If Racism is Bad…

[HoreTore]

However, HT is prone to limiting himself with what he believes to be the whole truth and ignoring (refusing to examine) all else.

What an extreme, unfounded and ridiculous claim.


Though an extremely common one among conspiracy theorists, zealots and fanatics.

EDIT: Anyway, I have read through Rothbard's essay found here (learn to use text sources instead of videos, ye heretic). It is predictable in its content entirely in line with Austrian economics, and just as unfounded. In essence, it's page after page of "the state is a thief, wa wa wa"-whining. Of course written in Austrian school lingo, with terms like "predator", "taxation is a crime", "parasitic caste" and so.

While most of it is deeply obscurantist he does make some claims one can verify. Like this one:

If the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries were, in many countries of the West, times of accelerating social power, and a corollary increase in freedom, peace, and material welfare, the twentieth century has been primarily an age in which State power has been catching up?with a consequent reversion to slavery, war, and destruction.[43]

So, to take two points, he asserts that the start of the industrial revolution increased the general material welfare and that the 20th century has seen an increase in war.

Unfortunately for him, neither is true.

The start of the industrial revolution saw a marked decline in living standards and life expectancy, as people were bused from relatively good lives in the countryside, to overcrowded cities with enormous problems. It took quite a while for life expectancy to catch up to pre-17th century standards.

Wars, on the other hand, have decreased in the 20th century and are rarer now than they were in the 18th(or whatever) century. See for example Steven Pinker for this(though he deals with crime as well as war). Added to this is the fact that most of the wars of the 20th century have been caused by cleaning up the mess left by Rothbard's 'golden age of increasing freedom', colonization.



But don't let those silly fact-thingies get in the way of ideological blindness.