§ 123).