Writes Karen De Coster:
3:07 pm on December 1, 2010Regarding your LewRockwell.com link from November 30: “9 Shocking Examples of Black Friday Violence…” As you know, I have long researched and written on the topic of hyper-consumerism and the record levels of household debt, foreclosures, and bankruptcies we witnessed during and after the bubble period, along with the spiritual debasement that drives individuals to behave in a manner that causes the aforementioned issues. Since I have posted some blogs — on your site as well as my own website — about some of the more ridiculous news items concerning the recent Black Friday madness, I have received what I’d refer to as a record number of hate mails, or even those that can be categorized “how dare you?!” mails.
This topic of criticizing the madness of the Idiocracy, as they resume their merry spending ways in the midst of an economic collapse, tends to make people exceedingly vicious. I suppose that is so because when I link to and describe real events that are in the news (stuff I do not make up), and explain the insanity of it all in my own commentary, I am describing their own behavior, and hence I am “attacking” them. I have received more raging (and borderline psycho) emails from a few recent blog posts than I have from my last three dozen full-length articles combined.
Unfortunately, too many people haven’t connected the dots. The underlying cause, the Federal Reserve and its heated-economy-turned-credit-bubble-turned-bust, is the launch pad for the excess (cheap) credit, the continued lack of market interest rates, the “have-pulse-will-loan” environment (lack of lending standards), the housing boom, and the ensuing bust. Yet they write me in response to my posts critical of Black Friday madness, and they say, “What does any of that have to do with Austrian economics or libertarianism?” First off, not everything I say or do has to have something “to do with” Austrian Economics or libertarianism. Who made this rule and when did it start?
However, for the reasons mentioned above, it does have to do with economics and/or libertarianism. Tom Woods did a pretty nifty job of assembling the facts about the government’s destruction of the economy, via interventionism, in his book “Meltdown.” And that’s a very “Austrian” view of things. Do people really miss the point that a bubble-inflationary economy feeding the masses a sense of false prosperity makes people go crazy, lose control, and, essentially, causes the moral fabric of a society to decay rapidly? For more on this, see Jörg Guido Hülsmann’s “The Spiritual and Cultural Legacy of Fiat Inflation” and Paul Cantor’s “Hyperinflation and Hyperreality: Thomas Mann in Light of Austrian Economics.”
The other (really sloppy) argument made by libertarians who have much to learn is that it is somehow “unlibertarian” to criticize the actions of others. They say that any action that is voluntary must be free of all criticism from libertarians. Really? And that is because…? Criticism does not equal calling for the force of laws — at all. So why do libertarians pretend to not understand that? For instance, you and I may, as libertarians, support the voluntary actions of selling one’s body (prostitution) or shooting up with heroin, but we are also free to criticize the actions as unhealthy, immoral, disgusting, or just plain stupid as long as we don’t stand uninvited on their private property to do so. Additionally, the Black Friday consumer madness you linked to involved unprovoked aggression against others. Does this sort of madness not strike a chord with folks as they watch the insanity unwind itself over toys and video games? If folks are brought to this level of madness over DVDs and video games at Wal-Mart and plastic junk at Toys R Us, how will they react when food is scarce, a box of Cheerios is $18, unemployment checks are non-existent, and everyday goods and services are no longer affordable?
As I’ve told you in the past, Lew, the movie Idiocracy was a documentary, not a comedy. You saw, in those Black Friday riot videos, all of those people acting completely out of control and inciting riots over the purchase of everyday junk. Do you think such a mass uprising — with people charging the doors, trampling fellow human beings, and beating each other up — would occur over the race to grab a copy of Mises’s pocket edition of Human Action? We know that would not occur because such actions on the part of individuals are a result of their level of independent thinking and intelligence (or lack thereof).
