The following question was posted to the Hernando de Soto thread. I’m moving it here to keep the discussions separate.
I have a question and wanted to post it on the main venue but I don’t know how or if I can so I’ll try here.
At the site http://www.infoshop.org/faq/index.html
there is a long Anarchist Individualist FAQ,
Under section ;
G.2.1 What about their support of the free market? ,
If someone wouldn’t mind scimming this section and make a little sense of it, I would appreciate it. These “Individualists” who call for a “free market” maintain they are socialists. They say their “free market” is free but is far different from the “capitalistic free market”
For example, here is a paragraph;
“Given that the right-libertarians who make such claims are not well informed of the ideas they oppose (i.e. of socialism, particularly libertarian socialism) it is unsurprising they claim that the Individualist Anarchists are not socialists (of course the fact that many Individualist Anarchists argued they were socialists is ignored). Coming from a different tradition, it is unsurprising they are not aware of the fact that socialism is not monolithic. Hence we discover right-libertarian guru von Mises claiming that the “essence of socialism is the entire elimination of the market.” [Human Action, p. 702] This would have come as something of a surprise to, say, Proudhon, who argued that “[t]o suppress competition is to suppress liberty itself.” [The General Idea of the Revolution, p. 50] Similarly, it would have surprised Tucker, who called himself a socialist while supporting a freer market than von Mises ever dreamt of. “
“[t]o suppress competition is to suppress liberty itself.”
Proudhon said that .. .
Comments please? Thanks. . .
-Skye
Posted by: skye Stewart at October 21, 2004 05:46 PM
Skye Stewart,
Don’t waste your time at InfoShop. The socialists anarchists are a bunch of nutcases with no understanding of economics. They’d like to eliminate private property, which would lead to higher and higher time-preferences (no incentive to save for the future if someone else can gobble up all your stocks). They have no plan for crime, but just think that once you eliminate the evil capitalist pigs, it will magically go away.
Furthermore, their FAQs are presented in long long winding rambles, with plenty of quotes. Put shortly: the marginal psychic profit from reading InfoShop is negative.
Posted by: David Heinrich at October 21, 2004 06:18 PM
