Damning With Grammar

by Liberty and Power

Never mind the silly attempt to resurrect the Soviet-style planned economy (Jesus, is the body even cold yet?). That's a different post.

What if instead of this, Matthew Yglesias, at the end of a post commenting on Hilter's notable highway construction and punctual public transportation," conceded" that,"on the other hand, millions of Jews got themselves killed in Hitler's various schemes."

Yeah. We'd be revolted. Awfully creative with sentence structure, that Matthew Yglesias.

But I suppose it's okay to not only brush off the deaths of millions of halocaust victims, but to actually implicate them in their own deaths, so long as you do so en route to defending an anti-capitalist philosophy.

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Gus diZerega - 5/26/2004

The excerpt from Yglesias is out of context and very misleading. Here is what preceded it:

"Kieran Healy writes about a new book arguing that Soviet economic performance up to the 1970s or so has been underrated. Sounds interesting. Soviet economic management, obviously, flew in the face of everything we currently believe about the efficacy of command-and-control systems and historians are always able to point to dozens and dozens of specific examples of some scheme or another being utterly wrecked by the party-state-economy fusion."

There is nothing positive about Stalin in his post - just a curiosity about a book arguing that perhaps at a purely developmental level it might not have been an utter failure. It scarcely represents an endorsement of statism or central planning. And there are FAR more reasonable ways to interpret his statement about Stalin's victims.

This is the kind of out-of-context left bashing that right wingers who helped elect the current thugs in office practice to a fine art. I am disappointed to see it appearing here. Radley Balko apparently found the excerpt on a different blog. Too bad he didn't check the whole thing.

Yglesias is no Libertarian, and he describes himself as a man of the left. But he seems to treat libertarians with more rrespect than this post does him, as can be seen in his May 25 post on libertarians:
http://www.matthewyglesias.com/