Recommended podcasts:
- TWiT Live Specials 32: The Future Of The Web. In this episode–hosted by TWiT host Leo Laport’s daughter, high school senior Abby Laporte–”Young entrepreneurs give their vision of the future of technology.” It is quite impressive and inspiring to see these dynamic, intelligent, confident, ambitious, well-spoken young people–and quite a contrast to the unfortunate ignorance and aimlessness of too many young people today.
- Sheldon Richman’s FEE talk “Mutual Aid and the Welfare State.” This is a fascinating and informative lecture, to which the libertarian can subscribe without adopting mutualism proper, which is itself problematic (see my A Critique of Mutualist Occupancy).
- Tom Palmer’s FEE talk Theory of Rights and Property — overall, an excellent and interesting (some of it elementary) discussion of the history of ideas, “delivered to students at the History and Liberty seminar.” Note: Palmer describes the Hayekian position on socialism and attributed it to Mises; yet Mises’s calculation argument against socialism is distinct from Hayek’s emphasis on knowledge–see my Knowledge, Calculation, Conflict, and Law; Salerno, “Postscript: Why a Socialist Economy is ‘Impossible’” and Mises and Hayek Dehomogenized. Palmer’s criticism of Bork’s famous “inkblot” comment is also a bit lacking–my view is Bork’s theory of original understanding is basically sound but that he applies it incorrectly to the Ninth Amendment. Also, Palmer denigrates Rothbard’s property views for relying “only” on homesteading–Palmer says he has a “more pluralist” view of how property can arise–but doesn’t specify what this might be. Interestingly, he observes correctly that when we libertarians say we favor property rights we of course do not mean that property has rights. Of course, a parallel observation could be made regarding the notion of “states’ rights”–when libertarian decentralists say this, they just mean the federal government has limited and enumerated powers.
I’ve noted in recent posts that while some left-libertarians seem to oppose standard libertarians’ positive endorsement of “capitalism” for semantic or strategic reasons, for others they actually oppose the substance of what libertarians mean by (non-crony, non-corporatist) capitalism (see, e.g., Capitalism, Socialism, and Libertarianism, and links in that post; see also Wirkman Virkkala’s post A capital ism?). An example of those with a more semantic or strategic concern would be Sheldon Richman, who is concerned about the “baggage” associated with the word, which will hamper our getting our pro-property rights, libertarian message out. Thus he favors using “free market” instead, but as far as I can tell this is similar to what we mean by “capitalism”–a libertarian society with a market based on respect for property rights, which of course includes private ownership of the means of production (and everything else). (See also Sheldon’s comment to Should Libertarians Oppose “Capitalism”?) Another would be Jock Coats, who notes here that while the baggage of the term “capitalism” might have turned him off had he not also seen the term “free-market anti-capitalism,” now that he understands the term he is “quite happy to be identified as an Individualist Anarchist/Mutualist and at times an Anarcho-Caplitalist,” and is “for keeping ‘capitalism’ as a word in our lexicon.”
To be clear, I think the semantical and strategic debate is one we can have, but it’s different than a substantive disagreement–and we can have that discussion too. But these are separate discussions and should not be intermingled. This leads to confusion at best and equivocation and dishonesty (on the part of leftists) at worst.
In my view there is little doubt that libertarians who have concerns about the appropriate words to use or strategic matters are of course libertarians. We just differ on the best way to convey and spread and communicate about our ideas. But those who disagree on substance may simply not be libertarians. This should not be masked by conflating the discussion with more mundane issues of semantics and strategy.
Now some of the left-libertarians more concerned about terminology and strategy deny or downplay the charge that at least some of them have much more than a mere lexical disagreement with us. So it is good that some of them are willing to explicitly admit this. Take, for instance, one Roman Pearah, who writes in Hmmm…No, Sir. I Don’t Like It.: [Keep reading…]
The debate over whether “capitalism” should be used by libertarians and other supporters of free markets waxes rather than wanes. Last week, Sheldon Richman published “Is Capitalism Something Good?” on Freeman Online. And I can see why Stephan Kinsella calls this an “extremely frustrating” debate. We never get very far.
My favorite of Richman’s points is lexical:
At the semantic level, capitalism is an unfortunate word when applied to the free market. It suggests a privileged status for capital over other factors of production, which is not the case in a free market. A capitalist is not a believer in capitalism but rather an owner of capital. One can be a socialist capitalist, that is, one who owns capital while favoring a system called socialism.
In my younger days of argumentation, people would sometimes accuse me of being a capitalist. Well, in those younger days I was broke. I had no savings. I had nothing to invest, and invested in nothing but my own mind. So I would correct them: “Hey, I’m near the poverty line. No capitalists down here! Besides, I support laissez-faire because it regulates businesses: It enforces a rule of law that disallows businesses from demanding I pay for their goods if I don’t want their goods, or pay more than I would under competition, which laissez faire also enforces. I am not a capitalist, because I insist that we keep capitalists in their place.” [Keep reading…]
