Comments on Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism: Review: The Mind of the Market, by Michael Sherme...

Carlos,Thanks for the comment.I didn't mean to giv...

2008-05-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

Carlos,

Thanks for the comment.

I didn't mean to give the impression that free market libertarians are uniformly vulgar or corporate apologists. I do think the most visible establishment organizations at the heart of the "official" movement tend to be that way (e.g., Cato treating a politician's vote on CAFTA as a litmus test for his "free trade" stance, vouchers as part of a "small government" agenda, a tax policy aimed primarily at shifting taxes off of investment income and off the top brackets, etc.).

Excellent post. But I'd think you underestimate ma...

2008-05-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

Excellent post. But I'd think you underestimate many libertarian. I visit a lot of libertarian sites and many would agree that corporate capitalism is far from a real free market

I for one upon seeing this book in a bookstore, no...

2008-05-11T19:58:00.000-07:00

I for one upon seeing this book in a bookstore, noticed that it was endorsed by the neoconservative professional huckster Dinesh D'Souza and figured it was pretty much just corporate apologetics.

Maybe I'll check it out now. It's always easier to use those sort of "guilt by association" excuses than to get better at "'eating what I want and spitting out the rest'even when it's embedded in an ideological framework I disagree with," which I personally see as one of the big problems of contemporary political discourse.

As usual, smashing work Kevin! It's amazing how my...

2008-05-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

As usual, smashing work Kevin! It's amazing how myopic "vulgar libertarians" are.

The elements you describe as "vulgar" in "right-li...

2008-05-06T16:58:00.000-07:00

The elements you describe as "vulgar" in "right-libertarianism" seem to me the essense of that doctrine.

Its a noble effort to "reform it from within" and I wish you all success in that endeavour but I would simply abandon "right-libertarianism" in favour of geo-libertarianism, left-libertarianism, libertarian socialism and elements of classical liberalism.

In my view "right-libertarianism" is a purely reactionary doctrine - classical liberalism sans single tax. You have to fight it tooth and nail and send it back to where it came from. It's particularly insidious because it induces well-intentioned people who might otherwise be radicals to veer from the left and ally with the right. Try and convince me that's not the whole point of it.

I agree the dogma of the 'free market' and the 'invisible hand' is vastly overstated as well. Yes, the 'invisible hand' is a correct and valuable insight, but in general people should be banned from (ab)using this phrase. The popular understanding is now such that to critique the system you do indeed have to dissociate yourself from the 'free market'.

Thank you for writing this post. I have great resp...

2008-05-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

Thank you for writing this post. I have great respect for Shermer in his struggle against irrational beliefs. Ironic, then, that he would choose to defend crony capitalism in this way.

I have read other reviews of his book, and found they were similar to yours, though less detailed. It would have better served his ideas and his audience if he kept the ideology out - or at the very least subdued - and instead focused more on evolutionary behaviour, which by several accounts is the strength of the book.

"For starters, the main purpose of the World Bank ...

2008-05-06T06:06:00.000-07:00

"For starters, the main purpose of the World Bank and foreign aid over the past sixty years has been to subsidize the export of capital and offshoring of production from the West, by funding the transportation and utility infrastructure necessary for capital investment overseas to be profitable".

It's worse than that. To the extent that "investment" piggybacks on "exporting inflation" (from a depreciating fiat currency), what is achieved isn't actually investment at all but a wealth transfer from the target country to the "investors".

I think you have bought into the homesteading idea too much, by the way. That formula also allows the dispossession - more precisely, marginalisation - of those whose cultures didn't treat land etc. in the same way as the would be homesteaders. This shows up throughout the colonial experience, and even "giving" the locals land rights of the (to us) familiar sort was a cultural imperialism that merely set them up for losing their land through unfamiliarity, as with the US allotment movement for Indian Reservations.

You may be interested in G.K.Chesterton's Sanity, that I recently came across linked at Distributism, which addresses some of the gaps you felt Hilaire Belloc's "The Servile State" had about the role of corporations in "actually existing" capitalism. That may offer a more rounded picture than books like this one you are reviewing.

Great post. It seems that the counterbalance (or a...

2008-05-06T05:27:00.000-07:00

Great post. It seems that the counterbalance (or antidote?) to Shermer's approach is the recent evolutionary economics work of Gintis, Bowles, et al. I think we left-libertarians need to pay much closer attention to this stuff.

MDM