Slashdot, Gilligan's Island and the Mises Institute
The popular Slashdot site, "News for nerds, stuff that matters", has posted a link to the Mises Daily article, The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III. You might find the massive discussion this has sparked at Slashdot interesting, 255 comments and counting! Some of them are pretty silly, but some are honest attempts to deal with the arguments for free market money.
Also, Slashdot has a reputation for shutting sites down when it points to a small server and the tens of thousands of Slashdot readers pile on. With justifiable pride, Jeff Tucker notes that "Mises.org had no trouble and never went above 25% CPU usage". Kudos to Jeff and David Veksler who recently revamped the Mises.org servers.
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Thanks to David Purves for the pointer to an entertaining article published yesterday, "The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell II,"... Read More
Thanks to David Purves for the pointer to an entertaining article published yesterday, "The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell II... Read More
Comments (7)
I'm actually pretty impressed by the quality of comments on Slashdot. Normally, to my eye, they seem extremely anti-free market, but I only noticed a few such (highly moderated) comments in this thread.
Of course, it might just be that people with anti-free market viewpoints don't understand enough economics to counter an even moderately complex economic analogy.
Published: September 1, 2004 1:04 PM
I found out about the Gilligan article from Curt Howland, a poster to the smith2004-discuss Yahoo! Groups mailing list. I now find myself passing it on to other friends, and may blog about it later. I predict the article will be an enduring classic in the hacker community, up there with Eric Raymond's cultural essays.
Published: September 1, 2004 2:31 PM
Russell, Slashdotters are more libertarian than you think. The OpenSource movement provide plenty of evidence to that effect. In fact, they are more libertarian than they realize themselves most of the time. The outrage at censorship and things like Carnivore and Echelon not to mention anti-spam and RIAA legislation shows their colors; some of their arguments not-with-standing.
As far as I'm concerned, the geek crowd out there (of which I am proudly a part of) is a huge untapped market of libertarianism and rational economic thought. It's simply a matter of education. They tend to be logical, rational people who simply need to have years of socialism exposed to the cold, hard light of logic and reason.
Published: September 2, 2004 1:08 AM
Jake: You are correct. It is called the "wired crowd." More info on them here: http://www.theadvocates.org/celebrities/internet-users.html
Published: September 2, 2004 2:04 AM
There are a significant number of libertarians in Slashdot; however, there are also a significant number of socialists and interventionists, who think that the government should subsidize Open Source Software or Free Software, and that it should punish Micro$oft for being evil greedy capitalist pigs.
Published: September 2, 2004 5:03 PM
You know... funny thing. I've been trying and trying to find a Mises Daily article that would interest the Slashdot crowd so I could post it as a story to Slashdot. I agree with "Jake" (above) about the Slashhorde being an "untapped market" and I would like to register Mises.org in at least a couple three of those minds. In fact, I wrote once to the contact address asking for a more geek-ish topic, with this motive in mind. Apparently someone else succeeded.
Published: September 10, 2004 10:23 AM
They are very libertarian in general. They are also very anti-monopoly, they believe in a dynamic competitive free market, not a monopolized polarized free market.
Published: September 17, 2004 2:50 PM