On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Matt Cramer wrote:
> [screw the bloody limit, since apparently no one else honours it]
Hey, speak for yourself, big boy. Some of us have effectively internalized the protestant ethic of delayed self-gratification.
>
> BTW, and I don't mean to pick on you, but there seems to be a lot of
> paranoia here about any kind of libertarian position. Everything
> libertarian is bad, and everything bad is libertarian, I guess? Right?
> Did a bunch of libertarians pee in y'all's cornflakes or something? I
> wasn't even talking about being a libertarian in my reply to Doug, but
> because I mentioned it at one time or another in a different thread I get
> some nutty paranoid reply mixing the two.
>
I imagine Doug will throw in something here, but here's my take: the individualism inherent to the libertarian position is an essential element of existing social and economic relations in our society. Say what you will about robots, but the rhetoric of free will and choice and private property are taken for granted by both your "robots" and your supposedly poorly socialized "libertarians". Why are these ideas so widespread? They are not natural, nor necessary in human societies: rather, their function is purely ideological. The belief in the sovereign individual who owns stuff is, if I may be dramatic, the psychological lynchpin of a capitalistic economic system that systematically transfers wealth from the workers to the elite.
And here's the irony: given the ethic of individualism, most of us embrace this exploitation and perpetuate this economic system, because, dammit, everybody's free to live the way they want to.
Is the leftist lack of enthusiasm for libertarianism any clearer now?
Miles