ABECEDARIAN
a sesquipedalian probationer
bkmarcus
[bk]
a sesquipedalian probationer
bkmarcus
[bk]
A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
The opposite of intellectual humility.
I mean it as a portmanteau of arrogance and ignorance, but if it reads as "aggravated ignorance" I can live with that.
bkmarcus, "agnorance"
[bk]
Most people would sloppily call non-theism, or negative atheism, "agnosticism" -- but a-gnosis means "outside knowing". An agnostic is not someone "on the fence" over the whole existence-of-God issue, but rather a person who knows that he doesn't know, either way. You've heard of the suspension of disbelief? An agnostic practices the suspension of belief.
It is not the case that atheism is a stronger form of agnosticism, or agnosticism a weaker form of atheism. They deal with entirely different questions. Atheism is an ontological position, while agnosticism is an epistemological one. (The former deals with questions of existence while the latter deals with questions of knowing.)
bkmarcus, "On Atheism, Agnosticism, and Faith"
[bk]
Anarchism is a negative; it holds that one thing, namely government, is bad and should be abolished. Aside from this defining tenet, it would be difficult to list any belief that all anarchists hold. Just as atheists might support or oppose any viewpoint consistent with the non-existence of God, anarchists might and indeed do hold the entire range of viewpoints consistent with the non-existence of the state.
Anarchist Theory FAQ
or
Instead of a FAQ, by a Man Too Busy to Write One
by
Bryan Caplan
Version 5.2
[caplan]
This brings us to Anarchism, which may be described as the doctrine that all the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished.
Individual Liberty by Benjamin Tucker,
"State Socialism and Anarchism: How far they agree, and wherein they differ."
[tucker]
The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.
Emma Goldman, "What is Anarchy?"
[redEmma]
ANARCHISM, the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government - harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being.
(an·ar·chism Pronunciation: 'a-n&r-"ki-z&m, -"när-)
Anarchists believe that the highest attainment of humanity is the freedom of the individual to express himself, unhindered by any form of repression or control from without. The belief that all governments rest on violence to control their subjects.
1984 Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia
[funk]
Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula, jails, conscription, states.
Paul Goodman,
Like A Conquered Province, 1965
Chapter 6: "Is American democracy viable?"
[goodman]
Government by the best men. (In this sense the word is obsolete; so is that kind of government.) Fellows that wear downy hats and clean shirts -- guilty of education and suspected of bank accounts.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
A belief system that neither includes nor excludes the existence of God or gods is technically atheistic. Pure Buddhism is, in this sense, an atheistic religion. The Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, uses the term "non-theistic" to communicate this concept because everyone thinks "atheistic" means "anti-theistic".
"The difference between theism and non-theism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. It is an issue that applies to everyone, including Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us ... From this point of view, theism is an addiction. We're all addicted to hope... Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves ... In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning." -- Pema Chodron, Hopelessness and Death
I suppose the clearest way to communicate this distinction is to follow Pema's lead and avoid the word 'atheism' altogether -- to specify either non-theism (a lack of a belief in God) or anti-theism (a positive belief in the non-existence of God). What I tend to do instead is make the distinction as negative atheism (lack of belief) versus positive atheism (as in, "I'm positive that there is no God!" -- which is not a lack of belief, but a strong belief, positively held, for the non-existence of God).
bkmarcus, "On Atheism, Agnosticism, and Faith"
[bk]
Individualists have always been accused by their enemies of being "atomistic" -- of postulating that each individual lives in a kind of vacuum, thinking and choosing without relation to anyone else in society. This, however, is an authoritarian straw man; few, if any, individualists have ever been "atomists." On the contrary, it is evident that individuals always learn from each other, cooperate and interact with each other; and that this, too, is required for man's survival. But the point is that each individual makes the final choice of which influences to adopt and which to reject, or of which to adopt first and which afterwards. The libertarian welcomes the process of voluntary exchange and cooperation between freely acting individuals; what he abhors is the use of violence to cripple such voluntary cooperation and force someone to choose and act in ways different from what his own mind dictates.
Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
A common defense of the State holds that man is a "social animal," that he must live in society, and that individualists and libertarians believe in the existence of "atomistic individuals" uninfluenced by and unrelated to their fellow men. But no libertarians have ever held individuals to be isolated atoms; on the contrary, all libertarians have recognized the necessity and the enormous advantages of living in society, and of participating in the social division of labor. The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.
Murray Rothbard, "The Moral Status of Relations to the State," The Ethics of Liberty
[rothbard]
Libertarians are generally what might be called simplistic and "vulgar" individualists.
[...] While only individuals exist individuals do not exist as isolated and hermetically sealed atoms. Statists traditionally charge libertarians and individualists with being "atomistic individualists," and the charge, one hopes, has always been incorrect and misconceived. Individuals may be the only reality, but they influence each other, past and present, and all individuals grow up in a common culture and language. (This does not imply that they may not, as adults, rebel and challenge and exchange that culture for another.)
[...] It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook the obvious.
Murray Rothbard, "The Nationalities Question"
[rothbard]
Liberty as I have defined it does not preclude as guidance for one's acts any form or degree of advice and influence, if voluntarily accepted, which, originates elsewhere than within himself. This guidance might be religious influences, evidence from historical records, scientific knowledge, the advice of another person, or even processes of mental telepathy or clairvoyance or insight from mystical origins, to whatever extent these may occur. If willingly accepted, the act resulting from such influences is as much an act of liberty as would be any other.
So liberty as I have defined it is not limited to self-willed conduct arising from total isolation. All these other forces can operate to influence one's acts as a free man. I would even argue that such influences operate at their best and their fullest only under liberty.
F.A. "Baldy" Harper, in an address given before the Mont Pelerin Society at St. Moritz, Switzerland, on September 4, 1957
[harper]
Authoritarians want government to advance society and individuals through expert central planning. They often doubt whether self-government is practical. Left-authoritarians are also called socialists, while fascists are right-authoritarians.
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.
