Hahaha, pretty much a perfect example of brucefan. A dude who was so blatantly wrong about his predictions has the ability to claim he was right all along. It's amazing how Austrians can actually believe the shit they spew.
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As everyone now knows, Rothbard was wrong. (He also predicted that there would be apocalyptic bank runs, which was also wrong.) He was wrong because he did not understand how modern banking systems work. But that is a side-issue. What is key here is that he made a very specific prediction and it turned out to be incorrect. After the bailouts the US experienced neither “immediate runaway inflation” or “a massive flight from the dollar”. And yet here’s the most amazing thing: I have encountered that quote (more than once) as proof that Rothbard was correct and he saw it all coming!
Just look at this
Mises.org post entitled ‘
Rothbard saw the future’ written by this
rather unusual individual (who also seems to have also written
an essay rationalising drinking liquor in the morning). Incredible!
You would think that a rational person, after reading that would inquire into why Rothbard had gotten it so wrong. But no, not the libertarians. Instead, the cult devotee takes the quote and shamelessly presents it as evidence to his intellectual adversary that his views are correct.
Imagine if we could all walk around showing our failures to our opponents and claiming that they were victory. “Logic be damned, even when I’m wrong I’m right!”
These are the popular manifestations of the libertarian ideology.
This is what happens when a political cult forms. There are many other examples – indeed, the libertarian style is often an adoption of one of the above positions: either an attempt to lull the opponent into a metaphysical shouting match or an attempt to pass off a watery, unverifiable quote as truth about a given issue or to shamelessly display a failed theory or prediction and claim it as an intellectual victory.
And all of this stems out of the same phenomenon: a closed mind.
Libertarians are typically narrow and closed minded individuals. They are in search of Absolute Truths about the world and when they have posited them to themselves these Truths enter an intellectual sphere where they are beyond empirical reproach. For all their hatred of primitivism, the libertarians are the primitive ones. They have not yet entered into the civilised world of disinterested, factual argument.
They remain stuck in an adolescence filled with value judgements, vague predictions (that are often incorrect) and metaphysical proclamations.
Andrew Dittmer has pinpointed
this tendency in the sixth part his excellent ‘interview’ series on libertarianism. The libertarians even have a pseudo-rational name for this proud perversion of the scientific method: praxeology. Praxeology is to the libertarians as diamat was to the Marxist-Leninists;
an a priori pseudo-philosophy that allows them to ignore unwelcome evidence and insulate themselves from criticism.
