10 Jul 2011

Tom Woods Doing the Job That Even Mexican Immigrants Wouldn’t Want

Economics 6 Comments

I’ve been feeling really guilty the past several months, because I asked Tom Woods for a review copy (that means a price of zero to me) of his latest book, Rollback, and I haven’t even finished it yet. (In defense of myself, I haven’t read any book this year, since I’ve been so busy, except The Theory of Money and Credit, for which I just wrapped up the study guide.)

Anyway, the book is awesome, but I can’t believe how much wonkish, boring econ think tank stuff Tom had to wade through to write it. It reminds me of the old Jewish comic who comes home to find his best friend in bed with his wife: “Tommy, I have to…but you?!”

It seems Tom’s penance has continued past the writing of that book. In a recent series of three articles at LRC (1, 2, and 3), he takes on anti-capitalist cliches. This is the kind of thing that I normally leave as an exercise for the student, but Tom isn’t taking any chances and wants everybody on script.

Anyway, you might want to forward the above links to people who are just getting into free-market economics, and still have doubts that you personally resolved 15 years ago. And then you can also thank your lucky stars that Tom wrote those articles, so we don’t have to. (I think I would rather play 52 card pickup ten times in a row.)

6 Responses to “Tom Woods Doing the Job That Even Mexican Immigrants Wouldn’t Want”

  1. Ivan Georgiev says:

    This is a joke, right? What Tom has done (and is doing) isn’t less important than what you, Hoppe, Block or any other great men (and women) are doing in defense of capitalism (liberty). 🙂

    • bobmurphy says:

      Yeah it’s a joke. For that matter, Mexican immigrants perform very valuable work, even though I personally don’t want to do some of those jobs.

    • gienek says:

      And that’s pretty much the message that Mr. Murphy’s blogpost conveyed. What is surprising is that Mr. Woods took time to reply to such falsehoods and striking misconceptions.

      • Matthew Murphy says:

        He needs to be assigned another book, I guess? 😉

        Actually, I like these articles- written for us, not the twitter critic.

  2. Matthew Murphy says:

    Bob, you haven’t finished Rollback yet? It’s one of Tom’s best. You’re exactly right when you say “I can’t believe how much wonkish, boring econ think tank stuff Tom had to wade through to write it”

  3. Rettoper says:

    Freedom means no one has the right to initiate aggressive force against anyone else. What else could it mean without becoming Orwellian? — Tom Woods

    Tom’s faith-based notion that anarcho-capitalist society is peaceful is a fallacy.

    Pure capitalist societies would be equally, if not more, violent than the present geopolitik. Indeed, they would be significantly more violent than a geopolitik dominated by liberal democracies.

    Within an anarcho-capitalist society coercion would be a legitimate and necessary means to reallocate valued resources from heretofore unprofitable individuals and enterprises.

    Note, violence would be exercised within ancap society under the following conditions:

    1) peaceful exchange of a valued resource was not possible or,

    2) peaceful exchange is more costly than the use of coercion to obtain the valued resource and,

    3) the transaction costs associated with the use of coercion to annex a valued resource are less than the expected gains from acquiring the valued resource.

    Note that this free market mechanism insures that valued resources are managed to their maximum profitability or they will be subject to predation due to inadequate defense. Moreover, those profit driven actors who annex heretofore under utilized resources from negligent owners are benefiting society at large by releasing scarce resources that were previously denied to the marketplace.