I was replying more to gracchus. And in either case, I know what is being attacked is not a straw man. It really is out there. (And I hate it, too.) I just think it needs another name.

Um, I pay into the system when I enjoy the upside, and get to benefit from the retraining if my job gets shipped to India? What’s so hard about that? It works a whole lot better than me trying to save enough to live off for a year and hoping I succeed at that before my job gets shipped to India (and that, if my job does get shipped to India, my savings are enough to cover me and my husband’s insurance and medical bills until I get a new job).

But I think genuine libertarianism needs to be distinguished from what Kevin Carson calls “vulgar” libertarianism, which is often just a knee-jerk defense of the economic status quo under the guise of the free market. Kevin has written some very thought-provoking stuff about this as his mutualist.blogspot.com (also linked on the left).

And when you give government the power to intervene, the only thing you know is that it has a new power at its disposal. You don’t know what it really intends to do with it. Large corporations will tend to figure out ways to make the case that their competition is harmful to the public. Battering each other through the state will become the new form of competition. (Except that they already do this.)

This is Brian Caplan.

So is this.

You are certainly right to recall his name when reading this post of Lee’s on What to Expect When You’re Free Trading, by Steven Landsburg, self-described “hardcore libertarian.”

Caplan is one of those economists who make Milton Friedman seem like a liberal softy.

Many decades have passed since the urbane Canadian, J. K. Galbraith, was America’s leading public economist.

Those were, of course, decades of the rise of conservatism, the core of which was, in fact, the growing respectability and influence of the bare-knuckle capitalist ideology produced by a growing tribe of professional economists, backed by an increasingly influential group of libertarian philosophers like John Hospers, Robert Nozick, Jan Narveson, and Tibor Machan.

But there have been and are professional economists of another bent, who, understanding perfectly well that capitalism, left unregulated and as free as the owning classes could desire, will ruin and enslave everyone but them, were and are willing to denounce it and support extensive government interference with those forms of liberty so much insisted on by libertarian ideologues, backed by public philosophers committed to progressive views like John Dewey, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Tom Nagel.

So it isn’t really true that all professional practitioners of the dismal science are demented right-wing boobies or suborned propagandists.

It just often looks that way.

Of course, “compensation packages” (as they say) fall faster than prices, in net, in the economy as a whole.

And profits rise accordingly for those doing the oversears producing for sale in America.

And so we get two ro three decades of stagnant to falling wages, loss of benefits, and dropping working class well-being accompanied by skyrocketing profits and much better pay for the guys at the top.

Trickle-up economics.

So, is this guy a mouthpiece for some conservative think tank? Or just looking for a job at one?