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 | Left-Libertarian
Thief of Hearts
The premise of this movie seems to be a cross between Logan’s Run and the original Repo Man. The idea, I gather from the trailer, is that in the near future, patients in need of an organ transplant can purchase artificial organs on an installment plan – but if they don’t keep up their payments, then their organs can be bloodily “repossessed.” The protagonist, Jude Law, is an organ repo man who has no misgivings about his job – until, after a job gone wrong, he wakes up with an organ transplant he can’t afford and ends up on the run, pursued by his former partner, Forest Whitaker.
I thought I’d weigh in early on what I take to be the libertarian perspective on this. Some libertarians may say that these organ repo men are simply enforcing contracts, and so are behaving legitimately. But on my view (elaborated here, here, here, and here; cf. also Rothbard and Barnett), contracts involve the conditional transfer of alienable rights, while rights over bodily parts (whether made of meat or not) are inalienable so long as they’re within the body. (Moreover, there are limits on what one can do in recovering alienable property too.) So my verdict is that what the organ repo men are doing is not libertarianly legitimate.
Retreat!
The schedule for next month’s ISIL conference/retreat in Phoenix is gloriously online. I’m doing an equality dance and a Rand/class-conflict dance.
Carson Defends Carson
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 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).