Tag Archives: Freedom

“Anarcho”-Capitalism (Proprietarianism) vs. Real Libertarian Anarchism

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An American’s sacred right to property being profaned.

Continuing from my last post, here reproduced are excerpts from the Usenet debates I had in the summer and fall of 2002, mostly, with self-described “anarcho”-capitalists. The original argument concerned “rights” and “freedom,” but it quickly led, as most debates with “anarchos” go, to the question of property. As I mentioned yesterday, these issues, I believe, lie at the very heart of the debates going on presently over the debt-ceiling (actually over revenues vs. spending) in Congress and the media. But you won’t hear our pundits or politicians for the most part bring it down to the very ground it all springs from. Continue reading →

The “Anarcho”-Capitalist Conundrum

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In the wake of September 11, 2001 and continuing through the lead-up to the Iraq War and into 2003, I was involved in an intense debate on several political Usenet groups (my involvement in political Usenet, actually, goes back to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1997-1998), in which there was a clique of rabidly right wing libertarians holding forth on what they called “anarcho-capitalism.” Many believe that the only logical conclusion to right libertarianism (and to history, actually) is capitalism completely unfettered by government. In a sense, they’re right (except for the history part): If you think government is bad for business and you think business is the best way to distribute resources, then the best government is no government at all.  Of course a lot of Libertarians believe government is necessary to provide for the defense of business interests, but the anarchos would argue that if businesses need to be defended, they should do it themselves. Abolish government, they say, abolish borders, open all the world to capitalism. Let the market determine the value of everything. Continue reading →

Stiglitz: “The belief in free and unfettered markets brought the world to the brink of ruin.”

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Joesph Stiglitz says supply-side economics almost destroyed the world in 2008, and its back again to try to finish the job. Continue reading →

Republicans Are Not Free (Is the President?)

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Lancet-fluke infected ant marches to the top of a grass blade where a sheep will ingest it. Much like House Republicans and the supply-side mind virus.

Let’s get down to brass tacks: Republicans are slaves to a fantasy ideology called supply-side. They are not free to consider any actions other than those that enrich the rich. The ostensible logic of this compulsion of theirs is that the wealthy alone are capable of distributing their own wealth, that they do this by investing in ventures that create jobs for the non-wealthy.  But let’s be real:  Republicans are not free to think beyond the first step: Enrich the rich. Any sector other than the rich doesn’t exist for Republicans. Enrich the rich.

In this, Republicans are exactly like the lancet-fluke infected ants Daniel Dennett likes to cite when discussing freedom and religion. Like these helplessly suicidal ants, Republicans are merely the vessel by which a very dangerous meme propagates itself. Until very recently it was not absolutely clear how dangerous this meme was, but the conditions for a perfect storm unleashing the danger have been brewing since the tandem events of the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. Continue reading →

Is Ron Paul’s Principle of “Voluntary Associations” Racist Code?

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2. All peaceful, voluntary economic and social associations are permitted; consent is the basis of the social and economic order.

–from The Ten Principles of a Free Society

I mentioned in the first of this series that Tea Party and post-Democrat leftist favorite Ron Paul long ago left a trail of basely racist remarks as he crept to his current place of near-prominence in the national and world debate on issues of war, peace and economics. The article that first detailed Paul’s association with fringe-right ideas is by James Kirchik and it that appeared in The New Republic in January 2008 (quoted after the jump): Continue reading →

A Critique of Ron Paul’s Ten Principles of a Free Society: Natural Rights?

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My first encounter with the idea/s of Ron Paul came more than a decade ago on a long-defunct Website, I’m sad to say, the name of which I don’t recall. It was a repository of intelligence about some of the more bizarre beliefs of prominent right-wingers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were particularly favorite targets. But there was one page devoted to Ron Paul’s outrageous racism, a catalog of some truly ignorant and occasionally horrifyingly mean-spirited remarks Paul was alleged to have made about poor people of color over the course of his political and academic careers.

When, during the last decade, Paul’s courageous (or simply intellectually rigid?) anti-war stance earned him a lot of love from many on the left and heightened his stature internationally, I wanted to double-check my first prejudice against him. Alas, the site was gone, and the web seemed to have been scrubbed of any evidence of Paul’s backwardness on race.  (A Google check today, however, now that Paul is a big favorite of Tea Party types, shows that his racist past–and probable present– is ready to come back and bite him at any time: Jonathan Chait and James Kirchik for example have written on the subject for TNR.) Continue reading →