The fact is, “capitalism” means, at best, the privilege-laden mixed economy we see all around us. We will fail to communicate if we ignore that fact.
“I think a description of the functioning of a free market calls for the subjunctive case, not the indicative.”
If the cottagers had to leave the land because of acts of Parliament, how can we say simply that they chose “oppressive” factory work because it was the superior alternative?
Kevin Carson: This makes the unwarranted assumption that working for someone else is the only way of reducing risk, as opposed to cooperative ownership, federation, etc..
“And now they’ve sold off all the splints, and contracted out the tourniquets, And if we jump through hoops, then we might just survive.”
Kevin Carson: This school of libertarianism has inscribed on its banner the reactionary watchword: “Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.”
If the privilege remains, statist “corrective” action will be the inevitable result.
The reality is considerably more complicated, with all sorts of permutations and combinations of public and private.
From the Oscar winning documentary “Toward Liberty”.
To speak of a 19th-century libertarian critique of fascism might seem anachronistic, since fascism is generally understood as a 20th-century phenomenon. But it did not spring from nothing, and the libertarians of the 19th century saw it in the making.
Kevin Carson: with Rothbard’s disillusion with (and abandonment of) his New Left alliance. Now I want to look at some of the people who continued the left-Rothbardian tradition.
From before 1969 to the mid-1990s
Kevin Carson: In their equation of progress and productivity with the sheer quantitative mass of capital invested, are stuck in the paleotechnic age.
The growing irrelevance of conventional measures of economic output to our actual material conditions of living has been a recurring theme in recent years.
Kevin Carson: It means we’re in for some interesting times.
Those who see government power and corporate power as being in conflict, and those who seem them as being in cahoots, each have a point.
Intellectual property rights have a tainted past. Originally, both patents and copyrights were grants of monopoly privilege pure and simple.
An all-private system can be oppressive, just as an all-public one can be.
The availability of public space may be a moral precondition for the right to freedom from trespassers.
There’s a popular historical legend that goes like this: Once upon a time, back in the 19th century, the United States economy was almost completely unregulated and laissez-faire.