G.K. Chesterton, G.K.'s Weekly, 4/10/26
As Kolko pointed out, all the various measures of federal regulation and welfare statism that left and right alike have always believed to be mass movements against Big Business are not only now backed to the hilt by Big Business, but were originated by it for the very purpose of shifting from a free market to a cartelized economy that would benefit it. Imperialistic foreign policy and the permanent garrison state originated in the Big Business drive for foreign investments and for war contracts at home.
Murray N. Rothbard,
"Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"
[rothbard]
In analyzing the 1924 presidential election, Mencken wrote:
Big Business, it appears, is in favor of him [Coolidge].... The fact should be sufficient to make the judicious regard him somewhat suspiciously. For Big Business, in America ... is frankly on the make, day in and day out.... Big Business was in favor of Prohibition, believing that a sober workman would make a better slave than one with a few drinks in him. It was in favor of all the gross robberies and extortions that went on during the war, and profited by all of them. It was in favor of all the crude throttling of free speech that was then undertaken in the name of patriotism, and is still in favor of it.
Rothbard in
Betrayal of the American Right,
quoting H.L. Mencken, "Breathing Space,"
Baltimore Evening Sun, August 4, 1924
[Mencken]
(See POLITICAL CAPITALISM.)
bkMarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
"Capital" is denounced by writers and speakers who have never taken the trouble to find out what capital is, and who use the word in two or three different senses in as many pages.
William Graham Sumner, "What The Social Classes Owe Each Other"
[sumner]
From the notion of capital goods one must clearly distinguish the concept of capital. The concept of capital is the fundamental concept of economic calculation, the foremost mental tool of the conduct of affairs in the market economy. Its correlative is the concept of income.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, Chapter XV, Section 2: "Capital Goods and Capital"
[mises]
What accountants and economists call capital, I will call CAPITAL FUNDS, in the hope of avoiding confusion and emphasizing the distinction. Where CAPITAL GOODS are the objects we subjectively qualify as the means toward the production of consumer goods, capital funds are the monetary measure of our capital goods. The goods are qualitative; the funds are quantitative.
bkmarcus
[bk]
From the notion of capital goods one must clearly distinguish the concept of capital. The concept of capital is the fundamental concept of economic calculation, the foremost mental tool of the conduct of affairs in the market economy. Its correlative is the concept of income.
[...]
Today there is, among businessmen and accountants, unanimity with regard to the meaning of capital. Capital is the sum of the money equivalent of all assets minus the sum of the money equivalent of all liabilities as dedicated at a definite date to the conduct of the operations of a definite business unit. It does not matter in what these assets may consist, whether they are pieces of land, buildings, equipment, tools, goods of any kind and order, claims, receivables, cash, or whatever.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, Chapter XV, Section 2: "Capital Goods and Capital"
[mises]
The fundamental concept of economic calculation which expresses in monetary terms the net wealth (assets minus liabilities) of the complex of all kinds of capital goods and marketable assets (savings) belonging to a definite person or other unit participating in a market economy. It is only by use of such an accounting concept that
Thus the mental tool of capital is essential both as a compass for guiding future market actions and as a means for evaluating the success or nonsuccess of completed market actions.
Percy L. Greaves Jr., Mises Made Easier
[greaves]
In static analysis, the term capital refers equally to the aggregate value of all capital goods and to their "quantity," measured in terms of cost (or in some other way).
F.A. Hayek, "Investment that Raises the Demand for Capital"
[hayek]
Actually, the best definition of 'capital' is the one given to us by Karl Marx: capital is "the means of production".
Socialism is based on the belief that capital should not be privately owned.
Marx was not against the private ownership of all property. Personal possessions (the ends of production) were acceptable, but the means of production -- what Marx called "bourgeois property" -- had to be held publicly.
Benjamin Tucker summarized the Marxist distinction (which Tucker rejected) as follows:
To the individual can belong only the products to be consumed, not the means of producing them. A man may own his clothes and his food, but not the sewing-machine which makes his shirts or the spade which digs his potatoes. Product and capital are essentially different things; the former belongs to individuals, the latter to society.
-- "State Socialism and Anarchism: How far they agree, and wherein they differ."
Ideologically, then, the term 'capitalism' can be understood to mean the rejection of the Marxist thesis.
Ideological capitalism is the position that private individuals can legitimately own the means of production: sewing machines and spades, tractors and factories.
bkmarcus,
Reluctant Capitalist
[Note that I was still conflating
CAPITAL GOODS and CAPITAL FUNDS.]
[bk]
The term 'capitalism' is as semantically unstable as the term 'liberalism' and will rarely mean the same thing for two people in an argument -- or even an agreement -- or even for one person in a private monolog from one moment to the next.
Even its denotations diverge:
The private ownership of the means of production by individuals. (See IDEOLOGICAL CAPITALISM.)
(Please note that this is the one and only definition of capitalism that could count as ideological. All others are economic, strategic, or emotional.)
(Note also that "corporate capitalism" -- the private ownership of the means of production by collectives -- is not the same thing. Under the State, a corporation is a collective entity that is treated as an individual person. The State-sanctioned corporation is not a person in any moral sense, but is merely a legal fiction created to shield individual persons from responsibility for the actions of the entity that generates their profits. See POLITICAL CAPITALISM.)
Profit from capital -- in contrast to compensation for labor.
An economic system based on prioritizing profit and prioritizing capital.
A commercial economy -- a market where the emphasis is on commerce and profit.
Any system that prioritizes capital over labor.
A free market in labor, in the context of a monopoly on capital. (Tucker)
[See the various essays on capitalism at BlackCrayon.com.]
[bk]
Compare and contrast the following:
bkMarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
In a political context, the word 'censorship' means coercion used against non-coercive communication.
Libel, slander and the way-too-often-cited-but-misunderstood shouting-Fire!-in-a-crowded-movie-theater are all examples of fraud, which is coercive communication.
Flag-burning, cross-burning, and the infamous N-word, are (in and of themselves) non-coercive communication, no matter how much people may be emotionally hurt or offended by them.
[bk]
Centrists favor selective government intervention and emphasize practical solutions to current problems. They tend to keep an open mind on new issues. Many centrists feel that government serves as a check on excessive liberty.
