I don’t see anything wrong with buying “shit you don’t need.” There are lots of things that I don’t need, but which I choose to buy anyway because it makes my life better to have them. E.g., books, music, tasty food, computer equipment, furniture, hot running water, trips to visit my family and friends, etc. etc. etc. Of course, I could choose to abstain from these and limit my spending only to necessities. But why should I?

Of course, there are also many activities that make your life worthwhile that do not require a purchase. To the extent that corporatism cuts people off from these forms of enjoyment, corporate capitalism should be undermined and resisted. But whether or not one chooses to personally abstain from spending on non-necessities does just about nothing to address these issues. The power of corporate capitalism to restrict alternative forms of enjoyment has very little to do with individual decisions about consumption and a lot to do with the monopolistic privileges granted by State power at the points of production and acquisition of land and resources. These are better resisted through labor organizing, targeted strikes and boycotts, resistance to State coercion, etc., rather than doing what “anti-consumerist” groups typically do, i.e. adopting an ascetic lifestyle and chiding, ridiculing or harassing those who aren’t as personally hardcore as you are.

Arthur,

Again, I’m not denying that parents have a legitimate right to reclaim the money that is stolen from them in taxes, whether through education vouchers or through other means.

What I am saying is that voucher systems constitute a government subsidy to private schools, in virtue of forcing the parents to spend that reclaimed money within a cartel of government-approved private schools. There is nothing wrong with parents reclaiming stolen money through the voucher system, but the cartelized schools that financially benefit from federal patronage are still subject to the usual libertarian analysis and criticism offered against government subsidies.

There is no benefit that you could possibly get from a government voucher scheme that you could not get just as easily from a no-strings-attached tax break, and some specific evils that vouchers but not tax breaks would produce. So the question is, given the choice, why advocate the cockamamie transitional government scheme, rather than just advocating the simple libertarian measure?

This is a software bug in feed consumers, related to some mistakes, rather easily made under certain conditions, as to how to handle Yahoo’s MediaRSS namespaced elements. It is not, essentially, a problem with WordPress.com’s feeds.

FeedWordPress users may be pleased to know that this bug has been fixed in the latest release of FeedWordPress, version 0.991.

No, “returning tax-payers’ money” is not a subsidy. But forcing the recipients to give the “returned” money to one of a select cartel of government-approved “private” schools is a government subsidy to those schools.

If you want to return tax-payers’ money, why not just advocate tax cuts?

William,

Well, the question you posed was not whether “Leftist” properly refers to “people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx,” but whether there was another short word that could do the same work just as well. If there is such a word then there are independent reasons (already explained) for preferring that other word to “Leftism” when what you mean is “state socialism” or “government economic planning.”

I am not sure that I understand your objection to using “state socialist” in particular. Doctrinaire Marxists famously believe that the “workers’ state” is a transitional phenomenon, which will become unnecessary with the emergence of communism proper. Does that make the label “state socialist” inappropriate for, say, V.I. Lenin? Well, in one sense yes, and in another sense no, since he advocated state socialism in the short term and a form of anarcho-communism in the long term. But whatever complications this may introduce into applying the label, it will introduce exactly the same complications for your usages of “Leftist” and “socialist,” since you’ve made those identical with state economic control, and it was advocacy for state economic control during a “transitional” period, but not after, that supposedly generated this problem.

As for the common usage of “Leftism,” you’re right that when most people use the term, they are referring to state economic control. When most people think of “free trade,” they are referring to IMF-financed state corporatism, and when most people think of “anarchy,” they are referring to riots or civil war. What Wittgenstein advised looking to was not just the unordered facts about usage, but the logic of the use, and if the usage is incoherent or confused, the thing to do is to disentangle the confusion, not to pander to it. In any given case, depending on the breaks, it might be better to disentangle it by abandoning the word for a different word, or it might be better to keep on using the word, so long as you use it more rigorously or precisely. One should often do the latter when there is something challenging and genuinely valuable embedded in the package-deal which it is important to emphasize or affirm. I hear that some Russian radical once made similar efforts to reclaim or redeem the package-deal term “capitalism” from advocates of government privilege for the business class. While I disagree with the application on this point, I see nothing wrong with the method.

