[ohazi]

This is a terrible idea on its own, but I find it particularly unpalatable because the author is deliberately tickling the fancy of all the "My theories are so beautiful and internally consistent" libertarians who wouldn't be able to identify a negative externality if it punched them in the nose.

I've had this discussion a million times in college. It's always a dumpster fire.

[RobinHanson]

I don't recall mentioning anything about consistency or beauty, and I think I'd do pretty well at a test of identifying externalities.

[394549]

> This is a terrible idea on its own, but I find it particularly unpalatable because the author is deliberately tickling the fancy of all the "My theories are so beautiful and internally consistent" libertarians who wouldn't be able to identify a negative externality if it punched them in the nose.

> I've had this discussion a million times in college. It's always a dumpster fire.

This, a thousand times. Simple theories can be beautiful, compelling, and wrong (both in the sense of correctness and morality). There's an vast minefield of "knowing just enough to be dangerous" between ignorance and wisdom, it seems like many fans of economics and its associated ideologies get stuck there.

[nickik]

The idea that libertarians don't understand negative externalities is simple wrong. Maybe you talked to some people in collage who just don't know a lot of economics.

But in actual economics people who one could describe as libertarian politically have been on the forefront of research on externalizes. In fact the most important work on that was done by Ronald Coase. And since then many people like that have worked in that space.

[ohazi]

No, the idea isn't wrong, it simply acknowledges the fact that there are a lot of libertarians who act like this:

http://libertarianpeacenik.blogspot.com/2011/12/big-mouth-li...

You're correct that there are many who are actually reasonable and pragmatic, but it's disingenuous to claim that the other kind of pseudo-intellectual libertarian doesn't exist. They do exist, and they give the reasonable ones else a bad rap.