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
A centrist believes that there is a left side and a right side, and that the healthy position is in the center.
They are the sort of people who insist that there are two sides to every issue -- only two.
[bk]
The so-called "Middle Of The Road" is occupied by those who think political concerns are pragmatic, not principled.
[bk]
A political moderate is someone without principles.
[bk]
The 19th-century liberal held the same principles as the 20th-century individualist libertarian -- freedom from coercion on both personal and economic matters.
As the term 'liberal' changed in the 20th century, from designating an individualist philosophy to something more collectivist (and influenced significantly by moderate forms of state socialism), the term Classical Liberalism was used to indicate the pre-collectivist liberalism of the previous century.
Unfortunately, contemporary use of the term Classical Liberalism seems to emphasize economic freedom over civil liberties.
Even more unfortunate is the common association of Classical Liberalism with conservative politics.
[bk]
First, I employ the term "liberal" in the sense attached to it every-where in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. This usage is imperative because there is simply no other term available to signify the great political and intellectual movement that substituted free enterprise and the market economy for the precapitalistic methods of production; constitutional representative government for the absolutism of kings or oligarchies; and freedom of all individuals for slavery, serfdom, and other forms of bondage.
Ludwig von Mises,
Human Action,
Introduction to the 3rd Edition
[available online]
[mises]
The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding. I use throughout the term "liberal" in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that "liberal" has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.
It is true, of course, that in the struggle against the believers in the all-powerful state the true liberal must sometimes make common cause with the convservative, and in some circumstances, as in contemporary Britain, he has hardly any other way of actively working for his ideals. But true liberalism is still distinct from conservatism, and there is danger in the two being confused. Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desireable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of estblished privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(from the preface to the 1956 American paperback edition)
[hayek]
(See also: Non-Aggression Principle.)
[bk]
Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term "coercion" can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it "physical violence or the threat thereof," with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
Murray N. Rothbard, "Society without a State"
[rothbard]
If we consider that each person owns his own body and can acquire ownership of other things by creating them, or by having ownership transferred to him by another owner, it becomes at least formally possible to define "being left alone" and its opposite, "being coerced". Someone who forcibly prevents me from using my property as I want, when I am not using it to violate his right to use his property, is coercing me. A man who prevents me from taking heroin coerces me; a man who prevents me from shooting him does not.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
We have so far been discussing the free society, the society of peaceful cooperation and voluntary interpersonal relations. There is, however, another and contrasting type of interpersonal relation: the use of aggressive violence by one man against another. What such aggressive violence means is that one man invades the property of another without the victim's consent. The invasion may be against a man's property in his person (as in the case of bodily assault), or against his property in tangible goods (as in robbery or trespass). In either case, the aggressor imposes his will over the natural property of another -- he deprives the other man of his freedom of action and of the full exercise of his natural self-ownership.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
[rothbard]
As a moral philosophy, collectivism recognizes groups as potential moral agents.
(Contrast with individualism.)
In politics, collectivism is an emphasis on the rights and responsibilities of different classes or groups, and proposes collective strategies for improving the conditions of those classes and groups considered to be disadvantaged.
Collectivism does not necessarily deny individual rights, but it considers group rights primary.
(Compare with communitarianism.)
[bk]
In collectivism, the "collective is the ultimate value, to which individual goals are subordinate."
R.W. Grant, The Incredible Bread Machine
[rwGrant]
'Collectivism' is defined as the theory and practice which make a collective or collectives rather than individuals the ultimate and fundamental unit of political, social, and economic concern.
[...]
Presumably it is on present usage correct to characterize all socialists as being, as such, collectivists: while the nearest approach in our time to any actual realization of Bakunin's ideal of a collective would seem to be the self-managing 'associations of labour' in Yugoslavia, Israeli kibbutzim, or the collectives set up by the Spanish anarchists during the Civil War.
[...]
Collectivists in theorizing insist that the claims of collectives must, in general and normally, if not always and without exception, override the claims of individual members.
[krauth]
It seems to me that one thing all forms of collectivism share is that individual choice is always subordinate to The Group, be it the fascist volk or a local soviet or an anarcho-syndicalist people's council or whatever other fiction of 'society' the state decides to use.
[...]
Fascist collectivists try to prevent mixed race sex, socialist collectivists try to prevent 'undemocratic' private trade, but the principle of collectivism is always the same. If an individual does something he wants to do in a collectivist 'society', it is because the political collective allows him to do it, not because it is his right to do as he pleases with those who are willing participants.
According to the doctrines of universalism, conceptual realism, holism, collectivism, and some representatives of Gestaltpsychologie, society is an entity living its own life, independent of and separate from the lives of the various individuals, acting on its own behalf and aiming at its own ends which are different from the ends sought by the individuals. Then, of course, an antagonism between the aims of society and those of its members can emerge. In order to safeguard the flowering and further development of society it becomes necessary to master the selfishness of the individuals and to compel them to sacrifice their egoistic designs to the benefit of society.
Ludwig von Mises, " A Critique of the Holistic and Metaphysical View of Society," Human Action
[mises]
Because it is the institutional setting in which people engage in trade, society is thus essential for human welfare; but here we must avoid a fatal mistake. Construed in Chodorov's fashion, society consists solely of individuals who engage in exchanges to their common benefit. It is not an independent entity, with a will and purpose of its own. Chodorov phrases this fact in a picturesque way: "society are people."
Once stated, Chodorov's point appears obvious. How can anyone seriously deny it, affirming by contrast a group mind with thoughts and intentions of its own? However apparent the mistake, promulgating it has been in certain persons' interests; and the myth of society as a thing apart has persisted. People, it is alleged, must sacrifice themselves for the good of society.
But who determines this good? If, in fact, there is no group mind, then it is particular persons who allege to others that they must do as "society" dictates. [...] behind their mystification of "society" lies brute force.
David Gordon's review of Frank Chodorov's The Rise and Fall of Society
[gordon]
Communism is the position that property can only be legitimately owned by the community and never by individuals.
Much confusion, disagreement, stupidity, and bloodshed resulted from conflating The Community with The State.
