David Friedman is far too generous, as evidenced by the libertarian
socialists and anarchist mainstream dismissing his work out of hand,
especially his concepts of PPL, which they consider to be 'garbage'
although they consider it to be the best thing to come out of extropic
thought (which tells you what they think of the rest of our ideas).
What we mean by a liberal society is not what they mean by a liberal
society. They, in fact, dismiss western liberalism as a failure. They
are stridently against capitalism, they almost uniformly say their prime
goal is to end capitalism of any kind, not just the mercantilist big
business that is created and protected by big government. They are
anti-property in a very Georgist fashion, and regard anything owned
beyond ones clothes, home, and tools, to be theft (and there is debate
over ownership of one's home). Land, they say, is not ownable by anyone
or group less than all the human race (and the cute and fuzzy animals
too) without infringing on the freedom of others to access the land.
Based on this, they are most properly described as communists in sheeps
clothing. They are a new communism that has merged with the
environmental movement, which is rather incongruous to anyone who has
ever seen the environmental impact of communism wherever it has taken
root. They still do NOT get it about human nature, and they refuse to
admit that because their goals conflict with human nature so severely
that they must inflict tyranny to achieve them.
Michael Wiik wrote:
>
> Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> > I am eager to hear a
> > Libertarian Socialist. Military Intelligence is a term easy to grasp but
> > libertarian socialist?
>
> Found my long-lost copy of _The Machinery of Freedom_ the other day.
> Here's a quote where Friedman talks about Czech students:
>
> "They wished to preserve government health case and some other welfare
> measures, but these were not what they meant by socialism. To them,
> socialism meant a just society, a society where people were reasonable
> prosperous and reasonably free; it meant roughly what we mean by a
> liberal society.
>
> "This, I think, is what socialism means to much of the world. If so,
> socialism need not be opposed--merely improved."
>
> Someone on slashdot identified himself as Green/Libertarian the other
> day. Any why not? I'm on the viridian green mailing list myself.
>
> -Mike
>
> --
> ======================================================================
> Michael Wiik
> Principal
> Messagenet Communications Research
> Washington DC Area Internet and WWW Consultants
> http://messagenet.com
> mwiik@messagenet.com
> ======================================================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:37 MDT