Tag Archives | Left and Right

Let Both Grow Together Until the Harvest

Here’s a parody video of a bunch of market anarchists, of both left-wing (e.g., Brad Spangler, Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, me) and right-wing (e.g., Walter Block, Stefan Molyneux, Keith Preston) varieties. (CHT Ross Kenyon.) The vocal imitations of me and of Molyneux are especially good. (Some of the others, not so much.) But I don’t know why there’s no Hoppe.


Caffeinated Free-Market Anti-Capitalism

Book Talk/Signing:
7:00 p.m., Wednesday, 30 November 2011, at the Gnu’s Room bookstore/café in Auburn, Alabama

Markets Not Capitalism

Co-Editor Charles Johnson and major contributor Roderick Long to the book Markets Not Capitalism (2011) will be at The Gnu’s Room for a discussion of the topics addressed in the book. The economic crisis needs fresh new responses, which emphasize the ways in which poverty and economic inequality have resulted from collusion between government and big business, which has enriched a few corporate giants at the expense of the rest of us. Rather than turning back to politics, the authors argue that working people must begin to free themselves of the mistakes of the past, and work together to take back control over their own lives and livelihoods through individual freedom, mutual exchange, and nonviolent grassroots social activism.


God and Harry Browne

I dug up two letters-to-the-editor from days past. The first, co-written with my friend and then-colleague Elizabeth Brake, was submitted to the Opelika-Auburn News on 9 June 2000; to the best of my recollection, it was published.

Bruce Murray [Letters, 5/31/00] tells us that without divine revelation, we cannot know right from wrong. Yet he offers us no reason to accept this breathtaking dismissal of the last 2500 years of moral philosophy.

God

Do we really need a revelation from a supernatural being before we can figure out that cooperation and mutual respect are better than violence and cruelty? If we can discover through our own reasoning power what the square root of 529 is, why can’t we discover through our own reasoning power how we should behave? The apostle Paul himself acknowledged (Romans 2:14-15) that those who have not received the moral law through revelation can find it for themselves through their own consciences.

Murray seems to think that morality is something that has to be handed down by an authority; but this claim betrays a logical confusion. For an authority’s commands merit our obedience only if the authority itself is good. Since an authority must already be good for its commands to count as good, no authority’s commands could be the standard of goodness.

“Absent the Creator,” Murray opines, “all moral claims are equally opinion.” But then why desn’t he also think that, absent the Creator, all mathematical claims are merely opinion as well? After all, the Bible doesn’t tell us what the square root of 529 is. Nor does it tell us what we should think about abortion, or affirmative action, or genetic engineering, or any number of other important moral issues. Should we just remain agnostic on these issues until we receive a special revelation from the Creator? Or should we instead accept the responsibility of reasoning through such issues, weighing the arguments pro and con to see which side has the strongest case?

Why would God have given us the capacity to reason unless he expected us to make use of it to discover the truth? Murray tells us that without divine revelation we are only animals. But as philosophers from Aristotle to Kant have pointed out, what separates us from mere animals is above all the possession of reason,a nd the responsibilities that come with it. In Hamlet’s words, we were surely not given “godlike reason to fust in us unus’d.”

Roderick T. Long          Elizabeth Brake

The second was published in the Auburn Plainsman, 2 November 2000 (back in my partyarch days):

To the Editor:

Do voters deserve to have full information before they make their choice in the voting booth next Tuesday? The Auburn Plainsman doesn’t seem to think so.

When The Plainsman covers other kinds of races – for student government or Homecoming Queen, for example – they cover all the candidates, not just the top two contenders. Likewise, in the past, The Plainsman has tried to represent all sides fairly rather than simply cheering for the dominant faction. But apparently the rules are different this time.

Al Gore & George W. Bush

George Bush and Al Gore are not the only candidates for President on the ballot. But although The Plainsman has offered space to representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties for guest editorials supporting their candidates, third-party supporters have been denied equal time.

As faculty advisor to the Auburn Libertarians, I asked to write a guest editorial making the case for Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party candidate, since the faculty advisor to the College Republicans recently had a guest editorial making the case for George Bush.

After I was initially told yes, my editorial was eventually turned down because the Libertarian Party is not one of the “main” parties.

Instead, The Plainsman published a vague write-up of the Libertarian Party that made it appears indistinguishable from the Republicans. For example, the party was described as seeking merely to “reduce” the federal income tax (rather than eliminate it), and there was no reference to the Libertarian Party’s stand against all victimless crime laws, including drug laws.

Harry Browne

Is it really any of the government’s business what you choose to inhale or inject into your body? Is your body government property? Moreover, the government’s war on drugs doesn’t just interfere with the freedom of drug users; it threatens everyone else. The drug war is the government’s principal excuse for increasing the invasion of civil liberties.

When government anti-drug programs fail, governments respond by demanding increased powers, by weakening constitutional safeguards against search and seizure, and – of course – by raising taxes.

Prohibition didn’t work with alcohol in the 1920s, and it isn’t working with drugs now; it only breeds organized crime and police corruption, as it did then.

Democrats want to control your economic life, through increased taxes and regulations. Republicans want to control your personal life by dictating what you can read, what you can inhale and whom you can sleep with. Both parties seem to think that politicians and bureaucrats can make better choices than you can about the proper use of your mind, your body, and your money.

Harry Browne is the only candidate for President who doesn’t claim the right to control your life. If you want to be fully informed about your choices on Nov.7, check out the full details on Libertarian positions at www.harrybrowne.org and www.LP.org. And please vote your conscience next Tuesday.

Roderick T. Long


Manifesto Manifests, Manifestly

Markets Not Capitalism

Charles has an official announcement of the release of the C4SS/ALL anthology Markets Not Capitalism, along with:

  • a table of contents
  • an excerpt from the book
  • two different links to buy it
  • a link to read it online
  • and a link to download it.

So why are you still over here?

Incidentally, the official release date is – the Vth of November. Dismember, dismember.


We Are Everywhere

  • Molinari/C4SS and ALL have a presence at next week’s Libertopia in San Diego, with presentations by Gary Chartier, Sheldon Richman, and your humble correspondent. Gary and I are also on an anarchism panel with David Friedman.
  • We (Molinari/C4SS/ALL folks) also have a free-market anti-capitalist manifesto forthcoming: Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty, edited by Gary Chartier and Charles Johnson, with contributions from … well, the usual suspects. You can order an advance copy here while checking out the endorsements from Ken MacLeod, Alexander Cockburn, Sean Gabb, and Bill Kaufmann.
  • Our own Ross Kenyon, the initial organiser of Occupy Auburn, gets press in our student newspaper.

Our quest for world domination continues!


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