[bk]
(Contrast with PROPERTARIANISM and IDEOLOGICAL CAPITALISM.)
[bk]
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
[marx]
In the 20th century, the term 'communism' came to mean communitarian statism.
As implemented at a national level, 20th-century communism was exclusively authoritarian.
An anarchist or anti-Statist conception of communism is of a free society of equals without private property. In anarchist communism (a.k.a. 'anarcho-communism'), all property is owned by the community or collective, freeing "the workers" from the exploitation of capitalism and the coercion of the State.
Karl Marx shared this definition of communism with the anarchists, but believed that the ultimate goal of an anarchist communism had to be preceded by state socialism -- a "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Vladimir Lenin called the Russian anarchists "Left-Wing Communists" and described their stance against state centralization as "an infantile disorder".
[bk]
Anarcho-communism, both in its original Bakunin-Kropotkin form and its current irrationalist and "post-scarcity" variety, is poles apart from genuine libertarian principle.
If there is one thing, for example, that anarcho-communism hates and reviles more than the State it is the rights of private property; as a matter of fact, the major reason that anarcho-communists oppose the State is because they wrongly believe that it is the creator and protector of private property, and therefore that the only route toward abolition of property is by destruction of the State apparatus.
Murray Rothbard, "The Death Wish of the Anarcho-Communists"
[rothbard]
Anarcho-communists, in contrast with their mutualist comrades, reject the market because they reject all forms of competition, and see all forms of trade as exploitative: someone wins and someone loses. To a communist anarchist, the very term 'free market' is self-contradictory.
bkmarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
Communitarianism is a collectivist philosophy that explicitly rejects individualism.
Collectivism by itself does not necessarily deny individual rights, but it considers group rights to be primary. Communitarianism does not merely relegate individualism to a subordinate position, but is openly hostile to it.
[bk]
An antiliberal political theory whose advocates seek to establish a democratic politics of the common good and thereby to tame or even to supplant the prevailing liberal politics of individual rights. The communitarian movement rose to prominence in 1980s, in the political world as well as in the academy. This revival of the idea of community has taken a remarkable variety of forms, from traditional conservative to social democratic to radical postmodernist. As a result, it is difficult to state with precision the distinctive features of a communitarian political theory.
But communitarians at least are united by a shared hostility to the pervasive individualism of contemporary liberal democratic politics. They are critics of liberal democracy founded on individual rights and partisans of more robust forms of democratic politics founded on common deliberation about the common good. Communitarians thus raise again a question that for a time had been closed by the theoretical and practical successes of liberal democracy: the nature of a just and healthy democratic polity.
[krauth]
That school of capitalist philosophy which claims allegiance to the Free Market while actually supporting usury, landlordism, tariff, and sometimes taxation.
[celine]
Right-Conservatives prefer self-government on economic issues, but want official standards in personal matters. They want the government to defend the community from threats to its moral fiber.
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
The essence of conservatism is "its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom that goes beyond what can be demonstrated or even explicitly stated."
Conservatism, though a necessary element in any stable society, is not a social program; in its paternalistic, nationalistic, and power-adoring tendencies it is often closer to socialism than true liberalism; and with its traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical propensities it will never, except in short periods of disillusionment, appeal to the young and all those others who believe that some changes are desireable if this world is to become a better place. A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others.
F.A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(from the preface to the 1956 American paperback edition)
[hayek]
Because liberalism, socialism and leftism have become nearly universally identified with statism, it should not be surprising that many contemporary opponents of the state regard themselves as "conservative". However, the historical meaning of conservatism is not individual liberty and greater freedom from government but an emphasis on maintaining a static hierarchical, stratified order, tradition-based collectivism, subservience of the individual to elite privilege, theocracy, and nationalistic statism.
Conservatism Is Not Enough: Reclaiming the Legacy of the Anti-State Left
In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules. Since he is essentially opportunist and lacks principles, his main hope must be that the wise and the good will rule -- not merely by example, as we all must wish, but by authority given to them and enforced by them. Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.
F. A. Hayek, Why I Am Not a Conservative
[hayek]
It was European conservatives who, apparently fearful of the openness of the Industrial Revolution (why, anyone could get rich!), struck the first blows at capitalism by encouraging and accepting laws that made the disruptions of innovation and competition less frequent and eased the way for the comforts and collusions of cartelization.
[...]
The States' rights lapse is simply that conservatives who would deny to the Federal government certain controls over people, eagerly cede exactly the same controls to smaller administrative units. They say that the smaller units are more effective. This means that conservatives support the coercion of individuals at the most effective level. It certainly doesn't mean that they oppose coercion.
[...]
In failing to resist state segregation and miscegenation laws, in failing to resist laws maintaining racially inequitable spending of tax money, simply because these laws were passed by states, conservatives have failed to fight the very bureaucracy that they supposedly hate -- at the very level where they might have stopped it first.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
There are no right-wing Utopias, either, no novels of the colorful Buckleyite future. The conservative view of heaven is the status quo ante -- a dead, flat, black-&-white daguerreotype of a past that never existed. Any status quo will do, as long as it ain't Red. If people are tortured in banana republic jails, it's acceptable as long as they're not Communist jails. If a long train of abuses & usurpations are visited upon individual freedom in this country, it's fine, as long as they're not left-wing abuses & usurpations, & even better, if they're in the name of National Security.
L. Neil Smith, "Unanimous Consent and the Utopian Vision"
[elNeil]
Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) refers to a political or economic system in which power is given to civic assemblies that represent economic, industrial, agrarian, and professional groups. These civic assemblies, known as corporations (not necessarily the same as contemporary business corporations) are unelected bodies with an internal hierarchy; their purpose is to exert control over their respective areas of social or economic life. Thus, for example, a steel corporation would be a cartel composed of all the business leaders in the steel industry, coming together to discuss a common policy on prices and wages. When much political and economic power rests in the hands of such groups, then a corporatist system is in place.
