On Bleeding Hearts and Crocodile Tears

By Matt Zwolinski On March 12, 2011 · 31 Comments · In Left-libertarianism, Libertarianism, Social Justice

I wasn't quite sure how to react to Art Carden's essay, after first reading it. On the one hand, it wasn't as though I actually disagreed with any of his main claims. I think he's right about the minimum wage, rent control, subsidies, and international trade. Of course, he doesn't provide the arguments or data to support any of these claims. But I think that's understandable, given the forum in which they were made.

But still, something about it didn't sit quite right with me, even if I couldn't quite place my finger on exactly what it was. And on reading the comments thread on this post, I realized that I wasn't alone. After a bit of reflection, however, I think that there are two main sources of my unease.

Both have more to do with what he doesn't say than with what he does say. First, what he does say, for the most part, is that policies that are aimed at relieving the plight of the poor very often have the unintended consqeuences of hurting them. The message, of course, is that we should not pursue such policies. And insofar as such policies really do hurt the poor, of course I am in agreement with them. Still, I am reminded of the words of the American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, editor of the great periodical Liberty, in introducing one of Herbet Spencer's essays:

Liberty welcomes and criticises in the same breath the series of papers by Herbert Spencer on "The New Toryism"…. They are very true, very important, and very misleading…. I begin to be a little suspicious of him. It seems as if he had forgotten the teachings of his earlier writings, and had become a champion of the capitalistic class. It will be noticed that in these later articles, amid his multitudinous illustrations … of the evils of legislation, he in every instance cites some law passed, ostensibly at least, to protect labor, alleviate suffering, or promote the people's welfare. He demonstrates beyond dispute the lamentable failure in this direction. But never once does he call attention to the far more deadly and deep-seated evils growing out of the innumerable laws creating privilege and sustaining monopoly. You must not protect the weak against the strong, he seems to say, but freely supply all the weapons needed by the strong to oppress the weak. He is greatly shocked that the rich should be directly taxed to support the poor, but that the poor should be indirectly taxed and bled to make the rich richer does not outrage his delicate sensibilities in the least. Poverty is increased by the poor laws, says Mr. Spencer. Granted; but what about the rich laws that caused and still cause the poverty to which the poor laws add?

Carden writes, in others words, as though if we were to remove these policies designed to benefit the poor, we would have a free market, and this would be much better for the poor than what we currently have. The second part of that claim, I think, is absolutely true. A genuinely free market really would be better for the poor than what we currently have. But policies designed to promote the interests of the poor are, I think, a very small part of what keeps us from such a genuinely free market. To focus on them as if they were is, at the very least, to invite misinterpretation. At worst it is mere vulgar libertarianism.

My second source of concern is this. Carden claims to be motivated by a concern for the poor. His commitment to free market, his post suggests, is a product of his belief that free markets serve the interests of the poor better than alternative institutions. But his commitment to the free market does not seem at all qualified. He does not say that free markets do, in certain contexts, a pretty good job of promoting the interests of the poor, but perhaps they are limited in such and such ways. He does not present any cases where deviations from the free market might be necessary to promote the interests of the poor. He does not even say that the interests of the poor would be better served by government intervention, but that considerations of aggregate well-being or deontological constraints prevent us from purusing those polciies. The message seems to be that if your concern is to help the poor, free markets are always the best answer.

Now, maybe he's right. I don't think he is, but perhaps I'm under the sway of false economic beliefs. Still, it all seems a little too neat. When someone claims to be committed in a fundamental way to both X and Y, and then claims that (happy day!) X and Y always turn out to be mutually recognizable, I begin to suspect that the conclusion is driven more by psychological processes designed to reduce cognitive dissonance than by careful empirical study or theoretical reasoning.

I don't mean to suggest that Carden is anything less than genuine in his claims to support either free markets or the interests of the poor. Perhaps, in a forum where he had more room to explore the subtleties of his position, he would have addressed the kinds of concerns I have raised here. Even still, I think there's a lesson to be learned here for bleeding heart libertarians about the manner of one's presentation. As the comments thread I referred to above reflects, Carden's essay doesn't seem to have done much to persuade those on the left, however enthusiastically it may have been accepted by those on the (libertarian) right.

To show those on the left that we are taking their concerns seriously, we need to make it clear that our concern for the poor is something that we take seriously as a moral concern, and not merely a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu with which to persuade others to accept our independeltly held faith in American-style capitalism.

