Either that or an excellent example of a strawman argument. Or both.
Bryan Caplan Critiques Jeff Deist on Decentralization, by Bryan Caplan.
Recently, some of my friends singled out this piece by Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute, as truly awful. When I actually read it, however, it seemed like a reasonable presentation of a plausible view.
You know, I always say you can tell about a man by the company he keeps. While Caplan refers to the piece as “reasonable” and “plausible,” his friends see it as “truly awful.” What do his friends see as “truly awful”? We can’t know for sure, other than to perhaps infer something from the lines of Deist’s speech cited by Caplan:
[L]ibertarians are busy promoting universalism even as the world moves in the other direction…. Mecca is not Paris, an Irishman is not an Aboriginal, a Buddhist is not a Rastafarian, a soccer mom is not a Russian…. Or would our time be better spent making the case for political decentralization, secession, and subsidiarity? In other words, should we let Malta be Maltese?
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We should prefer states’ rights to federalization in the US, and cheer for the breakup of EU. We should support breakaway movements in places like Catalonia and Scotland and California.
Now maybe these are the parts Caplan finds “reasonable”; maybe these are not the parts Caplan’s friends find “truly awful.” You might get some sense of this when you find that Caplan is to the left of the United Nations on open borders and immigration. I leave to you to decide the reason why Caplan’s friends regard Deist’s piece as “truly…