There's no reason to give people a pass for hiding core beliefs behind "market principals." I'd say you're on target for the Austrian school. There are some who label themselves as Libertarians who are simply not aware of the implications, however. It's their job to get educated.

Here's a nice critique of the Austrian school.

...for 30 years taught me one thing regarding racism; when people feel safe around their peers and don't have to worry about being PC; racism rears it's ugly head. All of the rah rah crap about how far we've come is just so much bullshit! I'll even allow there has been some progress; but it's more like continental drift; can you measure that?

because I am not a gold bug. There's not enough gold to go around and the supply isn't flexible enough to allow growth.

But I do have a quibble with the tie you make between small government libertarianism and racism. While I'd agree that the idea is keeping federal government out of local affairs, and that the scenario you describe could in some cases be one of those affairs, it's wrong to assume that all small communities favoring local control are racist or their ideas racially motivated.

I honestly think racism has become a larger problem in some Northern states than it is in the South. I witnessed this originally when a group of state inmates from Pennsyvania were shipped to a federal facility in Texas where I was being housed.

I myself am tired of seeing federal tax dollars used to give unfair trade advantages to large banks and corporations. I am tired of the waste and inefficiency of large government and the inflexibility of one size fits all programs. Those and many other notions cause me to favor small localized government, not racist ideology.

I did inhale.

I think the connection Stirling makes is both right and wrong. That connection is clearly there in the majority of cases, but it does not have to be there. This is similar to how so many will defend our current Capitalist structure as the totality of Capitalism and then erect a false argument that questioning what we practice today is the same as questioning Capitalism wholly.

It just so happens to be that the a great many (if not the majority) of "small government libertarians" are racist and fail to see that many of their proposed structures cannot exist without a huge pile of humanity on which to feed...this pile should naturally be brown, because that's the way God intended.

I'd call myself a reciprocal-libertarian (i've chosen "reciprocal" over "socialist" - small "s" because "socialism" is a dirty word that most cannot define or discuss differences within - who believes in devolving as much power to local levels as possible because it is there that the population can have the most control over politics. I do not wish to see the dissolution of federal governing, only making it as efficient and elegant as possible...neither state being attainable within a looming bureaucracy insulated from, and often overbearing on, the population it should be serving.

(Note: i fully realize how dangerous it is to give the population more control, because the population tends to be crazy and/or stupid. But i note that people act with much more reason within the confines of issues that they can understand at a personal level. Eg, i know many died-in-the-wool conservatives who are all for "free markets" in the general but oppose the opening of a nickel and uranium sulfide mining operation nearby. It's not so much NIMBY as it is a realization of the costs associated with ideology when it becomes a local reality.)

[duplicate deleted]

I think racism is an over used word; Jimmy Carter, for example, tried to claim that Obama's popularity plummeted because folks were racist; folks like myself, however, became appalled by that insinuation since that was like calling Iraqis militants for trying to protect their own interests.

The latest polls imply that Ron Paul is as popular as Obama and, without a doubt, Ron Paul is Obama's "yes we can" shadow since he embraces austrian economics.

Perhaps-- if people had virtue, I'd choose sides but, to the contrary, people seem to hold onto their petty self interests and Obama is no different.

As far as I can tell, all politicians are egotistical neoconservatives who think "I'm the change they're looking for."

At the end of the day, human nature is in control and history repeats itself.

So Obama's supporters will start stuffing money into their own bank accounts and, like the children of the 60's, they'll fall in love with austrian economics since it revolves around their evolved identity that picked up a darker ego.

Moreover, I wouldn't call that racism; it's about over appraising your contribution to society.

The most racist place I've lived on this Planet was Dallas, TX.

I've lived in the British Colonies, Britain itself, South Africa under Apartheid, Rhodesia before Zimbabwe, Belgium and now the US, so I've have some contenders for the top spot in my experience.

