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Roderick T. Long: Jedi Knight
Here’s some of what I would have said if I were smarter:
“Corporate liberalism functions via a façade of opposition between a purportedly progressive statocracy and a purportedly pro-market plutocracy. The con operates by co-opting potential opponents of the establishment; those who recognise that something’s amiss with the statocratic wing are lured into supporting the plutocratic wing, and vice versa. Whenever the voters grow weary of the plutocracy, they’re offered the alleged alternative of an FDR or JFK; whenever they grow weary of the statocracy, they’re offered the alleged alternative of a Reagan or Thatcher. Perhaps the balance of power shifts slightly toward one side or the other; but the system remains essentially unchanged. (Which explains, for example, why the recent much-trumpeted power shift in Congress has resulted in precious little policy change.)
“Alas, just as the insights of the 19th century were largely lost by the 1920s, so the insights of the 1960s seem to have become largely lost by the 1980s. Probably Reagan indeed played a crucial role in sowing confusion once more, this time by wrapping fascism in libertarian rhetoric just as the Progressives and FDR had wrapped fascism in leftist rhetoric. In any case, many libertarians today (sometimes even professed followers of Rothbard) have gone back to thinking of business as a persecuted minority to be defended against the creeping “socialism” of the regulatory state, while many on the left (sometimes even professed anarchists, like Noam Chomsky) look to the federal government as a bulwark against so-called “laissez-faire” and indulge in nostalgia for the New Deal.”
Thanks Anthony.
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I like Roderick Long’s stuff, he has some great lectures over at Mises.org. He frequently tries to defend free market principles with philosphy. Which is what needs to be done.
Check these lecture titles out over there and listen to them:
http://www.mises.org/media.aspx?action=showname&ID=383
Apriorism and Positivism in the Social Sciences
They Saw it Coming: The 19th-Century Libertarian Critique of Fascism
Rothbard’s ‘Left and Right’: 40 Years Later
Oh, by the way check out Kevin Carson’s blog:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/
He has some good stuff too, I don’t agree with the mutualist stuff though
Only a Marxist would think big business benefits from big government. The state is anti-corporate, and always has been. Corporations are persecuted by the welfare mothers who steal their money through taxes, thanks to evil anti-corporate policies that are in place despite the best efforts of libertarian-leaning free-marketers like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to reverse them.
Without going into more depth on this than the excerpt you posted, I think it is too simple to divide in two categories and think that everyone must be diverted into one or the other. There are the visible appurtenances of power, of course, but there are also the hidden holders of the levers, whether they are the owners of the corporations or the people themselves. What we are doing goes beyond a change of party, it is a change of mind, a transformation to a new way of making decisions through the mechanism of the internet.
Once you understand that this is about empowering you and me and everyone who can and wants to publish their opinions, analysis, or anything relevant to our political decisionmaking, then you will have nothing to fear from it. Our conversation here is part of how we do it, and as it crosses from and between blogs. You can see how the blogs were able to support two of our own (of whom only one had my actual support because I don’t know the other one well) against the attack machine, if you followed the story about John Edwards campaign.
The idea that you have something to fear from democracy implies that you do not have the confidence to make your own arguments and persuade us of their merits, because here you have a platform that you can use to make any proposals you like and have them given regard by those who care to read them, as I am doing now.
Anthony, you are simply wrong. Corporations are creatures of the state, and exist only by state charter. Big corporations make big money from big government. See Halliburton, for one current example.
re: “The idea that you have something to fear from democracy implies that you do not have the confidence to make your own arguments and persuade us of their merits, because here you have a platform that you can use to make any proposals you like and have them given regard by those who care to read them, as I am doing now.”
No. Only that if the majority is wrong they still don’t have the right to control me. Our anti-pot law and anti-war arguments are superior to our opposition, no? And yet democracy delivers oppression violence against our wishes.
BTW: Anthony was making fun of the idiot-libertarians above. See my interview of him from yesterday to see where he’s really coming from:
http://dissentradio.com/radio/gregory_2_8_7.mp3
Scott, what we have now is not democracy, but a kind of plutocracy. From that perspective, cannabis prohibition makes perfect sense, although it is wrong and anti-democratic.
It is not anti-democratic.
The vast majority of Americans favor drug prohibition. My point is that the fact that they all think so should not bind me.
Should it?
No, it should not bind you. You have sovereignty of your body.
Drug prohibition is not cannabis prohibition. It is not appropriate to confuse cannabis, which is benign, with harmful drugs like heroin or cocaine, each should be considered independently, and while you should have the sovereignty to put anything you want in your body it does not follow that anyone can sell it without regulation.
But of course it does. If I have a right to possess and consume pot I have the right to possess and consume heroin or anything else and to trade in it too. By what principle don’t I?
The American majority favors pot prohibition too. Democracy does not equal liberty.
And if I have sovereignty over my body, why should (even the most perfect) democracy have any authority over me whatsoever (aside, perhaps, for protecting others against acts of force, theft or fraud initiated by me)?
Me above: “But of course it does. If I have a right to possess and consume pot I have the right to possess and consume heroin or anything else and to trade in it too. By what principle don’t I?”
What I mean is, skateboarding is harmful to me, but you don’t think the democracy should be able to prevent me from doing that? So is watching TV. And besides, pot is harmful. Just ask any of these guys who listen to the KAOS Report how often I forget what the hell I’m talking about just because of one tiny little tangent.
But it’s still only my decision.