I suspect left-libertarians get nitpicky because people like Miss Anthrope Karen De Coster keeps baiting them.

And yes, thanks to the government’s taxes and interventions, its impossible for some working class members to save even a fraction of their income under the current scenario.

I think Mises said it best when he said (paraphrased) the MO of keynesianism is to cheat the workers.

I agree with the left libertarian misgivings about corporate power, which current hierarchical structures are supported by the state, but I don’t think corporations or certain types of hierarchies are illegitimate. however, It is possible to have corporations in a libertarian society be bigger and more “stratified” than they “should” be, but the blame for this situation lies with an unexpected group that most libertarians do not address or just plain miss altogether…

blame the working class

Think about it. The average working man (in America at least) has a negative savings rate and high interest debt. This puts him at a constant mercy for income and at companies that provide jobs. It does not help that they have been misled to get into such debt and not save by the influence of schools, universities, the media, corporations, and the government. Not to mention that compulsory education implicitly undermines the entrepreneurial spirit that aspiring “working class” individuals could have otherwise had.

High debt and no savings puts the working class under constant pressure to bring in monthly income, and the fear of getting fired will make the worker more likely to put up with “dilbert-like management” that can form under corporate hierarchies. Its hard for someone to say “F*** you!” to their jerk boss if it means they could default on all their loans and end up with losing their home, car, and most of their possessions. This could happen in a month or two for the average debt ridden worker, not too much time to take chances on job hunting. Any forms of collective bargaining by the working class is a minor symptom relief to a major illness (IMO any forms of collectivism are enemies of the poor and the weak).

Contrast this to a working class that saves at least a third of their income consistently, and pays most (or all major) expenses off with little leftover debt. How much easier is it for someone to quit a job where managers treat them like crap or use stupid business models? How much easier is it for them to invest in education for some time or start a business while going without income for a few months? How much easier is for them to be picky about their jobs and pay if they can tolerate “lower pay but better environment” in other jobs or careers lines? (it also helps if the poor or working class were not subject to taxes either, namely the property, income, and sales taxes)

Corporations would be forced to become much more wage competitive, and treat their workers better with good and efficient management, unlike the management in dilbert, because workers would have more options and freedom to switch jobs that comes along with high savings and low to no debt.

So in a libertarian society, the working class will hold the key to how “exploitative” the corporate structure is, by how much they save and how much debt they have. The whole “culture war” of corporate power can be won over by following the, um, following: Stay out of debt, save a lot.

Once again, the true enemies of the working class are the federal reserve the government. Nothing new here…

veritas et aequitas

I, too, wish that we could all defuse the sometimes nasty sectarian rancor between left-libertarians and their fellow anti-state brethren; however, I think it’s important to realize that, both sides can be faulted with a tendency to read with suspicion and pick nits regarding ‘tone,’ atmospherics, and the like. Just think of the many snarky, anti-’vandarchist’ posts that have appeared over at the Mises Blog since the phenomenon of Long-Johnston-Carson-Spangler left-libertarianism arose within (and partly outside) the confines of Austro-libertarianism. Instead of carefully sifting through this work and seeking to appropriate its genuine insights*, there has been a lot of name-calling and broad-brush characterizations. One of the main obstacles to mutual enrichment is the polysemy of words such as ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism.’ These words have no stable, univocal definition. People like Rand and Mises tried to repristinate the term ‘capitalism’ to stand for an economy structured according to unalloyed free market principles, and then to only use it in reference to actually-existing economies as an approximation (or else to call the actually-existing economy a ‘mixed economy’). People on the Left tend to use the term ‘capitalism’ for the social formation that actually emerged in the West, in the aftermath of the various “primitive accumulations,” Enclosures, and the like. Likewise, Mises sought to use ‘socialism’ as a devil term for planned, top-down, command economies. Quite naturally, then, people fed on a steady diet of Mises’s works, then, can’t help but treat all criticisms of ‘capitalism,’ or words in praise of ‘socialism,’ as fighting words…

*Likewise, I find it infuriating that the many other (often quite intelligent and important) scholars associated with the Mises Institute don’t appear to have carefully read and absorbed Long’s Wittgensteinian and coherentist re-casting of praxeology, and his eudaemonistic elaboration of libertarian ethics.