Posts in "Center for a Stateless Society"

By Elliot Engstrom at 1:26PM

Apr 21, 2010

Markets vs. Free Markets

Anna Morgenstern has a recent piece up at the Center for a Stateless Society talking about what distinguishes a market as "free." She writes:

Libertarians throw the phrase “free market” around a lot, but the important word among those two is free. Markets, per se, are really an after-thought. It’s not as if we don’t want freedom in our non-market activities. We want to have freedom, in all ways, including in our “market transactions”. The word market confuses a lot of people because they imagine “markets” to be an institution, a thing that one can point to and say “this is a Market”. But we don’t mean it that way, really. There’s no such thing as a market. It’s just a catch-all term to cover the sum total of all exchanges.
The only alternative to a market is to have rationing by command. One monopoly with control of all goods who hands them out to people according to a scheme that monopoly has planned out in advance. A situation where there is any sort of trade at all, is technically a market.

Read the rest here.

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By Elliot Engstrom at 7:19PM

Mar 17, 2010

The Delusion of Modern Liberals

There’s an old saying about the definition of a liberal, as opposed to a radical: a liberal is someone who thinks the system is broken and needs to be fixed, whereas a radical understands it’s working the way it’s supposed to ... A liberal who doesn’t think the system is working, doesn’t understand what it’s supposed to do.

So writes Kevin Carson in his recent piece at the Center for a Stateless Society on why people who play by the rules in American society rarely end up reaping the full benefits of their actions.

While I know that not everyone at YAL agrees with many of the tenants of C4SS, I find great value in this organization as a bridge for the liberty movement to the standard "left" side of the political spectrum. We need to be drawing people to libertarianism from all sides of the political spectrum, and one great way to draw in sincere leftists is to show them that the welfare/warfare state in which they have put their faith is in fact the originator of most of the societal ills that they wish to correct.

The Problem with Constitutionalism

A Feb. 3 article from the Center for a Stateless Society calls into question the utility of Constitutionalism as a political philosophy. I would have to say that I am completely of accord with the author, Thomas L. Knapp, on this point. When two parties enter into a written contract (like a Constitution), and one party is backed by massive coercive force and one is not, no one should be surprised when the stronger party does not uphold its end of the bargain.

Knapp writes:

The conservative niche marketing device commonly known as “constitutionalism” — a device which massages the libertarian impulse in a way that makes it an ideal fetish for “smaller government” types to wave at anarchists — boils down to the notion that government could be made to “work” if only we herded it back into the corral of constitutional limitations.
While that’s a very debatable notion, it’s one we don’t really have to reach, because the question it raises is answered in the negative at the word “if.” Government can’t be herded back into the Constitutionally OK Corral. It trampled down that corral’s fences long ago; the corral no longer exists. Any time you see some random piece of government standing in the area that the fences used to surround, what you’re seeing is a mere temporary coincidence of the running battle between that piece of government and some other. Government is an animal run wild. That it happens to occasionally run across the area its old pen used to cover is to be expected.

I have to agree with Knapp. As Ludwig von Mises wisely noted, government is not an institution bound by paper -- it is an institution rooted in physical force.