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Yes, Libertarians Really Are Lazy Marxists
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Cornelius Crane
Dec 2, 2018, 12:05:00 PM12/2/18
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Yes, Libertarians Really Are Lazy Marxists
I have only really just started studying Marxism in depth
(though I am stopping short of Capital for now). Subsequently,
while reading Bertell Ollman‘s Alienation: Marx’s Conception of
Man in a Capitalist Society, it once again struck me that
(right-)libertarianism is really just lazy Marxism. In many
ways libertarianism reads like the first third of Marxism: the
area which explores methodological questions and the nature of
man. Both libertarianism and Marxism are generally fairly
agreeable – and in agreement – in this area, but the former
never really fleshes out its arguments satisfactorily. Often I
find libertarians, after describing some basic principles (non
coercion etc.), make the jump to property rights and capitalism
being the bestest thing ever, without fully explaining it.*
I will focus primarily on Robert Nozick and Ludwig von Mises
here, as they are the only two libertarians who really explored
libertarianism from basic principles of man and his
relationship to both nature and economic activity (Murray
Rothbard was really an interpretation of Mises in this
respect). Overall, I think Nozick and Mises combine to form a
fair reflection of minarchist libertarianism.
The state of nature and the nature of man
In Anarchy, State & Utopia, Robert Nozick’s ‘State of Nature’
is one where there is no state (government). He asserts that
individuals have rights to protect themselves from aggression,
they have rights to the fruits of their labour, and they have
the right to cooperate voluntarily, free from deception and
theft.
It has always struck me how incomplete Nozick’s exposition of
the state of nature is. That man should be a priori free from
aggression and entitled to whatever he produces is not really
in dispute. What bothers me is that Nozick never really
attempts to explore the relationships between different men,
between men and society, and between men and nature. For
Nozick, an abstract expression of individual rights could be
extrapolated up to the whole without much discussion of how
things link together. This is especially odd because he
demonstrated he was capable of understanding and the limits of
such individualism in his incisive critique of methodological
individualism. So much the worse for his philosophy that he
didn’t apply this thinking to it.
Enter Marx. Marx emphasised that, naturally, man had ‘powers,’
which are the means by which he achieves specific needs. Eating
is a power; hunger is the relevant need. Thinking is a power;
knowledge is the relevant need. (The former is a ‘natural
power,’ common to all animals; the latter is a ‘species
power,’ specific to man). By exercising different powers, the
individual emphasises different aspects of themselves, and
depending on who they are with, which society they are born
into, and their available resources, different aspects of the
individual will appear to be important, and different
conceptions of freedom, happiness, and even the individual
himself will emerge.
This may seem like a digression, but in fact it is essential.
Once you have established that the abstract individual, when
interacting with society, with others, is a very different
beast to a lone man in the woods, it leads you down a different
ethical path. What becomes important are the interactions the
individual engages in, rather than merely the individual
himself. It is not enough merely to say an individual should be
granted certain rights and that’s that; we have to explore how
these rights affect the individual, even by virtue of being
defined.
To define every man as an island who cooperates with society
and others only through discrete voluntary actions is to
diminish the importance of how society and others shape these
actions. More than this, it ignores how the rights themselves
interact to produce outcomes that may be inconsistent with the
principles upon which those same rights, in abstract, were
built. Libertarians will likely think I am about to suggest we
strip individuals of their rights, but this is not the point.
The point is that the rights are not a neutral baseline, and
the emergent relations governing these rights could be opposed
to individual freedom.
For example, private property is surely the foundation of
libertarianism (private property is to be distinguished from
possession, btw). But Marx did not think private property, the
division of labour, wage labour and capitalist exchanges could
ever take place independently; one necessarily implied the
other. Any degree of material wealth that qualifies as
‘property’ implies accumulation, which implies producing more
than one labourer can manage, which implies employing others,
which implies splitting up their tasks into specific,
repetitive actions, which implies that what they produce is not
necessarily what they need to survive, which implies they must
purchase this elsewhere, and so forth. Adam Smith observed this
interrelation when he noted that, “as it is the power of
exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so
the extent of this division must always be limited by
the…extent of the market.” I will explore why this may be
undesirable from the point of view of individual freedom below,
but for now it is sufficient to show that such an emergent
property amounts to more than the individual rights from which
it originates.
