Jeffrey Albert Tucker is an American libertarian writer, publisher, entrepreneur and advocate of anarcho-capitalism and Bitcoin. For many years he worked for Ron Paul, the Mises Institute, and Lew Rockwell.
Yep. The worse circumstance is when a lunatic champions a legitimate cause be it technological authoritarianism, the absurd concentration of corporate power, or income inequality.
It's worth remembering that "libertarian writers" advanced deregulation and climate change denial tropes for decades, and "libertarianism" is itself a billionaire-manufactured and -evangelized sock puppet ideological religion concocted with the help and credibility of Laissez-faire, pro-corporate economists and riding the coattails of a philosophically-bankrupt fiction writer who makes the irrational leap that reality (to a human observer) can ever be a known, unbiased, and concrete certainty.
An hominem. Just because he appears to be a loon on paper doesn't mean his point is invalid. I found myself nodding a few times in his essay, it's been predicted by many science fiction authors that we'd eventually end up in a corporate state of some kind. All that remains is private drone armies to complete the final step to dystopia. There are very obvious things that need to be done, I'm sure if the author had made recommendations he would have immediately lost me. My own recommendations would be to remove money from elections, reduce lobbying, trust busting. These pragmatic solutions will take a political groundswell to actual make happen, but it appears the public are unaware of the root cause of their pain.
Government typically secures the financing for education; government regulations (eg, mandated insurance) and policies (eg, mandated ER) are a substantial fraction of healthcare. More so if you include the VA and MediCare.
Neither is something that resembles a free market.
Car companies in 1910 would have been real bastions of free enterprise. By 1950 they had massive lobbyists and all the rest.
All large industries wind up working with government. The tech companies didn't have them initially because they were not that big. But now that they are huge of course they work with the US government.
The US government and big business have interests that sometimes converge but to say it's all corporatist is overstating it.
The US government still engages in anti-trust. Companies would sit there and be really annoyed by various actions taken by the US government.
This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. [...]
I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
Epoch Times guy is really onto something here. It's crazy that there's no existing body of literature that explores how the ways in which a society's productive forces and relations (its "base", if you will) interacts with its other institutions like government, media, etc. (its "superstructure", if you will). But here we are. He's the lone Cassandra, his desperate cries falling upon deaf ears.
I’m not sure if you’re joking so forgive me if the sarcasm missed me, but there is a gargantuan body of work on this subject. It’s central to theories Marx developed and was expanded on by both his contemporaries and more modern scholars in fields like political economics, sociology and cultural studies.
Some reading around this:
Louis Althusser: "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970)
Antonio Gramsci: "Prison Notebooks" (1929-1935)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "The German Ideology" (1845) and "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859)
Honestly it’s astonishing that so few (especially in the US) have an understanding of these points of view and are left reading sources like the Epoch Times to form a view of capitalism that isn’t “I love it, even though I don’t what it is”.
I was indeed being sarcastic. I found it pretty galling that this guy claimed no one is speaking to these things when, as you pointed out, there is a massive body of theory dating back over 150 years that addresses these things with diligence and scholarly rigor.
You did much better than me by actually providing some references!
The people you're talking about were speaking to their time. It's not automatically clear that proposals for an industrializing economy are applicable to a post-industrial highly financialized economy
presumably, post US Civil War. the "Gilded Age" and all that.
Also the age of actual snake-oil salesmen and literally blowing smoke up your ass. excesses of which are best exemplified by The Jungle, the Pullman Railcar Strike, or the fact that union leader Eugene Debs got ~3% of the US national vote -- the highest ever for a socialist candidate, even now -- while in federal prison (or leading labor riots).
Or how John Company managed to take over most of India, etc.
There is an attempt to create a narrative that this is a new thing, but it's been a thing forever.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadIt's worth remembering that "libertarian writers" advanced deregulation and climate change denial tropes for decades, and "libertarianism" is itself a billionaire-manufactured and -evangelized sock puppet ideological religion concocted with the help and credibility of Laissez-faire, pro-corporate economists and riding the coattails of a philosophically-bankrupt fiction writer who makes the irrational leap that reality (to a human observer) can ever be a known, unbiased, and concrete certainty.
https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Virtue-of-Stupidity-A-C...
If the US were actually a socialist country, you would not need to buy higher education and healthcare.
Government typically secures the financing for education; government regulations (eg, mandated insurance) and policies (eg, mandated ER) are a substantial fraction of healthcare. More so if you include the VA and MediCare.
Neither is something that resembles a free market.
It reminds me of people praying for more or better things for themselves.
Why would the gods of capitalism care for that? Why would any god?
All large industries wind up working with government. The tech companies didn't have them initially because they were not that big. But now that they are huge of course they work with the US government.
The US government and big business have interests that sometimes converge but to say it's all corporatist is overstating it.
The US government still engages in anti-trust. Companies would sit there and be really annoyed by various actions taken by the US government.
Car companies couldn't produce cars between February, 1942 and October, 1945, because the federal government ordered them to produce weapons instead.
There was certainly at least one car company executive that resisted that, he got called a fascist.
Free enterprise was completely suspended. 100%.
That's not really the whole story, lol.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Bennett
I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
Epoch Times guy is really onto something here. It's crazy that there's no existing body of literature that explores how the ways in which a society's productive forces and relations (its "base", if you will) interacts with its other institutions like government, media, etc. (its "superstructure", if you will). But here we are. He's the lone Cassandra, his desperate cries falling upon deaf ears.
Some reading around this:
Louis Althusser: "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970)
Antonio Gramsci: "Prison Notebooks" (1929-1935)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "The German Ideology" (1845) and "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859)
Honestly it’s astonishing that so few (especially in the US) have an understanding of these points of view and are left reading sources like the Epoch Times to form a view of capitalism that isn’t “I love it, even though I don’t what it is”.
You did much better than me by actually providing some references!
You might want to take this as an opportunity to re-read Poe's law[0]. It does in fact always apply on the internet.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
The people you're talking about were speaking to their time. It's not automatically clear that proposals for an industrializing economy are applicable to a post-industrial highly financialized economy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
.
Also the age of actual snake-oil salesmen and literally blowing smoke up your ass. excesses of which are best exemplified by The Jungle, the Pullman Railcar Strike, or the fact that union leader Eugene Debs got ~3% of the US national vote -- the highest ever for a socialist candidate, even now -- while in federal prison (or leading labor riots).
Or how John Company managed to take over most of India, etc.
There is an attempt to create a narrative that this is a new thing, but it's been a thing forever.
It's sort of sadly funny to see the author try to appoligize for a basic tennet of modern US capitalism: make more money at all costs (to others)
Every single issue he describes is due to unregulated capitalism.
Once the "market" is eliminated by virtue of one overwhelmingly dominant vendor, who gets to guide the magical invisible hand?
https://archive.org/details/Despotis1946