C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Anthony Gregory & Anna O. Morgenstern‘s “What Is It That Government Has Built?” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Anthony Gregory & Anna O. Morgenstern‘s “What Is It That Government Has Built?”
$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.
This booklet brings together two recent essays on the corporate state and the production of state capitalism. If corporate liberals insist that we recognize how much government has built the business environment that surrounds us, then surely the next question to ask is – What is this corporate economy that the capitalist state has built?
“There is a deeper truth in Obama’s comments. Many businesses do not merely benefit from state intervention, but would sink without it. Big business’s dependence on government has only increased as government has grown. Yet liberals like Obama and Warren rarely confront the corporate interests that most rely on Washington’s redistribution of wealth to the powerful and socialization of risk. They love taking credit for subsidizing American businesses, but never address (or admit any responsibility for) the full reality of the corporate state. Perhaps they don’t want the inequality they decry traced back to them. . .” – Anthony Gregory
“Libertarians don’t do their cause any good at all when they try to defend big business on free enterprise grounds. There is no free enterprise at that level. No business is going to become big, in this economy, without approval from the gatekeepers. Free enterprise is a system which never existed, except for brief periods of time during historical social unrest. Once an elite is reestablished, it’s back to the game. . . . It’s a crooked game and it’s the functional equivalent of Yaldabaoth’s ‘ersatz reality’ in certain neognostic formulations. They replace our real life, our real myths, our real economic and social relations, with a premanufactured, predesigned substitute that keeps us trapped in the spectacle of an honest world, but it’s all just flash and hot air.” – Anna O. Morgenstern
Anthony Gregory, a Research Editor at the Independent Institute and a blogger at The Huffington Post, is a libertarian activist, writer, and musician. He claims to be an anarchocapitalist, but market anarchists get along with him anyway.
Anna O. Morgenstern, a Contributing Writer at the Center for a Stateless Society, has been an anarchist of one stripe or another for almost 30 years. Her intellectual interests include economic history, social psychology and voluntary organization theory.
