Charles has a new post on W’a L’ma R’t. Stephan replies here, albeit to arguments different from those Charles actually gave. Also check out this long thread on Da Leftlib and related issues (wherein it transpires inter alia that William G. has doubts about “the Carson/Long project,” though I’m not entirely sure what that is).
Tag Archives | Conflation Debate
A Match Made in Hell
Libertarians who recognise the oppressive effects of statism everywhere – but insist that we are currently living in a society in which women have achieved effective legal and social equality, and indeed a certain degree of legally-mandated superiority.
Feminists who recognise the oppressive effects of patriarchy everywhere – but insist that we are currently living in a free market in which government intervention has been scaled back to nearly nothing.
Without the Gaoler We Should Soon Want for Gruel
I’ve often noticed how right-libertarian criticisms of left-libertarians look a lot like statist criticisms of libertarians in general.
My bud (I was going to say “my compadre” before I found out what it actually means) Stephan (who, I must in fairness point out, is by no means a right-libertarian across the board, but who nonetheless is incontinently* prone to reveling in his right-libertarian side whenever opportunity permits) seems bent on proving my point; he thinks it’s a score against left-libertarianism that these prosthetic legs were developed by a capitalist corporation. How is this different from the statists’ notion that the state’s provision of roads, mail service, and the like is some kind of score against libertarianism?
Votre théorie s’arrête à ce qu’on voit, ne tient pas compte de ce qu’on ne voit pas.
* I use the term in the Aristotelean sense of excessive susceptibility to temptation, not in the medical sense of poor bladder control – though the meanings are not unrelated.
Amazon Goes Straight
Amazon.com recently started tagging gay-themed books as “adult,” meaning they’re removed from sales rankings and don’t show up in general searches. (Conical hat tip to Neil Gaiman.)
According to Amazon management, it was a glitch.
According to Amazon employees, it wasn’t a glitch.
At times like these it’s worth remembering that there are other places to buy books online besides Amazon ….
Democrats For Plutocrats
Left-leaning libertarians and libertarian-leaning leftists have been saying for years that “liberals” (in the mainstream sense), far from wielding the club of governmental regulation against big business, have been among the chief enforcers of corporate interests.
Now we get confirmation straight from the horse’s mouth. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (Conical hat tip to Lew Rockwell and Ralph Raico), Obama, Biden, and Clinton all have a higher “pro-business” record than Ron Paul – because (and give them credit for their honesty) the Chamber’s criterion for being “pro-business” is support for corporate subsidies and special privileges, not support for free markets.
The right-leaning Washington Examiner’s story makes it sound as though it’s liberals rather than conservatives that are pawns of the plutocracy (hence their headline “New Chamber index shows conservatives aren’t corporate pawns”), but a look at the winners of the Chamber’s “Spirit of Corporate Welfare Enterprise” award shows Republicans and Democrats both eagerly filling the trough – with my own state’s Senator Richard Shelby at the top of the list.
In the Footnotes
Often topics arise in the comments sections that are only tangentially related to the original post. In case you missed these:
My post on cultural literacy has generated a debate on feminism; my post on W’a L’ma R’t has generated two pages of debate on left-libertarianism (I’ll try to answer some more of the comments tomorrow); and the L & P version of my post on the Atlas Shrugged movie has provoked a whole new post there by William Marina on Rand’s awful awfulness.