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]
"Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary."
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
[mises]
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]
Originally of French origin, "bourgeoisie" appeared in the early 16th century from the same root that gives us borough and burgh. The word referred to the growing number of free citizens who were neither gentlemen nor peasants making their living in growing towns. These citizens were mainly shopkeepers and merchants.
Marx changed the definition for many when he used it to refer to specifically to property-owning capitalists who exploited the working class or proletariat.
Today the term refers generally to members of the middle class.
Clinton A. Johnston
[caj]
"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]
What will think of our times is something that only history will tell. But it is a good guess that it will select collectivism as the identifying characteristic of the twentieth century. For, even a quick survey of the developing pattern of thought during the past fifty years shows up the dominance of one central idea: that Society is a transcendent entity, something apart from and greater than the sum of its parts, possessing a suprahuman character and endowed with like capacities. It operates in a field of its own, ethically and philosophically, and is guided by stars unknown to mortals. Hence, the individual, the unit of Society, cannot judge it by his own limitations nor apply to it standards by which he measures his own thinking and behavior. He is necessary to it, of course, but only as a replaceable part of a machine. It follows, therefore, that Society, which may concern itself paternalistically with individuals, is in no way dependent on them.
Frank Chodorov, The Rise and Fall of Society
[chodorov]
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:
We may call both of these aggressions "land monopoly" -- not in the sense that some one person or group owns all the land in society, but in the sense that arbitrary privileges to land ownership are asserted in both cases, clashing with the libertarian rule of non-ownership of land except by actual transformers, their heirs, and their assigns.
Land monopoly is far more widespread in the modern world than most people -- especially most Americans -- believe.
Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, "Land Monopoly, Past and Present"
[rothbard]
One skilled in circumvention of the law.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
Unwarranted repose of manner in a person of low degree.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
That school of capitalist philosophy which attempts to correct the injustices of capitalism by adding new laws to existing laws. Each time conservatives pass a law creating privilege, liberals pass another law modifying privilege, leading conservatives to pass a more subtle law recreating privilege, etc., until "everything not forbidden is compulsory" and "everything not compulsory is forbidden."
[celine]
Left-Liberals prefer self-government in personal matters and central decision-making on economics. They want government to serve the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for economic equality.
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
[Contrast with CLASSICAl LIBERALISM.] [Compare to FABIAN SOCIALISM.]
[bk]
To lay a ghost at the outset and to dismiss semantics, a liberal is here defined as one who believes in utilizing the full force of government for the advancement of social, political, and economic justice at the municipal, state, national, and international levels.... A liberal believes government is a proper tool to use in the development of a society which attempts to carry Christian principles of conduct into practical effect.
Former US Senator Joseph S. Clark, Jr., when he was Mayor of Philadelphia, Atlantic, July 1953
[clark]
Most on the left think of themselves, and probably sincerely, as "democratic socialists," as believers in a blend of socialism. with democracy and freedom of speech and opinion. Libertarians hold that vision to be self-contradictory, and democracy, freedom of speech, and socialism to be ultimately incompatible.
Murray Rothbard, "Where the Left Goes Wrong on Foreign Policy"
[rothbard]
This is perhaps the most ambiguous word in the political vocabulary.
[...]
American liberals are not hostile to the market and individualism; it is rather that they demand constant corrections of its apparently random processes by a benevolent state if the traditional value of freedom can be realized.
[...]
European liberalism is perhaps better known as classical liberalism.
[...]
The basic tenets of liberalism were formulated in this period [in eighteenth-century Europe]. They may be summarized as follows. The individual is the source of his own moral values; the process of trade and exchange between individuals has both efficiency and freedom-enhancing properties; the market is a spontaneous order for the allocation of resources; exchange between nations will not only maximize wealth through the international division of labour, but also tends to reduce war and political tension; and public policy should be limited to the few common concerns of individuals.
[krauth]
As the word liberty is ambiguous, however, so is the word liberal. A liberal may believe that freedom is a matter for the individual alone and that the role of the state should be minimal, or he may believe that freedom is a matter for the state and that the state can and should be used as an instrument to promote it. The former view in its extreme tends toward anarchism, while the latter in its extreme tends toward socialism, called social, or welfare, liberalism. In between are myriad gradations. Rarely has a liberal movement been unaffected by this ambiguity; some have even collapsed because of it.
The Greek Catalog - History Directory
[omhros]
One of the effective tactics of creeping socialism, especially in America, has been the annexation of words with favorable connotations. The best example is the word 'liberal'. In the nineteenth century, a liberal supported laissez-faire economic policy, free trade, broadly based democracy, and civil liberties. The word had strong positive connotations; even today, while 'conservative' is sometimes used favorably, 'illiberal' is always pejorative. The socialists opposed liberal economic policies. The more successful socialists, instead of saything that liberalism was bad and socialism good, called themselves liberals (or progressives, another "good" word) and their opponents conservatives.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
The Old Left, flourishing in the United States in the 1930's and 40's, may best be summed up as Social Democracy... Essentially what this means is an accommodation to and admiration for the State, and a willingness to settle down in cozy alliance with Big Business and other power groups to parcel out perquisites and privileges in the mixed economy of welfare-warfare State Monopoly Capitalism.
Murray Rothbard, "Liberty and the New Left" (PDF)
[rothbard]
The principled rejection of all proactive coercion, whether by individuals or by groups.
(See also: Non-Aggression Principle.)
[bk]
The libertarian position is that there is no legitimate initiation of force. Whether or not there is justification for reactive force is outside the definition of libertarianism, but do note that the pacifist position presumes the libertarian position: you cannot oppose all use of force without also opposing the initiation of force. To be true therefore to pacifist principles requires an acceptance of the libertarian position ...
bkMarcus, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism
[bk]
Libertarian Partisans (a.k.a. minarchists) "are self-governors in both personal and economic matters. They believe government's only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence. They value individual responsibility, and tolerate economic and social diversity."
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.
[elNeil]
Libertarianism is a direct attack upon the mystique of the state. It recognizes that the state is only an abstraction and reduces it to the actions of individuals. It applies the same standard of morality to the state as it would to a next-door neighbor. If it is not proper for a neighbor to tax or pass laws regulating your private life, then it cannot be proper for the state to do so. Only by elevating itself above the standards of personal morality can the state make these claims on your life. . . .
