Doug Henwood:
> So why are geeks such market-besotted libertarians? Because they're
> poorly socialized loners? What's the reason?
My theory is that they're lower-middle-class, petit bourgeois. They more or less own their tools, and their skills have been in high demand most of the time. If they were further up the economic food chain, they'd be bourgeois and the government would protect their status, property and other interests. If they were further down, unions and social democratic programs would become attractive. But they're in the middle -- like plumbers. By them, the government and often large corporations are seen as agencies which exact costs and do not return value.
If they are indeed loners -- I don't know if this is really the case -- I would guess they would be interested in the market in the way I said autodidacts would be interested in Kropotkin: the market is (supposed to be) a community of voluntary cooperators rather than a hierarchy. In a hierarchy, if the underling's poor social skills don't work on the boss, the underling is s.o.l. In a market, in theory, the underling can seek other relationships. Also, a market might facilitate the separation of the goods sold from the personality of the seller, an important advantage for the less socially skillful.
Eric Raymond has a kind of life-drama going about himself which may illustrate my hypotheses in high contrast. He is afflicted with cerebral palsy, and like many who share his condition, he seems to have had the experience of attempted consignment to the human junk heap. One might see CP, in a way, as a poverty of social skills -- one lacks the fine tuning of the nervous system to speak and gesture gracefully, one may look funny, like a Puerto Rican or a fat person or someone who is old. The price for this sort of failing is usually pretty high, as I think most of us know, and it's especially high if you're a young person with no money and no connections. Raymond thinks he fought his way out of the trap through his own will power _against_ the authorities. Maybe he did, the relationship between the therapeutic and the therapeutized being as ambiguous as it is. In any case for himself he's the poster child of libertarianism, the outsider who rejects and is rejected by authority and finds salvation in the free market and untrammeled "capitalism".
(I get all this from many Usenet go-'rounds in the old days.)