Al

I found this post very insightful.
http://profile.typepad.com/andrewlevine Andrewlevine

Great post.

I just kicked myself for not mentioning Amartya Sen in the “wish they would read” thread. But so much of his work is in poverty, and the role of individual liberty (as defined in Sen’s terms) in reducing it, which lends him special relevance to this topic.

It is important to give simultaneous recognition to the centrality of individual freedom and to the force of social influences on the extent and reach of individual freedom. To counter the problems that we face, we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment. – Development as Freedom
http://blog.hecker.org/ Frank Hecker

I didn’t comment in the previous thread, but I too had a mixed reaction to Carden’s article. One factor you and others have not mentioned is that the chosen venue for the article influences its reception: Clearly an article like this published on the Forbes site is highly likely to elicit little more than head-nodding from the sort of people likely to read that site. If Carden had published it on a site whose readers were less friendly to his line of argument then I’d be more impressed.

More important though I think is a factor I mentioned in a comment to Jason Brennan’s “advocacy vs. …” post: On this blog it’s clear that you take seriously many of the core principles your ostensible opponents hold, and are doing serious work to address how those principles might square with a libertarian approach. It’s sort of an intellectual version of honest signalling under the handicap principle, and one that convinces me as a non-libertarian layman of the quality of your arguments in a way that hundreds of articles like Carden’s would not.
John V

I think there’s too much made of how it sounded to certain ears. He wasn’t running for office or writing a research paper. He was simply stating his view. I think it’s very fair for him to expect his readers to get this
Andy

I am sympathetic to your point, but does every article need a disclaimer at the bottom, “I also oppose corporate welfare” and “these are some possibly acceptable roles for government”?
http://blog.hecker.org/ Frank Hecker

@John V and @Andy: I agree that this is a tempest in a teapot for the most part, and that Carden certainly has a right to state his views without apologies or disclaimers. However he did name-check this blog at the bottom of his article, which implicitly invites the sorts of comparisons commenters here have been making.
http://profile.typepad.com/andrewlevine Andrewlevine

Plus, it’s hard to take him on good faith when he trots out straw-man arguments. Anyone who posits a nutrition-assistance program that entails telling people where they can stand in line to pick up their government cheese, then points out how inefficient this is, and extends that by implication to all “poor laws”, spares himself the trouble of engaging with such programs as they are actually implemented. Any people who have done so will find it hard to take him seriously.
Sheldon

I think you’re far too gentle in your pushback of Carden’s essay. Here, for example, is the most basic question his essay failed to address: What was the poverty rate like before “liberal,” non-market interventions, starting with the New Deal? (Hint: It was an awful lot higher.) You don’t need to go beyond the answer to that basic question to dismiss Carden’s approach, so common and unquestioned on the Right. He and others with his viewpoint write as if our current poverty approaches emerged for no reason, rather than as a response to very real and pre-existing deprivation and hardship in what was at the time a far less regulated economy. Second, the idea that a totally “free and unfettered market” would be better for the poor is fatuous on its face: These days there is no market – certainly not one nearly as robust as required – for unskilled, undereducated labor, and no reason whatsoever to believe that if there was no intervention to help people in that category to live something approaching a human life, the threat of starving to death would force them to become skilled and educated. That’s not the way the world works, outside libertarian fantasies – we would instead end up with a society far more violent and dysfunctional than we have today. Does anyone really doubt that? Apparently Carden and others like him do.
John

Very interesting comments Matt. I do agree that an odd standard for the libertarians taking very strong market-favored positions in that welfare is always discussed in the context of the poor and not corporate welfare. It’s also the case that any that are honest in their positions will naturally oppose corporate welfare. Why then don’t we argue more using corporate welfare as the vehicle?

A) We do — it’s just not as public a debate so the claim we don’t is more perception than reality. That probably deserves some empirical testing.

B) Following a comment from the other topic — welfare for the poor is the “strongest” one can make. Everyone will agree with those arguments. Maybe that’s an excessive claim but…

C) Given that the arguments are that the government plans always seem to fail, who cares about corporate welfare — corporations have a lot of resources so who cares if the government plan does them some harm. It’s a second order inefficiency.

I think A and B are probably true; C a bit problematic but introduces the question “Are the inefficiencies here second order?” While the supply siders don’t talk about corporate welfare they clearly think government induced inefficiencies are not second order. I think if one view economic activity from the lens of his production triangle the assumption of a second order status is also questionable. I think Public Choice literature also points one in that direction as well.