Wendy McElroy, Demystifying the State
[mac]
Libertarianism has become a descriptive term for the individualist political doctrine in recent years largely because the nineteenth-century word 'liberalism' has been used by semi-collectivist creeds, especially in America.
[krauth]
The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life.
Murray N. Rothbard, Six Myths About Libertarianism
[rothbard]
Libertarians favor the abolition of all States everywhere, and the provision of legitimate functions now supplied poorly by governments (police, courts, etc.) by means of the free market. Libertarians favor liberty as a natural human right, and advocate it not only for Americans but for all peoples.
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[available online]
[rothbard]
'Libertarian' is another term for Free-Market Anarchist, though it often includes softer-core fellow travelers such as minarchists.
The word originally was used by free-thinkers in relation to religion to mean those who believed in free-will over determinism (which is not all that bad an association for us) and then became a euphemism for anarchist in Europe in the 19th Century.
It was revived by Leonard Read in the 1940s to mean those Classical Liberals who refused to join the rest of the Liberal Movement into becoming soft-Left statists, and who had largely joined the U.S. Old Right coalition against that kind of Liberal, bordering on fascist, New Deal.
With the election of Eisenhower and death of Robert Taft, the Old Right coalition disintegrated. Buckley pulled the pro-State conservatives into his New Right while Murray Rothbard rallied the Isolationist (non-interventionist in foreign policy) Libertarians into alliance with the New Left. New York-based Rothbard became an anarchist in 1950 and defined the hard-core position accordingly. Robert LeFevre accomplished the same in the Western U.S.
[sek3]
Libertarianism elaborates an entire philosophy from one simple premise: initiatory violence or its threat (coercion) is wrong (immoral, evil, bad, supremely impractical, etc) and is forbidden; nothing else is.
Samuel Edward Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto
[sek3]
In its broadest meaning, the word libertarian applies to anything that is for Liberty and not against it. Many American libertarians in particular wish to limit the label to people who believe the free market is essential to Liberty, leaving out the (mostly European) libertarians who just as fervently believe in some form of socialism and collective property. And while some Libertarians cling to the State as somehow capable of defending Liberty if only kept small enough, the modern Libertarian Movement that we know and love (or not) considers the State (involuntary government) a necessary or unnecessary Evil but definitely an Evil. In fact, the State is generally perceived as the institutional opposite of Liberty.
[sek3]
Liberty is -- and has always been -- the properly defined exercise of freedom that does not violate the rights of others.
Your right to liberty is not violated by restrictions on your freedom to rape and murder, because you have no such right in the first place.
(Contrast with License. Compare to Equal Liberty.)
[bk]
The word 'liberty' describes all behavior that is absent coercion.
The principled rejection of aggression and coercion is the same thing as the principled support for liberty.
[bk]
No one is obliged to do more than comply with this injunction: In the exercise of your own rights do not encroach upon the rights of another; an injunction which is the exact definition of liberty.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?
[proudhon]
A man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people.
Ludwig von Mises, "The Individual in Society"
[mises]
"actions that violate
A "PRESUMPTION OF LIBERTY"In addition — and as the dissent notices — now there is no pretense of a "fundamental right" rebutting the "presumption of constitutionality." If you reread his opinion, you will see that Justice Kennedy never mentions any presumption to be accorded the Texas legislature. More importantly, he never tries to justify the right to same-sex sexuality as fundamental. Instead, he puts all his energy into demonstrating that same-sex sexual freedom is a legitimate aspect of liberty — unlike, for example, actions that violate the
rights of others , which are not liberty but license.
Randy E. Barnett,
commentary on the Lawrence versus Texas sodomy case before the Supreme Court, 2003
A tall building on the seashore in which the government maintains a lamp and the friend of a politician.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
The distinguishing device of civilization and enlightenment.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
An art of converting superstition into coin. There are other arts serving the same high purpose, but the discreet lexicographer does not name them.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
The mercantilists wrongly assumed that gold and silver were the real wealth of a nation, not goods and services.
The Trade Deficit: Much Ado About Nothing, by Lawrence W. Reed.
[fee]
Mercantilism, which reached its height in the Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was a system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state. Thus, mercantilism held that exports should be encouraged by the government and imports discouraged.
Murray Rothbard, "Mercantilism: A Lesson for Our Times" in his The Logic of Action II (Cheltenham, England: Edward Elgar, 1997), p. 43.
[rothbard]
Mercantilism is economic nationalism for the purpose of building a wealthy and powerful state. Adam Smith coined the term "mercantile system" to describe the system of political economy that sought to enrich the country by restraining imports and encouraging exports. This system dominated western European economic thought and policies from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The goal of these policies was, supposedly, to achieve a "favorable" balance of trade that would bring gold and silver into the country. In contrast to the agricultural system of the physiocrats, or the laissez-faire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mercantile system served the interests of merchants and producers such as the British East India Company, whose activities were protected or encouraged by the state.
The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
[econlib]
Term coined in 1971 by SEK3 to substitute for the clumsy phrase, "limited-government Libertarian."
[agorist]
"[Minarchists] ... believe government's only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence." (See libertarianism.)
World's Smallest Political Quiz
[quiz]
The minarchist position was summarized by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who said, "That government is best which governs least."
bkMarcus, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism
[bk]
Minarchism, sometimes clumsily called minimal statism, is the view that government should be as small as possible. Supporters argue that it continues the tradition of classical liberal philosophy in its original form.
Radical minarchists usually agree that government should be restricted to its "minimal" or "night-watchman" state functions of government (courts, police, prisons, defence forces). Some other minarchists include in the role of government the management of essential common infrastructure (roads, money); some, by what is sometimes reproached to them as a slippery slope, include quite a lot in such essential infrastructure (schools, hospitals, social security). Actually, these minarchists often accept (in a conservative rather than principled way) as valid some of current government's domain, and consider it more urgent to stop the expansion of government than to reduce its domain to any particular size. Minarchists are generally opposed to government programs which transfer wealth or which subsidize certain sectors of the economy.
Minarchists usually justify their vision of the state by referring to basic principles rather than arguing in terms of pragmatic results. For example, in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick defines the role of a minimal state as follows:
"Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons'rights not to be forced to do certain things , and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection."
