How long?
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the US Supreme Court has decided that the government may seize private homes for de facto non-public purposes.
How long before homeowners decide the People may seize the Supreme Court?
Libertarian Class Theory
Ali Hassan Massoud has a new post: The Great Denial: Liberty and Class-Consciousness
Ali (and others), I don’t know if you’re familiar with this or not, but there is a body of work referred to as Libertarian Class Theory that could use some refinement, re-statement and updating.
It’s essentially the pre-Marxian class theory of Comte and Dunoyer — the struggle of the productive class versus the political class.
For extensive reading on Comte and Dunoyer, this might be a good place to start:
http://homepage.mac.com/dmhart/ComteDunoyer/Title.html
Perhaps the best modern and (relatively) short explicitly libertarian take on it is this essay by Rick Tompkins from when he was running for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination back in 1996:
http://sc.ca.lp.org/scl/9605-class.html
I’d love to see some fresh and original work in this vein. I took a tentative stab at it with an article on Rational Review several months ago. I keep meaning to come back to it, but seldom find myself in a position to give it the attention it really deserves.
I’ve heard that Marx had a critique of Comte’s class theory, although I personally haven’t gotten around to researching it yet. What I can tell you is that Marx’s description of primitive accumulation actually meshes pretty well with a Rothbardian outlook, in my own opinion.
Someone might be able to break some new ground by answering Marx’s criticism of Comte from a more informed modern perspective — that is to say, illuminated by a solid understanding of Rothbard and perhaps Konkin. As a suggestion, one person to talk to about this would definitely be Kevin Carson of mutualist.org fame. He’s done a lot in that vein already, particularly with “Austrian and Marxist Theories of Monopoly Capital: A Mutualist Synthesis“.
AnCap Wiki search plugin for Firefox
Don’t get me wrong. I love Wikipedia. It’s just that some material that would be good to have available might not necessarily fit well with Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy.
So, I’ve decided that when citing background material specific to Market Anarchism / Anarcho-capitalism, I ought to perhaps reference Bill St. Clair’s AnCap Wiki or, perhaps, LibertyWiki — instead of Wikipedia.
The thing is, they could both do with a lot more in the way of contributed material. That got me started thinking about how to better incorporate them into the blogging “workflow”. I wondered if more convenient search might encourage anarchist bloggers to first check for material that might be there — so they can either cite it or start a new stub article if it’s not.
Well, more convenient search isn’t to hard to arrange. I wrote a little Firefox search plugin for Bill St. Clair’s AnCap Wiki as a test. I’ll probably get around to doing the same for LibertyWiki if this proves popular.
Now do me a favor and try it out. Just download it, unpack the zip file and follow the instructions in the “readme.txt” file to install.
Then let me know what you think.
Update: Before I forget, just let me mention that although I’ve only tested this on Firefox 1.0.4, it’s also likely to work on recent versions of the Mozilla and Netscape (7.1+) web browsers. Let me know.
Gitmo comes home
Defense Tech: Whistleblower Beating: Details Emerge
This is one reason why I am very serious about the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
The men “didn’t take his wallet or our car,” Susan added. But they “kept telling him,” according to Tommy’s lawyer, Bob Rothstein, ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut.’”
The Wilsonian case fails
Professor R.J. Rummel holds forth WWII as the shining example of the Good War(tm) that proves the virtue of US military intervention abroad:
“Now to say that, ‘War as such clearly does not enhance the security of any nation, democratic or otherwise,’ is questionable, given World II against Hitler and Tojo, and the Korea War that saved South Korea, which eventually became democratic.”
Yet I recently demonstrated very easily that WWII was caused by US military intervention in WWI — by the same Wilsonian doctrine that Rummel appears to advocate, perhaps in a dusted off form, today — and which he sees as vindicated by WWII.
This is perhaps the most pernicious fallacy of all time — that government is the only way to deal with problems that most neglect to acknowledge are created by government in the first place.
Tom Knapp ROCKS!
Fellow anarchist Tom Knapp, responding to his minarchist muse Robert Bell, holds high aloft the black flag and refuses to do obeisance to partialitarianism, perfecting his arguments instead.
Bell maintains that anarchists “…fail to articulate a feasible alternative.”
Knapp demolishes those arguments, pointing out that anarchy is actually far more practical than the State.
Read Knapp’s post — “The radical writ“. Follow this discussion. Tom’s writing is like a hot wind from a blast furnace, incinerating all the cliched specious arguments against anarchism that attempt to stand before it.
Anarchists: read Tom Knapp and improve your advocacy of the stateless society.
Hillary Clinton on Abuse of Power???
I’m still attempting to wrap my humble mind around the dao of Hillary Clinton talking about abuse of power:
“There has never been an administration, I don’t believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda,” Mrs. Clinton told the audience at a “Women for Hillary” gathering in Midtown Manhattan this morning.
…when referring to the Bush administration. It’s not that I disagree with her on that point — for I don’t disagree at all. If anything, I believe so more passionately than she does.
It’s just ironic as hell considering who the previous record holders were.
UPDATE: Wall Conger has more to say on this, and boy do I love that picture he posted.
Wasn’t this originally a Burt Reynolds movie?
High-End Cars Pulled Over in Run to Vegas
VANCOUVER, Wash. - Washington State Patrol troopers pulled over Porsches, Ferraris and even a Lamborghini on Interstate 5 this weekend as more than 50 drivers, many in luxury cars, set out on a five-day rally that involves driving from city to city to collect poker cards.
Followup: more from Karl Hess
Big hat tip to Freeman, Libertarian Critter for digging up some more Karl Hess goodies in response to my recent posting of a link to his 1969 article in Playboy, “The Death of Politics.”
As Freeman says, this really is “Good readin’“:
Economics really can make sense
B.K. Marcus is back from a mini-hiatus with a great pair of posts on the nature of wealth and value as explained from an Austrian school perspective.
I’m not even going to post an excerpt. There’s just to much good information in those posts to absorb. Go get yourself an education, folks.
