Toward a good conspiracy theory

Murray Rothbard said:

The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of "paranoia." First, he stops with the cui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just a hypothesis, and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so. (Perhaps the wackiest example of this was the British journalist Douglas Reed who, seeing that the result of Hitler's policies was the destruction of Germany, concluded, without further evidence, that therefore Hitler was a conscious agent of external forces who deliberately set out to ruin Germany.) Secondly, the bad conspiracy analyst seems to have a compulsion to wrap up all the conspiracies, all the bad guy power blocs, into one giant conspiracy. Instead of seeing that there are several power blocs trying to gain control of government, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alliance, he has to assume — again without evidence — that a small group of men controls them all, and only seems to send them into conflict.

On the other hand:

Were all the Trilateralists and Rockefeller Foundation and Coca-Cola people chosen by [President] Carter simply because he felt that they were the ablest possible people for the job? If so, it's a coincidence that boggles the mind. Or are there more sinister political-economic interests involved? I submit that the naïfs who stubbornly refuse to examine the interplay of political and economic interest in government are tossing away an essential tool for analyzing the world in which we live.

Hmm, says I.

I don't suppose any of those people are active today?

BTW, this post is largely the result of perusing the Mises.org daily articles archive in pursuit of the source of my previous post. I had to check out this article, because I didn't think my boy Murray Rothbard could be led astray by anything as crude as the crap I've heard from the John Birchers or the LaRouchies. Amusingly enough, he lends some support to both groups. That does not mean that he, nor I, desired to support the goals of either group.