Sheldon Richman: Swartz was a passionate champion of technology’s power to liberate and democratize. He vowed to fight anything which threatened that potential. This offended powerful vested interests.
Carson: The people who hounded Aaron Swartz to his death did so, not even in the realistic hope of victory, but out of the same vindictive impulse that drives a defeated invader to inflict one more indignity on the violated country on its way out.
A fully freed market means liberating essential command posts in the economy from State control, to be reclaimed for market and social entrepreneurship
Carson: To the lords of artificial scarcity, who derive their income from impeding producers’ ability to produce, natural abundance is a danger.
“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: “The central function of the state is to suppress competition, create artificial property, and enable economic ruling classes to extract rents.”
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.
Because in a free society, billionaires like Buffett might have to learn to work for a living.
The availability of public space may be a moral precondition for the right to freedom from trespassers.
Dawie Coetzee: How Innovation is Used to Advance the Interests of the State-Industrial Machine.
A prompt from a reader to consolidate some sketches.
This calculation argument can be applied not only to a state-planned economy, but also to the internal planning of the large corporation.
Charles Johnson: Left-libertarians are sometimes known to stick on distinctions and the definitions of words.
Corporate capitalism is organized around the imperatives, not of maximizing efficiency, but of maximizing the extraction of rents. When maximum extraction of rents requires artificial imposition of inefficiency, the capitalists’ state is ready and willing.
Easing the Transition to an Alternative Economy
Kevin Carson: By all means, enjoy yourselves. Get it out of your system.
Gary Chartier: Left-libertarianism in the relevant sense is a position that is simultaneously leftist and libertarian.
Carson: Whatever corporate copyright lockdown Disney puts the franchise under couldn’t possibly exceed George Lucas’s worst. The Disney acquisition actually offers to breathe new life into the Star Wars universe.
