On Talking Past Each Other and World Trade

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen has been hosting a labor roundtable, which has emerged as a combination of spontaneity and directed planning in the way that the blogosphere especially tends to foster.  Participants have included many of my favorite bloggers: E.D. Kain, Jason Kuznicki, Kevin Carson, Mark Thompson, Freddie deBoer, and James Hanley, among others.  At stake is the entire system of American capitalism.  For anyone with a spare afternoon or so, it's worth visiting that London coffee house.

I’ve read through all the articles and comment threads in this labor roundtable thus far, and it seems to me that there are three general issues which have been largely or systematically taken for granted or underserved in the discussion.  I've brought these issues up in comments, but few people seem interested in exploring them, which (being a libertarian) I can't really fault anyone for.  These issues are: (1) libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement; (2) distortions in the ways we usually measure wealth that confuse the debate; and (3) the role of American corporations in globalization.

As for topic (1) - libertarianism’s historical relationship to the labor movement - no one has acknowledged that libertarianism more or less grew out of the union movement in Europe as that faction which proposed a return to the principles of classical liberalism (Adam Smith) in opposition to the coercively entrenched interests of state/capital at the turn of the twentieth century.  Many libertarians shifted focus after the New Deal because the Roosevelt government seemed to represent a greater threat to liberty at that time than corporate regulatory capture; but the base of the movement remains as principally an opposition to the pernicious cartel of that two-headed monster of the wealthy and powerful.

If libertarianism has been effectively subverted to corporate interests in the United States, which is the contention of Noam Chomsky and other anarchist theorists whose intellectual roots lie in the Gilded Age milieu of thoughtful bourgeois discussion, this must be because either: (a) self-described libertarian institutions have been captured by corporate special interests; (b) echoes of the New Deal excesses of central government still seem like a more serious threat to liberty than corporate power; or (c) having strong, collective labor counterbalance strong, unitary capital is no longer considered a necessary evil (due perhaps to the existence of a strong middle class).

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Minipost: the Table of the Worthy

I commented at LoOG:

It seems to me like there is always a Table of the Worthy of sorts that gets to weigh in on national industry policies. Instead of coming up with policies that are beneficial for everybody, we work on ways to throw bones to all the relevent parties. How can we switch to a system with more central control without destroying private enterprise? I know, let’s just nest a layer of corporations between consumers and legislators. How can we improve food safety while keeping costs low? Let’s put it all under the umbrella of FDA control, but we can compensate with more farm subsidies and restrictions on foreign competitors.

What you wind up getting with such a system is a kind of mercantilist, privatized oligarchy that can only really leverage its own clout against other rival mercantilist, privatized oligarchies to succeed. The constitution sets down and elaborates on a specific set of principles designed to avoid this intractable situation, yet we’ve stretched and gerrymandered it to the point where it provides the putative justification for the exact opposite of its intentions.

I'm going to call this kind of special interest unfreedom club the Table of the Worthy from now on.  Look for it in our archives.

That E.D. Kain is So Hot Right Now

I've been reading E.D. Kain for quite some time now (aren't I such a great hipster?), and I've had the opportunity to witness his meteoric rise from twelve posts a day at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen to being profiled by Conor Friedersdorf for the Daily Dish during Andrew Sullivan's hibernation (Cause he's a bear, get it?).  I read Kain's posts on Capitalism, Anarchy & War today (I think that's the first time I've ever typed an ampersand.  Seriously, I had to look for it.) and was absolutely floored: it was as though Howard Beale had been crossed with Mikhail Bakunin, cloned by Norman Borlaug, and then grown by Dame Julie Andrews and John Valjean with Michel de Montaigne as a private tutor a la Aristotle.

Kain:

When our government wages a war overseas against terror or domestically against drugs (or overseas against drugs and domestically against terror) [extremely pithy, emphasis mine] or when they tell you that they’re trying only to stabilize Afghanistan or resolve the conflict in such a way as to make a graceful exit, etc. these are lies.

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Private vs. Privatization

The free market is understood to be the optimal delivery mechanism for most goods and services.  As competition intensifies, the weaker competitors are selected out and the stronger competitors are selected in.  The stronger competitors grow and evolve to meet the demands of a particular consumer base.  Friedrich von Hayek called this behavior of the market a "spontaneous order" and posited spontaneous order as a generalized Theory of Evolution.  Darwinian Evolution can itself be described as a special case of spontaneous order, as can language, memetics, pedestrian traffic, the popularity of music, the price mechanism, Wikipedia, and the order of the universe.  For his work on the price mechanism, Hayek won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics.

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