Conservatism And Libertarianism Both Have No Dogma

[kaz]

Hey kaz...how ABSOLUTE are you beliefs in property rights? Do you support or oppose the rule of the commons? The air we breath, the water we drink and the soil we seed...can any of those be 'privatized'?

Here you go.

What is a small government libertarian US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum

Note how you're changing your complaint regarding my position, but failing to acknowledge that you got it completely wrong before. Regardless, I'm saying no state run or regulated prisons. We can't say exactly how the market would supply the equivalent of prisons, but Robert Murphy has some fairly interesting ideas on the subject that I think would certainly be a viable model. You can read about it for free in his essay in the book "Chaos Theory."

Robert P. Murphy Chaos Theory

It should also be pointed out that not all libertarians would agree that the state has no role in maintaining prisons.

I was wrong. I thought you were a person with a brain. You are not a libertarian, you are a full blown anarchist...

You have ZERO interest in human rights, you only care about property rights. That is the ULTIMATE far right wing state. A pure aristocracy. A feudal system.

Robert P. Murphy Chaos Theory
Anyone interested in exploring the farthest reaches of anarchist theory must come to terms with Murphy's account.

Well, I have a brain, hence my ability to converse with you. Furthermore, there are minarchist libertarians, and there are anarchist libertarians. "Mr. Libertarian" Murray Rothbard, without whom there would arguably be no libertarianism, was an anarcho-capitalist. You shouldn't make pronouncements like that without understanding the ideology.

Property rights are human rights. In fact, human rights all boil down to property rights in the end. For example, there is no freedom of speech without private property rights.

You don't even understand what you promote. Let's break it down...anarcho-capitalism. What does that prefix represent Kevin?

You possess ZERO understanding of human rights. Property rights are NOT human rights. A society based on property rights is feudalism.


"Republicans care more about property, Democrats care more about people"
Ted Sorensen - President Kennedy's Special Counsel & Adviser, and primary speechwriter

Why don't you tell me what you think that prefix represents?

Again, property rights are the only human rights. Absent property rights no other rights exist. Going back to the example of free speech and using USMB to further the example. In your home you may say whatever you like, because you own your home. On USMB, however, somebody else is the owner, and they may decide at any point in time, well within their rights, to exclude whomever they like for whatever reason they like. So let's say the owner decides one day that they've had it with libertarians and no longer want to let them participate. So they ban me and anybody else who has ever claimed the mantle of libertarian for nothing more than talking about our positions on the issues. They have every right to do so, and our "freedom of speech" means nothing in this context because we have no property right in USMB. Give any human right you like and it will still only exist in the context of property rights.

Feudalism was a pre-industrial form of privilege granted by governments, and has nothing to do with private property or free market capitalism. Sorry, try again.

Not a Republican, and not a Democrat. Your quote means nothing.

If you eliminate government, and base a society on property right, then you create a feudal society. A society of wealthy land barons and renters. YOU and your dogmatic ilk will be left out...you will be a renter who is a slave of the land barons. America would be a series of fiefdoms with no uniform rule of law.

You folks are the EXTREME of extremists. You make right wing authoritarians look like Gandhi...

Yes, anarchists are as extreme as you Marxists are. Small government libertarians are the true moderates.

Libertarians Are The True Political Moderates US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum

A s for "If you eliminate government, and base a society on property right, then you create a feudal society," we created a government that respects property rights, that is what we wanted. It's actually in the Bill of Rights. You and yours have ended it in your greed, then you blame the victim.

 

[orogenicman]

And liberals totally support that premise. But it is the laissez-faire side of libertarians that is the problem.

The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principle but that of gain.
Thomas Jefferson - Letter to Larkin Smith (1809).

They support the premise until taken to its logical conclusions in that people should be free to use their property in any way they see fit so long as it does not infringe on the use of anybody else's property. Aggression must be implemented, by both liberals and conservatives, to deny property rights.

I surmise you don't know where that line is.

Drawing a line on people's property rights constitutes aggression.

I suspect you are confusing aggression with something else, like the law. Property rights are not open-ended: never have been nor should they be.

Where the law violates property rights the law is aggression.

Not supporting your extraordinary claim with facts is just lame. Try again.

 

[orogenicman]

I surmise you don't know where that line is.

Drawing a line on people's property rights constitutes aggression.

I suspect you are confusing aggression with something else, like the law. Property rights are not open-ended: never have been nor should they be.

Where the law violates property rights the law is aggression.

Give me examples? Almost all property laws are local ordinances.

You're thinking of property in narrow terms. One can say that an individual has a property right in their own body, for example, so a law that says we can't smoke marijuana is a violation of everybody's property right in their own body. But we might also say that local laws that forbid smoking in restaurants or bars are violations of the property rights of the owners of the restaurant or bar.

Except that none of your examples are examples of property rights, much less the law violating property rights.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

They support the premise until taken to its logical conclusions in that people should be free to use their property in any way they see fit so long as it does not infringe on the use of anybody else's property. Aggression must be implemented, by both liberals and conservatives, to deny property rights.

