Message from discussion To David Friedman: Antitrust

From: gsoll...@virginia.edu
Subject: Re: To David Friedman: Antitrust
Date: 1998/05/13
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In article <199805130741.AAA20...@cybere.creative.net>,
  "Vincent Cook" <Use-Author-Address-Header@[127.1]> wrote:
>
> Gordon Sollars wrote:
>
> >I enjoy reading Rothbard in high dudgeon as much as the next libertarian,
> >but I would suggest that it is a mistake to confuse this aspect of his
> >writing with good scholarship.
>
> This is more polite than Friedman characterizing Rothbard's work as a
> hatchet job, but it suffers from the same problem - unsupported attacks
> against Rothbard do not add up to a refutation of his analysis.
>
I was taking the fact that you used the passage from Smith quoted by Rothbard
as showing that it was Rothbard's (or your) best evidence that Smith
advocated public education over private.  But the passage said nothing about
public education.  Thus my attack on Rothbard with regard to this particular
was not "unsupported", although Rothbard (or you) may have some other, better
argument than the one you gave.

In the meantime, David Friedman has provided evidence that Rothbard's
analysis is flawed in other particulars as well.  Does this add up to
Rothbard's treatment of Smith being a "hatchet job"?  Perhaps there is room
for reasonable disagreement, but I think the answer is "yes".

> I think it is easier to work out the logical implications of a theory
> and to investigate how committed a theorist was in acting
> on their ideas than it is to invent facts that are contrary to
> history and use that as the basis for judging people.
>
And I was sugggesting that imagining the theorist against a different
background of politics and culture might be a good way to carry out such an
investigation.

> >Is there more than one economist who hangs out here?  :-)  Perhaps you mean
> >"students of Economics".  ;-)
>
> Well, I'm not that fussy about academic titles and positions, so I
> sometimes treat people as experts in a field even when they don't
> have a state-approved degree declaring them as such.

I wasn't thinking of "state-approved" degrees; I was making a (weak, I
gather) joke with reference to Rand's statement that her followers should
refer to themselves as "students of Objectivism" rather than as
"Objectivists".

Gordon Sollars
gsoll...@virginia.edu

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