More brilliance from the genius-commenters at File 770. Seriously, what you have to remind yourself whenever you read them is to keep in mind that they quite genuinely believe that they are our intellectual betters. It makes everything much, much funnier.
Glenn Hauman on May 25, 2015 at 9:51 am said:
Stevie: The deal with Tor means that Scalzi gets to write, and all the other stuff is done by Tor who are better at it than Scalzi is; VD is too egotistical to accept that he isn’t the best at everything he does. Scalzi certainly has a healthy ego but he’s got the brains to know that it doesn’t make any sense to spend his time doing something which other people do betterMore, that implies that Beale has never heard of Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, which states that you should be doing what you’re best at even if you do other things better than other people, as it’s a waste of your efforts otherwise. Surprising for Beale to claim to be so well versed in economics and yet be ignorant of a basic tenet of the field.
I wonder what Mr. Hauman believes I was addressing when I wrote the column entitled The Religion of Free Trade, which begins in the following manner:
Let us suppose I told you of a certain doctrine in which millions of people believe without ever having read the book in which it is contained, which is predicated upon a situation that has never existed, and promises positive consequences that not only have never been delivered, but we are told cannot even be measured and cannot be realized without achieving something that has never been done before in the history of Man. Furthermore, the doctrine was developed by a gambler and politician with absolutely no credentials or qualifications on the subject, which subject he had never encountered before the age of 27, in tandem with a related theory that is so obviously insane that barely anyone has ever even heard of it.
So long as we are careful to set aside any reliance upon the genetic fallacy, does this sound like a doctrine that is not only infallible, but one that it would be crazy to even consider questioning? And yet, the fervor with which the advocates of the free-trade doctrine defend David Ricardo’s outdated, disproven theory of comparative advantage and decry those who question it is so ferocious as to indicate the nature of a belief that can only be described as religious.
David Ricardo was without question a brilliant and successful man, but what is much less often noted is how intellectually dishonest he was. In a previous WND column, titled Free Trade Harms America, I showed how Joseph Schumpeter labeled his peculiar and tautological method of argument the “Ricardian Vice.” Furthermore, he was not even the original author of the theory of Comparative Advantage, it having been first introduced by Robert Torrens in “An Essay on the External Corn Trade” two years before Ricardo transformed a specific argument for a specific situation into something passing for a general principle, which he published in “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.”
Truly, my ignorance on the subject, which I also addressed in 2010 and in 2014, astounds. The theory of Comparative Advantage also came up in my interview with Ian Fletcher, who has devoted a considerable amount of time and effort to utterly demolishing Ricardo.
Remember, SJWs always lie. And perhaps more importantly, we again see an example of the midwit having so little ability to grasp what his intellectual superior is saying that he erroneously assumes stupidity and ignorance on said superior’s part. As it happens, I am probably one of the 100 people on the planet most equipped to discuss David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage in critical detail, so it is vastly amusing to see Mr. Hauman assert that I am “ignorant of a basic tenet of the field.”
Perhaps Mr. Hauman, being such a noted expert in Ricardian theory, would do us all the favor of calculating the real value of Mr. Scalzi’s new contract based on the only true determinant of profit.
And just to be clear, if you are not one of the five people reading this who understand the reference, that is a joke.