Wikipedia, Corporatism
Corporativism. The economic program of the Italian Fascist Party, largely copying the program of British "guild socialism" (q.v.). All organized economic activities were divided into 22 sectors, each of which was represented by a corporation. The council of each corporation was presided over by a Fascist Party member and was comprised of government appointed "experts" and representatives of employees, employers and the Fascist Party. Each council was responsible to the Minister of Corporations for the management of its corporation, and its members were also members of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, which was scheduled to become the lower house of the legislature. In practice, the Corporation council members merely ratified the decisions of the nation's Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945).
Zwangswirtschaft, (German). An economic system entirely subject to government control. "Zwang means compulsion, Wirtschaft means economy. The English language equivalent for Zwangswirtschaft is something like compulsory economy."
Mises Made Easier: Corporativism; Zwangswirtschaft
[Mises]
Compare with POLITICAL CAPITALISM. Contrast with ECONOMIC CAPITALISM. See also FASCISM.
bkmarcus
[bk]
There are two different patterns for the realization of socialism. The one pattern -- we may call it the Marxian or Russian pattern -- is purely bureaucratic. All economic enterprises are departments of the government just as the administration of the army and the navy or the postal system. Every single plant, shop or farm, stands in the same relation to the superior central organization as does a post office to the office of the Postmaster General. The whole nation forms one single labor army with compulsory service; the commander of this army is the chief of state.
The second pattern -- we may call it the German or Zwangswirtschaft system -- differs from the first one in that it, seemingly and nominally, maintains private ownership of the means of production, entrepreneurship, and market exchange. So-called entrepreneurs do the buying and selling, pay the workers, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But they are no longer entrepreneurs. In Nazi Germany they were called shop managers or Betriebsfuhrer. The government tells these seeming entrepreneurs what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. The government decrees at what wages laborers should work, and to whom and under what terms the capitalists should entrust their funds. Market exchange is but a sham. As all prices, wages and interest rates are fixed by the authority, they are prices, wages and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the authoritarian orders determining each citizen's income, consumption and standard of living. The authority, not the consumers, directs production. The central board of production management is supreme; all citizens are nothing else but civil servants. This is socialism with the outward appearance of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify here something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.
Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos
[Mises]
Money coerced from landowners to pay the Vikings to go away.
My dictionary defines Danegeld as "a land tax levied in medieval England, originally to raise funds for protection against Danish invaders."
The problem with this definition is that "protection" implies that the tax was used to fund military defense, but in fact, the more appropriate term would be not "protection" but "protection racket," i.e., money paid to thugs to dissuade them from immediate thuggery.
Rudyard Kipling wrote,
... once you have paid him the Danegeld,
You never get rid of the Dane.
Wikipedia notes, "The term has come to be used as a warning and a criticism of paying any coercive payment whether in money or kind," but no criteria are offered to distinguish Danegeld from any other kind of taxation.
[bk]
The term 'democracy' has 3 distinct usages:
These 3 definitions are incompatible.
bkmarcus
[bk]
Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
???
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
H.L. Mencken
[penn]
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.
William Penn (1693)
[penn]
... if a proponent of liberty is a libertarian, then it seems to follow that a proponent of diversity is a diversitarian.
Let's call the practical, strategy-based position 'diversitarianism' -- the advocacy of decentralized, diverse strategies, solutions, services, cultures, etc. This is what I now understand many to mean by "the market" -- although I think the idea applies to all biological, ecological, social, organizational, negotiated exchange-based relationships, and not just what most people understand by the term 'economic'.
bkMarcus, Email Essay: 'diversitarian'
[bk]
It is more than passing curious that those in the university community who are most heavily addicted to diversity cannot tolerate it when it comes to divergence of opinions, conclusions, public policy prescriptions, etc.
Walter Block, Social Justice
[block]
Economic capitalism is a free market in privately held property titles, including titles for "infrastructural capital" (technology) and "natural capital" (land).
It is often called 'laissez-faire capitalism' or sometimes 'pure capitalism' or even 'true capitalism' by those who want to tie the economic concept back to the ethical position of ideological capitalism.
(Contrast with POLITICAL CAPITALISM.)
bkMarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
Your property is that which you control the use of. If most things are controlled by individuals, individually or in voluntary association, a society is capitalist. If such control is spread fairly evenly among a large number of people, the society approximates competitive free enterprise -- better than ours does. If its members call it socialist, why should I object?
Socialism is dead. Long live socialism.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism
[friedman]
If commercial activity were unregulated and absolutely unsubsidized, it could depend upon only one factor for success -- pleasing customers.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
The market economy is the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production. Everybody acts on his own behalf; but everybody's actions aim at the satisfaction of other people's needs as well as at the satisfaction of his own. Everybody in acting serves his fellow citizens. Everybody, on the other hand, is served by his fellow citizens. Everybody is both a means and an end in himself, an ultimate end for himself and a means to other people in their endeavors to attain their own ends.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
[mises]
Following German philosopher, Max Stirner, Philosophical Egoism shares with Natural Law theory the rejection of coercive authority, involuntary legislation, and the notion of a "social contract", but it also rejects what had been for over a century the philosophical basis for individualism: the notion of an individual's "right" to be free from coercion.
Egoists reject moral philosophy in general, and see anarchism not as rights-based, but as a pragmatic compromise in a system where each individual seeks only self-interest.
bkMarcus, A Brief Biography of Benjamin Tucker
[bk]
The equally uncoerced status of all individuals taken into consideration.
[bk]
If, however, I am to have as muchliberty as others, and if others are to have as much as I, then, feeling secure in what we have, it will behoove us all undoubtedly to try to attain the maximum of liberty compatible with this condition of equality. Which brings us back to the familiar law of equal liberty; the greatest amount of individual liberty compatible with the equality of liberty. But this maximum of liberty is a very different thing from that which is to be attained, according to the hypothesis, only by violating equality of liberty. For, certainly, to coerce the peaceful non-co-operator is to violate equality of liberty. If my neighbor believes in co-operation and I do not, and if he has liberty to choose to co-operate while I have no liberty to choose not to co-operate, then there is no equality of liberty between us.
Benjamin Tucker
"Liberty and Organization"
[tucker]
If
So if we let A designate an American Employer, and B designate an "undocumented worker", then we would have to say that A and B do not enjoy equal liberty because of the coercive threat of C, the government immigration agent.
