We don't have a free market. Blaming the crash on freedom is ridiculous.

A far stronger case could be made that the crash was because markets aren't free enough, since those taking risks knew governments would back them up.

It's an interesting and very complex topic, but this article is little more than nakedly partisan mud-flinging. The crash proves nothing, except that modern economics is beyond the ken of modern man.

No, no, no. Libertarianism is not the philosophy that free markets will never crash. Libertarianism is the idea that government intervention is morally wrong, and many libertarians believe that it is always eventually destructive.

The article does not address the bigger question: What government intervention would have prevented this?

The article is disturbing because not only does it lack rigorous logical arguments, it openly mocks libertarians for using them. This kind of anti intellectual attitude is common among republicans, but I am surprised to see slate publish an article that espouses it.

uncov should mock PressFlip.

This really is a hack though. It only works in high school rules by exploiting a formation designed for kicks, but using that formation for passing plays. Since it doesn't work at higher levels, it's actually a disservice to any players who will want to play college ball afterward.

It's clever, for sure, but I'm fairly certain it will be eliminated quickly.

I usually don't take pleasure in the misfortune of others, but I'm having a real hard time not pulling a Nelson, "Ha ha!"

Reminds me of the maxim: Be nice to people on the way up, because they're the same ones you're going to meet on the way back down again.

... and promptly takes up spewing trash again, which is being gobbled up by the whiny masses on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/77sl1/paul_grah...

What a nasty individual.

Everything that's abnormal isn't a "hack."

Wouldn't the next cycle be a better indicator? I am guessing it took a while for folks to get co-founders, work on idea towards a prototype, etc. -- all of which took longer than the past few weeks.

"Speaking truth to power"? More like, flinging feces at productive people.

The article says we are in the problems we have now b/c 3 people who explicitly believe in libertarian or libertarian like ideas followed their philosophy and deregulated specific portions of the market.

The added, and somewhat implicit premise, is that these actions are logically implied by libertarianism, since libertarians are known for logical consistency and the people at fault are a good example of this libertarian virtue.

Thus, their failure of policy is an implied failure of libertarianism. This is analogous, which the article points out, with the failure of communism - the best practical example of the ideology in practice is unsuccessful thus invalidating the ideology.

So, claiming that we don't have a free market does not address the argument the article makes. Instead, it is like the communists claiming communism hasn't worked so far only b/c it hasn't been implemented purely. Even if this is true, arguments like this only mean that the proposed philosophy is practically unworkable, since it is not possible to purely implement any ideology.

Maybe Knuth was more of a rebel back in the day, but somehow I can't imagine him having that sort of response.

In Randall Munroe's Authors@Google talk [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24], Don Knuth asks him a question at ~21:30 and at ~25:30 Randall asks Knuth about this very anecdote. Knuth's response is "I've been told this story a number of times...but I was impressed by him more than he was impressed by me."

A good satirist can laugh at himself. That is not the impression I get from this fellow.