8ball
Check your privet hedge
Ayn Rand follower in 'barking mad' shocker.
Libertarians
- Thread starter J Ed
- Start date
Ayn Rand follower in 'barking mad' shocker.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Is "Binswanger" a name, or a directive?
I have to say that his column (three examples of which I forced myself to read) is the kind of absolutist religious thinking I usually expect from zealots or fanatics for an ideology - logic proceeding from false premises, and near total elision of any inconvenient facts.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I believe that some of them may even take their sexual etiquette from her novels, believing them to actually be directives.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...nservative-grassroots-candidate-sexuality-gay
Mark Wallace is now having articles in the Guardian, ffs..
Mark Wallace is now having articles in the Guardian, ffs..
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Mind bleach NOW!
Maurice Picarda
Actually, might as well flounce.
Eek.
Mind bleach NOW!
You mean it's not satire?
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
It's the image in the mind, satire or not.
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Didn't Alan Greenspan have an affair with Rand?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Loads and loads of people did. Very complicated and bitchy infighting around it as well - involving literary executors, money, the right to operate under the RAND imprint today.
8ball
Check your privet hedge
It's a definite 'it depends'.
edit: those agreeing that libertarian espouses the right to associate with others free from coercion would be decidedly against 'closed shop' and other monopolistic union practices, but even 'right libertarian' types I've spoken to make no arguments against workplace organisation per se
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Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Hilarious recent lecture from Yaron Brook, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, at the LSE:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2071
He sounds like Barry Kripke from the Big Bang Theory:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2071
He sounds like Barry Kripke from the Big Bang Theory:
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
Libertarians will spend all day and night slagging off really existing trade unions, trade union demands, individual trade union members etc in a way that they never would corporations but will still talk about how trade unions would operate and ensure workers' rights in their dystopian fantasy world. They are also happy enough to talk about how necessary trade unions were in the past but how all demands they make now are unreasonable. They need to maintain these positions to be able to maintain that their ideology is an ideology for everyone, not just the rich, while using it for its true purpose which is to shill for the very richest in society at the expense of the rest.
Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
AFAIA libertarians (of the sort this thread is about) usually theoretically support the right of individuals to form and join trade unions but oppose any legal protections against discrimination, dismissal etc for trade union membership or activity. The belief is that the employment contract is a voluntary transaction between employer and employee both acting in their own self-interest and therefore any attempt to impose legal duties upon it in relation to union activity constitutes a 'distortion' of the free market.
Lo Siento.
Second As Farce
You can organise, collectively bargain and even have a strike, but employers can fire the organisers and bring in all the scabs they want, so in effect it wouldn't exist. (or it would exist, and they'd need to contract an armed force to repress it, so you'd just be replacing the monopoly of the state on violence with the monopoly of the employer)
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Jeff Robinson
Marxist-Lentilist: Jackboots and Jackfruit
Most libertarians aren't opposed to superior (although not monopoly) armed violence resting with the state. The anarcho-caps constitute a minority in the movement. The Night Watchman State mobilizing its armed violence to enforce contracts and protect the property rights of employers is exactly what most (right) libertarians want it to do.
8ball
Check your privet hedge
They're like most people - they're perfectly happy with a violent unaccountable tyrannical centre of power so long as it is on their side.
Of course it isn't. Why on earth would union membership be incompatible with libertarianism? A person would join a trade union if they so wished, and gain the benefits it offered and accept the responsibilities that come with membership.
However, I think that under libertarianism trades unions would be rather different beasts from those of today.
J Ed
Follow Back Pro Expropriation
In theory yes, in reality see Chile under Pinochet.
8ball
Check your privet hedge
Well, in theory you don't get major inequality with communism...
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Thing is, I've never seen a coherent 'libertarian' platform. Rand is a good example - her ideas are totally incoherent. It mostly seems to boil down to little more than simplistic reification of the right of property owners to exploit everyone else, where the person saying it doesn't even realise that this is what they are doing.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Maurice Picarda
Actually, might as well flounce.
Nozick is coherent, the problem being that he builds on a bizarre foundation of misapplied Kantianism.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Nozick's the chap who argued with Rawls, no? Don't know too much about him except that he argued with Rawls.
Maurice Picarda
Actually, might as well flounce.
They were both horribly wrong; it's a salutary lesson on why philosophers shouldn't be let near politics. Applied philosophy of any sort is dangerous - they're even less trustworthy on ethics.
See any summary of Anarchy State and Utopia for Nozick's views. Essentially he starts from a position of absurdly prioritised negative rights, then spends a lot of effort explaining how an ultraminimal state (but no more) is justified by the existence of a dominant protection agency.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Strikes me that absurdly prioritising negative rights is what the US does. Its constitutional rights are all very good and have positive effects in many ways, but someone can lie in a ditch and starve in plain view of the whole world and not have their constitutional rights violated.
8ball
Check your privet hedge
"The moral case for freedom". Fuck's sake.
His definition of capitalism early on appears to be use of slavery and the sequestering of huge amounts of natural resources by force.
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