Purposeful action is productive action (which is why capitalism
sucks)
Mises claimed man acts to attain certain ends, and only by
achieving these ends can he be said to engage in purposive
action. If there were no ends to be sought, man would not act;
that he acts tells us he has unfulfilled needs. Voluntary
exchange gives man the choice and ability to engage in
purposeful action with an ever-expanding range of ends at his
disposal. The entrepreneur’s role in this is vital, as he
channels the purposive actions of many people in the market
place, allowing them to attain the ends they seek. This creates
an evolutionary process through which man continually realises
his chosen ends.
Marx too believed that only man is capable of purposive
activity, and this is what separates man from other animals.
However, for Marx, the most purposive activity was labour, not
consumption. Man engages in productive activity for two main
purposes: (1) the end product of his labour and (2) the ability
to exercise certain powers of his choosing when labouring, for
whichever reason he deems appropriate (efficiency, enjoyment of
the task itself, development of skills, etc.). Marx saw
capitalism as alienating because in a capitalist system, the
individual becomes separated from both the product and the
method of production, as well as the time and location in which
it takes place.
This separation can be illustrated by an exchange between the
worker and the capitalist. The capitalist pays the worker wages
so the worker will produce what the capitalist requires him to
produce. In this exchange, the worker becomes separated from
the product of his labour, producing not what he wants, but
what the capitalist requires him to produce. The worker is also
required to produce not how he chooses, but at a time, location
and in a manner chosen by the capitalist. The worker then uses
the wages he earns to purchase other products produced under
similar circumstances. The end result under capitalism is that
individuals become primarily tied together by what the
capitalist guided division of labour demands, rather than by
their own autonomous, purposive action. The result is the
worker’s alienation from his own labour and also from the
products he purchases (this applies to the capitalists too, in
a different form; after all, they are on the flip side of the
relationship).
So we have two competing narratives here. In one narrative, the
individual is merely at the whims of capitalism, while in the
other narrative, the individual exercises control over
capitalism. Which is more accurate? Ultimately, the question
boils down to whether production or consumption is the more
purposive activity.
In consumption, the means is exchange, which requires little in
the way of personal development or planning, and is brief. What
matters most in consumption is the end result: a good or
service. Many goods purchased are interchangeable and the act
of consumption is relatively brief.** Services are by
definition done by somebody else, and generally speaking, the
buyer is only interested in the end result (the outcome of a
lawsuit; their health; a new conservatory). I’m not suggesting
that purchasing goods and services is not useful and does not
yield any positive results; I am merely pointing out that as
far as man’s self-actualisation goes, as far as purposive
action is defined, consumption does not require or achieve much
in the way of planning, personal development or uniqueness.
In contrast, during production the individual has both means
(productive activity) and an end (the product) in mind when he
sets out to act. The productive activity itself cannot be
separated from the individual and so the two are inextricably
intertwined. Furthermore, productive activity requires and/or
results in building up some personal attribute, whether a
individual’s capacity to reason, his physical strength and
fitness, his perseverance or anything else. Generally these
attributes will last beyond the original act of production. The
end result is both that the individual achieves some goal he
chose, planned and set out to achieve, whatever its exact
nature, and that through the process he exercises his
individualism by realising certain powers (again chosen by
him).
The question for Miseans is how exactly the individual can
“discover causal relations” between his purposive productive
activity and what he produces if he is not producing what he
wants, but doing it under the command of someone else. Mises
glosses over the role of the worker in his exposition of
purposive action; in fact, he explicitly rejects the notion
that labour can be considered ‘action,’ because he considers
only ends, rather than means, important for man’s individual
development. But are any of man’s actions as rational, as
explicitly thought through, as deliberate and purposeful, as
labour? For Marx, the tragedy was when labour became a means to
an end; Mises merely assumed this was the case.
