The reader looks at the post title and asks themselves "Who is Mike Huben?" Huben was the founder/editor of Critiques of Libertarianism, a website that had been around since the mid-1990s. The original version of the website was a simple all-text-and-hyperlinks affair, as were most sites in the Netscape Navigator era of the Internet; a few years ago Huben switched over to a Wiki-style site at another address....and then it all imploded. The site went blank a few years ago, and then went down. The original (now badly link-rotted) also vanished, though you can get to it via archive.org.
So why care about Huben? The guy knows his stuff; he was arguing with 'tarians and O-ists (what they were calling Libertarians and Objectivists in the '90s) on Usenet newsgroups back when The Internet was brand-new. He had actually written one of the first FAQs on the subject ("A Non-Libertarian FAQ", link here.) My understanding is that Mike Huben moved to Costa Rica (?) within the last decade and started a new life, which I think meant that he gave up doing math for a paycheck, and the English-language Internet stopped being so damn interesting.
As long as you are here, please check out Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature, which started off as a book of the same title by Greg S. Nyquist in 2001. I know I first found the blog via Huben's website, which I forgot to mention was a giant collection of links on top of being a series of critiques of Libertarian ideas; they had an entire section on Rand and Objectivism (her take on Libertarianism). It was here I first read the name "Murray Rothbard" in conjunction with his satirical play "Mozart Was a Red", which took pot-shots at Ayn Rand's group of fan-collaborators, "The Collective" which he was a part of for a period, alongside Allan "The Undertaker" Greenspan. In fact, the Rand stuff was the most interesting part of Critiques of Libertarianism; that woman was an utter nut. The ARCHN blog hammers that home if you read the posts from 2006 to 2014. Pass it along to friends who have fallen into the Rand rabbit-hole. And if anybody who reads this knows Mike Huben, please pass along that I would love to interview him on the subject, because of all the overlap with the early years of Wikipedia (he might have argued with Wales and Sanger in ancient times.)
I knew Mike but haven't seen him in recent decades. I don't remember if he ever argued with Jimbo, but if so it was probably on HPO so you could look — I thing Usenet archives are still up.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a response to his FAQ:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/response_to_huben.html
Thank you for your response. Mike Huben has not answered his email for a while; I tried to tell him that the head of Neo-Tech/Zon Power had died, I think he responded to that, but He has not responded to questions about the Wiki version of "Critiques."
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