Even if the contract between A and B is voluntary (uncoerced), we might still say that B is the victim of exploitation. This exploitation is more the contribution of agent C than it is of employer A.
[bk]
Taking advantage of a person.
Simply put, exploitation should be impossible between equals. To exploit persons is to use an advantage over them -- to their disadvantage.
An uncoerced transaction can still be exploitation if the terms of contract are dictated to someone's disadvantage. The exploitation lies in the "conditions of compulsory restriction and limitation under which such contract" is made.
[quoting from Benjamin Tucker's essay, The Aboliton of Interest]
Individualist Anarchism sees the exploitation of certain groups or classes as the visible symptom of a deeper problem whose root cause is coercive monopoly.
The individualist does not sanction the use of force to fight the symptom, but only to fight the coercive root cause itself.
bkMarcus, The Aboliton of Exploitation
[bk]
... the allegation that an exchange has unduly favoured one of the parties ...
Anthony de Jasay, "Your Dog Owns Your House"
[deJasay]
'Exploitation' is a word often used but rarely defined. In its most literal meaning -- I "exploit" you if I in some way benefit from your existence -- it is the reason human society exists. We all benefit from one another's existence. We all exploit each other. That is why we associate with each other. But as the word is usually used, it carries the implication of one person benefiting from harming another, or at least of one person's benefitting unfairly, at the expense of another. This usage we derive from Marx's theory of the exploitation of labor.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
The illusion persists that those with much are villains. With it as a necessary corollary goes the illusion that those who have little or nothing are the heroes who are deserving of every good thing in life.
This is the Marxist argument. It assumes that those who are capable of producing abundance, in some way exploit those who are incapable of producing much of anything. How does one "exploit" the impoverished? The concept is nonsense. One does not take from those who have nothing worth taking.
Robert LeFevre, Capitalism
[leFevre]
Toward the end of the 19th century, a group of Brits, decided that they were in favor of socialism in the original sense of a planned economy, but that they were opposed to the revolutionary socialism of the Marxists and the communist anarchists. They called themselves "Fabians" after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, whose tactics involved harassment and attrition rather than head-on battles. Instead of revolution, the Fabians advocated evolution toward socialism. Like Marx, they believed in class struggle and like Marx, they believed that "progress" meant moving away from private property and toward central administration. The most famous Fabians were H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and later, Bertrand Russell.
bkMarcus, "why I am not a leftist"
[bk]
It is commonly asserted that Fabianism and Leninism differ only in method and pace: that the former believes in gradual change and the latter in revolution. But this completely misses the real point: that Fabianism, which is basically Social Democracy, believes in blending into the State apparatus, whereas Leninism believes in its destruction.
Murray Rothbard, "Liberty and the New Left"
[rothbard]
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
Either
bkmarcus, "On Atheism, Agnosticism, and Faith"
[bk]
An authoritarian form of statism that advocates
(Notice that between the first 2 criteria, fascism promotes political capitalism without any pretense of a free market.)
Socialists and left-liberals often refer to any form of fervent conservatism as fascism, but they are incorrect in doing so.
Many people use the term to refer to any form of authoritarianism. This usage is less incorrect, but strictly speaking, fascism requires all 4 of the above criteria.
(See also SOCIAL FASCISM.)
[bk]
Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, refers to the authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy in 1922-1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. The name comes from fascio, which may mean "bundle", as in a political group, but also fasces, the Roman authority symbol of a bundle of rods and axe-head.
The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that exalts nation and often race above the individual and uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition, engages in severe economic and social regimentation, and espouses violent nationalism and racism (ethnic nationalism).
It has become customary among libertarians, as indeed among the Establishment of the West, to regard Fascism and Communism as fundamentally identical. But while both systems were indubitably collectivist, they differed greatly in their socio-economic content. For Communism was a genuine revolutionary movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew the old ruling elites; while Fascism, on the contrary, cemented into power the old ruling classes. Hence, Fascism was a counter-revolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges upon society; in short, Fascism was the apotheosis of modern State monopoly capitalism. Here was the reason that Fascism proved so attractive (which Communism, of course, never did) to big business interests in the West -- openly and unabashedly so in the 1920's and early 1930's.
Murray N. Rothbard,
"Why Conservatives Love War and the State"
(originally appeared in Left and Right, Spring 1965, pp. 4-22,
as "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty.")
[rothbard]
[Wilhelm] Ropke recognized that as a social and economic system fascism is not a third way between the free market and communism. It is merely another form of totalitarianism that sought to "combine its general totalitarianism with the individualistic character of society." Such a middle-of-the-road policy created an extreme interventionist state whose chief production agent was the government-created monopolist.
Fascism has a grave moral defect, Ropke argued: it fails to recognize the individual as the key social unit. Right economic reasoning, he said, begins not with the nation but with human action, and right social policy begins with the recognition that society is made up of individuals with souls. Fascism, on the other hand, by ignoring the individual soul, is socialism's close cousin because it exults in the idolatry of the state.
Mises.org: Biography of Wilhelm Ropke (1899-1966)
If you study the domestic policies of the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administrations, and compare them with the policies of Adolf Hitler and his mentor, Benito Mussolini, you will eventually come -- however reluctantly -- to the conclusion that World War II was not a conflict between fascism and something else, as advertised, but a conflict between competing brands of fascism.
L. Neil Smith, Empire of Lies
[elNeil]
definition of the economy of fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses
Murray N. Rothbard,
"Nixonian Socialism"
[rothbard]
The seizure of land by conquest and the continuing assertion and enforcement of ownership over that land and the extraction of rent from the peasants continuing to till the soil.
Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, "Land Monopoly, Past and Present"
[rothbard]
That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion.
[celine]
If a 'market' is a system of exchange, and 'free' means that it is voluntary, that is to say, uncoerced, then a 'free market' is a system in which all voluntary exchanges are permissible and all involuntary exchanges are impermissible.
[bk]
The Market is the sum of all voluntary human action. If one acts non-coercively, one is part of the Market.