Dallas was just special. It has the Park cities, Designed as white enclaves just north of downtown. It has a flood barrier along the Trinity River which protects downtown and the white enclaves, and ends just before the black neighborhoods south east of downtown, that flooded each year when I lived in Dallas.

The white enclaves had good roads, and were well maintained, the black neighborhoods, poor roads, badly maintained, and to my huge surprise no supermarkets and no bank branches. It was with great price that the local newspaper ran an announcement on a day in the early '90s, stating the local supermarket chain had been operating a supermarket SE of downtown, the first ever in that area of the City, and with an air of surprise stated the store was the most profitable in the chain.

I though, what, WTF? Poor people don't eat? There was a mind set in Dallas, that the black areas of town were ineligible for anything, City Services, Roads, Bank Branches, and Supermarkets.

This is the worst Racism I've seen, ever. It's is not the worst poverty I've seen in the US. The worst poverty I saw, worse than Africa, was on Highway 1 north out of Raleigh, NC, when in driving along the road I saw a local, an African-America, emerge from a corrugated sheet metal shack at the side of the rid, that would have been an embarrassment in the Lagos slums in Nigeria. This in the richest country in the world.

I wonder if any of the Agonistas are aware of the UK's post WW II housing policy. After WW II, it became the legal obligation of the local Councils to provide housing for all, with money supplied by the central Government to build housing. I spent my childhood between Africa and the UK, in Africa there were hereditary cripples begging on the side of the Road, locals living in the Bush and large slums. In the UK I don't recall one single homeless person, beggar, or Tramp, ever. This in a country brought to its knees by the costs of WW I and WW II.

I now live in CA, and some of the older, poorer, full or rental property neighborhoods I've seen are just disgusting. Poorly maintained buildings, full of mold, badly built and now in disrepair.

Racism in the US? Ugly. Poverty, up there with racism. Just ugly. Racism and Poverty intertwined in a way that's uniquely American, unique to a country as rich as the US, something that should be a constant source of shame.

Thanks for bringing this up, Stirling. I think you have Southern roots as I do, so I know you know what racism looks, sounds, tastes and smell like. And Jimmy Carter knows what it looks like down there in Georgia.
I also happen to believe that history hugely affects our lives. So you get some late 19th century oligarch who is appalled by the beginnings of socialism and decided to spend his fortune well into the 20th Century fighting it. And we get Libertarians today.
Racism is very easy to deny for any American who has grown up in your average whitebread suburb in almost any American city. They have no clue. And it is deeply tied to the 250 years of slavery prior to 1863. And the value of the slaves as assets and workers in the agricultural economy.
Get the government out of the way and there are many who would bring back slavery today. Although it would probably be called Free Market Jobs for Biblical Improvement.

I'm not an economist, I've not been trained in (or studied in detail) the various schools of economic thought. I'm a personal investor and have been an engineer by trade. So I wonder what schools of economic theory are not inherently racist at the core? It would seem that most of our modern global economic models revolve around a poor, low wage class (like China) working for virtually nothing to support affluence elsewhere (Europe, the USA.) This seems like slavery by proxy to me and it is everywhere I look.

So what is the alternative? What models do not rely on this method for profitability to add growth? The simplest comeback for someone supporting the Austrian school would seem to be: what system does not rely on the same basic imbalance of wealth? I would not know what to say to that retort. So teach me please, I'd love to know (no sarcasm, I'm genuinely ignorant in this area.)

Gold and The Monarchy shall never fall.

In the 1600's the British Parliament passed several Acts which set the annual salary of a naval seaman at 7 pounds something. During the Napoleonic Wars there was a seaman strike, demanding a raise to... 9 pounds something. The Spaniards (/Dutch) had been importing gold for 200 years and causing inflation.

(The Acts also dictated naval warfare tactics, stating that warships must form a line and attack en masse. Talk about an intrusive government!)

Sunnstein is the new Godwin