I don’t really buy into the premise of C, that corporate welfare harms or oppresses corporations. I think there’s an asymmetry here that left libertarians and liberals should pay attention to. If the government programs repeatedly fail to accomplish the “goal” but continue to endure and be funded one needs at question what the true goal is.

The choices probably are not market versus government but better markets and better government. The challenge is to have better understanding of where these two institutions apply. I’ve never really thought of either as a goal or endpoint. They are merely social tools, and like a hammer used with a screw, open to misuse. Misuse will have a very large impact on what results are achieved.
Ken S

I might be stereotyping here, but I believe this selective vision of right leaning folks is due to them being more accepting of social hierarchies. Considering most of us will find ourselves not too far on the bottom or top of social orderings, it makes more sense to give advice about what to do with those at the bottom than to tell what those who made it to the top (presumably fairly) to do with the rest of us.

This would not be a shared assumption between egalitarian folks, because as semi-rational creatures we can decide how we want to reshape (with mainstream ideas) or redo (with radical ones) the social or economic ordering regardless of our position in the current one.

I would expect a coherent political philosophy to fully take into account how social/political hierarchies influence economic ones, and give a satisfactory answer about what should be done, and how much could be done given our tendencies towards forming and accepting social hierarchies.
Dan Kervick

Libertarians just seem to believe on faith that no government has ever succeeded in doing anything right, ever. They develop anecdotes about particular instances of government over-reaching and foolishness into a cosmic theory of the overall impotence of human organizational and planning abilities. Apparently, no government has ever succeeded through legislation and administration in achieving a socially desirable economic outcome, but has been thwarted at every turn by the demon on unintended consequences.

Yet the postwar societies of the West – including Japan – are the most prosperous societies in human history. They are triumphs of human social organization. All of them, including the post-New Deal United States, are mixed economies featuring some combination of liberal markets, on the one hand, and government activism and economic participation on the other.

These societies all instituted unprecedentedly strong labor rights and protections, and did not leave the conditions and rules governing work entirely in the hands of the owners of private productive enterprises. They also took pro-active steps to make sure that their wealth – vast be world-historical standards, was effectively distributed to their societies’ worked in the form of both social services and leisure time, rather than hoarded by the societies’ owners. Broad middle class prosperity advanced tremendously during the period, and much progress was also registered against egregious poverty.

The initial postwar period also included a high level of financial stability, with none of the horrible panics and collapses that marked the earlier period of capitalism in the industrial age. Unfortunately, since that time, we have allowed the formation of a much less well-regulated shadow banking sector, which has grown to astonishing proportions now dwarfing the regular banking sector. The pace of financial innovation has outstripped the regulatory capacities of sound government, an unfortunate process abetted by a neoliberal ideology of protecting predators by keeping the law away from them.

The libertarian position seems to be that these postwar societies thrived despite their governments’ activism, rather then in part because of it, and that if only these societies had aspired toward even freer markets, they would be even more awesome.

Of course, we can all point to instances of attempted regulation or welfare policies that didn’t work. I have my favorites examples as well. But libertarians, when faced with a manifest cases of failure on the other side – areas in which deregulation of some activity has seemingly lead to undesirable outcomes – always retreat to the claim that the problem is that the activity is still not deregulated enough. And since there is always some aspect of the relevant sector that remains regulated, their claims are conveniently unfalsifiable.
Dan Kervick

I would expect a coherent political philosophy to fully take into account how social/political hierarchies influence economic ones …

And it must also contain an account of how economic hierarchies influence social/political ones.

My own view is that (i) wealth consists in the possession of the things that people desire, and (ii) people are governed by their desires, so (iii) those who possess transferable wealth possess in the same degree the capacity to govern other human beings, and (iv) a society that permits stark inequalities in the distribution of wealth thereby permits stark inequalities in the distribution of the power to govern.

Institutional checks on power are possible and desirable, and these checks can have some ameliorative effect in slowing the pace at which wealth is transformed into governing influence. But no matter how a society is structured it is predominantly governed in the end by its owners, and the ownership shares correspond to governing shares.