Another point: in my view, we are about as likely to achieve minarchy as we are to achieve anarchy. I.e., both are remote possibilities. What is striking is that almost every criticism of "impracticality" that minarchist hurl at anarchy is also true of minarchy itself. Both are exceedingly unlikely. Both require massive changes in views among millions of people. Both rest on presumptions that most people simply don't care much about.
N. Stephan Kinsella, "What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist"
[kinsella]
a.k.a. 'person'
Moral Agency is a concept in moral philosophy and the discussion of ethics.
A Moral Agent is anything that can be held responsible -- credited or blamed -- for decisions or behavior. It is moral agents who have rights and responsibilities, because it is moral agents whom we take to have choices and the power to choose.
If you do not think anyone or anything should ever be blamed, then you are denying the concept of moral agency -- as well as the concept of rights and of responsibilities. (See EGOISM.)
[bk]
Being a Moral Agent does not mean that you are successfully making moral decisions or that you are intelligent or that you are righteous. It means that you belong to that category of being that can be blamed. If we can't blame you, you have no rights. If you have no rights, we can't blame you. It means that we get to hold you responsible for the decisions you make, no matter how well or poorly you make them.
If the guy who beats me up isn't a moral agent, then I can't blame him for what he did -- I have to treat him as a force of nature. Blaming someone MEANS that you are treating him as a moral agent. Without the concept of moral agency -- the idea of choice -- there can be no SHOULD or SHOULDN'T.
[bk]
The number 4 is not a physical agent. It cannot do anything in the physical world.
A tornado is a physical agent because it can and does do things in the physical world.
But a tornado can't do anything in the moral world. It can destroy my house, but it can't rob me of my property in the same sense that a person can.
A person is a moral agent. I care differently if my house is destroyed by a tornado than I do if it's destroyed by a terrorist. The terrorist robbed me of my house, because, unlike the tornado, the terrorist can do things in the moral world, and 'to rob' is a morally-defined term.
[bk]
In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
Mutualism is an individualist, free-market form of anarchism that rejects the idea of land as property.
Specifically, a mutualist would recognize de facto property (occupation and use), but not de jure property titles to territory.
Mutualists (by the above definition) are the direct ideological descendants of Proudhon, Warren, and Tucker.
Since economic capitalism depends on property titles, the mutualists cannot be considered anarcho-capitalists.
(In fact, they often call themselves free-market socialists!)
For more information see the mutualist website.
[bk]
The mutualists are the strange wedge in anarchism between advocates of socialism and advocates of capitalism.
bkMarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
While the state is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept, the "nation" may be and generally is voluntary.
The nation properly refers, not to the state, but to the entire web of culture, values, traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised.
It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook the obvious. Let us never forget the great libertarian Randolph Bourne's analysis of the crucial distinction between "the nation" (the land, the culture, the terrain, the people) and "the State" (the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians), and of his important conclusion that one may be a true patriot of one's nation or country while -- and even for that very reason -- opposing the state that rules over it.
Murray Rothbard, "The Nationalities Question"
[rothbard]
[Mises defined the nation as a speech community:]
"Now we see that all national struggles are language struggles, that they are waged about language. What is specifically 'national' lies in language."
Community of language is at first the consequence of an ethnic or social community; independently of its origin, however, it itself now becomes a new bond that creates definite social relations. [...] Community of language binds and difference of language separates persons and peoples. If someone finds the explanation of the nation as a speech community perhaps too paltry, let him just consider what immense significance language has for thinking and for the expression of thought, for social relations, and for all activities of life.
Ludwig von Mises, "Nation and Nationality"
[mises]
Nationalism is advocacy for the nation-state: the position that the nation and the state should be coextensive.
In the context of an empire, nationalism is a decentralist and pro-liberty philosophy. (Think of Indians under British rule.)
In the context of a federation, nationalism is centralizing and illiberal. (Think of American so-called Federalists -- i.e., nationalists -- in the late 18th century, or German nationalists in the 19th.)
Ghandi was a nationalist. So was Hitler. Joan of Arc and Alexander Hamilton were both nationalists. Their contexts give the term very different meanings.
bkmarcus
[bk]
The synthesis of nationalism and socialism, the term is usually used to refer to fascism or right-wing socialism. Contrast with international socialism.
When capital letters are used ("National Socialism") the term refers specifically to the political party and ideology of Adolf Hitler.
The term "Nazi" is an abbreviation for NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN WORKERS PARTY.
(German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP).
bkmarcus
[bk]
Legal theory (and moral philosophy) of Lysander Spooner -- also called the Science of Justice -- wherein acts of coercion against individuals are considered "illegal" but the so-called criminal acts that violate only man-made legislation are not. According to Natural Law theory, an individual has a natural "right" to be free from coercion.
According to Spoonerian Natural Law, all legislation is itself illegal.
(Contrast with Philosophical Egoism.)
bkMarcus, A Brief Biography of Lysander Spooner
[bk]
In the controversy over man's nature, and over the broader and more controversial concept of "natural law," both sides have repeatedly proclaimed that natural law and theology are inextricably intertwined. As a result, many champions of natural law, in scientific or philosophic circles, have gravely weakened their case by implying that rational, philosophical methods alone cannot establish such law: that theological faith is necessary to maintain the concept. On the other hand, the opponents of natural law have gleefully agreed; since faith in the supernatural is deemed necessary to belief in natural law, the latter concept must be tossed out of scientific, secular discourse, and be consigned to the arcane sphere of the divine studies. In consequence, the idea of a natural law founded on reason and rational inquiry has been virtually lost.[2]
[2] And yet, Black's Law Dictionary defines the natural law in a purely rationalistic and non-theological manner:
Jus Naturale, the natural law, or law of nature; law, or legal principles, supposed to be discoverable by the light of nature or abstract reasoning, or to be taught by nature to all nations and men alike, or law supposed to govern men and peoples in a state of nature, i.e., in advance of organized governments or enacted laws (3rd ed., p. 1044).
Professor Patterson, in Jurisprudence: Men and Ideas of the Law (Brooklyn: Foundation Press, 1953), p. 333, defines the natural law cogently and concisely as:
Principles of human conduct that are discoverable by "reason" from the basic inclinations of human nature, and that are absolute, immutable and of universal validity for all times and places. This is the basic conception of scholastic natural law ... and most natural law philosophers.
