no people, no problem

The recent ASET book club discussion and Boyes posting on the challenge of engaging in civil discourse with statists continues to nag at me.

Jonathan J. Bean's post over on Liberty and Power and the recent posting at Mises confirm the importance of both civil discourse and the continuing frustration that advocates of liberty encounter - both in and out of the academy.

Higher education, as Daniel Klein and others have pointed out, is characterized by a lack of intellectual diversity - the overwhelming majority of those who teach hold statist ideology, what Sowell calls the unconstrained vision.

Bean's comments might lead one to conclude that once the current generation of liberty advocates pass on, that the conversation dies. I am not that pessimistic, I work with a few younger faculty and have encountered younger colleagues at Liberty Fund colloquia who are persuasive advocates of liberty.

That said, the current popular and scholarly debate certainly seems framed in such a manner as to generate loud and abrasive attack rather than civil discourse. I wonder to what extent the economic climate has influenced this climate. I am thinking of Benjamin Friedman's thesis in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth that tolerance, openness and engagement are cyclical qualities.