I surmise you don't know where that line is.

Drawing a line on people's property rights constitutes aggression.

I suspect you are confusing aggression with something else, like the law. Property rights are not open-ended: never have been nor should they be.

Where the law violates property rights the law is aggression.

Not supporting your extraordinary claim with facts is just lame. Try again.

You want me to support my opinion with facts? I might as well ask you to support your statement that property rights shouldn't be open-ended. You can only do so by resorting to your opinion. Regardless, individuals own their own bodies, because there is no other logical choice, and private property flows from the idea of self-ownership. So if I am the sole owner of my body, it must constitute aggression for somebody to tell me how I must then use my body. Drug laws, for example, constitute aggression against an individual's property right in themselves.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Drawing a line on people's property rights constitutes aggression.

I suspect you are confusing aggression with something else, like the law. Property rights are not open-ended: never have been nor should they be.

Where the law violates property rights the law is aggression.

Give me examples? Almost all property laws are local ordinances.

You're thinking of property in narrow terms. One can say that an individual has a property right in their own body, for example, so a law that says we can't smoke marijuana is a violation of everybody's property right in their own body. But we might also say that local laws that forbid smoking in restaurants or bars are violations of the property rights of the owners of the restaurant or bar.

Except that none of your examples are examples of property rights, much less the law violating property rights.

Of course they are. That you think of property rights in only narrow terms doesn't change the fact.

 

[Bfgrn]

Hey kaz...how ABSOLUTE are you beliefs in property rights? Do you support or oppose the rule of the commons? The air we breath, the water we drink and the soil we seed...can any of those be 'privatized'?

Here you go.

What is a small government libertarian US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum

I was wrong. I thought you were a person with a brain. You are not a libertarian, you are a full blown anarchist...

You have ZERO interest in human rights, you only care about property rights. That is the ULTIMATE far right wing state. A pure aristocracy. A feudal system.

Robert P. Murphy Chaos Theory
Anyone interested in exploring the farthest reaches of anarchist theory must come to terms with Murphy's account.

Well, I have a brain, hence my ability to converse with you. Furthermore, there are minarchist libertarians, and there are anarchist libertarians. "Mr. Libertarian" Murray Rothbard, without whom there would arguably be no libertarianism, was an anarcho-capitalist. You shouldn't make pronouncements like that without understanding the ideology.

Property rights are human rights. In fact, human rights all boil down to property rights in the end. For example, there is no freedom of speech without private property rights.

You don't even understand what you promote. Let's break it down...anarcho-capitalism. What does that prefix represent Kevin?

You possess ZERO understanding of human rights. Property rights are NOT human rights. A society based on property rights is feudalism.


"Republicans care more about property, Democrats care more about people"
Ted Sorensen - President Kennedy's Special Counsel & Adviser, and primary speechwriter

Why don't you tell me what you think that prefix represents?

Again, property rights are the only human rights. Absent property rights no other rights exist. Going back to the example of free speech and using USMB to further the example. In your home you may say whatever you like, because you own your home. On USMB, however, somebody else is the owner, and they may decide at any point in time, well within their rights, to exclude whomever they like for whatever reason they like. So let's say the owner decides one day that they've had it with libertarians and no longer want to let them participate. So they ban me and anybody else who has ever claimed the mantle of libertarian for nothing more than talking about our positions on the issues. They have every right to do so, and our "freedom of speech" means nothing in this context because we have no property right in USMB. Give any human right you like and it will still only exist in the context of property rights.

Feudalism was a pre-industrial form of privilege granted by governments, and has nothing to do with private property or free market capitalism. Sorry, try again.

Not a Republican, and not a Democrat. Your quote means nothing.

If you eliminate government, and base a society on property right, then you create a feudal society. A society of wealthy land barons and renters. YOU and your dogmatic ilk will be left out...you will be a renter who is a slave of the land barons. America would be a series of fiefdoms with no uniform rule of law.

You folks are the EXTREME of extremists. You make right wing authoritarians look like Gandhi...

Yes, anarchists are as extreme as you Marxists are. Small government libertarians are the true moderates.

Libertarians Are The True Political Moderates US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum

A s for "If you eliminate government, and base a society on property right, then you create a feudal society," we created a government that respects property rights, that is what we wanted. It's actually in the Bill of Rights. You and yours have ended it in your greed, then you blame the victim.

Either you just can't help yourself or you are really that blind and obtuse. You whine and stamp your feet when someone tries to paint libertarians with the same brush, THEN, you turn around and do the VERY same thing to liberals. I am not a Marxist. I have never read a word of Marx's writing. I have no interest in a philosophy that I don't believe in. I believe in capitalism, but not laissez-faire. I have no desire to live under the tyranny of corporations.

