I have some reservations of it, but you can read the whole article here:
Further, as Rothbard has forcefully argued, free-market capitalism serves no more than a symbolic purpose for the Republican Party and for conservatives. Economic liberty is the utopia that they keep promising to bring us, pending the higher priority of blowing up foreign peoples, jailing political dissidents, crushing the left wing on campus, and routing the Democrats.
Once all of this is done, they say, then they will get to the instituting of a free-market economic system. Of course, that day never arrives, and it is not supposed to. Capitalism serves the Republicans the way Communism served Stalin: a symbolic distraction to keep you hoping, voting, and coughing up money.
The article also mentions some books that are needed to educate people about libertarian policies and to get people away from socialistic policies.
I agree that both Democrats and Republicans are basically using politics to keep the other in check, and they hardly look out for the American people, but what really astounded me is that most of Asia and the Middle East (including Democratic nations) saw the break-up of the Soviet Union as a bad thing. I’ve always thought that capitalism is a good thing, but not to the point of libertarianism. Still, this is an article that should be read through, no matter what your policies are.
I thought the paragraph about the Republican party was a bit disjointed. It was almost like his personal take on Republicans needed to be put into the article, and it distracts from his overall critique against socialism.
Unless he was using it to highlight socialist ideas within the Republican party. Then maybe it fits in.
Could we pick the best bits from different parties and come up with our own? Isn’t that what America as a melting pot is about, celebrating and assimilating the best of cultures and ideas and tossing out the worst?
Is this guy of any actual importance or is he just a blogger? He strikes me as just a blogger. His ideas are under-researched and sophomoric. It’s always the people that think they know all about economics who use the USSR as an example of pure socialism. Now that’s ignorance. The more and more I read from libertarian writers the more I think of it as a big group of people that don’t want to actually learn anything, but just want to be angry at the government.
Free market capitalism is a disaster, just like socialism under a single seat of power is a disaster. The people like Obama that teabaggers like this guy are calling socialists are not socialists. According to their speeches, they’re trying to establish what history has taught us is the perfect balance of government. A group of representatives elected by the people that allows the private sector to compete on the basis of invention and re-investment, but not on the basis of cheating, stealing, or bribing, while at the same time looking after the poor at a minimal burden to the rich.
No one idea is absolutely correct.
I liked it. Some of the lines of thinking he referenced drive me nuts. I know quite a few people who say, in effect, “I hate George W. Bush. That means I must hate capitalism!” Clown dicks, I tell ya. Clown dicks.