Layperson’s Terms

Wandering through the cottage industry of anti-Wikipedia sites, one hears the occasional flippant remark suggesting that if you “want reliability, read [Encyclopedia] Britannica“[1] . And we are inclined to believe them. They are, after all, skeptics—they would never thoughtlessly direct us to a resource they hadn’t vetted themselves, right?

So thought I. Then I found Encyclopedia Britannica’s libertarianism article. I hope you’re appalled as I am.

What is so objectionable about it? Click the link to the article above.

Scroll down.

Down.

Lower.

Keep closing the “Sign up now!” popup that reappears every eight seconds (no exaggeration—I timed it).

Still lower…

There—bottom of the “Criticism” section. The article was written by none other than David Boaz.

Ah, David Boaz. How do we know thee? As vice president of the Cato Institute? Author of Libertarianism: A Primer? Rich white male? Executive in a think tank that conducts no primary research of its own and receives inordinate amounts of money from environmentally harmful corporations? Person on whom I wax negative?

David Boaz is one of a growing number of people who are professional libertarians; he makes a living pimping libertarianism as much as humanly possible. Hence my objection to EB choosing him to write their libertarianism article: a professional evangelical libertarian is not a reliable source on libertarian theory. He is far too close to be able to credibly expound upon it. For example, he paves over about half of all libertarian theory, clearly only interested in expounding on his favorite parts, and ignores the parts he can’t be bothered with. He also explicitly ties libertarianism to classical liberalism (as espoused by John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and the other dead people I can’t be bothered to name right now), thus asserting a libertarian creation myth as fact and vaporizing his credibility as a historian.

Most damning is his treatment of the criticism of libertarianism. (To spare you the aggravating task of working through EB’s pop-up windows or paying $70 a year, you can find a reproduction of the text here.) Boaz forgets that it is supposed to be a “Criticism” section, not a “Criticism and Rebuttal”. He writes that “some critics” have [insert criticism here], but always follows through with a rebuttal (i.e. “Libertarians respond that…”). This tactic effectively minimizes the impact and severity of the criticisms, encouraging the audience to dismiss them—”See? He already refuted it!”—despite the fact that his rebuttals amount to little more than hand-waving.

Britannica made the choice of allowing someone with a powerful incentive to whitewash unfavorable information write their libertarianism article. This is peculiarly inconsistent—EB did not hire a communist to write their communism article. Instead, they had Lewis S. Feuer and David T. McLellan write it. Note that neither is a communist. Also note their qualifications: they proclaim their academic degree and academic position front and center. As opposed to Boaz, whose proudest accomplishment seems to be that he is very successful at pimping libertarianism[2]. That he even went to college—Vanderbuilt University—is almost a footnote[3]. (Suspiciously, he declines to specify what his major was—who wants to bet it’s political science and not economics?)

On an amusing side note, Boaz also claims to be an expert in such non-academic fields as “the failure of big government, the politics of the baby-boom generation, drug prohibition, and educational choice”[3]. That’s amazing, David. My father is an expert in the fields of “failure of big sprinkler to water the lawn,” office politics, and “sorting out the recycling”.

My point is not that Encyclopedia Britannica is biased as a whole, or that it is less reliable than Wikipedia. Far be it from me to make such a weighty accusation based off a single case. My point is that we should constantly evaluate the credibility and bias of even trusted sources.

You never know when they may try to slip a whopper past you.

Tags: bias, David Boaz, Encyclopedia Britannica, Libertarianism, wikipedia

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 3:52 and is filed under Attack pieces, Libertarianism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.