More here in a piece he wrote criticizing the bailout.
As a subsidiarist, I disagree with Larison's strict, Ron-Pauline, Libertarian principles, but I respect his consistency and the rigor of his thinking. His conservative principles have led him to see the dangers to Liberty posed by the GOP and Dem collaboration to be as serious as I see them.
For what it's worth, as a subsidiarist, I am not in principle opposed to federal intervention in the financial markets. We have good reason to be suspicious about whether this intervention is necessary, and if it is necessary whether it will be effective. I am quite sympathetic to what Larison in the above excerpted from post says here:
Few on the right are more hostile to the perverse appeal to “creative destruction” than I am when it is used to justify de-industrialization, the displacement of people, the transformation of local communities or demographic upheaval through mass immigration, but what we are faced with this week is the victory of Hamiltonian collusion between finance and government to use the latter’s apparatus of power to shore up the former’s wealth. Central government is robbing the people to prop up concentrated wealth, and claiming in the process that it is doing us a favor. Never mind that the government’s alarmism may well be wrong.
But by no means do I think that the only alternative is to simply let the markets play themselves out. It's one thing if the the people gaming the market system are punished by the folly of their risk-taking; it's quite another if there is a serious risk that the rest of us must suffer because of their folly.
So that's where Larison and I part company. This situation would never have got to this point if there were prudent, federally imposed rules limiting the risks these players can take insofar as they might do harm to the commonweal. I'm all for risk-taking where the risk-taker reaps the rewards as well as the liabilities, but not when such risk-taking has the potential to punish people who have no stake in the reaping the rewards. This debacle should never have been allowed to happen in the first place. That's just common sense, but common sense that Libertarian principles obstruct one who has them from embracing.
And whether one is hostile to appeals to it or not, isn't creative destruction concomitant with strict libertarianism? I know that the great Whig Burke looking forward from his perch in 1800 embraced laissez-faire, but I wonder if having seen the destruction it wrought in the ensuing century he would have still done so from the perspective of 1900. I don't know, but I do know that anybody who is a free-market capitalist and someone who values the preservation of stable community life, with its traditional values and mores is living an unresolvable contradiction.
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