New Libertarian Manifesto by Samuel Edward Konkin III
[sek3]
The free market is the name for the array of all the voluntary exchanges that take place in the world.
Murray N. Rothbard, "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics" (1956)
[rothbard]
Free market is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society. Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services.
[...]
Both parties undertake the exchange because each expects to gain from it. Also, each will repeat the exchange next time (or refuse to) because his expectation has proved correct (or incorrect) in the recent past. Trade, or exchange, is engaged in precisely because both parties benefit; if they did not expect to gain, they would not agree to the exchange.
[...]
In modern game-theory jargon, trade is a win-win situation, a "positive-sum" rather than a "zero-sum" or "negative-sum" game.
[...]
But exchanges are not necessarily free. Many are coerced. If a robber threatens you with "Your money or your life," your payment to him is coerced and not voluntary, and he benefits at your expense. It is robbery, not free markets, that actually follows the mercantilist model: the robber benefits at the expense of the coerced. Exploitation occurs not in the free market, but where the coercer exploits his victim. In the long run, coercion is a negative-sum game that leads to reduced production, saving, and investment, a depleted stock of capital, and reduced productivity and living standards for all, perhaps even for the coercers themselves.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
[rothbard]
A "free market" can represent a spectrum of things to a variety of people. For some, the free market may provide justification for government-issued license to favored corporations to ride roughshod over the common market. To others it may imply "free and fair trade," proponents of which naively expect government to reign in corporate depredations. Somewhere betwixt these two poles fall those who realize that government is to business what steroids are to cattle. Given an injection of big government, corporations grow unnaturally large and aggressive. A market free of help or hindrance by government is the solution least likely to be tried. Too many hands in the tills at either end of the buffet; whether good intentions or self-serving motives run the registers, the results are similar. Policies that protect individual rights can and should also protect corporate rights.
Protectionist policies thwart the action of corrective forces by removing companies from the judgment of the open market. Not judgment by a prescient elite or majority, or by market experts, but by the cumulative force of each freely made individual economic choice acting as the sand in the hourglass.
First, there is no free market when government artificially restricts the supply of something, be it oil or sugar. In fact, because the U.S. government restricts the importation of sugar into this country in order to protect politically connected domestic sugar producers, we see a two-tiered pricing system: a world price and a U.S. price. While the U.S. price is determined in an open market setting, there is nothing free about it. The political classes have decreed that U.S. residents are going to pay higher prices for sugar than people do elsewhere.
The Oil Dependency Myth, by Willliam L. Anderson
A granfalloon is any large bureaucratic figment of people's imagination. For instance, there's really no such thing as the Feds or the General Veeblefeltzer Corporation. There are a bunch of people out there that relate to each other, and there's some structures, and some paper. In fact, there's lots and lots of paper. The people sit in the structures and pass paper back and forth to each other and charge you to do so.
All these people, structures, and paper are real. But nowhere can you point to the larger concept of "government" or "corporation" and say, "There it is, kiddies!" The monolithic, big "they" is all in your mind.
Kurt Vonnegut, who coined the term
[vonnegut]
A granfalloon is the lumping together of many diverse elements into an abstract collection, and to then think and speak as if the abstract collection is one single entity capable of performing actions. This phenomenon leads people to say things like "the government runs the country." I hope you realize (or will soon) just how absurd the previous sentence is.
Frederick Mann,
THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT, Version 2 - October, 1998
(Compare to collectivism. Contrast with individualism.)
[bk]
Ideologically, then, the term 'capitalism' can be understood to mean the rejection of the Marxist thesis. Ideological capitalism is the position that private individuals can legitimately own the means of production: sewing machines and spades, tractors and factories.
By this meaning, ideological capitalism is solidly in keeping with philosophical individualism, which rejects the very existence of "society" as the sort of entity that could own anything. Collective ownership -- in the ideological sense -- depends on philosophical collectivism.
bkMarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
(Compare to ECONOMIC CAPITALISM.)
(Contrast with POLITICAL CAPITALISM.)
[bk]
In fact, ideology means nothing more than systematic social thought.
Without systematic thought, the intellectual shiftiness of statist impulse gets a free ride.
Lew Rockwell, "Libertarianism and the Old Right"
[rockwell]
[Verb form: to incorrect]
Incorrection is when I use a non-error and you tell me I'm in error.
bkmarcus, "incorrectables"
[bk]
As a moral philosophy, individualism holds that only individual persons can be moral agents.
It holds that rights and responsibilities are only relevant to individuals.
Individualism denies that there are any collective moral agents, and therefore denies rights or responsibilities to groups (but not to the individuals within those groups).
[bk]
Straw-man "individualism": The position that individual rights always supersede group rights.
Stated this way, individualism seems unreasonable -- seems in fact like a call for dogmatically privileging one entity over another. True individualism is both far more reasonable and far more radical for it denies the very existence of such a thing as "group rights".
According to individualism, no one's rights ever supersede anyone else's rights because all rights are equal and compatible.
[bk]
In individualism, the "collective is not the ultimate value, but rather a vehicle for the realization of individual goals".
R.W. Grant, The Incredible Bread Machine
[rwGrant]
'Individualism' has a great variety of meanings in social and political philosophy. Three important types can be distinguished: ontological individualism, methodological individualism, and moral and political individualism. These three are often confused by highly reputable liberal and conservative philosophers [...] Ontological individualism is the uncontroversial metaphysical doctrine that social reality consists, ultimately, only of persons who act and choose. Collectivities, such as a social class, a state, or a group, cannot act. It is more easily understood in contrast to ontological collectivism, which does suppose that such collectivities have a reality independent of the actions of persons.
[krauth]
We have talked at length of individual rights; but what, it may be asked, of the "rights of society"? Don't they supersede the rights of the mere individual? The libertarian, however, is an individualist; he believes that one of the prime errors in social theory is to treat "society" as if it were an actually existing entity. "Society" is sometimes treated as a superior or quasi-divine figure with overriding "rights" of its own; at other times as an existing evil which can be blamed for all the ills of the world. The individualist holds that only individuals exist, think, feel, choose, and act; and that "society" is not a living entity but simply a label for a set of interacting individuals. Treating society as a thing that chooses and acts, then, serves to obscure the real forces at work.