I wish libertarians would recognize that “governing” is something that is happening everywhere, in every corner of a society, not just in those institutionalized arrangements that tradition is pleased to label “the government”. The only way people protect themselves from predation, enslavement and servitude is to constitute themselves as a society of equals, and then to enforce a strong rule of law that takes action against those who seek to elevate themselves as warlords over that society. And a corporate titan is as much a warlord as one who builds a cache of arms. Both have amassed the tools needed for impressing the wills of a few on the behavior of the many.
Kaleberg

Unfortunately, the facts seem to run against Carden. We know what poverty was like before the government stepped in. We know that people died of hunger quite regularly. We know that poor people were shorter and suffered from serious malnutrition. There’s a reason Judaism, Islam and many branches of Christianity require feeding the poor, and they were developed during times when there were more excuses for poverty than we have today.

Things were a bit better in the United States because we had pre-Marxist land reform, taking land from its owners, the native Americans, and giving it to anyone who would farm it, mine it or ranch it. By modern lights, 19th century America was barely capitalist with its land reform, protectionism, agricultural and manufacturing subsidies and lack of respect for intellectual property.

I’ll agree that we are far from having a perfect society, but the only way to move forward is to take an empirical approach. We know that some things helped and some did not. No one said that moving forward would be easy, but unlike radicals on both the left and the right, I have no desire to return to the good old days.
Dan Kervick

I wrote, in garbled fashion:

They also took pro-active steps to make sure that their wealth – vast be world-historical standards, was effectively distributed to their societies’ worked in the form of both social services and leisure time, rather than hoarded by the societies’ owners.

which should be:

They also took pro-active steps to make sure that their wealth – vast by world-historical standards – was effectively distributed to their societies’ workers in the form of both social services and leisure time, rather than hoarded by the societies’ owners.
Eric Rovie

I agree with most of what you’ve written here, Matt. I often call myself a ceteris paribus libertarian-I love the idea of free markets, and if things were equal (or close to equal), I think they would be ideal. But things aren’t close to equal, and I think the poor would be faced with different problems if the system were turned into a pure market system. I’m not an economist, but one of the things I remember from my econ courses (both undergrad and in grad school) was the importance of perfect information to make markets work ideally…and the poor will always be on the short end of that stick from the perspective of information.

I would also worry that the power-brokers in the marketplace (generally the businesses) can’t be counted on to play fair, given the informational asymmetry. Matt Taibbi has written some interesting stuff in Rolling Stone (and has a book coming out, or out) on the tricks pulled by big business that led to the housing market collapse. It’s very easy to lay blame on the individuals who take on loans they can’t pay (“if you make $10 an hour, don’t buy a $300000 home”), and they deserve their share of the blame, but I know a lot of smart people who got saddled with terrible loans because the banks intentionally made them impossible to understand. Most of what these banks did fell within ‘the rules of the game’ (to use Friedman’s phrase) but that didn’t make it right.

I guess the million dollar question for Carden’s view would be “how much harm would it do to the poor before the markets righted themselves and the market actually started improving the lot of the poor”? It might take a while for the results to come in, and, in the interim, I’m guessing a lot of people would be worse off. If this is so, then you have to make a choice: do you care more about the welfare of the poor, or the development of the free market?
http://profile.typepad.com/lebar Mark LeBar

I wonder, for those like Keleberg and Kervick, and others who think it is so obvious that markets failed: how long have governments been around? What has been the poverty rate for most of human history? When did that begin to change? Is it just an accident that markets and market-enabling institutions (like effective legal systems and robust rights to private property) came about in the same times and places that real change in the relentless poverty that characterized human history through recorded history also changed? That, to me, is a simply incredible reading of human history. Government could have fed nobody if not for food that markets allowed to be produced. That’s not a final word on human social arrangements, of course. But it’s a first word that, if it is lost sight of, will doom everything else we have to say to irrelevance at best.

Damien RS

“how long have governments been around?”

This question assumes that all governments are the same for our purposes.

Over the past couple of centuries, we’ve seen a rise in markets and supporting (government) institutions, a fall in absolute poverty, a fall in relative poverty, an explosion of scientific knowledge and technological power, and a rise of democratic government and welfare policies. Governments have been around for 5000 years or more; social democratic ones haven’t.

Markets clearly get some of the credit for our aggregate wealth; they just as clearly don’t get all the credit — lots of key science had nothing to do with markets — and it’snot clear they get much direct credit for raising the poor, vs. the effects of technology and new forms of government.

