"Were Our Enemies Right?"

Asks quasi-conservative David Frum:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Well, of course. When I read The Volokh Conspiracy, I am delighted by the legal analysis, and then they bring up politics and I'm stunned. WTF? How could reasonable people hold such unreasonable beliefs?

Libertarian economics is pie-in-the-sky thinking. A story is constructed that makes rational sense, or at least appeals to our sense of good story-telling. That persuasive aesthetic is why people follow it.

In fact, libertarians reject commonly-accepted rational analysis. From Wikipedia: "Austrian economists reject empirical statistical methods, natural experiments and constructed experiments ....."

If you have to reject rational thought in order to believe libertarian economics, then you might as well be sacrificing goats.