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Saturday, January 01, 2011
Why Left-Libertarianism Matters
Left-libertarianism is motivated in part by indignation over the historical power disparity between workers and owners of capital. Nonleft-libertarians respond that there is no disparity in the free market. Left-libertarians agree. The difference is that nonleft-libertarians often talk about the present capitalist world as though it were the freed market. (This is what Kevin Carson calls "vulgar libertarianism" and Roderick Long calls "Right-conflationism.")
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7 comments:
And of course the Daily Kos liberals attack the world that produced AIG, Bear-Stearns and Bernie Madoff as if it had been a freed market.
Liberals either don't understand basic economic theory or don't care about deficits or good money management.
Conservatives either don't understand basic economic theory or don't care about deficits or good money management.
I would say that Left-libertarianism also matters when it demonstrates the damage done to consumers from heavy-handed government interference in free exchange (sometimes mistakenly referred to as "regulation").
For instance, how many Americans really understood why the health care system is so screwed up, versus thinking that it was another "market failure"?
So these ideas matter, at least potentially. In the context of the health care debate, few of these ideas ever reached the masses, so they didn't matter there, unfortunately.
My designation for the type of libertarian criticized here is "Panglossian libertarian".
The rest of us still see some room for improvement via reductions in state violence.
Carson's vulgar libertarianism is an important distinction, but it isn't determinative. The limits of homesteading is what separates the right- from the left-libertarians.
Really? How do left-libertarian Roderick Long and right-libertarian Hans-Hermann Hoppe differ regarding "[t]he limits of homesteading"?
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