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Saying It Again

By on August 9, 2011 4

The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News. Regular readers of this blog will find no surprises here:

To the Editor:

D. W. St. John (“Regulations often needed in today’s world,” Thursday) blames both the BP oil spill and the financial crisis on a lack of government regulation.

On the contrary, both disasters were caused by pro-big-business regulations.

BP took unnecessary risks because they’d been given a liability cap of $75 million. Small wonder that they engaged in riskier behavior when they could count on regulations limiting their victims’ right to sue.

Alan Greenspan

As for the financial crisis, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s manipulation of interest rates distorted price signals and encouraged unsustainable investments, thereby making a collapse inevitable. Calling this longtime regulator a messiah of unregulated markets is ludicrous.

Most government regulations are pro-plutocracy in their effects, regardless of how they’re marketed. Both liberal and conservative politicians are reliable supporters of the big-government/big-business partnership that dominates our economy, though of course they’re careful to wrap that support in anti-big-business rhetoric and anti-big-government rhetoric, respectively.

It’s no coincidence that most of the supposedly anti-big-business legislation of the Progressive Era was lobbied for, often even drafted by, the corporate elite, who understood that big businesses thrive when small businesses are choked by regulations.

The grain of truth in the idea that crises are caused by deregulation is that when government grants special privileges to banks and corporations, and then removes restrictions on how these privileges are exercised, perverse incentives take over and catastrophic results predictably ensue.

But the problem is the initial regulations that create the privileges in the first place.

Unchaining a state-privileged entity is not a decrease in state intervention; rather the contrary.

To learn more about why government regulation systematically serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of everybody else, check out the websites of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and the Center for a Stateless Society.

Roderick T. Long

Why Lawrence O’Donnell Is Not a Real Journalist Either

By on August 6, 2011 13

Lawrence O'Donnell

Lawrence O’Donnell accuses a “right-wing website” (he means Reason.com) for refusing to criticise cops – even though Reason.com not only frequently criticises cops, but regularly carries the columns of Radley Balko, one of the most prominent critics of police brutality in the country.

Nick Gillespie responds.

Kevin Carson responds.

Radley Balko responds and then responds some more.

I would hold my breath waiting for O’Donnell’s apology and retraction, only I’m not suicidal. As Kevin points out, O’Donnell himself has admitted that he regards only the great and powerful as deserving of courtesy.

John King Explains Why He Is Not a Real Journalist

By on August 5, 2011 2

John King

When a man jumped the White House fence on August 2nd and was taken down by the Secret Service, John King’s program was already broadcasting live from the location. King commented:

Now you see, if you are ever thinking about this, the inevitable result if you hop that fence. … One of the things we don’t like to do is give too much coverage to this – if it is a political stunt, it would encourage somebody else to do it. So we’re going to turn away from this for now and come back to our coverage. … You never know what happens if you come down here. But the Secret Service, as always, performing quickly and admirably to bring it to a close.

He later told Don Lemon:

We usually don’t give these things any coverage, Don, because political stunts can happen, people trying to make a political statement, who want to be on television, jump the fence. Because we were on live television, from the White House, what had happened – we did show it.

Magic When We’re Together

By on August 5, 2011 10

Melissa Harris-Perry, poli sci prof at Tulane, explains to Rachel Maddow:

Leviathan

When your government is a free and fair democratically-elected-in-regular-elections government, then it’s not some scary thing outside of you. It is you. It is, in fact, that we, by being together in communal space, we say: okay, look, there are these community assets, air, water, land, national defense. And we know that individually we always have short time horizons. Not malicious or bad or evil – we can only see so far, only see our own good; so we come together in government – freely elected, not all governments – that say: look, we will protect our common good, our inner child that can’t speak for itself. Our job as a government is to protect that, and so government regulations, particularly federal government regulations, are precisely the interest groups that these sorts of common interests are to have.