Mark D. Friedman

Matt,
I am a little unclear on what you mean by: “But policies designed to promote the interests of the poor are, I think, a very small part of what keeps us from such a genuinely free market.” Is our system of public education a policy designed to help the poor or to keep them impoversished? I would argue that the departure from a free market in K-12 education represents the greatest impediment to upward-mobility faced by the disadvantaged elements in our society. Does K-12 education constitutue part of the “small part” of programs designed for the poor? If so, this “small part” is a big part of the problem IMHO.
http://profile.typepad.com/vinceskolny VinceSkolny

Carden has posted at Mises a response to this thread and comments. It’s worth reading, as there are some economic misconceptions floating around here.
Sheldon

Vince, speaking for myself only, I found Carden’s response there quite unpersuasive. Just for starters, his notion that “A lot of the [New Deal] interventions came after long declines in the problems (child labor, for example) they are credited with fixing” is quite disingenuous – even if true (debatable), he leaves quite a lot out. Again, just look at the changes in poverty over the past century. We are clearly better off with some form of safety net, whatever the number of free-riders (smaller in dollar amount that corporate free-riders in any case), than we were in a previous era of less-bounded laissez-faire. And I would dearly love to see a description of the free-market anti-poverty program that will bring us to right-wing utopia.
Dan Kervick

Mark LeBar,

I certainly agree that the expansion of markets and finance in the modern period have proven wonderfully effective in creating previously undreamt of forms of wealth, and brought much higher levels of material progress and prosperity. Throughout the entire modern period of expansion, however, governments have participated in the expansion, and done a great deal to fund it by collecting and investing public funds in it. “Public-private partnerships” have been the rule, not the exception.

Also, these new forms of material progress have brought with them new forms of social organization and work, and new challenges to social harmony, social justice, solidarity and cooperation. Uncoordinated economic individualism does unleash a great deal of productive dynamism, but that dynamism contains self-destructive aspects as well. Not all of the destruction is either necessary or “creative”. Capitalism fully unleashed has always shown a tendency to impoverish and immiserate its own consumers and undermine the foundations of the societies that support its existence. So the entire modern period has seen continuing political dialogue about the best way of regulating the new economic tools, and the art of government has seen dramatic creative evolution moving in tandem with the economic innovations.

Re: the new post by Carden that VinceSkolny cites, on the New Deal, Carden is certainly correct that the some of the problems, like child welfare, had already begun to be fixed before the advent of the New Deal. But that is because these problems had already been addressed by earlier rounds of progressive legislation. Certainly, the private market system itself had shown minimal capacity or willingness to address these problems on their own in the absence of political action – or at least pressure.

Much of the criticism of Marxism is in the direction of showing that “capitalism” has historically proved much more resilient and socially progressive than the socialist critics anticipated. And that is true to some extent. But what I think the real lesson is is that it is liberal democracy had proved resilient, and that resiliency has consisted precisely in its ability to debate, appreciate and adapt the best features of the socialist critique of capitalism, and incorporate those critiques as reforms into their ever-evolving mixed economic systems.
John

Ken, I think you are stereo-typing and I think Dan does as well when he says “Libertarians just seem to believe on faith that no government has ever succeeded in doing anything right, ever.” There is a minority that might argue that (some days that would include me). I suspect the more accurate characterization is one that views government as suitable for specific areas of action.

I think Kaleberg would benefit greatly from reading David Bieto’s work on mutual aide societies. Moreover, to attribute all of the gains in health and longevity to government would require substantial work to establish any empirical basis for the claim.
Until that’s provided one might as easily claim that the the government involvement has stunted both our average hight and longevity.
http://profile.typepad.com/andrewlevine Andrewlevine

I think Kaleberg would benefit greatly from reading David Bieto’s work on mutual aide societies.

The reason I’ve found Bieto’s work unconvincing on the libertarian point (though illuminating overall) is that even though he acknowledges that most of the societies he writes of were with a few exceptions supportive of the New Deal, he glosses over this fact, and it is glaring. In From Mutual Aid to Welfare State, even as he points out how hard the Elks advocated for Social Security, he laments the impoverishment of such organizations in favor of the “welfare state” without asking if their decline might mean that their members flocked to government assistance programs and supported them at the polls because they felt the government programs worked better. Bieto hints at this narrative but leaves it largely unexplored.
Ben Southwood

I am very wary about wading into this comment thread ‘discussion’, since it largely seems to consist not in responses to the relevant material, but general strawmen of particular political positions, e.g. libertarians cannot be correct because they (apparently) assume every single government program has been a failure (allegedly) even on its own grounds for success.

