Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen are more reasonable…
Along with a few others, I mentioned them both by name in an earlier version of that post. I didn’t want to get bogged down presenting all the relationships needed to establish that all these people were in fact libertarians:
Arnold Kling, who writes at EconLog, has done a fair amount of thinking about the unique worldview in the Economics department at George Mason University (see here and here). I claim the position he lays out is essentially the same as mine above, with the explicit partisan identification removed. Kling is an adjunct professor of economics at GMU, along with Robin Hanson, Alex Tabarrok, and Tyler Cowen (whose blog cites his frequently). Kling’s co-blogger Bryan Caplan has a written a popular book about public choice theory, which presents a thorough critique of government intervention and is supported by a lot of important research and some cool math. Caplan and Kling are both adjunct scholars at the Cato Institute, which also sponsors Will Wilkinson, whose wife is an editor at Reason.
Instead of beating that glob of stuff into something readable, I got lazy and went for the low-hanging fruit instead, specifically the over-the-top claim that there’s no such thing as a coherent, consequentialist, libertarian argument against (e.g.) European-style socialzed health care.
Along with a few others, I mentioned them both by name in an earlier version of that post. I didn’t want to get bogged down presenting all the relationships needed to establish that all these people were in fact libertarians:
Instead of beating that glob of stuff into something readable, I got lazy and went for the low-hanging fruit instead, specifically the over-the-top claim that there’s no such thing as a coherent, consequentialist, libertarian argument against (e.g.) European-style socialzed health care.