In other news, left-libertarians will find Ben O’Neill’s new piece on Chomsky a bit frustrating. It attacks Chomsky at a point where he certainly needs attacking, and rightly complains that “Chomsky’s quarrels with private business entities do not rest on any allegation of the initiation of force either by these corporations or on their behalf”; moreover, O’Neill even cites Kolko re the dependence of corporate power on government intervention. So far, so good.
Nevertheless, the Kolko references notwithstanding, the tone of O’Neill’s piece still conveys the impression that existing corporate structures, with all their Dilbertian irrationality and obnoxious hierarchy, are mostly the result of the free market and so to be defended, thus leaving the reader with the old choice between vulgar liberalism (treating various nasty features of the prevailing corporatism as though they constituted an objection to the free market) and vulgar libertarianism (treating the case for the free market as though it justified various nasty features of the prevailing corporatism). In fact, given the impact of statist intervention on corporate structure, Chomsky’s characterisation of corporations as “private tyrannies” can be vindicated on purely libertarian grounds – as Kevin Carson does in his new book Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. (And of course it’s also worth saying that even forms of power that don’t involve or depend on coercion can still be harmful and worth fighting – noncoercively, of course.)
While we’re on this topic – I haven’t forgotten my promise to respond to some of the later criticisms in the Conflation Debate; life has just been über-hectic lately.
A new online journal named 
He got up and they took each other’s hands.