I bid you the same.

You appear to be an expert at reading between the lines and drawing conclusions therefrom as to what I must believe and must not believe. You have discovered my tongue-in-cheek Byzantine-Rite Calvinist moniker, but not much else about me or my writings, judging from what you’ve written immediately above. Feel free to think me guilty until proven innocent, if you’d like, but you should not expect a fruitful exchange to come out of it. Have a good day.

Interesting declaration, but one that does not square with your previous statement: “The other believes the individual should pursue his or her own economic goals, even at the expense of the commons.”

The problem is that it is almost impossible to make a durable pursuit of one’s economic goals at the expense of the “commons”, but it is incredibly easy in the “mixed economy”, hence we have a myriad of crony capitalist scandals (Solyndra, GM, TARP, etc)

Your excursion into Rand is telling, but tedious and irrelevant. Rand is far less an influence on the Tea Party than Acton. There’s no doubt that Rand was given to excess, but most intellectuals display this tendency. You would do well to read Paul Johnson’s “Intellectuals”.

Her brand of misanthropy, however regrettable, wouldn’t offer the intellectual justification for state sponsored mass murder that Marx provided or the financial shenanigans that invoke Keynesian sorceries.

That having been said, I have worked in government for the better part of a decade, in multiple agencies, including having audited Medicaid/Medicare. I have direct experience that leads me to reason that the proposition that “the welfare state is not just ineffective and expensive; it is immoral” is true. Worse, it is designed to entrap people into dependency and partisan loyalty.

Look, I get it. You are completely at ease with syncretism (describing yourself as a “byzantinecalvinist”. You are by professional inclination, completely at ease with the state and fearful of the market. Most members of the professoriate are statists and agoraphobes.

The problem is, your response has done nothing to dispel my suspicion that you lack a fundamental understanding of basic economics, the division of labor, the exchange function and the irresolvable epistemic diseconomies of centralization. You are quick to asserting that there should be limits on the market, but not on government-no doubt in small part because you fancy yourself an expert on government.

I’m sorry, but this author clearly does not understand economics. Adam Smith first showed us how the market benefits the “commons”, when he wrote “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

The only time a free market does not direct personal acquisitiveness to the benefit of the commons, is when the vendor sells vice-and that is something the left enthusiastically supports.

To assume that the state is the omniscient and incorrupt custodian of the common good is foolishness.

Agreed. Although I will stay firm in my prediction that Obama has it locked.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/297023/ryan-shrugged-robert-costa

Thus it would appear to be a mistake to impute Rand’s ur-libertarianism and social Darwinism to him.

Moreover, he has shown some tendencies toward pragmatism rather than Randian idelaism in working with Dems on, e.g., Ryan-Wyden bill for Medicare reform.