So let me get this straight. We’re a bunch of self-centered, short-sighted individuals. And government isn’t something different from us; it’s just us. And yet government decisions are not similarly self-centered and short-sighted. Gee, I wish she’d explain what the mechanism is.

Anarchy In Seattle: Call For Papers

By on August 4, 2011 1

The Molinari Society

MolinariSociety.org

Call for Papers

for the Society’s Symposium to be held in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting, April 4-8, 2012, Seattle.

Symposium Topic:
Explorations in Philosophical Anarchy (II)

Submission Deadline:
September 30, 2011

Seattle

The past two decades have seen a resurgence of interest, both in activist and academic circles, in Anarchist politics and theory, with new and challenging work from several different directions. Renewed academic interest in Anarchism has drawn attention to the importance, vitality and philosophical fruitfulness of key Anarchist arguments and concepts – such as the conflict between authority and autonomy; tensions between collectivism and individualism; critical challenges to hierarchy, centralized power, top-down control and authoritarian conceptions of representation; and the development of concepts of spontaneous social order, decentralized consensus, and the knowledge problems and ideological mythologzing inherent in relations or structures of domination.

Most of this discussion has, naturally enough, taken place within the field of political and moral philosophy. But Anarchist theory (like marxist or feminist theory) embodies more than a policy orientation or a system of moral or political theses. The Anarchist tradition offers a wide-ranging, diverse and vigorously argued literature, concerning the nature and foundations of human society, with implications for every aspect of philosophy, including not only political and moral theory but also aesthetics, social-science methodology, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, religion, history, language and logic. We are looking for papers that address possible connections, approaches, challenges or insights that anarchy and its conceptual environs may suggest for philosophy broadly – or that philosophy may suggest for anarchy – beyond the familiar territory of political and moral theory, especially in such areas as epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, and metaphilosophy or philosophical method. Papers from all analytical and critical standpoints (both with regard to philosophy and with regard to Anarchism) are welcome.

Seattle anarchists stimulating the glazier industry

Please submit complete papers of 3,000-6,000 words for consideration for the 2012 Symposium by September 30, 2011. Papers should be of appropriate scope and length to be presented within 15-30 minutes. Submitting authors will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of their papers by October 10, 2011.

Submit papers as e-mail attachments, in Word .doc format or PDF, to longrob@auburn.edu or feedback@radgeek.com.

For any questions or information, contact us at the above email addresses.

* * *

Some possible topics include – but are by no means limited to:

  • Authority and Epistemology
  • Anarchy and Logic
  • Illusions of control in philosophy
  • Decentralism or spontaneous order in philosophy of language
  • Philosophical implications of the work of “canonical” Anarchist theorists (Godwin, Proudhon, Molinari, Tucker, Spooner, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, De Cleyre, Goodman, Bookchin, Rothbard, Wolff, Zerzan…)
  • Anarchy and Rationality
  • Hierarchy, legibility and knowledge problems
  • Philosophical Method and Anarchism
  • Claims of representation and claims of knowledge
  • Etc.

Please spread the word to anyone who you think would be interested in the symposium topic!

Addendum:

More info here.

Locked Out

By on August 2, 2011 14

One of the triumphs of government schooling is that most educated English-speakers nowadays cannot read this sentence from Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education:

The age is not like to want instances of this kind, which should be made land-marks to him, that by the disgraces, diseases, beggary, and shame of hopeful young men thus brought to ruin, he may be precaution’d, and be made see, how those join in the contempt and neglect of them that are undone, who, by pretences of friendship and respect, lead them to it, and help to prey upon them whilst they were undoing: that he may see, before he buys it by a too dear experience, that those who persuade him not to follow the sober advices he has receiv’d from his governors, and the counsel of his own reason, which they call being govern’d by others, do it only that they may have the government of him themselves; and make him believe, he goes like a man of himself, by his own conduct, and for his own pleasure, when in truth he is wholly as a child led by them into those vices which best serve their purposes.

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