Charles Johnson’s excellent essay “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” which appeared in the anarchism/minarchism anthology that Tibor Machan and I edited, is now available online.
Read it now, or the statists win.
Tag Archives | Conflation Debate
Tea For Two
I was going to write something about CPAC and the tea parties. But then I remembered that I’d already written this last spring.
Zwei Seelen
How can Butler Shaffer write this great anti-conflationist book and then turn around and say this? Grumble grumble gripe gripe ….
The Blood Bank
(CHT François.)
Help Noam Chomsky Find His Inner Anarchist
A reader tipped me off that Noam Chomsky has agreed to answer the top-rated questions submitted via this reddit page; the reader suggested that I condense my “Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism” gripes into a question.
So I did. Here’s my question for Chomsky:
Although as an anarchist you favour a stateless society in the long run, you’ve argued that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of the state in the short run, and that indeed we should be trying to strengthen the state right now, because it’s needed as a check on the power of large corporations.
Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research – your own research most definitely included, though I would also mention in particular Kevin Carson’s – has been to show that the power of large corporations derives primarily from state privilege (which, together with the fact that powerful governments tend to get captured by concentrated private interests at the expense of the dispersed public, would seem to imply that the most likely beneficiary of a more powerful state is going to be the same corporate elite we’re trying to oppose).
If business power both derives from the state and is so good at capturing the state, why isn’t abolishing the state a better strategy for defeating business power than enhancing the state’s power would be?
Users can vote comments upward or downward on the list; so if you’d like to see Chomsky answer the above question, go here and try to boost it up the list. (Or ask one of your own, of course!)
The APEEan Way Leads to Caesar’s Palace
The schedule is up for this coming April’s Las Vegas APEE conference at which Gary Chartier, Steve Horwitz, Charles Johnson, Sheldon Richman, and I will be holding forth at our panel on Free-Market Anti-Capitalism (whatever that is).
Note that the venue has changed from Bally’s to Caesar’s. I don’t know the reason, but I’m glad of it, since I’ll probably be staying at the other end of the strip, and it’ll be easier to take the bus straight down the strip to Caesar’s rather than first taking it to Caesar’s, then taking the overpass to the other side of the street, and finally taking the boom tube to Bally’s. (Plus I confess I’m fond of the Forum Shops at Caesar’s, with their fake-sky ceilings perpetually cycling between day and night – boldly straddling, like so many things in Vegas, that treacherous line between the charming and the tacky.)
In related news, I see that they have a number of 7:40 a.m. sessions. I’m grateful that ours isn’t one of them.