Rob Urie in an excellent piece at Counterpunch about the libertarian accusation of “envy,” which, as I blogged here, is as misplaced as the socialist accusation of “greed”..and for pretty much the same reasons. The arguments are both inaccurate and circular in reasoning:

“One of the theories of the practice of psychology encountered in college is “egoism,” the argument that all people at all times act in their own self-interest. The theory is circular in that once the premise is accepted, any argument that runs counter to it is presumed to result from self-interest.”

I an earlier post, I argued this way:

The principal flaw in the socialist world view, as I see it, is a too great concern with appearances and an inability to see cause and effect in any complex way. It’s not the ‘materialism’ of dialectical materialism I object to. It’s the lack of ‘mind’ in the materialism. The reasoning is limited, superficial, and inaccurate. It lacks sufficient particularity, as Michael Oakeshott argued in “Rationalism in Politics” (1962).

And as Oakeshott argued there, that can be a problem in Hayek, as well.

Ure writes:

“Is there a difference in the degree of envy between the person holding the number two spot and the person holding the eight-billionth spot? The necessary answer is no because if so the person holding the eight-billionth spot might only want to move one spot up. This would mean that they aren’t envious of the rich and powerful at all, but rather only of the poor schmuck whose life is only microscopically, invisibly better than theirs. In that case, the only people envious of the rich and powerful are the rich and powerful just one step below them. There are a few people who fit that description that I’ve seen at Zuccotti Park, but they seemed neither driven by envy nor are they representative of the movement.”

Of course, Ure doesn’t apply the same acute reasoning to socialist arguments about greed.  In other words, if  envy is distributed equally among everyone, rich and poor, so is greed.