Murray N. Rothbard,
The Ethics of Liberty,
"Natural Law and Reason"
[rothbard]
The Non-Aggression Principle [N.A.P.] formalizes a way of living that many people already believe in:
No one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, nor to delegate its initiation.-- L. Neil Smith
The fundamental axiom of libertarian theory is that no one may threaten or commit violence ('aggress') against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; that is, only defensively against the aggressive violence of another. In short, no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor. Here is the fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory.
Murray N. Rothbard,
"War, Peace, and the State,"
The Myth of National Defense
[rothbard]
We shall not attempt to justify this axiom here: Most libertarians and even conservatives are familiar with the rule and even defend it; the problem is not so much in arriving at the rule as in fearlessly and consistently pursuing its numerous and often astounding implications.
Murray N. Rothbard,
"War, Peace, and the State,"
The Myth of National Defense
[rothbard]
Obligation: Something that a moral agent ought or ought not to do.
Responsibilities: The obligations you have to others in the world.
Rights: The responsibilities that the rest of the world has to you.
[See more on RIGHTS]
[bk]
"The pacifist position is that there is no legitimate use of force."
bkMarcus, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism
[bk]
In theory, the term 'anarcho-pacifist' should be considered redundant.
In practice ... well, you'll have to ask the individuals who are calling themselves pacifists.
[bk]
Whether or not there is justification for reactive force is outside the definition of libertarianism, but do note that the pacifist position presumes the libertarian position: you cannot oppose all use of force without also opposing the initiation of force. To be true therefore to pacifist principles requires an acceptance of the libertarian position, as was recognized by Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist and Christian anarchist.
bkMarcus, A Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism
[bk]
There are some libertarians who would go even further and say that no one should employ violence even in defending himself against violence. However, even such Tolstoyans, or 'absolutist pacifists,' would concede the defender's right to employ defensive violence and would merely urge him not to exercise that right. They, therefore, do not disagree with our proposition. In the same way, a libertarian temperance advocate would not challenge a man's right to drink liquor, only his wisdom in exercising that right.
Murray N. Rothbard,
The Myth of National Defense
[rothbard]
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
George Bernard Shaw
[shaw]
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
George Bernard Shaw
[shaw]
Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.
The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course ...
Emma Goldman
Patriotism: A Menace To Liberty
Anarchism and Other Essays
[redEmma]
I of patriotism brag, And wave the striped rag; At the numb-heads I am laughing in my sleeves. I am always for myself, For office and for pelf; I'm a member of the "Brotherhood of Thieves."
Anna K. - The Politician (poem)
Liberty, Vol. 10, No. 21, February 23, 1895, Whole No. 307
[annaK]
I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.
G.K. Chesterton, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, Act III
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
PATRIOT, n. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
Conservatives and liberals alike hold in common the mystical notion that nations really mean something, probably something permanent. Both ascribe to lines drawn on maps -- or in the dirt or in the air -- the magical creation of communities of men that require sovereignty and sanction.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
What is patriotism? Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from others spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one was born? But birth is a pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having been born on this spot or on that. Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Fuhrer, a camorra of commissars? I should say it depends entirely on what the jobholders are like and what they do. Certainly I had never seen any who commanded my loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if ever once I thought they could. Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political system and its institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-not? But if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from the standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than names. The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is regarded as good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if it has any, ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the people who live under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of the world, I found no reason in the nature of things why a person should be loyal to one system rather than another. One could see at a glance that there is no saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit may attach to any of them lies in the way it is administered.
So when people speak of loyalty to one's country, one must ask them what they mean by that. What is one's country? Mr. Jefferson said contemptuously that "merchants have no country; the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." But one may ask, why should I? This motive of patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it should be sound for merchants, why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in respect of material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains, intellectual and aesthetic gains? As a general principle, I should put it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.
Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
[nock]
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
Guy de Maupassant, short story writer and novelist (1850-1893)
[shaw]
Calendar days confiscated by the State to resemble holidays.
Heather Carson, "Poliday"
[carson]
That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it.
[celine]
Political capitalism is my term for what anarcho-capitalists call "State Capitalism" -- government run for the benefit of private capitalists.
(I use the term 'political capitalism' in part to contrast political means with economic means, and in part to avoid confusion with the term 'State Capitalism' as it was used by anti-Soviet leftists, who claimed that the Soviet Union could not properly be seen as communist or even anti-capitalist because the state monopoly had taken over the role of the capitalist in exploiting the proletariat, rather than abolishing the role and liberating the proletariat.)
Political capitalism is anti-competitive because established capitalists use the coercive power of the State to curtail entrepreneurial competition. Notice that political capitalism is incompatible with a free market.
bkMarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
(Contrast with IDEOLOGICAL CAPITALISM.)
(Contrast with ECONOMIC CAPITALISM.)
(Imperialism, mercantilism, protectionism, and statist, so-called "free trade" treaties (e.g., NAFTA) are all examples of political capitalism. So is "Corporate Capitalism": the State-sanctioned corporation is a legal fiction created to shield individual persons from responsibility for the actions of the entity that generates their profits.)
[bk]
Thatcherism is all too similar to Reaganism: free-market rhetoric masking statist content.
Murray N. Rothbard,
Making Economic Sense,
Chapter 62:Mrs. Thatcher's Poll Tax
[rothbard]
Big business in America today and for some years has been openly at war with competition and, thus, at war with laissez-faire capitalism. Big business supports a form of state capitalism in which government and big business act as partners.
[...]
This is not to say that economic bigness is bad. It isn't, if it results from economic efficiency. But it is bad if it results from collusion with political, rather than with economic power.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
The control of the collective means of violence-backed coercion.
Politics is about how we should decide whom to coerce about what.
[bk]
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral, or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life.
Murray N. Rothbard, Six Myths About Libertarianism
[rothbard]
Politics has always been the institutionalized and established way in which some men have exercised the power to live off the output of other men.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
... politics is just another form of residual magic in our culture -- a belief that somehow things come from nothing; that things may be given to some without first taking them from others; that all the tools of man's survival are his by accident or divine right and not by pure and simple inventiveness and work.
Karl Hess, "The Death of Politics", Playboy, March 1969
[karlHess]
Politics consists of 100,000 pressure groups trying to get their hands on the loot.
Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 261
These two forces [the economic and political classes], working one against the other, establish a locus of "equilibrium," a boundary between the set of rights the government has overridden or seized and the set of rights the plundered class has somehow managed to retain, whether by formal constitutional constraints or by everyday tax evasion, black-market transactions, and other defensive violations of the government's oppressive rules.
