BradSpangler.com

I was just reviewing the Rothbard profile page on BlackCrayon.com and found a couple of great quotes.

One regards corporate statism (or mercantilism, if you prefer that term) generally:

The “partnership of government and business” is a new term for an old, old condition. We often fail to realize that the point of much of Big Government is precisely to set up such “partnerships,” for the benefit of both government and business, or rather, of certain business firms and groups that happen to be in political favor.

Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 51: Government-Business “Partnerships”

Another concerns the good and the bad of a word with a variety of definitions — privatization.

In our enthusiasms for privatization, by the way, we should stop and think whether we would want certain government functions to be privatized, and conducted efficiently. Would it really have been better, for example, if the Nazis had farmed out Auschwitz or Belsen to Krupp or I.G. Farben?

Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 51: Government-Business “Partnerships”

That’s a remarkable quote coming from “Mr. Anarcho-capitalism” himself. After all, we’re often said to be in favor of “privatizing everything“. That’s just a truism and not the whole truth, though.

It’s literally true in the sense that a stateless society would have no government to be the de facto owner of public property. The word privatization, though, is often used to refer to the various sorts of government-business partnerships decried above, which any real libertarian ought to be opposed to. I’ve posted on this topic before.

The thing is, people don’t have to be explicitly, hardcore libertarian to recognize there’s something wrong with those sorts of public-private partnerships. I’m forced to conclude that the use of the term “privatize everything” may lead to more misunderstanding than enlightenment.

Tags: Politics //