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• Friday, May 9, 2008 08:58 PM

  I don't feel happy with my own suggested description of FFF anyway

  When I rounded off comment with the suggestion that he could just have condemned FFF as a "corporatist rat trap disguised as a libertarian think tank" I was being a bit too hasty. Calling it "corporatist" really sounds wrong. I suppose what I had in mind was a point I think you made a day or two ago, to the effect that in the absence of the much hated "big government" the USA would simply be run by private enterprise, the country would break down into a network of company towns, and the companies would necessarily be big.

  This fantasy of a nation owned and managed by private companies does seem to exist in recent American history, but I find it quite hard to focus. The British version of the fantasy would have been classified as "socialist," because our own "company towns" were owned and run by capitalists who saw themselves as top-down socialists, in a sort of Fourierist mould, I think. Some of the results of their efforts still exist, like the town called "Port Sunlight," which was built by the cocoa entrepreneur, Joseph Rountree., I am just going to check this befor proceeding ... ah, he was in fact a Quaker: http://www.josephrowntree.org.uk/

  The US "company towns" were a lot nastier, I expect. One can imagine the sort of "company towns" that Ayn Rand fans would build. Then there is yet another aspect, which I must admit I would find exciting, myself, partly because I spent a couple of years at architectural school in the 1970s, and was something of a Buckminster Fuller fan : technocracy. I know so little about this that I shall leave it there.

  —Rowan Berkeley Read Rowan Berkeley's other letters
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