Robert Higgs, "The Song that Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction"
[higgs]
Politics, as a practice ... has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918), Pulitzer Prize-winning historian (1919), grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams.
[hbadams]
From the Latin privi, private, and lege, law. An advantage granted by the State and protected by its powers of coercion. A law for private benefit.
[celine]
A right that is assumed contrary to just principles is privilege; it's absurd to agitate for the rights of the under-privileged unless you first renounce privilege in favor of justice. While you support the rights of one under-privileged group, you plant the seeds of another. Defend Justice, or uphold the right of Privilege to wreak havoc among peaceful people. Privilege is the political opposite of the hot potato: Once someone has it, he'll hold on to it. Privilege is political power, and political power has one object: shedding darkness into the light.
Propertarians advocate the individual private ownership of de jure, transferable, private property titles within a free market.
(Contrast with COMMUNISM.)
Specifically, propertarianism recognizes "natural capital" -- including land -- as a legitimate form of private property.
(Contrast with MUTUALISM.)
[bk]
Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a "property" in his own "person." This nobody has any right to but himself. The "labour" of his body and the "work" of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.
John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government
[locke]
Property is simply wealth, that is possessed -- that has an owner; in contradistinction to wealth, that has no owner, but lies exposed, unpossessed, and ready to be converted into property, by whomsoever chooses to make it his own.
Lysander Spooner, "What is Property?"
[spooner]
The reader will note that we use the word "property" in a very extended, but nonetheless exact, sense. Property is the right to enjoy for oneself the fruits of one's own efforts or to surrender them to another only on the condition of equivalent efforts in return. The distinction between property owner and proletarian is therefore fundamentally erroneous, unless we assert that there is a class of men who perform no work or have no rights over their own efforts or over the services that they render or over those that they receive in exchange.
It is erroneous to restrict the term "property" to one of its special forms, like capital or land, something that produces interest or rent; and it is this erroneous definition that is used to divide men into two hostile classes.
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), Economic Harmonies, "Private Property and Common Wealth"
[bastiat]
Of course, I know that in practice the ideal principle of property is far from having full sway. Against it are conflicting factors: there are services that are not voluntary, whose remuneration is not arrived at by free bargaining; there are services whose equivalence is impaired by force or fraud; in a word, plunder exists. The legitimacy of the principle of property is not thereby weakened, but confirmed. The principle is violated; therefore, it exists. We must cease believing in anything in this world, in facts, in justice, in universal consent, in human language; or else we must admit that these two words, "property" and "plunder," express opposite, irreconcilable ideas that can no more be identified than yes and no, light and dark, good and evil, harmony and discord. Taken literally, the famous formula, property is theft, is therefore absurdity raised to the nth degree. It would be no less outlandish to say that theft is property; that what is legal is illegal; that what is, is not, etc.
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), Economic Harmonies, "Private Property and Common Wealth"
[bastiat]
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
The usual solution is for the use of each thing to be decided by a person or by some group of persons organized under some set of rules. Such things are called property. If each thing is controlled by an individual who has the power to transfer that control to any other individual, we call the institution private property.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
If we assume that the individual has an indisputable right to life, we must concede that he has a similar right to the enjoyment of the products of his labor. This we call a property right. The absolute right to property follows from the original right to life because one without the other is meaningless; the means to life must be identified with life itself.
Frank Chodorov, "Taxation is Robbery"
[chodorov]
Appendix Zain -- Property and
Property is theft. -- P.J. Proudhon
Property is liberty. -- P.J. Proudhon
Property is impossible. -- P.J. Proudhon
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Proudhon, by piling up his contradictions this way, was not merely being French; he was trying to indicate that the abstraction "property" covers a variety of phenomena, some pernicious and some beneficial. Let us borrow a device from the semanticists and examine his triad with the subscripts attached for maximum clarity.
"Property1 is theft" means that property1 created by the artificial laws of feudal, capitalist, and other authoritarian societies, is based on armed robbery. Land titles, for instance, are clear examples of property1; swords and shot were the original coins of transaction.
"Property2 is liberty" means that property2, that which will be voluntarily honored in a voluntary (anarchist) society, is the foundation of the liberty in that society. The more people's interests are co-mingled and confused, as in collectivism, the more they will be stepping on each other's toes; only when the rules of the game declare clearly "This is mine and this is thine," and the game is voluntarily accepted as worthwhile by the parties to it, can true independence be achieved.
"Property3 is impossible" means that property3 (=property1) creates so much conflict of interest that society is in perpetual undeclared civil war and must eventually devour itself (and properties 1 and 3 as well). In short, Proudhon, in his own way, foresaw the Snafu Principle. He also foresaw that communism would only perpetuate and aggravate the conflicts, and that anarchy is the only viable alternative to this chaos.
It is averred, of course, that property2 will come into existence only in a totally voluntary society; many forms of it already exist. The error of most alleged libertarians -- especially the followers (!) of the egregious Ayn Rand -- is to assume that all property1 is property2. The distinction can be made by any IQ above 70 and is absurdly simple. The test is to ask, of any title of ownership you are asked to accept or which you ask others to accept, "Would this be honored in a free society of rationalists, or does it require the armed might of a State to force people to honor it?" If it be the former, it is property2 and represents liberty; if it be the latter, it is property1 and represents theft.
[celine]
Among free-market anarchists, the divisive issue is the recognition of land as de jure private property. Mutualist anarchists, following Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker, claim land cannot be bought and sold. Land can be legitimately possessed through occupation and use (e.g., "squatting"), but cannot be purchased, cannot be sold or otherwise transferred, and cannot therefore be used as collateral in a loan or investment. Under mutualist anarchism, land cannot be willed or inherited, since such transfers involve de jure property titles. If you want to give your land to your children, they'll just have to occupy it after you're gone.
[Contrast with PROPERTARIANISM.]
bkMarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
the personnel operating the government apparatus of coercion and compulsion
Ludwig von Mises, "The Gold Problem"
[mises]
The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. The words erroneously repeated.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
To be "radical" is to grasp things by the root. But to examine roots and origins, to engage in any analysis of fundamentals, one must be committed to a thoroughgoing, comprehensive strategy....
Chris Matthew Sciabarra "What the Hell Has Happened to the Radical Spirit of Objectivism?"
