I'd feel better about that graph if it wasn't so horribly spun. The vertical scale is showing a delta from the original value, not the value. It looks like an exponential explosion in spending when it's actually about 3.5x since 1970.

Honestly, if I were an investor and a startup tried to sell me that chart, I'd walk out of the room.

The broader point is valid, though. Education policy in the US sucks. But the details matter a whole lot -- we're spending on the wrong things (tests, security) and not on the things that are known to make a difference (e.g. teacher salary -- make it competetive with other professions and you'll get better teachers). It's far more complicated than the libertarian "Gov'mnt spending bad, hur, hur, hur." line.

No need to ridicule libertarians like that. There are different kinds of libertarians, different movements, and not all have such simple ways of thinking. At least libertarians invite criticism in the field of inflated government spendings.

Usually mass-media use the worst examples of libertarians to make fun of the whole concept/idea behind it. That's a common fallacy used to fight different kind of groups, when they are not mainstream and opposed to the current "approved way of thinking".

EDIT: Hayek, Nobel Prize in Economy in 1974, is one of the most well-known libertarians out there: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1...

His advices on Economy were notoriously NOT followed.

To be fair: the source of this discussion was a verifiably distortionist graph produced by a very mainstream libertarian think tank. To my mind, you're simply arguing the converse fallacy. The fact that there are smart people who hold any given opinion doesn't mean that the group associated with that opinion is worthy of praise.

Basically: Hayek being "right" about something doesn't make the Cato institute "not true libertarians".

It's not just about being worthy of praise. I am just making the point that "libertarian" is a too generic term to put everything and everyone in a single bag. There are anarcho-libertarians, libertarians who support the idea of a balance between government and private investment, and many other variations.

I think the only generic you can say about libertarians is that : they care about freedom of property and consider government intervention in private affairs with criticism. Beyond this point, the commonalities disappear, and there is a wider range of opinions among libertarians than in any other political group out there. There is no real "dogma", while Von Mises and Hayek are more or less recognized as Thought leaders for some of them.

I did not claim, by the way, that Hayek was "right" about anything, I just wanted to show one of the figureheads of some parts of the movement. Getting a Nobel Prize does not mean anything to me, and I personally feel very strongly that the recent Economy Nobel Prize Jo Stiglitz does not know what he is talking about (he's just an old school Keynesian, and even Keynes himsel admitted in being wrong later in his life). Stiglitz has a clear political agenda that has nothing to do with actual economic sense.

I didn't get my previous view of libertarians from mass media. I've seen people who I'm pretty sure are libertarian in this very thread arguing intelligently against extremist views. They usually go unchallenged outside HN, which is how people get a bad impression.

Libertarianism isn't well-served by letting anarchists call themselves libertarian unchallenged. I would like to see more of what I see on HN out in public view.