My final contribution (a brief and hopefully eirenic valediction) to the Cato-sponsored portion of the discussion is up at Cato Unbound.
In other news, Peter Klein has responded to my earlier response, and P. M. Lawrence has counter-responded. I’ll have more to say anon.
The Catofest is winding down (though I still hope to hear a peep from Matt Yglesias ere darkness falls). Dean Baker replies to me, and the Cato editors have rounded up a “best of the blogs” featuring Wirkman Virkkala, Sheldon Richman, Charles Johnson, and others. I plan to reply to some of the blogs, though probably not as part of the Cato Unbound conversation.
Now up at Cato Unbound: my latest response to Yglesias and Baker, Horwitz’s latest response to Yglesias, and most recently my response to Peter Klein, Will Wilkinson, and J. H. Huebert and Walter Block.
Charles Johnson also has a reply to Walter and Huebert up; I sent in my response before I saw Charles’s, but we ended up making similar points.
I hope Yglesias responds before things wind up; he’s only spoken twice so far.
My response is up at Cato Unbound, along with further responses by Steve Horwitz, Dean Baker, and Matthew Yglesias. Yet another response from me should be up tomorrow morning (well, today morning now).
Other responses to our debate are also popping up across the web, including contributions by Peter Klein, Will Wilkinson, and most recently J. H. Huebert and Walter Block. (The latter offers a rather odd interpretation of one of Charles Johnson’s blog posts.)
I plan to reply to these as well. But not tonight!
The latest round of dialogue on my anti-corporatism piece is up on Cato Unbound.
SUMMARY: In his response to Roderick Long, Matthew Yglesias argues that although corporations naturally seek to win special privileges from the state, libertarianism is far from the obvious solution to the problem. Instead, he reiterates the charge that libertarians often act as corporate apologists and suggests that the net effect of any “free market” advocacy will tend strongly toward corporate power.
SUMMARY: Steven Horwitz offers several examples of so-called “de-regulation” that only served to benefit corporations, while leaving the government, and therefore the taxpayers, to shoulder the risks of the market. He argues that market competition is a form of regulation, albeit a kind worth wanting, as it forces corporations to respond to consumer demand and punishes them when they fail to meet it. He takes issue with Roderick Long’s lead essay by arguing that “playing defense,” that is, defending today’s corporations when they act consonantly with a fully freed market, is a valuable part of libertarian advocacy; one must nonetheless take issue with these same corporations when they violate the principles of laissez faire, and distinguish carefully between these cases.
SUMMARY: In his response essay, Dean Baker declines to tally up a “score” of how well libertarians, or other groups, have defended a truly impartial, laissez faire economy. Instead, he suggests intellectual property as an obvious area where libertarians must challenge corporate power to distort the market. Patents that make health care more expensive and copyrights that artificially restrict whole areas of our culture are obviously concessions to corporatism, and the “extraordinary abuses” undertaken to enforce these privileges should be vigorously challenged. Although libertarianism has been skeptical of both patents and copyrights, Baker suggests that this is an area deserving still further attention, and one in which liberals could perhaps become solid allies.
Randal O’Toole’s, Jerry Taylor’s, and Timothy Lee’s responses to the respondents:
SUMMARY: The discussion this month has focused to a greater than usual degree on the activities of certain Cato Institute policy scholars. The editors thought it appropriate to solicit responses, and we present them here in their entirety.
My own response to the respondents:
TITLE: Keeping Libertarian, Keeping Left
Dean Baker’s response to me and to Timothy Lee:
TITLE: On State Funding and Innovation
My response to Timothy Lee and to Dean Baker:
TITLE: Owning Ideas Means Owning People
(This last isn’t posted yet but should be up shortly.)
The first of three commentaries for the Molinari Society’s authors-meet-critics session at the December APA is now online: this one by Nicole Hassoun of Carnegie-Mellon, author of “Why Libertarians Should Be Welfare Liberals.”
The other two commentators are Jennifer McKitrick (vice-president of the Molinari Institute and author of “Liberty, Gender, and the Family”) and Christopher Morris (author of An Essay on the Modern State).
The books under discussion are Crispin Sartwell’s Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory and the anthology I co-edited with Tibor Machan, Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?