Check out Kevin Carson’s latest C4SS research paper: MOLOCH: Mass-Production Industry As a Statist Construct.
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
Very interesting read. It would be interesting to see how business would have operated without the interference of the state over the last 150 or so years.
Some thoughts:
Carson seems to say that railroads (big ones running across the nation) wouldn’t have existed without state help. I wonder what he thinks about the Great Northern. It seems to have made it across the continent without the state intervention that competing railroad lines received.
On page 21 in the section “Mass Consumption to Absorb Surplus”, there’s a lot of discussion about marketing creating demand for surplus products. I’m confused as to whether or not he believes brands would exist in the absence of state intervention. I’m guessing he does, but I’m not sure. I think there would be. A brand might signal a certain quality to the buyer.
On the subject of advertising, the way Carson writes about it makes it seem as if marketing is some sort of magical thing that makes people buy stuff. I’m also unclear on if he thinks that mass production would not exist sans state help. Maybe his arguments here are too nuanced for me.