Comments on: Liberty red in tooth and claw

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 10:19:01 +0000

This site is put together well!

By: Katie

Katie — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 20:25:18 +0000

Jarndyce, I assume you've read this?

By: Chris Williams

Chris Williams — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 18:37:37 +0000

Left Hayekians? Sound like True Smithians to me. Maybe we should start a non-stop picket outside the Adam Smith Institute, or at least give them all copies of Ormerod’ _The Death of Economics_.

On the matter in question, y’all could do worse than shell out Ã‚Â£1.50 for this pamphlet – if only to appreciate the tranparent pseudonym:
http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/bulletin/publications.htm#patchrider

By: Blimpish

Blimpish — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 14:42:31 +0000

Gawd knows what happened with the link on that one – it was supposed to be at the end of the second paragraph, “whether Marx himself… gave a stuff about the justice of capitalism.”

By: Blimpish

Blimpish — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 13:18:57 +0000

Don’t knock it, Nosemonkey. The greater the thinker, the less they should be monopolised by partisan interpretations. Tocqueville’s the best example of that.

Not that I am a Marxist, but historical materialism is a way of seeing the world which has no necessary policy implications. Remember once there were Right Hegelians and Left Hegelians, and Marxism grew out of the latter – but there’s no reason why not to have Right and Left Marxists. After all, there’s still a big, big question about whether Marx himself .

A mode recent thinker, but one committed to historical materialism of a particular sort (Alexandre Kojeve) was ambivalent – for him, the matter of which side won the Cold War was a relatively uninteresting fact to be settled by progress, so long as someone won it and we could continue to be carried forward to the End of History.

So, two cheers for Free-market Marxism!

By: Nosemonkey

Nosemonkey — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 12:00:53 +0000

Personally I just long for the days when I thought a “free market” was a Marxist utopia where nothing cost a penny. After all, if we’re going for left-wing interpretation of Hayek it’s only fair that we have a right-wing interpretation of Marx – and the final stage of communism is basically some kind of free market libertarian ideal where supply and demand are so perfectly balanced that everyone’s happy. Or something. Ho-hum… I always preferred Plato myself. As long as I get to be the enlightened despot.

By: Oscar Wildebeest

Oscar Wildebeest — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 11:25:59 +0000

Or, as someone put it, in a world ostensibly full of choice, some people have no choice but to make certain choices.

By: N.I.B.

N.I.B. — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 09:53:30 +0000

This fella knows his onions. It's important to remember we don't have many of the choices (in how to earn and what to buy, for example) that a *really, truly* free market would bring.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 09:33:56 +0000

But why is it that you rarely ever encounter libertarians in civil life, but in the blogosphere the buggers are everywhere?

Personally, my objection to libertarianism is summed up by something one of the Crooked Timber team said: the problem with libertarianism is that the societies closest to it are Somalia and the DR Congo.

By: Blimpish

Blimpish — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 09:07:27 +0000

Hayek gets an unjustified rep. He certainly wasn’t a market fundamentalist and went out of his way to damn nineteenth century laissez-faire (see the essays in Individualism and Economic Order), and saw a positive role for government (see Constitution of Liberty). If you go all the way to the Fatal Conceit, his last work, he became very conservative in many ways that would be uncomfortable to libertarians.

Leaving aside politics, his approach to social and economic phenomenon (start here with articles like the Use of Knowledge in Society or Economics and Knowledge, but there’s lots to go on to from there) can benefit anybody. He was a great systematiser and his work, while very dry, does force you to think through The Way The World Works, and to do so without recourse to convenient simplifying assumptions about hidden forces, but to the chaos of human interaction.

Re efficiency vs equity – quite so. But then libertarianism seems to me just another form of Gnostic heresy, much like socialism was. It’s just that for socialists, heaven-on-earth would be equal in material outcome, while for libertarians it would distribute material outcomes according to (very unequally shared) merit. Far more difficult to contend with being between extremes – recognising that scarcity necessarily requires inequality, but recognising too that necessity shouldn’t be sanctified so that it can’t be traded at all against other goods.