The term radical is used with at least three related but distinct senses:
Roderick T. Long, "Mises as Radical"
[long]
German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) used money confiscated from the exiled King of Hanover to create a secret fund for bribing reporters and bankrolling political movements in Germany and abroad. He called it the "Reptile Fund" (Reptilienfonds) because of his contempt for those who took such money.
The term is still used generically (especially among the British and Irish) for off-the-books government spending on manipulating both the domestic and foreign press.
(See "Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?" for the history of the CIA's reptile fund.)
[bk]
We shall be speaking throughout this work of "rights," in particular the rights of individuals to property in their persons and in material objects. But how do we define "rights"? "Right" has cogently and trenchantly been defined by Professor Sadowsky:
When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use.[53]
Sadowsky's definition highlights the crucial distinction we shall make throughout this work between a man's right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right. We will contend that it is a man's right to do whatever he wishes with his person; it is his right not to be molested or interfered with by violence from exercising that right. But what may be the moral or immoral ways of exercising that right is a question of personal ethics rather than of political philosophy -- which is concerned solely with matters of right, and of the proper or improper exercise of physical violence in human relations. The importance of this crucial distinction cannot be overemphasized. Or, as Elisha Hurlbut concisely put it: "The exercise of a faculty [by an individual] is its only use. The manner of its exercise is one thing; that involves a question of morals. The right to its exercise is another thing."[54]
[53] James A. Sadowsky, S.J., "Private Property and Collective Ownership," in Tibor Machan, ed., The Libertarian Alternative (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), pp. 120-21.
[54] Hurlbut, cited in Wright, American Interpretations, pp. 257 ff.
[See also OBLIGATIONS.]
Murray N. Rothbard,
The Ethics of Liberty,
"Natural Law and Natural Rights"
[rothbard]
What are rights? They are legal immunities from interference by the state and by violent people.
[north]
Making falsifiable models to describe the empirical world.
The study of those areas of knowledge that can be pursued with predictive models that are
All such models are to be judged pragmatically, i.e., Can they be tested? Have they been tested? Are they useful? More specifically, are they useful for making predictions.
All such models are assumed to be temporary.
Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Statistical Social Sciences, etc.
[Yes, Fundamentalist Materialism and Model Agnosticism are in direct opposition.]
[bk]
"Science ... is the endeavor to attain a mental grasp of the phenomena of the universe by a systematic arrangement of the whole body of available knowledge."
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
[mises]
Let us set aside for a moment the corollary but more complex case of tangible property, and concentrate on the question of a man's ownership rights to his own body. Here there are two alternatives: either we may lay down a rule that each man should be permitted (i.e., have the right to) the full ownership of his own body, or we may rule that he may not have such complete ownership. If he does, then we have the libertarian natural law for a free society as treated above. But if he does not, if each man is not entitled to full and 100 percent self-ownership, then what does this imply? It implies either one of two conditions:
These are the only logical alternatives to a state of 100 percent self-ownership for all.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
[rothbard]
Semantics is the branch of philosophy and linguistics concerning meaning.
Anyone who says "just semantics" in a dismissive manner, or who thinks "arguing over semantics" means quibbling over trivia, must not know the meaning of of the word meaning.
bkmarcus
[bk]
forced labor at below free-market wages
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[available online]
[rothbard]
Social Contract Theory is an attempt to justify coercion by claiming that certain involuntary arrangements are actually voluntary after all.
Individualism rejects any hypothetical contract with any hypothetical collective identity.
Contracts exist only between and among individuals.
(See MORAL AGENT.)
[bk]
Social contract is a phrase used in philosophy, political science, and sociology to denote a hypothetical agreement within a state regarding the rights and responsibility of the state and its citizens, or more generally a similar concord between a group and its members. All members within a society are assumed to agree to the terms of the social contract by their choice to stay within the society. The term "social contract" was coined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his influential 1762 treatise The Social Contract.
(See STATISM.)
Most modern theories of how society ought to work rest on some idea of agreement. Almost invariably, however, the agreement is fictitious, hypothetical, one that would be concluded if all men had equal "bargaining power," or saw things through the same "veil" of ignorance or uncertainty about their future. Or felt the same need for a central authority. The social contract, in its many versions, is perhaps the best known of these alleged agreements. All are designed to suit the normative views of their inventors and to justify the kind of social arrangements they should like to see adopted. Yet the only agreement that is not hypothetical, alleged, invented is the system of voluntary exchanges where all parties give visible, objective proof by their actions that they have found the unique common ground that everybody accepts, albeit grumblingly, but without anyone being forced to give up something he had within his reach and would have preferred. The set of voluntary exchanges, in one word, is the only one that does not impose an immorality in pursuit of a moral objective.
Anthony de Jasay, "Your Dog Owns Your House"
[deJasay]
(See FABIANISM.) (See LIBERALISM.)
bkMarcus
[bk]
As Fabians to the core, Social Democracy gave a pseudo-progressive and idealistic tone to the the state monopoly capitalism of the New Deal, comfortably assumed a large portion of power, and eagerly came to give "liberal" and socialist coloration to the Cold War and the Permanent War Economy that prevails in the United States.
Murray Rothbard, "Liberty and the New Left"
[rothbard]
"the reality of fascism cloaked with a thin veneer of populist demagogy"
Murray Rothbard, "Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty"
(summarizing the British Leninist theoretician, R. Palme Dutt, describing FDR's New Deal, 1934)
[rothbard]
The attempted abolition of all privilege by restoring power entirely to the coercive agent behind privilege, the State, thereby converting capitalist oligarchy into Statist monopoly. Whitewashing a wall by painting it black.
[celine]
Is Socialism state-centralization of the economy, or is it any system that levels out the society?
From what I've been reading, it seems that for the early 19th-century intellectual, Sociology was any description of how the society did work, and Socialism was any prescription about how the society should work.
By that definition, all anarchists were (and still are) socialists -- even the so-called Anarcho-Capitalists.
bkMarcus, Is anarchism a socialist philosophy or is it libertarian?
[bk]
Under socialism all the means of production are the property of the community. It is the community alone which can dispose of them and which determines their use in production.
Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
[mises]
Private property is eliminated, individualism goes by the board, individuality is flattened, all property is owned and controlled communally, and the individual units of the new collective organism are in some vague way equal to one another.
