Tyler Cowen seems to be getting a tad confused in his moral reasoning, as he tries to shove the poop back up the fear-mongerers  who fatally compromised science, genuine environmentalism, and genuine conservation:

“Good vs. evil thinking causes us to lower our value of a person’s opinion, or dismiss it altogether, if we find out that person has behaved badly.  We no longer wish to affiliate with those people and furthermore we feel epistemically justified in dismissing them.

Sometimes this tendency will lead us to intellectual mistakes.

Take Climategate.  One response is: 1. “These people behaved dishonorably.  I will lower my trust in their opinions.”
Another response, not entirely out of the ballpark, is: 2. “These people behaved dishonorably.  They must have thought this issue was really important, worth risking their scientific reputations for.  I will revise upward my estimate of the seriousness of the problem.”
I am not saying that #2 is correct, I am only saying that #2 deserves more than p = 0.  Yet I have not seen anyone raise the possibility of #2.  It very much goes against the grain of good vs. evil thinking:  Who thinks in terms of: “They are evil, therefore they are more likely to be right.”

My Comment

This is so idiotic confused

(in the spirit of Humble Libertarian´s post, I want to start ratcheting down any stridency on my own part, before expecting others to)

I can´t believe I´m reading it.

I don´t believe the very intelligent Professor Cowen wrote it.

Let´s see. Point by point.

1. Hitler did several rather evil things…would Cowen be happy if we tried to take another look at Hitler, because, gee, we´re all counterintuitive an’ all..

Of course, see what happens when anyone dares to make the morally far saner argument that although Hitler did many evil things, he might have been right about some other things…say, like vegetarianism. The howls of neo-Nazism would drive him from respectable (and unrespectable) society forever.

But it´s quite OK for a liberal to argue from the morally insane position that because Hitler did many evil things, he was therefore right.

I can only imagine what would have happened if someone from the south had ever said that….or someone from the third world….or any other benighted place where our superiors haven´t already planted the flag of moral imperialism (I coined that one just now)….

It never occurs to the supercilious center-liberals (I´m not sure the positions taken by Cowen or Powell are really libertarian) that their lectures admonitions are best directed at themselves.

2. Cowen calls Austrian theory a religion, when it´s not even a theory. It´s a set of principles that can be applied quite broadly to arrive at very different conclusions, even conclusions diametrically opposed to many positions that Austrians actually hold.

3. He uses the phrase ¨good versus evil thinking” — which seems to be a reference to Glenn Greenwald´s book on Bush and how good versus evil thinking got his administration into trouble. As a matter of fact, I made that analysis of Bush´s reasoning in my first book (“The Language of Empire”) as well as in an article, “The Pharisee´s Fire Sermon” (Dissident Voice), …and I can assure you that “good versus evil” thinking permeates every aspect of American thought…from Christian fundamentalism to liberalism universalism. Lew Rockwell has the least of it.

And one of the underlying reasons for why this kind of polarised thinking is pervasive is a very simple one.

Citizens in an imperial state can get away with it.

In no other corner of the world is there a state with so much space in its back yard, so many armaments to back up its lightest word and so much clout to twist every arm that can be twisted to get reality to bend to its own solipsistic vision of how things should be.

Mr. Cowen has mistaken an imperial problem pervasive in the US for a local ideological problem.
Only one of a number of errrors.

Here´s more of Cowen´s cogitations via EconomicPolicyJournal.com:

“Cowen began his comments, and almost immediately differentiated between what he called “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarianism” and “realistic” libertarianism. He said that like Palmer, he fell into the “realistic” camp.

During the Q&A, I asked Cowen to amplify on the differences between what he deemed “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarianism” and “realistic” libertarianism. He pointed to a view on immigration and “too much” conspiracy theory that he claimed the “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarians” held. He said they were moving toward the extreme right wing Republican camp. He contrasted this with what he called realistic-secular libertarianism. He said he expected that a full split between the two camps will occur.”

Outside the right-wing Islamophobe militarati, the place where you´ll see the most “good-versus-evil” thinking is not Lew Rockwell (where you can find even liberal-left thinkers like Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Wolf). It´s the liberal-left center.

And that split that´s coming up between LRC and secular libertarianism?

Baloney.

Lew Rockwell has plenty of atheist and secular libertarians. I happen to be a secularist and a Christian agnostic. Both the Christianity and the agnoticism are important to me. Equally. If Cowen can´t get his head around a position like that and lumps it in together with some loony farfetched idea he has about “Austrian religion” that really is his problem, not LRC´s.

Actually, the only split that´s coming up is the split of libertarian progressives and sensible environmentalists…from the left…and into the Ron Paul camp..which is also, much more prosaically, the just-the-facts, ma´am camp.

Cowen:

He then told me I could google, Austrian theory and financial crisis, and half the results would be “religious Austrians.”

Nice try at scare-mongering.

This is simply scare-mongering.

The real ayatollahs of thought are Olympian liberal-leftists who believe that anyone who argues against any of their most precious sacred cows — subsidized illegal immigration, thought police, the immaculate purity of the government on 9-11, the imminent end of planet earth on account of Republicans, and a host of other dim-bulb positions — must automatically be a wicked, greedy racist.

Economist, audit thine own intellectual books before trashing anyone else´s.

And for more juicy tomatoes flung at the good professor by fellow libs, read this .