 

[Bfgrn]

Chomsky on libertarianism and Murray Rothbard
Understanding Power, in which Noam Chomsky discusses the difference between libertarianism and anarchism and comments on the world envisioned by Murray Rothbard:
_____________________________

Man: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

Chomsky: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax"—but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.19

The whole thing's not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn't function for a second—and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it's not really serious.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Chomsky on libertarianism and Murray Rothbard
Understanding Power, in which Noam Chomsky discusses the difference between libertarianism and anarchism and comments on the world envisioned by Murray Rothbard:
_____________________________

Man: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

Chomsky: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax"—but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.19

The whole thing's not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn't function for a second—and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it's not really serious.

Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our "right-wing" libertarian movement; apparently he is — I am afraid unrealistically — concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute "the greatest tyranny the world has ever known." (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? Than Genghis Khan?)

Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an "anarchist" at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an "anarchist."

Syndical Syndrome - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

See how randomly quoting somebody doesn't actually make an argument in and of itself? Regardless, I do find it amusing that you quoted Chomsky in an attempt to make some sort of argument when you referred to me as being brainless for being an anarchist. Irony? Hypocrisy?

 

[emilynghiem]

Conservatism and Libertarianism both have no Dogma. It's true because both a founding father of modern conservatim and a leading Libertarian intellectual (oxymoron?) have claimed this to be true.

What do you thnk?

Yes and no. It depends on the person and the issue,
whether they are getting dogmatic with it.

For example, the concept of "prochoice" can be simple universal
natural logic -- like free choice, free will, free exercise, civil liberty seen as inherent with human nature --
OR it can become a dogmatic political principle
of pushing ONE agenda of prochoice, as in abortion
or with some people it's guns or drugs they want a choice in dogmatically.

Same with religion. Same with anything.
Environmental conservation can be just a simple basic policy and respect for the planet
and living things
or it can get religiously dogmatic as with global warming that is argued about like God and religion is.

There.

If I took the bait, I hope I chopped it up into
more palatable pieces that other people can chew on....

 

[Bfgrn]

Chomsky on libertarianism and Murray Rothbard
Understanding Power, in which Noam Chomsky discusses the difference between libertarianism and anarchism and comments on the world envisioned by Murray Rothbard:
_____________________________

Man: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

Chomsky: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax"—but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.19

The whole thing's not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn't function for a second—and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it's not really serious.

Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our "right-wing" libertarian movement; apparently he is — I am afraid unrealistically — concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute "the greatest tyranny the world has ever known." (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? Than Genghis Khan?)

Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an "anarchist" at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an "anarchist."

Syndical Syndrome - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

See how randomly quoting somebody doesn't actually make an argument in and of itself? Regardless, I do find it amusing that you quoted Chomsky in an attempt to make some sort of argument when you referred to me as being brainless for being an anarchist. Irony? Hypocrisy?

Thank you Kevin. Your reply has exposed who and what you really are. You are not for liberty or freedom, you are for creating the ultimate tyranny of robber barons. Here is where your true far right wing corporatism reveals itself. And your idea of freedom is to create a iron fisted hierarchy to rule over the masses. With stated SEVERE punishment for any lowly worker who doesn't submit to total submission. Pining for and embracing of the LEAST free eras in American history, the Gilded Age. Worker freedom to strike is criminalized, yet monopolies would be welcomed.

You are beyond ignorant. You have ZERO understanding of human nature, power and how it manifests. You support the exact same tyranny that these far right wing pea brains support...

Kevin Kennedy and cohorts...

 

[Bfgrn]

The Betrayal of Adam Smith - Excerpt

It is ironic that corporate libertarians regularly pay homage to Adam Smith as their intellectual patron saint, since it is obvious to even the most casual reader of his epic work The Wealth of Nations that Smith would have vigorously opposed most of their claims and policy positions. For example, corporate libertarians fervently oppose any restraint on corporate size or power. Smith, on the other hand, opposed any form of economic concentration on the ground that it distorts the market's natural ability to establish a price that provides a fair return on land, labor, and capital; to produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers; and to optimally allocate society's resources.

Through trade agreements, corporate libertarians press governments to provide absolute protection for the intellectual property rights of corporations. Smith was strongly opposed to trade secrets as contrary to market principles and would have vigorously opposed governments enforcing a person or corporation's claim to the right to monopolize a lifesaving drug or device and to charge whatever the market would bear.

Corporate libertarians maintain that the market turns unrestrained greed into socially optimal outcomes. Smith would be outraged by those who attribute this idea to him. He was talking about small farmers and artisans trying to get the best price for their products to provide for themselves and their families. That is self-interest, not greed. Greed is a high-paid corporate executive firing 10,000 employees and then rewarding himself with a multimillion-dollar bonus for having saved the company so much money. Greed is what the economic system being constructed by the corporate libertarians encourages and rewards.

Smith strongly disliked both governments and corporations. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. In his words, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.'' Smith never suggested that government should not intervene to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest or to protect the poor and nature from the rich. Given that most governments of his day were monarchies, the possibility probably never occurred to him.