Conclusion
The heart of libertarianism is the abstract individual, who
engages in voluntary actions to attain certain ends, and should
be allowed to do this, free from outside interference. But such
an abstract philosophy is incomplete and incoherent. In the
mainstream, Marx is often projected as disregarding the
individual, but in fact, Marx was always highly concerned with
the individual. The difference is that Marx’s concern with the
individual caused him to zoom out to see the context in which
the individual operates, and which aspects of an individual’s
character are shaped by the context in which the individual
labours. Under capitalism, the most important aspect of
purposeful individual action – production – is subsumed, under
the command of somebody else, and spurred only by the fact that
the work is necessary for the worker’s survival.*** Hence,
within his most purposive sphere, the individual is not free to
act to realise his own ends through means chosen by him;
rather, both the ends and the means are determined by forces
outside his control. To me, this doesn’t seem very libertarian.
*To be sure, libertarians do have plenty of fleshed out
arguments for capitalism’s efficacy as a system; what I am
arguing is that it does not follow from their discussion of man
and his nature.
**This has the exception of durables, but how often is the joy
of these based on one’s own work on them? Cars, houses and
gardens are all the pride and joy of people precisely because
they themselves engage in productive activity on them.
***We must remember the context (!) in which Marx was writing.
What he says was literally true at the time; in modern liberal
democracies the reality is less stark, but the underlying
mechanics of working life, and why people work, remain the
same.
PS I have used ‘man’ in this post because that is generally
what was used by the thinkers I am discussing. I originally
tried it with gender-neutral pronouns but it just became
confused and more difficult to relate to the original texts.
https://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/yes-
libertarians-really-are-lazy-marxists/
I have only really just started studying Marxism in depth
(though I am stopping short of Capital for now). Subsequently,
while reading Bertell Ollman‘s Alienation: Marx’s Conception of
Man in a Capitalist Society, it once again struck me that
(right-)libertarianism is really just lazy Marxism. In many
ways libertarianism reads like the first third of Marxism: the
area which explores methodological questions and the nature of
man. Both libertarianism and Marxism are generally fairly
agreeable – and in agreement – in this area, but the former
never really fleshes out its arguments satisfactorily. Often I
find libertarians, after describing some basic principles (non
coercion etc.), make the jump to property rights and capitalism
being the bestest thing ever, without fully explaining it.*
I will focus primarily on Robert Nozick and Ludwig von Mises
here, as they are the only two libertarians who really explored
libertarianism from basic principles of man and his
relationship to both nature and economic activity (Murray
Rothbard was really an interpretation of Mises in this
respect). Overall, I think Nozick and Mises combine to form a
fair reflection of minarchist libertarianism.
The state of nature and the nature of man
In Anarchy, State & Utopia, Robert Nozick’s ‘State of Nature’
is one where there is no state (government). He asserts that
individuals have rights to protect themselves from aggression,
they have rights to the fruits of their labour, and they have
the right to cooperate voluntarily, free from deception and
theft.
It has always struck me how incomplete Nozick’s exposition of
the state of nature is. That man should be a priori free from
aggression and entitled to whatever he produces is not really
in dispute. What bothers me is that Nozick never really
attempts to explore the relationships between different men,
between men and society, and between men and nature. For
Nozick, an abstract expression of individual rights could be
extrapolated up to the whole without much discussion of how
things link together. This is especially odd because he
demonstrated he was capable of understanding and the limits of
such individualism in his incisive critique of methodological
individualism. So much the worse for his philosophy that he
didn’t apply this thinking to it.
Enter Marx. Marx emphasised that, naturally, man had ‘powers,’
which are the means by which he achieves specific needs. Eating
is a power; hunger is the relevant need. Thinking is a power;
knowledge is the relevant need. (The former is a ‘natural
power,’ common to all animals; the latter is a ‘species
power,’ specific to man). By exercising different powers, the
individual emphasises different aspects of themselves, and
depending on who they are with, which society they are born
into, and their available resources, different aspects of the
individual will appear to be important, and different
conceptions of freedom, happiness, and even the individual
himself will emerge.
This may seem like a digression, but in fact it is essential.
