Over the last two decades, most of my adult life, I've watched as the world has grown more interconnected than ever, fuelled by changes in information technology which have almost universally been ...
"Anarcho-syndicalism is a conception of a very organized society, but organized from below by direct participation at every level, with as little control and domination as is feasible, maybe none."
But Bitcoin isn't a currency. It's a Ponzi scheme for redistributing wealth from one libertarian to another. At least that's all it is right now. One day it could be more. Venture capitalists, for their part, are quick to point out that it's really a protocol, like the early internet, and its underlying technology could still be revolutionary. What are they supposed to say, though, when they've bet hundreds of millions of dollars on it?
Few movements in the United States today harbor stranger political ideas than the self-proclaimed libertarians. The Rand Paul school of libertarianism is at least as far outside the mainstream on the right as, say, a rather doctrinaire old-school form of Marxism/Leninism is on the left. The difference is this: The mainstream media isn’t telling us that we’re in the middle of a “Marxist/Leninist moment.” Leninist politicians aren’t being touted as serious presidential contenders. And all the media chatter we’re hearing about a “Libertarian moment” ignores the very harsh, extreme and sometimes downright ugly ideas that are being disseminated under that banner.
The observation that science and politics make uneasy and often treacherous bedfellows is hardly revelatory. In science, all hypotheses must withstand the trial-by-fire of experiment; its methodology is self-correcting and objective, unconcerned with petty prejudices or personal conviction. Politics, by contrast, is deeply entangled with ideology – it is not bound to respect reality as science is, and thinks nothing of substituting convincing evidence for emotive rhetoric. And yet, when science and politics clash, it is all too often science that loses.
There is no mystery why libertarians love the Internet and all the freedom-enhancing applications, from open source software to Bitcoin, that thrive in its nurturing embrace. The Internet routes around censorship. It enables peer-to-peer connections that scoff at arbitrary geographical boundaries. It provides infinite access to do-it-yourself information. It fuels dreams of liberation from totalitarian oppression. Give everyone a smartphone, and dictators will fall! (Hell, you can even download the code that will let you 3-D print a gun.)
Few topics in recent years have aroused as much interest among libertarians as intellectual property. What place, if any, would IP — patents, copyrights, trademarks and the like — have in a libertarian society? Ayn Rand and her Objectivist followers view IP as the most basic of all property rights. Diametrically opposed are those who say, “You cannot own an idea”: ideas are not in the economic sense scarce goods and thus property rights in them are at odds with the purpose of property rights, avoiding conflict over the use of such goods. Still others shift the argument from rights to the benefits and costs of IP. Does IP promote valuable inventions and creativity, or does it impede them?
The poll then described Bitcoin to respondents as “a new online digital currency that is not connected to any particular country’s currency system and is not controlled by any government.” Then, even despite the high number who knows nothing about Bitcoin, a plurality (47 percent) said government should not allow people to use Bitcoins to purchase goods and services, while 38 percent said it should be allowed and another 14 percent don’t know.
Has the Internet democratized information? The answer is yes, with an asterisk. While the Web has made information tremendously more accessible, it has also introduced problems of how to classify, rank, and evaluate that information.
The theme of Ayn Rand’sAtlas Shrugged, according to Ms. Rand herself, is “what happens to the world when the Prime Movers go on strike.” The prime movers are corporate executives – “the motor of the world” – and Rand imagines what would happen if they all just went away. To Rand this is nothing less than “a picture of the world with its motor cut off.”
A conversation with: Peter Thiel, founding CEO of PayPal; Member, Board of Directors, Facebook; entrepreneur; and venture capitalist and Niall Ferguson, Laur...
jean lievens's insight:
alternative view, criticism worth listening too (without agreeing with his solutions though)
As we celebrate Labor Day, the annual holiday dedicated to the American labor movement, it's worth considering how the sharing economy is changing the workforce and rebranding capitalism.
In a post at the Students For Liberty (SFL) blog, (“Between Radicalism and Revolution: The Cautionary Tale of Students for a Democratic Society,” May 6), Clark Ruper uses the example of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as a warning against factionalism and division within the libertarian movement. The libertarian movement, he says, should be united on a broad common agenda that appeals to as many people as possible — one that focuses on the “most important” issues like fighting corporatism and foreign interventionism and protecting civil liberties. Ruper seems to focus mainly on anarchists, revolutionaries, social justice advocates and left-libertarians as the sources of potential schism. And he makes it clear that his post was motivated, in large part, by recent controversies over the “thick libertarianism” or “non-brutalism” endorsed (among others) by Roderick Long and Charles Johnson, Gary Chartier, Sheldon Richman andJeffrey Tucker:
The general elections of most countries with parliamentary systems have largely functioned in the same way. They have had some regular alternation between two parties, one ostensibly left-of-center and one ostensibly right-of-center. In these systems, there has been little difference between the two main parties in terms of foreign policy and only a limited set of differences on internal politics, centering on issues of taxation and social welfare.
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