Posts from September 2012

Facebook: A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery | Distro of the Libertarian Left

Facebook: September 27, 2012 at 11:21PM

One problem with transcribing articles from Instead of a Magazine: Herman Kuehn’s devotion to “simplified” and “reformed” spelling schemes means that I more or less never know for sure when something is actually a typo, and when it is an intended variant.

Facebook: The Industrial Radical Is Here!

Facebook: The Industrial Radical Is Here!

Facebook: Rad Geek People’s Daily 2012-09-24 – Nerd Contest!

radgeek on Anti-capitalist panel at this year’s Libertopia

Well, I'm not sure what to say other than "Cool story, bro." Certainly if you thought that the panel was going to be about how everybody ought to have the right to stop making payments on their rented boats, then it seems to me that you may not know quite as much about free-market anticapitalist or mutualist positions as you think you knew. (*) In any case, my own view, which is what I'm going to be presenting for my end of things, is that there are quite a lot of things that you ought to be free to try to do in an anarchic market, and that if you want to try signing people up for conventional wage-labor employment contracts, or for any number of rental arrangements, you should feel free to try it. I have more or less no interest whatever in outlawing or nullifying just about any kind of mutually consensual contract. Try and sell people on whatever capitalistic crap you want, as far as I'm concerned. However, I also think there are a lot of reasons to suspect that you are going to have -- and that you *ought* to have -- a much harder time finding a market for your wares when people are no longer forced to carry the weight of a deeply broken financial system, and have the full range of peaceful alternatives available to them. For more on why, see maybe [Bits & Pieces](http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/05/05/bits-pieces-on-free-market-anti-capitalism-by-way-of-introduction-or-apology/) or [Scratching By](http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/scratching-by-how-government-creates-poverty-as-we-know-it/), or the essays in [Markets Not Capitalism](http://radgeek.com/gt/2011/10/14/markets-not-capitalism-1st-ed/). Or just come by the panel and ask me about it. (* For reference, not all FMACs, and not all of the contributors to Markets Not Capitalism, are committed to a Tucker-style or Carson-style occupancy-and-use theory of land tenure. But those who are, as far as I can tell, still have more or less nothing at all to say about o&u that would touch on the status of boats, or other movable or immovable capital, because they are opposed to ground rents, not to house rents. Maybe you're not familiar with the distinction made here; and if not, that's fine, but if not, it's probably because you're not very familiar with mutualist ideas.)