Once you have established that the abstract individual, when
interacting with society, with others, is a very different
beast to a lone man in the woods, it leads you down a different
ethical path. What becomes important are the interactions the
individual engages in, rather than merely the individual
himself. It is not enough merely to say an individual should be
granted certain rights and that’s that; we have to explore how
these rights affect the individual, even by virtue of being
defined.
To define every man as an island who cooperates with society
and others only through discrete voluntary actions is to
diminish the importance of how society and others shape these
actions. More than this, it ignores how the rights themselves
interact to produce outcomes that may be inconsistent with the
principles upon which those same rights, in abstract, were
built. Libertarians will likely think I am about to suggest we
strip individuals of their rights, but this is not the point.
The point is that the rights are not a neutral baseline, and
the emergent relations governing these rights could be opposed
to individual freedom.
For example, private property is surely the foundation of
libertarianism (private property is to be distinguished from
possession, btw). But Marx did not think private property, the
division of labour, wage labour and capitalist exchanges could
ever take place independently; one necessarily implied the
other. Any degree of material wealth that qualifies as
‘property’ implies accumulation, which implies producing more
than one labourer can manage, which implies employing others,
which implies splitting up their tasks into specific,
repetitive actions, which implies that what they produce is not
necessarily what they need to survive, which implies they must
purchase this elsewhere, and so forth. Adam Smith observed this
interrelation when he noted that, “as it is the power of
exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so
the extent of this division must always be limited by
the…extent of the market.” I will explore why this may be
undesirable from the point of view of individual freedom below,
but for now it is sufficient to show that such an emergent
property amounts to more than the individual rights from which
it originates.
Purposeful action is productive action (which is why capitalism
sucks)
Mises claimed man acts to attain certain ends, and only by
achieving these ends can he be said to engage in purposive
action. If there were no ends to be sought, man would not act;
that he acts tells us he has unfulfilled needs. Voluntary
exchange gives man the choice and ability to engage in
purposeful action with an ever-expanding range of ends at his
disposal. The entrepreneur’s role in this is vital, as he
channels the purposive actions of many people in the market
place, allowing them to attain the ends they seek. This creates
an evolutionary process through which man continually realises
his chosen ends.
Marx too believed that only man is capable of purposive
activity, and this is what separates man from other animals.
However, for Marx, the most purposive activity was labour, not
consumption. Man engages in productive activity for two main
purposes: (1) the end product of his labour and (2) the ability
to exercise certain powers of his choosing when labouring, for
whichever reason he deems appropriate (efficiency, enjoyment of
the task itself, development of skills, etc.). Marx saw
capitalism as alienating because in a capitalist system, the
individual becomes separated from both the product and the
method of production, as well as the time and location in which
it takes place.
This separation can be illustrated by an exchange between the
worker and the capitalist. The capitalist pays the worker wages
so the worker will produce what the capitalist requires him to
produce. In this exchange, the worker becomes separated from
the product of his labour, producing not what he wants, but
what the capitalist requires him to produce. The worker is also
required to produce not how he chooses, but at a time, location
and in a manner chosen by the capitalist. The worker then uses
the wages he earns to purchase other products produced under
similar circumstances. The end result under capitalism is that
individuals become primarily tied together by what the
capitalist guided division of labour demands, rather than by
their own autonomous, purposive action. The result is the
worker’s alienation from his own labour and also from the
products he purchases (this applies to the capitalists too, in
a different form; after all, they are on the flip side of the
relationship).
So we have two competing narratives here. In one narrative, the
individual is merely at the whims of capitalism, while in the
other narrative, the individual exercises control over
capitalism. Which is more accurate? Ultimately, the question
boils down to whether production or consumption is the more
purposive activity.
In consumption, the means is exchange, which requires little in
the way of personal development or planning, and is brief. What
matters most in consumption is the end result: a good or
service. Many goods purchased are interchangeable and the act
of consumption is relatively brief.** Services are by
definition done by somebody else, and generally speaking, the
buyer is only interested in the end result (the outcome of a
lawsuit; their health; a new conservatory). I’m not suggesting
that purchasing goods and services is not useful and does not
yield any positive results; I am merely pointing out that as
far as man’s self-actualisation goes, as far as purposive
action is defined, consumption does not require or achieve much
in the way of planning, personal development or uniqueness.
