Two rather different libertarian takes on Scrooge: Butler Shaffer’s and mine. (Mine’s from 1993, so it’s not quite as I would word it today, but ’twill serve.)
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.
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What would you phrase differently? How and why?
I think it’s a gem as it is, and linked to it 2 weeks ago.
Well, I’d probably go into more detail about how people like Scrooge in particular owed their supremacy over people like Cratchit to governmental intervention. And I wouldn’t call the system I favour “capitalism.”
What a difference almost 20 years makes, eh?
Is Shaffer wrong in his portrayal of the competitive environment in Scrooge’s time? (What’s a good source?) Cratchit doesn’t seem terribly determined to improve his lot. Would there have been such a scarcity of opportunities in the London of his day?
Roderick Long,
What do you think of Steve Landsburg’s Scrooge?
Doesn’t strike me as right either. Scrooge neither deprives others of comforts in order to enjoy them himself (the conventional conception of selfishness) nor deprives himself of comforts in order to bestow them on others (the conventional conception of generosity). He renounces comforts for himself and begrudges them to others; he is simply anti-comfort across the board. He resents and disapproves of enjoyment generally; he tells himself that it’s because such enjoyment is wasteful, but it’s really because he is bitter and depressed and has focused so long on the means that he’s lost track of the end.
I hope you don’t mind if I take this opportunity to point out yet another take on Scrooge that Susan Wells and I put together a few years back: A Drug War Carol