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C4SS anti-“RTW” blogathon
C4SS, to its credit, has taken a stand against the barrage of anti-labor legislation in Michigan with a barrage of posts attacking so-called “right to work:” What’s Wrong with Right-to-Work by Gary Chartier “Right to Work”: Violation of Free Contract and Free Ride for Scabs by Kevin Carson Michigan “Right to Work” and the Folly…
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La lucha continua
What has now become the old model (the J.O.B. as the usual means of support) was a factory sweatshop partially humanized by several generations of intense activism and reform. Perhaps the precarious “freelancer” model that is rapidly replacing it can similarly be modified. The new rules seem to be that successful self-employment is a necessary…
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Exploring, as always, possible end-runs around market omniscience
Maybe “letting go and letting the Invisible Hand” is more or less guaranteed to result in an allocation that lies at rather than within the production possibility frontier (PPF), but maybe no point on the present PPF represents the best of all possible worlds. Ideally, the road to there will involve some non-market activity on…
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Quotebag #86
“Values plus Socialism tends to oppression. Socialism plus Liberty without Values tends towards an aimless mediocrity, Liberty plus Values without Socialism leads to injustice.”—John Madziarczyk “I have long felt that one cannot be sure that a person has offered him- or herself voluntarily for work or a service if that person does not have an…
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Quotebag #85
“If freedom means non-frustration of the exercise of one’s legitimate property rights, you can be made perfectly free by being relieved of all property, including the right to your own body and life.”—John Holbo “The truth is, frankly, that there is only one war left to fight; the war against our own baser nature, the…
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It’s not always the fake free-marketeers
The portions of the apparent free market package that disturb me the most are not the obvious distortions. It’s the frank anti-egalitarian attitudes of certain individuals who clearly do understand that not all pro-business politics is pro-market.
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“Freedom from arbitrary authority is a consumer good”
So says Gary Chartier. I’m inclined to agree that it’s a consumer good, at least in the actually existing economy. If freedom is doomed always to be an economic good, then there will always be constraints on freedom. Either freedom is impossible, or freed markets are an incremental step toward actual freedom, or freed markets…
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Steve Horwitz on libertarianism of the left and left libertarianism
Steve Horwitz has been known to refer to himself as a “libertarian of the left.” He’s critical of those who call themselves “left libertarians” for at least two things: The claim that management/labor and rich/poor inequities will take care of themselves once the markets are “freed” The refusal to defend those aspects of the status…
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Quotebag #84
“If the concept of the Unconditional Basic Income encourages laziness, why would any right minded parent pass on an inheritance to their children?”—bstard4bristolmayor, h/t Jack Saturday “Not asking out Ayn Rand girl. I will not date her in a boat, I will not date her with a goat, I do not like Objectivism and won’t…
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Maybe not Classics Club material, but a stack of 50 boooks to put on my to-read list.