Posts from 2013
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Facebook: January 24, 2013 at 04:46PM
I see that my introductory post on “Libertarian Anticapitalism” has been re-posted over at Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS):
“Well. Whether or not something comes off as ‘ironic’ depends upon your expectations; and on this point, I guess it may not be surprising that my expectations are not the same as those at the Wall Street Journal. In fact, I would say that a story like that of the Times Square zoning code is not only not especially ‘ironic;’ it’s really paradigmatic — a illustratively typical example of how large-scale, in-your-face commerce typically works in these United States, and how it interacts with the corporate economy throughout the world.”
Facebook: January 24, 2013 at 03:59PM
Georgists always want to tell me that all of the absolute worst features of the State would be OK as long as they were accompanied by the Single Tax. “Borders? Oh, they’ll be fine as long as there’s a Single Tax to pay out to those who have been excluded.” “Eminent Domain for urban development? Well of course it will be fine if it comes with a Single Tax to compensate those deprived of their property.” I expect some day I am going to do a post about the bombing of Hiroshima and some Georgist is going to leave a comment saying “Well of course that was horrible, but the real problem here is that the dropped the atom bomb without a Single Tax to compensate the people in Hiroshima for the locational rents that they were deprived of. If locational rents were being collected from the non-atom-bombed parts of the world, there’s nothing you could object to, right?”
Comment on Libertarian Anticapitalism by Rad Geek
I agree that those would be bad reasons for abandoning "secularism," "anarchism," or "capitalism" as labels.
My reasons for rejecting "capitalism" as a label for individualist, laissez-faire economic views have nothing in particular to do with the fact that critics of libertarianism happen to associate the term with bad things.
My reasons for rejecting "capitalism" as a label for individualist, laissez-faire economic views (at least, on the version libertarian economics that I have an interest in defending) are given in the passage beginning " In conventional debates over capitalism, we are usually offered two major positions — the position of the pro-capitalist Right, and the position of the state socialists…." and runs through to the end of the article. See especially the note on how both the advocates of "capitalism" and also anti-propertarian and state-socialist opponents of "capitalism" tend to obscure the fundamental causal claim that they are both taking for granted. My purpose in talking about the meaning of "capitalism" is to highlight that obscured, presupposed causal claim; and to expose it to some serious questioning and debate.
Of course, maybe you have a complaint about that argument too. But you'd have to actually let me know what it is.
HTH.
My recent post On Being Pretty Much O.K. With That. (Factories, Corporate Secrecy, and Free-Market Anti-Capitalism Edition.)
Facebook: January 23, 2013 at 02:55PM
Dear LazyWeb: I am looking for Wiki software to experiment with, where the back-end data store would be based on a git repository rather than a relational database such as MySQL. I’m open to trying out most things but an ideal case would be something that supports templates and transclusion in a way at least kinda-sorta similar to MediaWiki. Any suggestions?
Facebook: January 22, 2013 at 04:46PM
is off to home-make some tortillas.
