Letters to the Editor
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Shit!
...my sister had a dream in which we were arrested along with all our friends. There were two types of charges brought against us: Presence, which was a misdemeanor. And Existence, which was a felony. -- Paul Rosenberg
Absolutely brilliant. Absolutely depressing. Is everyone in your family a fucking genius? Do us all a favor, and let science preserve your DNA or something....
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@JoJo
Why should Milton Friedman be considered "stained by Pinochet"? You can give a bad man good advice.
The problem with Marxism isn't that it was poorly implemented; the problem with Marxism is Marxism. (And the problem with capitalism is capitalists, as William F. Buckley wrote.)
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@WT
It's probably not in the DNA but the methylation!
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@jojo
I understand all the philosophical inflorations that cover up this fact. But as a practical matter, collectives exist
Oh for god's sake, yes they do and I never denied it. Group behavior is usefully analyzed. But for purposes of rights and prison and what armed agents of the state should be concerning themselves with, the INDIVIDUAL is the unit of analysis.
"Collectives" may be studied, but have no rights the individuals constituting them lack. Got it? A group name does not transform into a right a claimed right that individuals do not possess.
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@kdwmson
The problem with Marxism isn't that it was poorly implemented; the problem with Marxism is Marxism.
Ahh, we agree! I just happen to smell Marxism in Libertarianism as well - it's got that Platonic or neo-Platonic stench that has been at the root of our problems for two millenia. Bahh with practical philosophy - in practice, it's just plain wrong.
And dear old Friedman - just giving bad advice to a bad man (recall, the Chicago boys ran out of Chile with their tales between their legs). Doesn't the fact that Friedman didn't recognize that a free-market system was impossible without freedom a warning sign? Maybe his "free-market" system has nothing to do with freedom at all? Would you not question the wisdom of Stalin's advisors?
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Reality Strikes Back, Again. More in Pity Than In Anger Edition.
Mona:
@Paul R.
The institutions created then have been modified, augmented, and re-evaluated repeatedly over the years since then. The libertarians stand out in particular for their failure to do this. Instead, they simply wish the whole experience away.
You could not be more mistaken -- but then, most that you write about libertarians is utter horseshit. The cause of the Great Depression has been extensively addressed by libertarian economists; it is not an area in which I hold much expertise, but I can verify that they are deeply critical of the way the stock market was organized and how stocks were purchased, among other things.
(1) Yes, yes, we know this already, Mona. There has never been a truly libertarian society, so all failures to approach libertarian utopia failed because they didn't get quite close enough. Libertarianism can never fail, it can only be failed. blah. blah. blah.
(2) If so few libertarians have reflected on the Great Depression that even you don't have the party line down, then in what meaningful sense have libertarians as a whole participated in the mature re-evaluation of the Depression experience?
What so many of you remind me of are the wingnuts online who just "know" that Kos is a raging far-leftist, a Marxist who probably longs for Stalin's resurrection. Greenwald, too -- utter Maoist, that Greenwald. How do they know this? Because everyone they read says so. You have that same inane dynamic going on where libertarians are concerned, as do many here.
Except that I spent several years as a teenager debating with a very well-read libertarian on an almost daily basis. And I spent much of the late 1990s going through it all over again online with dozens of inferior knock-off versions, who linked, quoted and invocked legions and legions more. So, after encountering 10,000 idiots, it just seems downright silly to say, "But you have met them all!"
Of course I haven't. That's because I'm not an idiot myself. I know when to stop.
p.s. About that horshshit. So, you openly disavow John Locke as a statist runing dog swine???
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Friedman
I wrote an obituary for Friedman for Random Lengths News. It's available online embedded in a longer post here:
http://patternsthatconnect.blogspot.com/2006/11/hegemony-is-enemypreludemilton.html
From the end of the obit:
If Friedman seemed relatively untroubled by the suffering caused by his economic theories in the Third World, he was noticeably upset with the short shrift given to his libertarian views by the conservative movement, including his support for decriminalizing drugs....
More recently, last July, Friedman said, "What's really killed the Republican Party isn't spending, it's Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression."
Finally, he wasn’t always opposed to government intervention, when markets failed to internalize true costs, for example. He supported London Mayor Ken Livingston’s proposal for a congestion fee for traffic in central London, and might well have supported container fees here in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
In short: His folly was enacted, while his wisdom was ignored.
That's how blindly and dogmatically anti-libertarian I am!
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@Mona
So collectives exist but have no legal rights? How do you have a legal entity without rights and duties? Really, what you're saying is that organism do not have any social properties that their constituent cells lack. That is nonsense.
You don't want collectives to have rights. You want to legally analyze them solely as individuals. That is simply closing your eyes. They will still exist, and they will manipulate the legal system so that, in fact, they have legal rights which are simply posed as individual rights. Collectives have lives separate from the individuals composing them.
But by posing "legal rights" in a delusional manner, you are simply destroying our ability to delineate these group rights. By eliminating them explicitly, you make it impossible to limit them explicitly. That's where I see Libertarianism not only as wrong, but as a predecessor to authoritarianism. The best way to institute authoritarianism is by simply declaring that the emperor does not legally exist - he is then absolutely unconstrained.
It's similar to this undercurrent of property rights being "natural". Beyond a hut and a shirt, there is no natural property. But by claiming so, we delude ourselves to the violence and consensus behind them.
So, you replace the class dialectic with individual conflict. What have you gained by boiling the legal system down to one level of analysis, other than blindness?