Jonathan,

Everyone knows that the only true libertarians are those who support creating new transnational government trade bureaucracies and federal government subsidies for “private” schools. Didn’t you get the latest memo from HQ?

William H. Stoddard: Nonetheless, I’m not sure what other short word there is to use for people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx.

Well. “Marxist”?

If you need something a bit broader in application, you might try “Marxian,” or, more broadly still, “State Socialist.”

Here’s my other favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip: GT 2006-04-16: Direct Action.

Holmes,

I don’t think you’re fixated on winning elections, and I can’t find anywhere that I made that claim. What I think you are fixated on trying to influence people through electoral means. But as I’ve already tried to explain at some length, electoral politics is structurally ill-suited to the kind of influence that you want to exercise. The message you’re trying to spread is fundamentally antagonistic to the very process you’re trying to use, and the dynamics of electoral campaigns are such that they tend to drum up a lot of noise and very little concrete progress.

As for the success of the Socialist Party’s domestic platform, I’m familiar with the story. But I think that its success depended much less on electoral pressure politics than it depended on shifts in the surrounding culture outside of the electoral arena. It is also had the advantage of a domestic platform which would enhance the power of the American political class rather than antagonizing and undermining that power. Any consistent form of libertarianism lacks the latter “advantage,” and so has a correspondingly much worse chance at any kind of uptake in political circles.

Holmes: Let me be clear, then: if the education doesn’t work, the practice is going to get crushed.

Any oppositional effort, including electoral politics, is going to “get crushed” if education and persuasion fail. But the relationship between practice and education depends on how you’re practicing, and whom you’re trying to educate and persuade. Unlike electoral politics, successful counter-economics doesn’t necessarily require a shift in the consensus among either politicians or mass political parties or 50%+1 of the tens of millions of voters. The opportunities for success on the margin in counter-economics are much greater, the number of people you have to convince to keep yourself and your friends safe is much lower, and the people that you’re aiming to educate and persuade are much less likely to have a pre-existing bias against individual freedom.

Me: You seem to be suggesting here that the only “political consensus” worth trying to sway is the consensus of incumbent politicians and political office-seekers.

Holmes: I suggested nothing of the sort.

As you like, but if you didn’t mean to so limit the “consensus” that you’re interested in shifting, then you’ve offered no argument in favor of adopting electoral strategies over counter-economics.

There are lots of ways to shift consensus outside of the coterie of incumbents and office-seekers, and I think there’s very little empirical evidence that electoral politics has much effect on that. Successful maverick politicians generally attract a groundswell of enthusiastic support, then their ideas are promptly quarantined and marginalized by appeals to electability, etc. After they (more or less inevitably) lose the general election, the enthusiasm dissipates, the ideas are more or less forgotten, and the organization bleeds down to a small hard core that already supported the ideas anyway. The enthusiasts who hopped on the bandwagon will find another maverick in the next election, often one with more or less contradictory ideas to the previous one. Cf. Ed Clark, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, etc. etc. etc.

Counter-economics, on the other hand, doesn’t depend on mass outreach, doesn’t depend on converting some significant chunk of a national constituency numbering in the tens or hundreds of millions, doesn’t operate on 2 or 4 year cycles, doesn’t suddenly splutter out after a single loss, doesn’t cost millions of dollars (indeed, is often profitable), and offers lots of opportunities for individual success on the margin.

As for overthrowing the State, that’s a secondary goal, and strategically a ways off. But that’s true for all theories that don’t involve a big helping of magical thinking. The primary goal is not to overthrow the State, but to widen the scope of your own individual freedom. That goal can be acted on immediately, through intelligent direct action, and to persuade your friends and neighbors to do likewise, or at least not to turn you in. Which I suspect is much easier to do than trying to influence either a sizeable chunk of the mass electorate, or the establishment politicians, towards libertarian policy or libertarian candidates. Especially when your vehicle for trying to do so is the Republican primary campaign of an anti-immigration Constitution crank.