[p2p-research] Another take on being a contemporary revolutionary...

[Kevin Carson]

On 6/6/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > That certainly carries more than a little vibe of paternalistic social
> > engineering.  But it would probably come across better if the the
> > author were politic enough to mention that the present system of
> > corporate capitalism, rather than being the spontaneous outgrowth of a
> > free market, is the result of a top-down social engineering experiment
> > at least as enormous and authoritarian as anything he has in mind.  It
> > would also be nice if he showed some awareness that most of what he
> > desires could be achieved, not by new restrictions and/or subsidies,
> > but by removing *existing* subsidies and protections from corporate
> > capitalism.

> It is a grand leap in the Age of Climate Change to suggest that
> paternalistic social engineering isn't a necessity.  I think that argument
> would have to sell first given any level of collective responsibility.
> Liberty is great so long as it doesn't mean collective disaster.
> Liberty+responsibility is key.  One doesn't outweigh.  When the two are
> added, I get social engineering as a sum.

The problem is that the current level of fossil fuel consumption, and
the transportation-intensiveness of the economy, result not from
laissez-faire, but from top-down social engineering in the wrong
direction.  Government has subsidized economic centralization and made
long-distance logistical chains artificially cheap, and also created
subsidized distance between where we live and where we work and shop.
Government has also, to a large extent, preempted traditional common
law standards of tort liability to prevent the negative externalities
of centralization and fuel consumption from being properly
internalized.  Simply removing the subsidies to the consumption of
energy and to the extensive use of transportation inputs, and ceasing
to protect pollutors from liability, would likely go a long way toward
scaling down energy use without the need for any countervailing social
engineering measures.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html