Comments Elsewhere

Mainardi,

Again, if you don’t know that he’s an anarchist then you haven’t read (or don’t remember) enough of “what he writes” to make an informed judgment about him or his work.

In The Machinery of Freedom he declares himself an anarchist on the first page of the introduction (“I hold that there are no proper functions of government. In that sense I am an anarchist. All things that governments do can be divided into two categories—those we could do away with today and those we hope to be able to do away with tomorrow.”) You might also consult Part III, “Anarchy is Not Chaos,” in which he spends over 50 pages (about a quarter of the length of the book) on the topic.

Reasonable people admit when they do not know enough about someone to tell whether somebody’s ill-conceived argument makes (say) a surprisingly boneheaded gaffe, or whether it’s indicative of being a moron, or whether it’s indicative of some other trait. What you have been doing, on the other hand, is pure bullshitting on the basis of clearly inadequate knowledge.

Lopez,

I can’t see where I complained about name-calling as such.

What I’m saying is that Mainardi evidently does not know enough about Friedman’s work to have any idea whether he is a “moron” or not. If you don’t know enough about Friedman to recall that he is an anarchist, then you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to David Friedman or his work. That’s not a problem, but turning around and talking about him when you have no idea what you’re talking about, is.

My complaint has to do not with name-calling, but with loud-mouthed ignorance.