Murray N. Rothbard,
Classical Economics, volume II,
An Austrian perspective on the History of Economic Thought
(Aldershot-Brookfield: Edward Elgar, 1995), p. 318.
[rothbard]
It may mean, and is often used to describe, merely the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security, which are the ultimate aims of socialism. But it means also the particular method by which most socialists hope to attain these ends and which many competent people regard as the only methods by which they can be fully and quickly attained. In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of "planned economy" in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(from the preface to the 1956 American paperback edition)
[hayek]
In fact, socialism must be the most ironic use of language in the history of human linguistics: it is the advocacy of the complete replacement of social interaction with political interaction, the very negation of civil society itself.
In its earlier and heady days, socialism was supposed to substitute "rational policies" for the supposed chaos of the market. Instead of having individuals competing with each other to produce and sell goods in the market, socialism instead would create a process by which planners could rationally determine the needs of individuals in society, then direct production and distribution toward those ends. Moreover, because planning was to be placed in the hands of economic "experts," there would be no need to deal with the interference from politicians and the special interests that they represent.
Energy Bills and Central Planning by William L. Anderson
The point here is not simply that laws, policies, and programs can have counterproductive results. The point is that, when social processes are described in terms of their hoped-for results, this obscures the more fundamental question as to just what they actually do .... Therefore socialism, for example, is defined in this book not in terms of such goals as equality, security, economic planning, or "social justice," but as a system in which property rights in agriculture, commerce, and industry may be assigned and re-assigned only by political authorities, rather than through transactions in the marketplace.
Thomas Sowell,
Knowledge and Decisions,
Preface to the 1996 Edition
[sowell]
'Socialism', in a less-strict, but nevertheless accurate and simple form means: OPPOSITION TO CAPITALISM.
bkMarcus, Capitalism v. Socialism v. Anarchism
[bk]
'Socialism' has become a word with positive connotations and no content.
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
[friedman]
Another enemy of the worldwide free market is socialism. The labor movement began and developed under the banner of socialism, however many may have been the names -- social democracy, syndicalism, collectivism, communism, etc. -- given, in the course of the years, to the diverse tendencies that represent but variant expressions of the same fundamental thesis. The word itself seems to have been coined by Robert Owen (1771-1858), an Englishman, to signify that economic activity ought to be inspired exclusively by altruism, and that the economy ought to be social, rather than individualistic.
Faustino Ballve, "Nationalism and Socialism"
[ballve]
Collectivism's perversion of individualism's ideal.
bkmarcus
[bk]
(See POLITICAL CAPITALISM.)
bkMarcus, Reluctant Capitalist
[bk]
The philosophical position (explicit or unconscious) that the State is morally justifiable.
The position that the State is necessary, whether or not it is morally justifiable.
Archism -- the rejection of anarchism specifically.
The rejection of libertarianism in general.
[bk]
Syndicalism (from French, syndic, "a delegate") is sometimes used loosely to designation decentralized socialism, but is, more specifically, radical labor unionism.
Like the more familiar labor unionism, syndicalism is based on a hierarchical structure of organization combining egalitarian rhetoric and democratic elections to determine who decides the union's actions. Unlike more familiar labor unions, the goal is not the negotiation with owners for more favorable terms of labor, but rather the transfer of ownership of the means of production from the exploiting capitalists to the syndicalist union itself. (Think communist revolution, but decentralized: one factory at a time.)
ANARCHOSYNDICALISM is explicitly anarchist syndicalism: it rejects any role for the State in the just arrangement of property titles.
See, for example, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka "Wobblies").
bkmarcus
[bkmarcus]
a movement for transferring the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution to workers' unions. Influenced by Proudhon and by the French social philosopher Georges Sorel (1847-1922), syndicalism developed in French labor unions during the late 19th century and was at its most vigorous between 1900 and 1914, particularly in France, Italy, Spain, and the U.S.
Oxford American Dictionaries
[oxford]
That form of privilege or interference with the Free Market in which commodities produced outside the State are not allowed to compete equally with those produced inside the State.
[celine]
A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
That form of coercion or interference with the Free Market in which the State collects tribute (the tax), allowing it to hire armed forces to practice coercion in defense of privilege, and also to engage in such wars, adventures, experiments, "reforms," etc., as it pleases not at its own cost, but at the cost of "its" subjects.
[celine]
In a barter economy, government officials can only expropriate resources in one way: by seizing goods in kind. In a monetary economy they will find it easier to seize monetary assets, and then use the money to acquire goods and services for government, or else pay the money as susidies to favored groups. Such sezure is called taxation.
Murray N. Rothbard,
What Has Government Done to Our Money?
[rothbard]
Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Some persons find this claim obviously true: taking the earnings of N hours labor is like taking N hours from the person; it is like forcing the person to work N hours for another's purpose.
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
[nozick]
At first, of course, it is startling for someone to consider taxation as robbery, and therefore government as a band of robbers. But anyone who persists in thinking of taxation as in some sense a "voluntary" payment can see what happens if he chooses not to pay. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter, himself by no means a libertarian, wrote that "the state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind."
[Joseph A Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York Harper & Bros , 1942), pp 198 and 1980]
The eminent Viennese "legal positivist" Hans Kelsen attempted, in his treatise, The General Theory of Law and the State, to establish a political theory and justification of the State, on a strictly "scientific" and value-free basis. What happened is that early in the book, he came to the crucial sticking-point, the pons asinorum of political philosophy: What distinguishes the edicts of the State from the commands of a bandit gang? Kelsen's answer was simply to say that the decrees of the State are "valid," and to proceed happily from there, without bothering to define or explain this concept of "validity." Indeed, it would be a useful exercise for nonlibertarians to ponder this question: How can you define taxation in a way which makes it different from robbery?
Murray Rothbard,
The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
Taxation transfers resources from the private sector, where they are used in accordance with individual preferences, to the government, where they are used in accordance with political preferences. A good text will make this point clear, and proceed to discuss three important issues in the economics of taxation.
The incidence of taxation. Taxes are frequently levied on an entity that will not bear the ultimate burden of the taxes. "Who really pays this tax?" is an important question, one that also helps the student to "think like an economist."
Tax incentives and disincentives. Taxes alter the payoff for taking or not taking certain actions. Many times taxation can make activities that are profitable -- and beneficial -- no longer profitable. The student should learn to consider the long-term impact of tax changes after individuals and businesses have adjusted to them.