The theory of market economics, in contrast to free-market ideology, specifies a number of basic conditions needed for a market to set prices efficiently in the public interest. The greater the deviation from these conditions, the less socially efficient the market system becomes. Most basic is the condition that markets must be competitive. I recall the professor in my elementary economics course using the example of small wheat farmers selling to small grain millers to illustrate the idea of perfect market competition. Today, four companies--Conagra, ADM Milling, Cargill, and Pillsbury--mill nearly 60 percent of all flour produced in the United States, and two of them--Conagra and Cargill--control 50 percent of grain exports.

In the real world of unregulated markets, successful players get larger and, in many instances, use the resulting economic power to drive or buy out weaker players to gain control of even larger shares of the market. In other instances, "competitors" collude through cartels or strategic alliances to increase profits by setting market prices above the level of optimal efficiency. The larger and more collusive individual market players become, the more difficult it is for newcomers and small independent firms to survive, the more monopolisitic and less competitive the market becomes, and the more political power the biggest firms can wield to demand concessions from governments that allow them to externalize even more of their costs to the community.

Given this reality, one might expect the neoliberal economists who claim Smith's tradition as their own to be outspoken in arguing for the need to restrict mergers and acquisitions and break up monopolistic firms to restore market competition. More often, they argue exactly the opposite position--that to "compete" in today's global markets, firms must merge into larger combinations. In other words, they use a theory that assumes small firms to advocate policies that favor large firms.

more

 

[Bfgrn]

more

The Betrayal of Adam Smith - Excerpt

Market theory also specifies that for a market to allocate efficiently, the full costs of each product must be born by the producer and be included in the selling price. Economists call it cost internalization. Externalizing some part of a product's cost to others not a party to the transaction is a form of subsidy that encourages excessive production and use of the product at the expense of others. When, for example, a forest products corporation is allowed to clear-cut government lands at giveaway prices, it lowers the cost of timber products, thus encouraging their wasteful use and discouraging their recycling. While profitable for the company and a bargain for consumers, the public is forced, without its consent, to bear a host of costs relating to water shed destruction, loss of natural habitat and recreational areas, global warming, and diminished future timber production.

If the full cost of producing and driving cars were passed on to the consumer we would all benefit from a dramatic reduction in urban sprawl, traffic congestion, the paving over of productive lands, pollution, global warming, and depletion of finite petroleum reserves.

The consequences are similar when a chemical corporation dumps wastes without adequate treatment, thus passing the resulting costs of air, water, and soil pollution to the community in the form of health costs, genetic deformities, discomfort, lost working days, a need to buy bottled water, and the cost of cleaning up contamination. If the users of the resulting chemical products were required to pay the full cost of their production and use, there would be a lot less chemical contamination in our environment, our food and water would be cleaner, there would be fewer cancers and genetic deformities, and we would have more frogs and songbirds. If the full cost of producing and driving cars were passed on to the consumer we would all benefit from a dramatic reduction in urban sprawl, traffic congestion, the paving over of productive lands, pollution, global warming, and depletion of finite petroleum reserves.

There is good reason why cost internalization is one of the most basic principles of market theory. Yet in the name of the market, corporate libertarians actively advocate eliminating government regulation and point to the private cost savings for consumers while ignoring the social and environmental consequences for the broader society. Indeed, in the name of being internationally competitive, corporate libertarians urge nations and communities to increase market distorting subsidies--including resource giveaways, low wage labor, lax environmental regulation, and tax breaks--to attract the jobs of footloose corporations. An unregulated market invariably encourages the externalization of costs because the resulting public costs become private gains. In the end it seems that corporate libertarians are more interested in increasing corporate profits than in defending market principles.

The larger the corporation and the "freer" the market, the greater the corporation's ability to force others to bear its costs and thereby subsidize its profits. Some call this theft. Economists call it "economies of scale."

Neva Goodwin, ecological economist, head of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, and an advocate of cost internalization, puts it bluntly. "Power is largely what externalities are about. What's the point of having power, if you can't use it to externalize your costs--to make them fall on someone else?"

Corporate libertarians tirelessly inform us of the benefits of trade based on the theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. What they don't mention is that the benefits the trade theories predict assume the local or national ownership of capital by persons directly engaged in its management. Indeed, these same conditions are fundamental to Adam Smith's famous assertion in The Wealth of Nations that the invisible hand of the market translates the pursuit of self-interest into a public benefit. Note that the following is the only mention of the famous invisible hand in the entire 1,000 pages of The Wealth of Nations.

 

[Bfgrn]

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The Betrayal of Adam Smith - Excerpt

Smith assumed a natural preference on the part of the entrepreneur to invest at home where he could keep a close eye on his holdings. Of course, this was long before jet travel, telephones, fax machines, and the Internet. Because local investment provides local employment and produces local goods for local consumption using local resources, the entrepreneur's natural inclination contributes to the vitality of the local economy. And because the owner and the enterprise are both local they are more readily held to local standards. Even on pure business logic, Smith firmly opposed the absentee ownership of companies.

The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own .... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less in the management of the affairs of such a company?

Smith believed the efficient market is composed of small, owner-managed enterprises located in the communities where the owners reside. Such owners normally share in the community's values and have a personal stake in the future of both the community and the enterprise. In the global corporate economy, footloose money moves across national borders at the speed of light, society's assets are entrusted to massive corporations lacking any local or national allegiance, and management is removed from real owners by layers of investment institutions and holding companies.