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[available online]
[rothbard]
The word 'individualist' had little of the idea of the abstracted self that the word today conjures. Rather, it was a dense concept suggesting an alternative to the collectivism of socialism and communism, certainly, but also remaining open to the interaction between the individual and his society and culture that crafts distinctive personality. Individualists, in this sense, belong to societies in ways they couldn't possibly belong to states, any more than theory could be wholly self-created.
analysis, a blog for individualists
(citing The Intercollegiate Review on Lee Edward's Educating for Liberty)
[analysis]
The customary terminology misrepresents these things entirely. The philosophy commonly called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus. On the other hand the application of the basic ideas of collectivism cannot result in anything but social disintegration and the perpetuation of armed conflict.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, "Human Society"
[mises]
By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. [...] The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, government bureaucracy.
Robert Nozick, "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?"
[nozick]
(See
COMMUNISM.)
bkmarcus
[bk]
Lenin did not content himself with the conquest of Russia. He was fully convinced that he was destined to bring the bliss of socialism to all nations, not only to Russia. The official name which he chose for his government -- Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics -- does not contain any reference to Russia. It was designed as the nucleus of a world government. It was implied that all foreign comrades by rights owed allegiance to this government and that all foreign bourgeois who dared to resist were guilty of high treason and deserved capital punishment. Lenin did not doubt in the least that all Western countries were on the eve of the great final revolution. He daily expected its outbreak.
Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos
[Mises]
Interventionism is any act of government that both represents the initiation of physical force and, at the same time, stops short of imposing an all-round socialist economic system, in which production takes place entirely, or at least characteristically, at the initiative of the government.
George Reisman, "What Is Interventionism?"
The system of the hampered market economy, or interventionism, differs from socialism by the very fact that it is still market economy. The authority seeks to influence the market by the intervention of its coercive power, but it does not want to eliminate the market altogether. It desires that production and consumption should develop along lines different from those prescribed by the unhindered market, and it wants to achieve its aim by injecting into the working of the market orders, commands and prohibitions for whose enforcement the police power and its apparatus of coercion and compulsion stand ready. But these are isolated interventions; their authors assert that they do not plan to combine these measures into a completely integrated system which regulates all prices, wages and interest rates, and which thus places full control of production and consumption in the hands of the authorities.
[...]
The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.
Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos
[Mises]
"Isolationism" was coined as a smear term to apply to opponents of American entry into World War II. Since the word was often applied through guilt-by-association to mean pro-Nazi, "isolationist" took on a "right wing" as well as a generally negative flavor. If not actively pro-Nazi, "isolationists" were at the very least narrow-minded ignoramuses ignorant of the world around them, in contrast to the sophisticated, worldly, caring "internationalists" who favored American crusading around the globe. In the last decade, of course, antiwar forces have been considered "leftists," and interventionists from Lyndon Johnson to Jimmy Carter and their followers have constantly tried to pin the "isolationist" or at least "neoisolationist" label on today's left wing.
Left or right? During World War I, opponents of the war were bitterly attacked, just as now, as "leftists," even though they included in their ranks libertarians and advocates of laissez-faire capitalism. In fact, the major center of opposition to the American war with Spain and the American war to crush the Philippine rebellion at the turn of the century was laissez-faire liberals, men like the sociologist and economist William Graham Sumner, and the Boston merchant Edward Atkinson, who founded the "Anti-Imperialist League." Furthermore, Atkinson and Sumner were squarely in the great tradition of the classical English liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in particular such laissez-faire "extremists" as Richard Cobden and John Bright of the "Manchester School." Cobden and Bright took the lead in vigorously opposing every British war and foreign political intervention of their era, and for his pains Cobden was known not as an "isolationist" but as the "International Man." Until the smear campaign of the late 1938, opponents of war were considered the true "internationalists," men who opposed the aggrandizement of the nation-state and favored peace, free trade, free migration, and peaceful cultural exchanges among peoples of all nations. Foreign intervention is "international" only in the sense that war is international: coercion, whether the threat of force or the outright movement of troops, will always cross frontiers between one nation and another.
"Isolationism" has a right-wing sound; "neutralism" and "peaceful coexistence" sound leftish. But their essence is the same: opposition to war and political intervention between countries. This has been the position of antiwar forces for two centuries, whether they were the classical liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the "leftists" of World War I and the Cold War, or the "rightists" of World War II. In very few cases have these antiinterventionists favored literal "isolation": what they have generally favored is political nonintervention in the affairs of other countries, coupled with economic and cultural internationalism in the sense of peaceful freedom of trade, investment, and interchange between the citizens of all countries. And this is the essence of the libertarian position as well.
Chapter 14: War and Foreign Policy
"Isolationism" Left and Right
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[available online]
[rothbard]
n. [< k-l-m-n-o-p. Note: Coined by John Ciardi in A Browser's Dictionary in 1980.]
A sequential straight line through the middle of everything, leading nowhere.
"Ted Kennedy's political career is a kelemenopy through 20th-century American politics."
[ciardi]
(See ECONOMIC CAPITALISM. See also FREE MARKET.)
bkmarcus
[bk]
Laissez faire, (French). Short for laissez faire, laissez passer, a French phrase meaning to let things alone, let them pass. First used by the eighteenth century Physiocrats (see "Physiocracy") as an injunction against government interference with trade. Now used freely as a synonym for free market economics, or what Mises prefers to call the unhampered market economy (see "Market economy, the free or unhampered").
Market economy, the free or unhampered. A pure or unhampered (i.e., free) market economy is an imaginary construction which assumes:
[Editor's Note: As a classical-liberal minarchist, Ludwig von Mises believed that "government," as specified in criterion #4, needed to be centered in the State. -bk]
Mises Made Easier: Laissez faire; Market economy, the free or unhampered
[Mises]
That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which one State-supported group "owns" the land and thereby takes tribute (rent) from those who live, work, or produce on the land.
[celine]
(See MUTUALISM.)
[bk]
Thus, there are two types of ethically invalid land titles: