Saturday, September 17, 2016

George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, who doesn't vote and won't vote, epitomizes everything loathsome about libertarians

It's hard to choose just one thing he says here which is objectionable, since it's all objectionable, but I'll pick this one:

"When I look at voters, I see human beings at their hysterical, innumerate worst. ... [C]onsorting with bad people hurts you deep inside. Politics isn't utterly hopeless, but it's mostly hopeless. The only way I know to escape this darkness is to focus on the tiny corner of the world in my control and make it beautiful and pure. Call me anti-social if you must. Unlike your candidates, at least I'm honest."

Professor Caplan does not know himself, which these days seems to be a requirement of elites and a major cause of modernity's manifold discontents. Clearly he thinks himself above us as if he were a god when he is actually nothing but a wild dog. I pity his students, and his children.

[M]an is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the “clanless, lawless, hearthless" man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also ‘a lover of war') inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts. ... [A] man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god. ... For as man is the best of the animals when perfected, so he is the worst of all when sundered from law and justice. For unrighteousness is most pernicious when possessed of weapons, and man is born possessing weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue, which it is possible to employ entirely for the opposite ends. Hence when devoid of virtue man is the most unholy and savage of animals, and the worst in regard to sexual indulgence and gluttony.

-- Aristotle, Politics 1.1253a