In contrast, during production the individual has both means
(productive activity) and an end (the product) in mind when he
sets out to act. The productive activity itself cannot be
separated from the individual and so the two are inextricably
intertwined. Furthermore, productive activity requires and/or
results in building up some personal attribute, whether a
individual’s capacity to reason, his physical strength and
fitness, his perseverance or anything else. Generally these
attributes will last beyond the original act of production. The
end result is both that the individual achieves some goal he
chose, planned and set out to achieve, whatever its exact
nature, and that through the process he exercises his
individualism by realising certain powers (again chosen by
him).
The question for Miseans is how exactly the individual can
“discover causal relations” between his purposive productive
activity and what he produces if he is not producing what he
wants, but doing it under the command of someone else. Mises
glosses over the role of the worker in his exposition of
purposive action; in fact, he explicitly rejects the notion
that labour can be considered ‘action,’ because he considers
only ends, rather than means, important for man’s individual
development. But are any of man’s actions as rational, as
explicitly thought through, as deliberate and purposeful, as
labour? For Marx, the tragedy was when labour became a means to
an end; Mises merely assumed this was the case.
Conclusion
The heart of libertarianism is the abstract individual, who
engages in voluntary actions to attain certain ends, and should
be allowed to do this, free from outside interference. But such
an abstract philosophy is incomplete and incoherent. In the
mainstream, Marx is often projected as disregarding the
individual, but in fact, Marx was always highly concerned with
the individual. The difference is that Marx’s concern with the
individual caused him to zoom out to see the context in which
the individual operates, and which aspects of an individual’s
character are shaped by the context in which the individual
labours. Under capitalism, the most important aspect of
purposeful individual action – production – is subsumed, under
the command of somebody else, and spurred only by the fact that
the work is necessary for the worker’s survival.*** Hence,
within his most purposive sphere, the individual is not free to
act to realise his own ends through means chosen by him;
rather, both the ends and the means are determined by forces
outside his control. To me, this doesn’t seem very libertarian.
*To be sure, libertarians do have plenty of fleshed out
arguments for capitalism’s efficacy as a system; what I am
arguing is that it does not follow from their discussion of man
and his nature.
**This has the exception of durables, but how often is the joy
of these based on one’s own work on them? Cars, houses and
gardens are all the pride and joy of people precisely because
they themselves engage in productive activity on them.
***We must remember the context (!) in which Marx was writing.
What he says was literally true at the time; in modern liberal
democracies the reality is less stark, but the underlying
mechanics of working life, and why people work, remain the
same.
PS I have used ‘man’ in this post because that is generally
what was used by the thinkers I am discussing. I originally
tried it with gender-neutral pronouns but it just became
confused and more difficult to relate to the original texts.
https://unlearningeconomics.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/yes-
libertarians-really-are-lazy-marxists/
me
Dec 2, 2018, 4:40:41 PM12/2/18
to
> Yes, Libertarians Really Are Lazy Marxists
>
... Often I
>
> find libertarians, after describing some basic principles (non
> coercion etc.), make the jump to property rights and capitalism
> being the bestest thing ever, without fully explaining it.*
>
I don't agree that libertarians jump to property rights and capitalism as being he best thing ever. Libertarians jump to individual liberty over forced control. Libertarians prefer to maximize individual choice, not imposed choices of others. They see government as a tool of exploitation. Libertarians believe the Social Contract to be voluntary. Human nature resists tyranny.
> coercion etc.), make the jump to property rights and capitalism
> being the bestest thing ever, without fully explaining it.*
>
...
>
> The state of nature and the nature of man
>
> In Anarchy, State & Utopia, Robert Nozick’s ‘State of Nature’
> is one where there is no state (government). He asserts that
> individuals have rights to protect themselves from aggression,
> they have rights to the fruits of their labour, and they have
> the right to cooperate voluntarily, free from deception and
> theft.
