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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Entirely too glib

By Megan McArdle
Dec 12 2008, 8:45 AM ET Comment

I don't understand what Mark Kleiman is trying to get at here, either by labelling Glenn Reynolds a "Glibertarian", or by this:

So what's a good glibertarian to do when it turns out that the free market has been flooding the environment with de-masculinizing chemicals? Support regulation? Support tort lawsuits?

As Tom Lehrer said in a different context, they have a hard problem, like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis.

Never fear: There's no problem so large that a real, manly glibertarian can't pretend it has a "free-market" solution. Didn't Ronald Coase prove there's no such thing as an externality?* Self-organizing complexity uber alles!

I don't think I've seen Instapundit argue that there was a free market solution to feminizing chemicals.  Indeed, the post didn't say anything at all about what we should do; it just pointed out that it might be happening.

There is often an operating assumption that failing to vigorously suggest regulation, or to preface/postface any post about a problem in the world with a sarcastic remark about how if it weren't for all the jerks who don't vote for Democrats, this never would have happened, is actually equivalent to stating that anarchocapitalism works. 

The failure to have a knee-jerk reaction is not, in fact, evidence of a knee-jerk reaction in the other direction.  Personally, I haven't posted on this, but if I did, I probably would have posted about what Glenn did.   I would have done so not because I think the government won't ultimately be involved in solving the problem, if it gets solved, but because I assume it will be solved in the standard boring way already in place, which is that the EPA will regulate the emission of these chemicals.  There are some potentially interesting issues in how you do a cost-benefit analysis on loss of masculinity, but I don't have any ideas on that front.

I also really, really wish that liberals would drop the "Glibertarian" label.  First of all, I don't like any variation on political labels designed to insult, and I doubt that Mark thinks the use of "Dimmocrat" reflects well on the person who employs it.  And second of all, on the internet the label is usually deployed by liberals who have taken it upon themselves to define what a "real" libertarian is, i.e. a libertarian who has never publicly much disagreed with said liberals.  We don't go around writing people out of the progressive movement, or putting block quotes around "progressive", no matter how foolish we think the people are, or how badly we think their stated positions betray the true goals of the movement.  Why not put aside the juvenile name-calling and engage the arguments?

In this context it particularly makes no sense, because trust me, if anything "Glibertarians" like Glenn and me are closer to you on this issue than most of the "real" libertarians, who are a lot closer to anarchocapitalists or minarchists.  The question is not "what's a Glibertarian to do", but "What's a libertarian to do".  In my case, the answer seems easy: regulate it with as close to a market-type mechanism as you can.  But you see, that's why I'm not a 'real' libertarian.




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