absolutely loves to go over the top throwing around terms like "evil" and "heroic." (They even called ME heroic once or twice!) But they're really outdone themselves this time, as Daniel Kuehn notes.
The title by itself is not really a big deal; severed from anything else, it reads like comic exaggeration. Unfortunately, the contents of the post make it clear that Tucker was not in a particularly jocular mood.
Within "free"-market circles, the set-piece affixing of the "heroic" tag to the entrepreneur/tycoon as an ideal type has long amused me. Two aspects stand out here.
1. It's not enough, apparently, to defend the liberties and acquired wealth of businessfolk against their denigration by coercive utopians or the envious. We have to hoist them atop our shoulders and make parade floats of them as well.
2. Such admiration is due them as a pure function of their role within the black-and-white laissez-faire morality play, regardless of the actual cultural/moral content of the goods and services he has sold, toward which as presumably "value-free" social "scientists" we are under strict doctorate's orders to remain silent in purest agnostic indifference.
Until such time, that is, that the formerly *wertfrei* paleolibertarian/Objectivist pauses for a breath...asks "what's that on your shirt?"...changes out of his clinician's hat in the blink of an eye...and launches into a doctrinaire Capitalist Realism lecture on the superior manliness in the defense of Western civilization inhering in, e.g., wool suits, bow ties, .45 caliber penis extensions, Modernist architecture, factory smoke, cigars and whichever brand of distilled spirits are most correct to decant this month, bloody steaks and great car-tipping Flintstones racks of ribs...
It helps, of course, if your motivations in such phenomenological modes are pure, i.e., born of siege-minded culture-warrior resentment rooted in poor toilet training, and above all a desire to piss off "liberals" or "The Left", two mythic phyla the rumors of whose existence I have read much in the Annals of Psychopathia Libertarianis...
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
In this paper , Hoppe, Hülsmann, and Block (HHB) make their ethical case against fractional reserve banking (FRB) based on the fact that "two individual owners cannot be the exclusive owner of one and the same thing at the same time." They then posit that since fractional reserve bank notes creates multiple titles or claims to the "same" gold, they are inherently fraudulent. In analyzing this claim, the first thing we will have to do is to turn it into a remotely sensible claim. No one who deposits money at a bank thinks they are entitled to the same money back. What they want, when they go to get their money out, is the same amount of money back. What a gold-backed fractional reserve note comprises is a claim to a certain amount of gold, not certain particular pieces of gold. I hope that change to their argument is uncontroversial! So their complaint comes down to this: if a bank issues pieces of paper that allow the bearer to claim a certain amount of gold...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
The title by itself is not really a big deal; severed from anything else, it reads like comic exaggeration. Unfortunately, the contents of the post make it clear that Tucker was not in a particularly jocular mood.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteRe "heroic" ascriptions:
ReplyDeleteWithin "free"-market circles, the set-piece affixing of the "heroic" tag to the entrepreneur/tycoon as an ideal type has long amused me. Two aspects stand out here.
1. It's not enough, apparently, to defend the liberties and acquired wealth of businessfolk against their denigration by coercive utopians or the envious. We have to hoist them atop our shoulders and make parade floats of them as well.
2. Such admiration is due them as a pure function of their role within the black-and-white laissez-faire morality play, regardless of the actual cultural/moral content of the goods and services he has sold, toward which as presumably "value-free" social "scientists" we are under strict doctorate's orders to remain silent in purest agnostic indifference.
Until such time, that is, that the formerly *wertfrei* paleolibertarian/Objectivist pauses for a breath...asks "what's that on your shirt?"...changes out of his clinician's hat in the blink of an eye...and launches into a doctrinaire Capitalist Realism lecture on the superior manliness in the defense of Western civilization inhering in, e.g., wool suits, bow ties, .45 caliber penis extensions, Modernist architecture, factory smoke, cigars and whichever brand of distilled spirits are most correct to decant this month, bloody steaks and great car-tipping Flintstones racks of ribs...
It helps, of course, if your motivations in such phenomenological modes are pure, i.e., born of siege-minded culture-warrior resentment rooted in poor toilet training, and above all a desire to piss off "liberals" or "The Left", two mythic phyla the rumors of whose existence I have read much in the Annals of Psychopathia Libertarianis...
Huh? PSH says that "unfortunately" Tucker was not in a jocular mood. How is your comment that "all is well" in agreement with that?
ReplyDelete