My comments for the upcoming Molinari Society session in New York this coming week are now online.
I can’t remember if I ever posted that paper on Nozick and class conflict that I presented at the last Alabama Philosophical Society meeting, but if not, that’s online too.
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.)
Check out Kevin Carson on Rachel Carson, DDT, and global warming. (And don’t miss ex-agorist J. Neil Schulman’s creative interpretive stylings in the comments section.)
The Huffington Post reports on the working conditions at Amazon.com, including the fact that workers are:
- Warned that the company refuses to allow sick leave, even if the worker has a legitimate doctor’s note. Taking a day off sick, even with a note, results in a penalty point. A worker with six points faces dismissal.
- Made to work a compulsory 10-hour overnight shift at the end of a five-day week. The overnight shift, which runs from Saturday evening to 5am on Sunday, means they have to work every day of the week.
- Set quotas for the number of items to be picked or packed in an hour that even a manager described as ‘ridiculous’. Those packing heavy Xbox games consoles had to pack 140 an hour to reach their target.
- Set against each other with a bonus scheme that penalises staff if any other member of their group fails to hit the quota.
- Made to walk up to 14 miles a shift to collect items for packing.
- Given only one break of 15 minutes and another of 20 minutes per eight-hour shift and told they had to notify staff when going to the toilet. Amazon said workers wanted the shorter breaks in exchange for shorter shifts.
Predictably, the reaction at LRC (see here and here) has been unsympathetic: “Do you mean to tell me that Amazon employees actually have to work?”
But a better question would be: “Is it likely that Amazon would be able to get away with this crap in a non-oligopsonistic labour market?
Brad Spangler has an excellent post on the relationship between thick libertarianism and anti-electoralism.
In imperial China it was common to describe officials as “Confucians when in office, Taoists when out of office.” Similarly, in modern western democracies whichever party is out of power tends to ramp up the libertarian rhetoric. Hence we hear all this anti-government talk from the Republicans during the Clinton and Obama eras, but (apart from a few honourable exceptions) where was it during the Bush era? And likewise for the Democrats, in the Bush era suspicion of government power was the order of the day, but now (again, apart from a few honourable exceptions) such suspicion is dismissed as evidence of lunacy.
Keith Olbermann
Olbermann and his ilk are perfect examples. Last year Olbermann used to address President Bush in terms such as these:
If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it! There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend.
You’re a fascist – get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it! …
The lot of you are the symbolic descendants of the despotic middle managers of some banana republic to whom “freedom” is an ironic brand name, a word you reach for when you want to get away with its opposite.
Thus, Mr. Bush, your panoramic invasion of privacy is dressed up as “protecting America.”
Thus, Mr. Bush, your indiscriminate domestic spying becomes the focused monitoring only of “terrorist communications.”
And so on, quite enjoyably. But nowadays anyone expressing similar sentiments toward our current President Incarnate would get nothing from Olbermann but ridicule, outrage, and probably some veiled threats of violence.
Which bring me to my point (and I do have one, right on top of my head), which is to recommend Kevin Carson’s critique of Olbermann-style liberalism.
Also check out the latest installment of Kevin’s critique of Sloanism.
And, in mostly unrelated news, check out Stephan Kinsella’s latest piece on IP.