Free Nation that undertook to enforce slavery contracts would not be a Free Nation worth fighting to build or to defend.
A fully freed market means liberating essential command posts in the economy from State control, to be reclaimed for market and social entrepreneurship
I hope that you realize that not everyone who supports universal healthcare supports government healthcare, and not everyone who opposes government healthcare opposes universal healthcare.
A genuinely radical project beckons, one that integrates the explanatory power of libertarian social theory and the context-keeping orientation of dialectical method.
It requires that we question the fundamental basis of the current statist system.
If libertarians continue to use the word “capitalism” as some kind of ahistorical ideal, they will forever be dismissed by the Left as rationalist apologists for a state-capitalist reality.
So it seems that any attempt by the anti-corporatist free market movement to engage with the mainstream Left will focus, of necessity, on a few issues.
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.
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.
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.
Intellectual property rights have a tainted past. Originally, both patents and copyrights were grants of monopoly privilege pure and simple.
