Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian
Everybody Run, Uncle Grady Has a Gun
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News. (I’ve restored my original paragraphing, which was altered seemingly at random.)
To the Editor:
Bob Sanders wonders (May 8th) why we would fear Uncle Grady the tax assessor. Surely the answer is: because Uncle Grady’s edicts are ultimately backed up by threats of violence from Uncle Sam.
Sanders favours the forcible extraction of money from innocent people (i.e. taxation) because he doesn’t see any other way to pay for, as he puts it, “roads and police and help for people who need it.”
Well, sure, we all want those things. The question is, is governmental violence the best way to get them? Monopolistic providers, since they don’t face competition, tend to provide inferior service at higher prices. Since they have a captive customer base, they also tend to abuse power. So why on earth would we want any important service to be supplied by a monopolistic government?
All the services that Sanders mentions can be, and historically have been, provided more fairly and efficiently by private competition. (Read Edward Stringham’s book Anarchy and the Law.)
The idea of government as a source of “help for people who need it” is particularly ironic. Historically, governments always get captured by concentrated interests (the wealthy) at the expense of dispersed interests (the poor). That’s why big business is so terrified of a genuinely freed market and always supports privileges and subsidies (wrapped of course in either free-market rhetoric or progressive rhetoric, depending on who’s in power).
Government policies – even, indeed especially, those touted as intended to protect the poor or to rein in big business – have had the actual (and largely intended, given who turns out to have lobbied for them) effect of destroying poor people’s livelihood and protecting the corporate elite from competition. Read, for example, Gabriel Kolko’s book The Triumph of Conservatism, Butler Shaffer’s In Restraint of Trade, David Beito’s From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, and Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy.
As for the tax-subsidized roads that Sanders champions, their chief beneficiaries are big corporations like Wal-Mart, whose heavy trucks for long-distance shipping cause the majority of wear and tear on the highway system, but who don’t bear a proportionate share of the tax burden. Like most government policies, highway subsidies redistribute money from the less to the more affluent, not vice versa.
Sanders’ worries about Sarah Palin’s anti-government rhetoric are unfounded. Palin poses as an enemy of big government, just as Obama poses as an enemy of big business; but if one looks past the rhetoric at the actual policies favoured by each, they’re both firm supporters of the big-government/big-business partnership that so thoughtfully manages our lives.
Roderick T. Long
Another Gift From IP
From an info page about the 1996 Doctor Who tv-movie:
Due to complicated licensing and ownership of the telefilm, no North American (a.k.a. Region 1) home video release has occurred in either VHS or DVD formats as of 2009, and no such release is expected in the foreseeable future. Ironically, several of the featurettes on the UK DVD were produced specifically for US audiences.
In fact, to compound the irony, the entire movie itself was specifically geared toward American audiences – which, incidentally, was one of the reasons it wasn’t as good as the recent BBC revival. Still, I imagine American Who fans would buy it if they were allowed to.
Point Man
An English translation of individualist anarchist Anselme Bellegarrigue’s 1848 work To the Point! To Action! is now available online (see parts one, two, three, and four), thanks to the efforts of Shawn Wilbur, Robert Tucker, and Jesse Cohn.
Incidentally, I see from a websearch that the photo of Max Nettlau at the top of Nettlau’s Bellegarrigue bio on the Molinari website has been widely mistaken for a photo of Bellegarrigue. Sorry, no.
Frankenstein’s Dad
Nice piece by Jeff Riggenbach on William Godwin. And what he says about the respective roles of communism and individualism in Godwin’s theory strikes me as basically right.
It’s also worth noting (since Riggenbach mentions Caleb Williams toward the end) that there’s been a revival of interest in Godwin’s novels as well; indeed I find that among academics he’s perhaps best known for his role in the development of the Romantic novel.
The theme of Caleb Williams might be described as “the problem of other minds, viewed through the lens of class analysis.” It concerns an innocent commoner being persecuted (for complicated reasons) by an aristocrat, where the difference in social status between the two men makes it literally impossible for even the most well-intentioned third parties to take seriously the possibility that the fault lies with the aristocrat; the notion that the aristocrat might be other than as he seems is treated as a skeptical hypothesis that can be entertained in the abstract but cannot seriously be lived. (Godwin had a deep interest in Humean worries about ordinary beliefs’ being unfounded yet impossible to surrender; see my Godwin paper.)
Among Godwin’s other novels, the best known is St.-Léon (originally titled The Adept), about an alchemist who discovers the twin secrets of making gold and of living forever. Just as H.G. Wells seems to have been the first writer to explore what being invisible would actually be like (including the disadvantages it would entail), so Godwin does the same thing for immortality and inexhaustible wealth. Byron once paid the novel a rather Byronic compliment:
[A]fter asking Godwin why he did not write a new novel, his lordship received from the old man the answer, that it would kill him. “And what matter,” said Lord Byron, “we should have another St.-Léon.”
(Given Godwin’s views on archbishops and chambermaids, he could hardly have objected to Byron’s suggested trade-off.)
Beyond Being
The Good is not being, but beyond being, surpassing it in dignity and power. — Plato
According to CBS News, the Department of Homeland Security has had its eye on Faisal Shahzad since 1999. That’s pretty impressive for a Department that didn’t exist until 2002.
Wow, so government agencies can do their jobs just as well when they don’t exist as when they do! I guess that settles the debate over anarchism.