Posts in "Kevin Carson"

By Elliot Engstrom at 9:53PM

Mar 28, 2010

Kevin Carson: The Founders Were Extremists

And they were right. Carson comments on the fact that questioning the government, a concept that is simply unbelievable to many in our day in age, is the very principle upon which our country was founded. He writes:

...Today I heard Bart Stupak, referring to Michelle Bachmann’s allusion to Jefferson (“it’s a good thing to have a revolution every twenty years or so”), respond that we just had one in the last election. In this country, he said, we have our revolutions through the electoral process. “That’s what Jefferson meant by that quote,” he said. Um, no, it wasn’t. What Jefferson meant was the kind of revolution that Captain Shays was fighting in western Massachusetts at the time he wrote...
...As the anarchist Voltarine DeCleyre noted over a century ago, from the public schools’ accounts of the American Revolution you’d have difficulty understanding why it was even called a revolution, as opposed to just a patriotic foreign war against another country...

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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.

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By Elliot Engstrom at 9:37PM

Mar 14, 2010

Revisiting Capitalism and Markets

I made a post a few days ago questioning whether or not what we consider capitalism is actually the result of the free market. In it I mentioned a political-theorist named Kevin Carson, who has done extensive work in this area. The post has received over 50 comments, so I felt I should do a bit of follow-up. I unfortunately do not have the time to write a complete summary of Carson's work and a response to every comment, but I can point to two pieces of writing by Carson that hopefully can give a bit more insight into what I am referring to.

Firstly, there is this article which simply deals with the use of the word capitalism. While this might seem trivial, it is something we should be careful to understand when talking to people who do not consider themselves libertarian and do not necessarily give capitalism the same definition that we do. Carson writes:

The Freeman editor Sheldon Richman, speaking at George Mason University, raised the question of just what mainstream libertarians mean when they call a country “capitalist.” What qualifies a country as “capitalist”?

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By Elliot Engstrom at 5:39PM

Mar 12, 2010

Capitalism vs. Free Markets

Anyone who has seen any of my YAL posts on capitalism or economics probably knows that I'm a big fan of the left-libertarian/mutualist school of thought. We of this mindset always try to ask the question: Are capitalism and a free market necessarily the same thing?

While I greatly appreciate the Austrian School of Economics, in particular its views on business cycle theory, monetary policy, and government, I break from Austrian theory on the historical development and current nature of capitalism. For example, I take issue with Ludwig von Mises's claims that the industrial revolution was such a wonderful thing for the common people. He writes in Economic Policy:

All the talk about the so-called unspeakable horror of early capitalism can be refuted by a single statistic: precisely in these years in which British capitalism developed, precisely in the age called the Industrial Revolution in England, in the years from 1760 to 1830, precisely in those years the population of England doubled.

Well, China's population has increased at a faster rate over the past 50 years than the United States,' so I suppose that this "single statistic" must mean that China has been a better place to live during this time. I think we all know this is not the case. Hence the falsity of the idea held by many capitalists that "growth" is always an ultimate good.

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By Elliot Engstrom at 3:46PM

Feb 5, 2010

Statism ≠ Socialism

More often than I can even remember, I have heard Barack Obama and his policies referred to as socialist. This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what we are up against in terms of attempting to reform our current government. We do not live in a socialist country -- we live in a statist one. Obama is not pushing for equality across the board, he is pushing for centralization of power in the hands of the state, via large proxi corporations to maintain the guise of "free market capitalism." While this has some similarity with socialist ideals, they are not the same thing (not to mention that referring to Obama as a "socialist" is an ad hominem attack, and would be the equivalent of referring to a libertarian as an "anarchist" without putting forth an argument.)

From Dictionary.com:

Socialism - a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
Statism - the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.

Which one sounds more like our Barack Obama to you?

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By Elliot Engstrom at 3:08PM

Feb 4, 2010

Kevin Carson

Many of you may have heard of Kevin Carson, a mutualist writer and researcher who has recently published several interesting books on political economy -- such books as The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, and Organization Theory. Carson is an advocate of free markets who argues that modern capitalism is in no means a result of free markets, but rather state policies. Whether or not one agrees, it is an interesting idea to consider and also should cause us to reflect on the diversity within the liberty movement.

For example, Carson writes:

The time-honored “free market” recipe, among the ruling classes, goes like this: 1) rob the producing classes of their traditional property rights in the land, and turn them into tenants at-will of the plutocracy; 2) through coercive controls on the population, like the Combination Laws and Law of Settlement, make it impossible for the producing classes to bargain effectively in the wage market; 3) when the process is complete, talk a lot about how great the free market works, and justify the existing concentration of capital ownership as a result of the superior efficiency of those who came out on top.

I'd encourage everyone to take a look at Carson's ideas, as they are an interesting and somewhat different take on the nature of free markets and government intervention.

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