I cannot hope to comment on all that’s been said but I would like to bring up two issues in particular which interested me in reading Carden’s article, the blogpost and the two following, Carden’s response, and the comment thread.

Firstly, this is that these confirm the key BHL claim, i.e. that the difference between much of the Left and many libertarians is highly empirical. This is shown clearly by the emphasis placed on whether in fact govt. interventions have been successful or not and on the flow of causation with regards to poverty and prosperity in modern societies. This underlines the importance of this blog, economics and the dialogue in general.

Secondly, I’d like to focus on one particular issue in question, that of child labour. Let’s say child labour was declining until the govt. intervened, and successfully eliminated it. Does this mean the govt. intervention was a good idea? Surely there are other important, relevant factors? Surely different sorts of means of elimination would be preferable? A straight transfer from rich beneficiaries of past interventions (and there are no dearth of these!) to poor families would have gone nearly all the way of eliminating this issue, since education and leisure are normal goods. It is worth also considering whether, in this resulting scenario, some residual child labour would be undesirable. Ought children never to help out on their family’s farm or in their shop?

It seems to me like we ought to be careful in simply supporting any scheme that seems to achieve a given goal.
http://profile.typepad.com/andrewlevine Andrewlevine

It is worth also considering whether, in this resulting scenario, some residual child labour would be undesirable. Ought children never to help out on their family’s farm or in their shop?

You want to talk about strawmen? I suggest looking at the actual laws and regulations in the U.S. on child labor.

http://www.stopchildlabor.org/USchildlabor/fact1.htm

“The above restrictions do not apply to youth who are employed by their parents on a farm owned or operated by their parents.”

There is also a specific exemption for “Minors under age 16 working in a business solely owned or operated by their parents” including retail.
Nathan P.

I agree with Mr. Southwood that this discussion has felt composed of strawmen to a rather unfriendly degree.

And to address the comment of Mr. Levine regarding the comment I am agreeing with, I would point out that bringing up those laws is actually an acknowledgment of the accused ‘strawman’ point. Those laws are recognized as just applications of the otherwise much reviled concept of ‘child labor’. They are not necessarily well understood, though. I haven’t encountered them since I was a child myself and until I read the comment in which they were shared, I had forgotten them.

I doubt their details were deliberately left out of the post. The old rule of ‘assume ignorance, not malice’ comes into play here, and I must say that it is more polite to assume a person doesn’t know a factoid than to assume that they are withholding it for propagandistic purposes.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share the information yourself. Just don’t accuse the person who had lacked it of using a ‘strawman’.
http://profile.typepad.com/andrewlevine Andrewlevine

I doubt their details were deliberately left out of the post.

So do I. My comment was directed at Mr. Southwood, not the post’s author.
John

Andrew, your point is something to keep in mind and something I was not really aware of. From a libertarian perspective, however, I think we can still draw on the private social security net structures Bieto shows us.

I suspect we should also be asking why the membership thought the government plan was better than the private — was it largely due to the crisis of the time which had to have put great stresses on these private support institutions or because they thought the government plan was a better solution for all environments? If the shift were largely crisis driven them I’m not sure your criticism is as strong.

Very good point about the child labor law. In fact I came across a marxist analysis that basically claimed the greatest degree of exploitation was to be found in these family owned businesses — with parents exploiting their children.

Damien RS

You can’t dismiss crisis-driven. “This system works, except when the largest number of people need it during the crises that happen now and again” is kind of absurd, like river levees that keep water in check except when there’s a real flood. Private charity that doesn’t work in recessions is charity that will fail in every decade.

John V

Well said, Ben.

And I think Carden’s response to the general tone of the unfavorable comments is also spot on.

Like I said in my response earlier in the thread, I think people are ignoring the content and focusing on tone and/or making Carden guilty of “leaving stuff out” when it’s just a short article to make a point. It’s not a dissertation.

It seems that Carden’s basic premise is being looked past in an effort to make this whole more or less than it was supposed to be. When a quick intro cannot be taken as intended and is instead attacked for what it didn’t say or how it said it, it’s on the reader…not the writer.

Anyone who wants to take it the next step with Carden should first acknowledge what he said before trying to further develop the discussion. But that part seems to have been skipped.
Pingback: Quote: When X and Y Always Turn Out To Be Mutually Recognizable | Alas, a Blog