 

[Bfgrn]

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The Betrayal of Adam Smith - Excerpt

It seems a common practice for corporate libertarians to justify their actions based on theories that apply only in the world that by their actions they seek to dismantle. Economist Neva Goodwin suggests that neoclassical economists have invited this distortion and misuse of economic theory by drawing narrow boundaries around their field that exclude most political and institutional reality. She characterizes the neoclassical school of economics as the political economy of Adam Smith minus the political and institutional analysis of Karl Marx:

The classical political economy of Adam Smith was a much broader, more humane subject than the economics that is taught in universities today.... For at least a century it has been virtually taboo to talk about economic power in the capitalist context; that was a communist (Marxist) idea. The concept of class was similarly banned from discussion.

Adam Smith was as acutely aware of issues of power and class as he was of the dynamics of competitive markets. However, the neoclassical economists and the neo-Marxist economists bifurcated his holistic perspective on the political economy, one taking those portions of the analysis that favored the owners of property, and the other taking those that favored the sellers of labor. Thus, the neoclassical economists left out Smith's considerations of the destructive role of power and class, and the neo-Marxists left out the beneficial functions of the market. Both advanced extremist social experiments on a massive scale that embodied a partial vision of society, with disastrous consequences.

If corporate libertarians had a serious allegiance to market principles and human rights, they would be calling for policies aimed at achieving the conditions under which markets function in a democratic fashion in the public interest. They would be calling for an end to corporate welfare, the breakup of corporate monopolies, the equitable distribution of property ownership, the internalization of social and environmental costs, local ownership, a living wage for working people, rooted capital, and a progressive tax system. Corporate libertarianism is not about creating the conditions that market theory argues will optimize the public interest, because its real concern is with private, not public, interests.

Game, set match...Chomsky

The first thing to understand is the difference between the natural person and the fictitious person called a corporation. They differ in the purpose for which they are created, in the strength which they possess, and in the restraints under which they act. Man is the handiwork of God and was placed upon earth to carry out a Divine purpose; the corporation is the handiwork of man and created to carry out a money-making policy. There is comparatively little difference in the strength of men; a corporation may be one hundred, one thousand, or even one million times stronger than the average man. Man acts under the restraints of conscience, and is influenced also by a belief in a future life. A corporation has no soul and cares nothing about the hereafter.
—William Jennings Bryan, 1912 Ohio Constitutional Convention

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Chomsky on libertarianism and Murray Rothbard
Understanding Power, in which Noam Chomsky discusses the difference between libertarianism and anarchism and comments on the world envisioned by Murray Rothbard:
_____________________________

Man: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

Chomsky: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax"—but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.19

The whole thing's not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn't function for a second—and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it's not really serious.

Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our "right-wing" libertarian movement; apparently he is — I am afraid unrealistically — concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute "the greatest tyranny the world has ever known." (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? Than Genghis Khan?)

Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an "anarchist" at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an "anarchist."

Syndical Syndrome - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

See how randomly quoting somebody doesn't actually make an argument in and of itself? Regardless, I do find it amusing that you quoted Chomsky in an attempt to make some sort of argument when you referred to me as being brainless for being an anarchist. Irony? Hypocrisy?

Thank you Kevin. Your reply has exposed who and what you really are. You are not for liberty or freedom, you are for creating the ultimate tyranny of robber barons. Here is where your true far right wing corporatism reveals itself. And your idea of freedom is to create a iron fisted hierarchy to rule over the masses. With stated SEVERE punishment for any lowly worker who doesn't submit to total submission. Pining for and embracing of the LEAST free eras in American history, the Gilded Age. Worker freedom to strike is criminalized, yet monopolies would be welcomed.

You are beyond ignorant. You have ZERO understanding of human nature, power and how it manifests. You support the exact same tyranny that these far right wing pea brains support...

Kevin Kennedy and cohorts...

Actually, my reply made only the point that you were a hypocrite for calling anarchists brainless on the one hand, while quoting one to make some sort of point on the other.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

The Betrayal of Adam Smith - Excerpt

It is ironic that corporate libertarians regularly pay homage to Adam Smith as their intellectual patron saint, since it is obvious to even the most casual reader of his epic work The Wealth of Nations that Smith would have vigorously opposed most of their claims and policy positions. For example, corporate libertarians fervently oppose any restraint on corporate size or power. Smith, on the other hand, opposed any form of economic concentration on the ground that it distorts the market's natural ability to establish a price that provides a fair return on land, labor, and capital; to produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers; and to optimally allocate society's resources.

Through trade agreements, corporate libertarians press governments to provide absolute protection for the intellectual property rights of corporations. Smith was strongly opposed to trade secrets as contrary to market principles and would have vigorously opposed governments enforcing a person or corporation's claim to the right to monopolize a lifesaving drug or device and to charge whatever the market would bear.

