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Monday, February 20, 2012

"Let the Market Decide" Always Means "Let Rich People Decide"

More Dispatches from Libertopia here.

4 comments:

Roderick T. Long said...

Um, false.

Dale Carrico said...

Um, true. Infinity!

Roderick T. Long said...

Except I cited evidence.

Dale Carrico said...

By "evidence" do you mean the link above to a splash page on which there are a bazillion links to titles on many topics, by many folks, none of which are devoted specifically to the refutation of the slogan of mine you disapprove of, not all of which are even consistent with one another?

As it happens, I do not need evidence that self identified "left libertarians" exist who imagine, unlike market libertarians mostly of the Anglo-American right, that "smashing the state" in whatever construal would open the way for the crystallization of a mutualist spontaneous order appealing to the left rather than a neo-feudalist market spontaneous order more appealing to the right.

By the way your own identification with the "market" yourself complicates, to say the least, the evidenciary support you seem to assume attaches to you of all people from a link with a site many of the authors on which would disdain your market identification as ferociously as I would. And as someone who has actually read Rothbard I regard the moniker Left-Rothbardian a frank idiocy.

Anyway, I believe so-called "left libertarians" are wrong to believe the silly things they do, I believe they should take a hard look at the reactionary nonsense of "right libertarians" and ask if they are looking at a funhouse mirror, but a mirror nonetheless.

I personally want not to smash the state but to democratize it, and I have written about what I mean by that and why at great length elsewhere. In the spirit of full disclosure -- I teach critical and political theory at the university level and often draw on texts from the left anarchist tradition, the radical democratic and feminist and anti-militarist aspects of much of which I find sympathetic even if I disagree profoundly with many of their guiding assumptions and aspirations. My point isn't to try to pull rank or anything like that, but just to signal to you that our disagreement isn't a result of ignorance on my part, something you wouldn't know just stumbling blindly upon a blog.

Now, you haven't proposed any argument contrary to my claim -- which is fine to the extent that you are replying to a bumper sticker rather than to one of my longer arguments. It remains true all the same that your first response was simply to say "no" and then provide a link to a site that proves nothing but that people disagree with me (something that was already obvious when you disagreed with me).

If turnabout is fair play, may I welcome you to engage with the actual arguments I have written on this topic, many of which are archived under the heading on the sidebar Against Anarchy: The Politics of Design and p2p-Democratization, calling your splash page and raising with my own?