>
> It has always struck me how incomplete Nozick’s exposition of
> the state of nature is. That man should be a priori free from
> aggression and entitled to whatever he produces is not really
> in dispute. What bothers me is that Nozick never really
> attempts to explore the relationships between different men,
> between men and society, and between men and nature. For
> Nozick, an abstract expression of individual rights could be
> extrapolated up to the whole without much discussion of how
> things link together. This is especially odd because he
> demonstrated he was capable of understanding and the limits of
> such individualism in his incisive critique of methodological
> individualism. So much the worse for his philosophy that he
> didn’t apply this thinking to it.
>
Outside philosophy real people understand and accept limits. Libertarians are also people. They even accept limits voluntarily on a regular basis in life precisely because they have to adjust to other people and their values.
> The state of nature and the nature of man
>
> In Anarchy, State & Utopia, Robert Nozick’s ‘State of Nature’
> is one where there is no state (government). He asserts that
> individuals have rights to protect themselves from aggression,
> they have rights to the fruits of their labour, and they have
> the right to cooperate voluntarily, free from deception and
> theft.
>
> It has always struck me how incomplete Nozick’s exposition of
> the state of nature is. That man should be a priori free from
> aggression and entitled to whatever he produces is not really
> in dispute. What bothers me is that Nozick never really
> attempts to explore the relationships between different men,
> between men and society, and between men and nature. For
> Nozick, an abstract expression of individual rights could be
> extrapolated up to the whole without much discussion of how
> things link together. This is especially odd because he
> demonstrated he was capable of understanding and the limits of
> such individualism in his incisive critique of methodological
> individualism. So much the worse for his philosophy that he
> didn’t apply this thinking to it.
>
> Enter Marx. Marx emphasised that, naturally, man had ‘powers,’
> which are the means by which he achieves specific needs. Eating
> is a power; hunger is the relevant need. Thinking is a power;
> knowledge is the relevant need. (The former is a ‘natural
> power,’ common to all animals; the latter is a ‘species
> power,’ specific to man). By exercising different powers, the
> individual emphasises different aspects of themselves, and
> depending on who they are with, which society they are born
> into, and their available resources, different aspects of the
> individual will appear to be important, and different
> conceptions of freedom, happiness, and even the individual
> himself will emerge.
>
> This may seem like a digression, but in fact it is essential.
> Once you have established that the abstract individual, when
> interacting with society, with others, is a very different
> beast to a lone man in the woods, it leads you down a different
> ethical path. What becomes important are the interactions the
> individual engages in, rather than merely the individual
> himself. It is not enough merely to say an individual should be
> granted certain rights and that’s that; we have to explore how
> these rights affect the individual, even by virtue of being
> defined.
>
I'm a libertarian. I voluntarily refrain from shitting on your living room rug because I respect your feelings. I don't need a law to understand civility and social decorum.
> To define every man as an island who cooperates with society
> and others only through discrete voluntary actions is to
> diminish the importance of how society and others shape these
> actions. More than this, it ignores how the rights themselves
> interact to produce outcomes that may be inconsistent with the
> principles upon which those same rights, in abstract, were
> built. Libertarians will likely think I am about to suggest we
> strip individuals of their rights, but this is not the point.
> The point is that the rights are not a neutral baseline, and
> the emergent relations governing these rights could be opposed
> to individual freedom.
>
> For example, private property is surely the foundation of
> libertarianism (private property is to be distinguished from
> possession, btw).
http://www.endit.info/Myth.shtml
But Marx did not think private property, the
> division of labour, wage labour and capitalist exchanges could
> ever take place independently; one necessarily implied the
> other. Any degree of material wealth that qualifies as
> ‘property’ implies accumulation, which implies producing more
> than one labourer can manage, which implies employing others,
> which implies splitting up their tasks into specific,
> repetitive actions, which implies that what they produce is not
> necessarily what they need to survive, which implies they must
> purchase this elsewhere, and so forth. Adam Smith observed this
> interrelation when he noted that, “as it is the power of
> exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so
> the extent of this division must always be limited by
> the…extent of the market.” I will explore why this may be
> undesirable from the point of view of individual freedom below,
> but for now it is sufficient to show that such an emergent
> property amounts to more than the individual rights from which
> it originates.