Corporate libertarians maintain that the market turns unrestrained greed into socially optimal outcomes. Smith would be outraged by those who attribute this idea to him. He was talking about small farmers and artisans trying to get the best price for their products to provide for themselves and their families. That is self-interest, not greed. Greed is a high-paid corporate executive firing 10,000 employees and then rewarding himself with a multimillion-dollar bonus for having saved the company so much money. Greed is what the economic system being constructed by the corporate libertarians encourages and rewards.

Smith strongly disliked both governments and corporations. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. In his words, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.'' Smith never suggested that government should not intervene to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest or to protect the poor and nature from the rich. Given that most governments of his day were monarchies, the possibility probably never occurred to him.

The theory of market economics, in contrast to free-market ideology, specifies a number of basic conditions needed for a market to set prices efficiently in the public interest. The greater the deviation from these conditions, the less socially efficient the market system becomes. Most basic is the condition that markets must be competitive. I recall the professor in my elementary economics course using the example of small wheat farmers selling to small grain millers to illustrate the idea of perfect market competition. Today, four companies--Conagra, ADM Milling, Cargill, and Pillsbury--mill nearly 60 percent of all flour produced in the United States, and two of them--Conagra and Cargill--control 50 percent of grain exports.

In the real world of unregulated markets, successful players get larger and, in many instances, use the resulting economic power to drive or buy out weaker players to gain control of even larger shares of the market. In other instances, "competitors" collude through cartels or strategic alliances to increase profits by setting market prices above the level of optimal efficiency. The larger and more collusive individual market players become, the more difficult it is for newcomers and small independent firms to survive, the more monopolisitic and less competitive the market becomes, and the more political power the biggest firms can wield to demand concessions from governments that allow them to externalize even more of their costs to the community.

Given this reality, one might expect the neoliberal economists who claim Smith's tradition as their own to be outspoken in arguing for the need to restrict mergers and acquisitions and break up monopolistic firms to restore market competition. More often, they argue exactly the opposite position--that to "compete" in today's global markets, firms must merge into larger combinations. In other words, they use a theory that assumes small firms to advocate policies that favor large firms.

more

As we have already seen, Smith was scarcely the founder of economic science, a science which existed since the medieval scholastics and, in its modern form, since Richard Cantillon. But what the German economists used to call, in a narrower connection, Das AdamSmithProblem, is much more severe than that. For the problem is not simply that Smith was not the founder of economics.

The problem is that he originated nothing that was true, and that whatever he originated was wrong; that, even in an age that had fewer citations or footnotes than our own, Adam Smith was a shameless plagiarist, acknowledging little or nothing and stealing large chunks, for example, from Cantillon. Far worse was Smith's complete failure to cite or acknowledge his beloved mentor Francis Hutcheson, from whom he derived most of his ideas as well as the organization of his economic and moral philosophy lectures. Smith indeed wrote in a private letter to the University of Glasgow of the 'never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson,' but apparently amnesia conveniently struck Adam Smith when it came time to writing the Wealth of Nations for the general public.

The Adam Smith Myth - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Looks like in all your copying and pasting you couldn't even get that small thing right.

 

[Bfgrn]

Chomsky on libertarianism and Murray Rothbard
Understanding Power, in which Noam Chomsky discusses the difference between libertarianism and anarchism and comments on the world envisioned by Murray Rothbard:
_____________________________

Man: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

Chomsky: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax"—but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.19

The whole thing's not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn't function for a second—and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it's not really serious.

Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our "right-wing" libertarian movement; apparently he is — I am afraid unrealistically — concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute "the greatest tyranny the world has ever known." (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? Than Genghis Khan?)

Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an "anarchist" at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an "anarchist."

Syndical Syndrome - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

See how randomly quoting somebody doesn't actually make an argument in and of itself? Regardless, I do find it amusing that you quoted Chomsky in an attempt to make some sort of argument when you referred to me as being brainless for being an anarchist. Irony? Hypocrisy?

Thank you Kevin. Your reply has exposed who and what you really are. You are not for liberty or freedom, you are for creating the ultimate tyranny of robber barons. Here is where your true far right wing corporatism reveals itself. And your idea of freedom is to create a iron fisted hierarchy to rule over the masses. With stated SEVERE punishment for any lowly worker who doesn't submit to total submission. Pining for and embracing of the LEAST free eras in American history, the Gilded Age. Worker freedom to strike is criminalized, yet monopolies would be welcomed.

You are beyond ignorant. You have ZERO understanding of human nature, power and how it manifests. You support the exact same tyranny that these far right wing pea brains support...

Kevin Kennedy and cohorts...

Actually, my reply made only the point that you were a hypocrite for calling anarchists brainless on the one hand, while quoting one to make some sort of point on the other.

Actually it was much more personal...I was talking about you...

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Chomsky on libertarianism and Murray Rothbard
Understanding Power, in which Noam Chomsky discusses the difference between libertarianism and anarchism and comments on the world envisioned by Murray Rothbard:
_____________________________

Man: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

Chomsky: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax"—but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.19

The whole thing's not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn't function for a second—and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it's not really serious.

Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our "right-wing" libertarian movement; apparently he is — I am afraid unrealistically — concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute "the greatest tyranny the world has ever known." (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? Than Genghis Khan?)

Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an "anarchist" at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an "anarchist."

Syndical Syndrome - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

See how randomly quoting somebody doesn't actually make an argument in and of itself? Regardless, I do find it amusing that you quoted Chomsky in an attempt to make some sort of argument when you referred to me as being brainless for being an anarchist. Irony? Hypocrisy?

Thank you Kevin. Your reply has exposed who and what you really are. You are not for liberty or freedom, you are for creating the ultimate tyranny of robber barons. Here is where your true far right wing corporatism reveals itself. And your idea of freedom is to create a iron fisted hierarchy to rule over the masses. With stated SEVERE punishment for any lowly worker who doesn't submit to total submission. Pining for and embracing of the LEAST free eras in American history, the Gilded Age. Worker freedom to strike is criminalized, yet monopolies would be welcomed.

You are beyond ignorant. You have ZERO understanding of human nature, power and how it manifests. You support the exact same tyranny that these far right wing pea brains support...

Kevin Kennedy and cohorts...

Actually, my reply made only the point that you were a hypocrite for calling anarchists brainless on the one hand, while quoting one to make some sort of point on the other.

Actually it was much more personal...I was talking about you...

Actually, you just quoted Noam Chomsky. You weren't talking about anybody.

 

[Bfgrn]

The Betrayal of Adam Smith - Excerpt

It is ironic that corporate libertarians regularly pay homage to Adam Smith as their intellectual patron saint, since it is obvious to even the most casual reader of his epic work The Wealth of Nations that Smith would have vigorously opposed most of their claims and policy positions. For example, corporate libertarians fervently oppose any restraint on corporate size or power. Smith, on the other hand, opposed any form of economic concentration on the ground that it distorts the market's natural ability to establish a price that provides a fair return on land, labor, and capital; to produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers; and to optimally allocate society's resources.

Through trade agreements, corporate libertarians press governments to provide absolute protection for the intellectual property rights of corporations. Smith was strongly opposed to trade secrets as contrary to market principles and would have vigorously opposed governments enforcing a person or corporation's claim to the right to monopolize a lifesaving drug or device and to charge whatever the market would bear.

Corporate libertarians maintain that the market turns unrestrained greed into socially optimal outcomes. Smith would be outraged by those who attribute this idea to him. He was talking about small farmers and artisans trying to get the best price for their products to provide for themselves and their families. That is self-interest, not greed. Greed is a high-paid corporate executive firing 10,000 employees and then rewarding himself with a multimillion-dollar bonus for having saved the company so much money. Greed is what the economic system being constructed by the corporate libertarians encourages and rewards.

Smith strongly disliked both governments and corporations. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. In his words, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.'' Smith never suggested that government should not intervene to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest or to protect the poor and nature from the rich. Given that most governments of his day were monarchies, the possibility probably never occurred to him.

The theory of market economics, in contrast to free-market ideology, specifies a number of basic conditions needed for a market to set prices efficiently in the public interest. The greater the deviation from these conditions, the less socially efficient the market system becomes. Most basic is the condition that markets must be competitive. I recall the professor in my elementary economics course using the example of small wheat farmers selling to small grain millers to illustrate the idea of perfect market competition. Today, four companies--Conagra, ADM Milling, Cargill, and Pillsbury--mill nearly 60 percent of all flour produced in the United States, and two of them--Conagra and Cargill--control 50 percent of grain exports.

In the real world of unregulated markets, successful players get larger and, in many instances, use the resulting economic power to drive or buy out weaker players to gain control of even larger shares of the market. In other instances, "competitors" collude through cartels or strategic alliances to increase profits by setting market prices above the level of optimal efficiency. The larger and more collusive individual market players become, the more difficult it is for newcomers and small independent firms to survive, the more monopolisitic and less competitive the market becomes, and the more political power the biggest firms can wield to demand concessions from governments that allow them to externalize even more of their costs to the community.

Given this reality, one might expect the neoliberal economists who claim Smith's tradition as their own to be outspoken in arguing for the need to restrict mergers and acquisitions and break up monopolistic firms to restore market competition. More often, they argue exactly the opposite position--that to "compete" in today's global markets, firms must merge into larger combinations. In other words, they use a theory that assumes small firms to advocate policies that favor large firms.

more

As we have already seen, Smith was scarcely the founder of economic science, a science which existed since the medieval scholastics and, in its modern form, since Richard Cantillon. But what the German economists used to call, in a narrower connection, Das AdamSmithProblem, is much more severe than that. For the problem is not simply that Smith was not the founder of economics.

