the thing most feared
I'm listening to Ralph Raico's History: the Struggle for Liberty in MP3 and assembling keywords for the individual lectures.
Lecture 2 is about the hijacking of the word 'liberal' around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Raico talks about the "new liberals" having an exaggerated* fear of the power of business, and suddenly it occurs to me that one could describe the Nolan Chart in terms of fear:
---
* An exaggerated fear of laissez faire capitalism, in other words.
Big Business is certainly to be feared, but only because of their real political power, not their supposed "economic power."
Big Business in the symptom; the State is the root cause.
**
Lecture 2 is about the hijacking of the word 'liberal' around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Raico talks about the "new liberals" having an exaggerated* fear of the power of business, and suddenly it occurs to me that one could describe the Nolan Chart in terms of fear:
- What the Left fears most is Business.
- What the Right fears most is the Left.
- What libertarians fear most is the State.
- What authoritarians fear most is the People.
- What centrists fear most is Extremism.**
---
* An exaggerated fear of laissez faire capitalism, in other words.
Big Business is certainly to be feared, but only because of their real political power, not their supposed "economic power."
Big Business in the symptom; the State is the root cause.
**
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."-- spoken by the Republican Barry Goldwater, but penned by the libertarian anarchist Karl Hess.
1 Comments:
I was listening to Tape 9 (WWI) just this afternoon...my third run through the entire Raico lecture series since I bought the set from the Mises Institute in April. I think it may be the most valuable lecture series I've ever listened to. (Laissez Faire Books has some other Raico tapes--all wonderful, b'way.)
Post a Comment
<< Home