The cost of taxation. Taxes do not collect themselves. And tax avoidance costs billions of dollars each year. Economic texts should explain to students that the economic resources devoted to tax collection -- as well as those devoted to tax avoidance -- are substantial, and not available for other purposes.
How Reliable Are Michigan High School Economics Textbooks?
[mackinac]
That institution which interferes with the Free Market through the direct exercise of coercion or the granting of privileges (backed by coercion).
[celine]
[The] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Max Weber, "Science and Politics"
[weber]
A compulsory territorial monopoly on final judgments.
[hoppe]
The state is "the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area."
Government is "the subjection of the noninvasive individual to an external will."
Joseph A. Labadie
(summarizing Tucker)
Anarchism: What It Is and What It Is Not
[labadie]
Anarchists have no quarrel with any institution that contents itself with enforcing the law of equal freedom, and ... they oppose the State only after first defining it as an institution that claims authority over the non-aggressive individual and enforces that authority by physical force or by means that are effective only because they can and will be backed by physical force if necessary.
Individual Liberty by Benjamin Tucker, "Liberty and Politics"
[tucker]
(involuntary government)
[sek3]
The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone expects to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic Bastiat
[bastiat]
The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet. Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects.
Murray Rothbard, "The Anatomy of the State"
[rothbard]
There will always be those who claim to have special rights over the rest of society, and the state is the most organized attempt to get away with it.
Lew Rockwell, "Why the State Is Different"
[rockwell]
... while some Libertarians cling to the State as somehow capable of defending Liberty if only kept small enough, the modern Libertarian Movement ... considers the State ... a necessary or unnecessary Evil but definitely an Evil. In fact, the State is generally perceived as the institutional opposite of Liberty.
[sek3]
Nowhere has the coercive and parasitic nature of the State been more clearly limned than by the great late nineteenth-century German sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two and only two mutually exclusive means for man to obtain wealth. One, the method of production and voluntary exchange, the method of the free market, Oppenheimer termed the "economic means"; the other, the method of robbery by the use of violence, he called the "political means." The political means is clearly parasitic, for it requires previous production for the exploiters to confiscate, and it subtracts from instead of adding to the total production in society. Oppenheimer then proceeded to define the State as the "organization of the political means" -- the systematization of the predatory process over a given territorial area.
[Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), pp. 24-27 and passim.]
Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
I would define government as a group of men who sell retributive justice to the inhabitants of a limited geographic area at monopolist prices.
Robert LeFevre, Commentaries
[lefevre]
Let me begin with the definition of government: A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "Government, Money, and International Politics" [PDF]
[hoppe]
The State is a group of people who have managed to acquire a virtual monopoly of the use of violence throughout a given territorial area. In particular, it has acquired a monopoly of aggressive violence, for States generally recognize the right of individuals to use violence (though not against States, of course) in self defense. The State then uses this monopoly to wield power over the inhabitants of the area and to enjoy the material fruits of that power. The State, then, is the only organization in society that regularly and openly obtains its monetary revenues by the use of aggressive violence; all other individuals and organizations (except if delegated that right by the State) can obtain wealth only by peaceful production and by voluntary exchange of their respective products. This use of violence to obtain its revenue (called 'taxation') is the keystone of State power.
Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto
[rothbard]
And who is the state? It is any group who manages to seize control of the state's coercive machinery of theft and privilege. Of course these ruling groups have differed in composition through history, from kings and nobles to privileged merchants to Communist parties to the Trilateral Commission. But whoever they are, they can only be a small minority of the population, ruling and robbing the rest of us for their power and wealth. And since they are a small minority, the state rulers can only be kept in power by deluding us about the wisdom or necessity of their rule. Hence, it is our major task to oppose and desanctify their entrenched rule, in the same spirit that the first libertarian revolutionaries opposed and desanctified their rulers two hundred years ago.
Murray Rothbard, Keynote Address to the Libertarian Party Convention, 1977
[rothbard]
The tragedy of the commons occurs when there is free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource. The combination of open access and scarcity ultimately dooms the resource through over-exploitation. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals, each of whom is motivated to maximize his or her own use of the resource, while the costs of exploitation are distributed among all those to whom the resource is available.
The term derives originally from a parable published by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 book on population. It was then popularized and extended by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons." However, the theory itself is as old as Aristotle who said: "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it." (See also "Mises and Thucydides" by Tibor Machan.)
bkmarcus, modifying Wikipedia
[bk]
If land is not owned by anybody, although legal formalism may call it public property, it is utilized without any regard to the disadvantages resulting. Those who are in a position to appropriate to themselves the returns [...] do not bother about the later effects of their mode of exploitation. For them the [...] impairments of the future utilization are external costs not entering into their calculation of input and output.
Ludwig von Mises, Nationalokonomie: Theorie des Handelns und des Wirtschaften
[Mises]
Typical examples of the "tragedy of the commons" include the near extinction of the buffalo and the whale, the destruction of the eastern forests during the 1800s, and the crowding of, literring on, and deterioriation of public parks, beaches, roadsides, and waterways. The same type of tragedy applies to legislatures, police, and courts. [emphasis added]
Bruce Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State, pp. 97f.
[Benson]
The tragedy of the commons isn't a symptom of too much market; it is the result rather of not enough private property. All allocation of scarce goods will be most efficiently handled by the price system -- so long as enforceable property rights are well defined.
[...]
When a resource is "public" it will either suffer the tragedy of the commons or be subjected to political allocation on the part of privileged interests, with all the waste and calculational chaos inevitable under central planning.
B.K. Marcus, "The Spectrum Should Be Private Property: The Economics, History, and Future of Wireless Technology."
[bk]
Vices are simply the errors which a man makes in his search after his own happiness. Unlike crimes, they imply no malice toward others, and no interference with their persons or property.
Lysander Spooner, "Vices Are Not Crimes"
[spooner]
The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
[devil]
...not all violent conflict constitutes war making. War is here defined as violent interaction between two groups of humans, one or both of which is a state.
Joseph T. Salerno, "Imperialism and the Logic of War Making"
[salerno]
War is the health of the State.
Randolph Bourne, "The State" (1917)
[bourne]
War is just one more big government program.
[sobran]
"man's faculty to choose between different states of affairs, to prefer one, to set aside the other, and to behave according to the decision made in aiming at the chosen state and forsaking the other."
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
[mises]
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