>
- show quoted text -
Evidently you forget the USSR clearly demonstrated how alienated workers get from both production and consumption. Looks like communist labor chose powers to not exercise laboring. Marx would have seen socialism as alienating labor from production and the method of production.
...
> So we have two competing narratives here. In one narrative, the
> individual is merely at the whims of capitalism, while in the
> other narrative, the individual exercises control over
> capitalism. Which is more accurate? Ultimately, the question
> boils down to whether production or consumption is the more
> purposive activity.
>
Ultimately, the question boils down to which system implodes and which produces. I would have to say the answer is clear to most reasonable people.
> individual is merely at the whims of capitalism, while in the
> other narrative, the individual exercises control over
> capitalism. Which is more accurate? Ultimately, the question
> boils down to whether production or consumption is the more
> purposive activity.
>
....
> Conclusion
>
> The heart of libertarianism is the abstract individual, who
> engages in voluntary actions to attain certain ends, and should
> be allowed to do this, free from outside interference. But such
> an abstract philosophy is incomplete and incoherent. In the
> mainstream, Marx is often projected as disregarding the
> individual, but in fact, Marx was always highly concerned with
> the individual.
The difference is that Marx’s concern with the
> individual caused him to zoom out to see the context in which
> the individual operates, and which aspects of an individual’s
> character are shaped by the context in which the individual
> labours. Under capitalism, the most important aspect of
> purposeful individual action – production – is subsumed, under
> the command of somebody else, and spurred only by the fact that
> the work is necessary for the worker’s survival.*** Hence,
> within his most purposive sphere, the individual is not free to
> act to realise his own ends through means chosen by him;
> rather, both the ends and the means are determined by forces
> outside his control. To me, this doesn’t seem very libertarian.
>
islander
Dec 2, 2018, 6:27:14 PM12/2/18
to
On 12/2/2018 1:40 PM, me wrote:
> I don't agree that libertarians jump to property rights and capitalism as being he best thing ever. Libertarians jump to individual liberty over forced control. Libertarians prefer to maximize individual choice, not imposed choices of others. They see government as a tool of exploitation. Libertarians believe the Social Contract to be voluntary. Human nature resists tyranny.
Libertarian beliefs in individual freedom are a sham. The CATO
> I don't agree that libertarians jump to property rights and capitalism as being he best thing ever. Libertarians jump to individual liberty over forced control. Libertarians prefer to maximize individual choice, not imposed choices of others. They see government as a tool of exploitation. Libertarians believe the Social Contract to be voluntary. Human nature resists tyranny.
Institute publishes a study of overall freedom which defines a profile
representing Libertarian principles, scoring governments on how well
they conform to these principles. <Ruger & Sorens, Freedom in the 50
States, An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom, Fourth Edition, 2016,
The CATO Institute>
Here is their scoring, revealing a strong bias for fiscal and regulatory
policy with only a third left over for for personal freedom:
Fiscal Policy Weights 29.7%
• State Taxation 13.4%
• Local Taxation 7.9%
• Government Employment 4.0%
• Government Subsidies 2.3%
• Government Debt 2.1%
Regulatory Policy Weights 38.7%
• Land Use 10.5%
• Health Insurance 7.4% (Pre PPACA)
• Labor Market 5.7%
• Occupations 4.5%
• Lawsuits 3.7%
• Miscellaneous 2.9%
• Health Insurance 2.8% (Post PPACA)
• Cable & Telecom 1.1%
Personal Freedom Weights 29.4%
• Incarcerations & Arrests 6.6%
• Marriage Freedom 4.0%
• Educational Freedom 3.2%
• Gun Rights 3.2%
• Alcohol Freedom 2.9%
• Cannabis Freedom 2.1%
• Gambling Freedom 1.9%
• Asset Forfeiture 1.8%
• Tobacco Freedom 1.7%
• Travel Freedom 1.4%
• Mala Prohibita 0.5%
• Campaign Finance Freedom 0.1%
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