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.)
Tag Archives | Conflation Debate
The Land of We All
Check out Charles’ latest Freeman article, this one on the healthcare debate.
(The title of this blog post comes from a piece by Richard Mitchell.)
A People’s History of Pandora, Part 2
Libertarians are divided on Avatar (which I haven’t seen yet); check out Peter Suderman, Stephan Kinsella, Peter Klein, David Kramer, and Lester Hunt.
Lester writes, inter alia:
What makes the business corporation in this movie so evil? Well, it engages in the following practices: using military force to invade and conquer foreign lands, slaughtering wholesale numbers of the inhabitants and burning their dwellings, all in order to steal their property. … Gee, I thought, I can’t think of a single business corporation that engages in those particular practices. Office Depot doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Dell Inc don’t either.
So in the comments section I responded:
I can’t think of many businesses that engage in those particular practices all on their own. But I can think of plenty of businesses that have either gotten governments to engage in those practices on their behalf (examples range from the East India Company to the United Fruit/Brands Company) or have themselves engaged in those practices on some government’s behalf (e.g. Blackwater, DynCorp).
The Tragic Rand
Will Wilkinson has a good anti-conflationist piece on Rand, here. (CHT Charles Johnson.) I posted the following quibble:
Excellent piece (and on related points see also my posts Ayn Rand’s Left-Libertarian Legacy and Ayn Rand and the Capitalist Class); but I think I disagree with you about the benevolent-universe premise; when she says that success is metaphysically normal, I don’t think she means this to entail that success (or even the possibility of success) is statistically normal. Admittedly I think she perhaps sometimes slides from the former to the latter in her later writings (as in her changing views on charity); but if so, that was a mistaken inference and doesn’t impugn the principle itself. By analogy (to make a Michael Thompson-y point): even if some plague caused most lions to be born with three legs, it would still be true that the lion is a four-legged animal or that being four-legged is normal for lions.
Spangler on Social Revolution
Brad Spangler has an excellent post on the relationship between thick libertarianism and anti-electoralism.
Thinking Littorally
Some last-minute changes to the schedule for the upcoming Alabamaphilosofest.