The problem is that he originated nothing that was true, and that whatever he originated was wrong; that, even in an age that had fewer citations or footnotes than our own, Adam Smith was a shameless plagiarist, acknowledging little or nothing and stealing large chunks, for example, from Cantillon. Far worse was Smith's complete failure to cite or acknowledge his beloved mentor Francis Hutcheson, from whom he derived most of his ideas as well as the organization of his economic and moral philosophy lectures. Smith indeed wrote in a private letter to the University of Glasgow of the 'never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson,' but apparently amnesia conveniently struck Adam Smith when it came time to writing the Wealth of Nations for the general public.

The Adam Smith Myth - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

Looks like in all your copying and pasting you couldn't even get that small thing right.

Of course, corporate libertarians have to disavow Adam Smith, it destroys their corporate tyranny and people can READ.

The theory of the market economy traces back to the Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) and the publication of Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Considered by many to be the most influential economics book ever written, it articulates the powerful and wonderfully democratic ideal of a self-organizing economy that creates an equitable and socially optimal allocation of a society's productive resources through the interaction of small buyers and sellers making decisions based on their individual needs and interests.

Market theory, as articulated by Smith and those who subsequently elaborated on his ideas, developed into an elegant and coherent intellectual construction grounded in carefully articulated assumptions regarding the conditions under which such self-organizing processes would indeed lead to socially optimal outcomes. For example:

• Buyers and sellers must be too small to influence the market price.
• Complete information must be available to all participants and there are no trade secrets.
• Sellers must bear the full cost of the products they sell and pass them on in the sale price.
• Investment capital must remain within national borders and trade between countries must be balanced.
• Savings must invested in the creation of productive capital.

 

[Bfgrn]

Chomsky on libertarianism and Murray Rothbard
Understanding Power, in which Noam Chomsky discusses the difference between libertarianism and anarchism and comments on the world envisioned by Murray Rothbard:
_____________________________

Man: What's the difference between "libertarian" and "anarchist," exactly?

Chomsky: There's no difference, really. I think they're the same thing. But you see, "libertarian" has a special meaning in the United States. The United States is off the spectrum of the main tradition in this respect: what's called "libertarianism" here is unbridled capitalism. Now, that's always been opposed in the European libertarian tradition, where every anarchist has been a socialist—because the point is, if you have unbridled capitalism, you have all kinds of authority: you have extreme authority.

If capital is privately controlled, then people are going to have to rent themselves in order to survive. Now, you can say, "they rent themselves freely, it's a free contract"—but that's a joke. If your choice is, "do what I tell you or starve," that's not a choice—it's in fact what was commonly referred to as wage slavery in more civilized times, like the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example.

The American version of "libertarianism" is an aberration, though—nobody really takes it seriously. I mean, everybody knows that a society that worked by American libertarian principles would self-destruct in three seconds. The only reason people pretend to take it seriously is because you can use it as a weapon. Like, when somebody comes out in favor of a tax, you can say: "No, I'm a libertarian, I'm against that tax"—but of course, I'm still in favor of the government building roads, and having schools, and killing Libyans, and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.19

The whole thing's not even worth talking about, though. First of all, it couldn't function for a second—and if it could, all you'd want to do is get out, or commit suicide or something. But this is a special American aberration, it's not really serious.

Professor Chomsky has recently expressed a great deal of worry about the recent rise of our "right-wing" libertarian movement; apparently he is — I am afraid unrealistically — concerned that we might succeed in abolishing the State before the State has succeeded in abolishing private property! Secondly, Chomsky has written that the anarcho-capitalist society would constitute "the greatest tyranny the world has ever known." (What, Noam? Greater than Hitler? Than Genghis Khan?)

Whether or not anarcho-capitalism would be tyrannical is here irrelevant; the problem is that, in so expressing his horror at the possible results of complete freedom, Professor Chomsky reveals that he is not really an "anarchist" at all, indeed that he prefers statism to an anarcho-capitalist world. That of course is his prerogative, and scarcely unusual, but what is illegitimate is for this distinguished linguist to call himself an "anarchist."

Syndical Syndrome - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

See how randomly quoting somebody doesn't actually make an argument in and of itself? Regardless, I do find it amusing that you quoted Chomsky in an attempt to make some sort of argument when you referred to me as being brainless for being an anarchist. Irony? Hypocrisy?

Thank you Kevin. Your reply has exposed who and what you really are. You are not for liberty or freedom, you are for creating the ultimate tyranny of robber barons. Here is where your true far right wing corporatism reveals itself. And your idea of freedom is to create a iron fisted hierarchy to rule over the masses. With stated SEVERE punishment for any lowly worker who doesn't submit to total submission. Pining for and embracing of the LEAST free eras in American history, the Gilded Age. Worker freedom to strike is criminalized, yet monopolies would be welcomed.

You are beyond ignorant. You have ZERO understanding of human nature, power and how it manifests. You support the exact same tyranny that these far right wing pea brains support...

Kevin Kennedy and cohorts...

Actually, my reply made only the point that you were a hypocrite for calling anarchists brainless on the one hand, while quoting one to make some sort of point on the other.

Actually it was much more personal...I was talking about you...

Actually, you just quoted Noam Chomsky. You weren't talking about anybody.

No, I quoted David Korten, and you merely quoted reactionary crap from the Austrian school of mass destruction.