Jimmy Breeze's Library tagged politics →  View Popular

Even Scott Pack concludes Twitterstorms are "alright if they're basically about pointing out that someone has written something really, really out of order, and wanting to tell people about it". But some Twitterers, he says, published Jan Moir's home address. Others were plainly every bit as out of order as the journalist's piece: "It wouldn't be so good, obviously, if it reached a point where people were stopped from expressing an opinion."

The bottom line with Twitter, though, Pack argues, is quite simply that "I've got a way of saying something now. And if enough people agree with me, we can really make a difference." That, obviously, gives the site a mighty momentum – and be warned: a leaked internal document from Twitter suggests the site is aiming for 1 billion users by 2013. With that many Twitterers tweeting, the document reportedly says, "we will be the pulse of the planet".

I should note that today almost every single economist--even those who (like me) are profoundly hostile to many of Hayek's arguments (that government regulation of the money supply lies at the root of the business cycle, that political attempts to reduce inequalities in the distribution of income are likely to lead to totalitarianism, that the Federal Reserve should be abolished, that the competitive market is the "natural spontaneous order" of human society)--agrees that Hayek and his company (including Scott) hit the particular nail that is Scott's central theme, the critique of high-modernist centrally-planned social-engineering, squarely on the head.

Scott's Seeing Like a State's index contains no references to Ludwig von Mises. It does contain six references to Friedrich Hayek:

The first two references I agree with. Hayek is right in criticizing the inflexibility of the command economy, and Scott is right in arguing that the market economy is not the "natural" form of human social order.

The third, fourth, and fifth references seem to me to miss the point: no one reading Hayek should be surprised that he is skeptical about claims to useful theoretical knowledge, the unanimity between the left and right branches growing out of the anarchist tradition is not "curious" but a result of these two branches' common roots, and the late Foucault (even though correct, and at the time of his death a serious student of liberal political economy) is not the expert of choice on liberal political economy.