Occasional Notes: Day Job Edition
Jason Kuznicki on Nov 11th 2008
Podcast: Watch a podcast of yours truly discussing the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism with Ronald Hamowy, Charles Murray, and William Galston. David Kelley, Randy Barnett, and William Niskanen are among the cameo appearances. I haven’t reviewed it yet because I have this strange horror of watching myself on video (really, hearing my own voice). Seeing myself in print is still totally cool for some reason.
Magazine: At Cato Unbound, Roderick Long discusses the difference between libertarianism and corporatism, a difference that perhaps has never been more important:
Corporations tend to fear competition, because competition exerts downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on salaries; moreover, success on the market comes with no guarantee of permanency, depending as it does on outdoing other firms at correctly figuring out how best to satisfy forever-changing consumer preferences, and that kind of vulnerability to loss is no picnic. It is no surprise, then, that throughout U.S. history corporations have been overwhelmingly hostile to the free market. Indeed, most of the existing regulatory apparatus—including those regulations widely misperceived as restraints on corporate power—were vigorously supported, lobbied for, and in some cases even drafted by the corporate elite.
The message for left-liberals is that you guys got played, royally, by the corporate elite, from the Progressive Era right down to the present. Brer Rabbit just begged you not to throw him in the briar patch of regulation. And so you did.
The message for libertarians is also harsh: Too often we haven’t appreciated the ways in which the status quo isn’t anything like a free market. When we defend the status quo, we’re being conservatives rather than libertarians. Libertopia is likely farther away, and weirder, than we now imagine. Which is not to say it won’t be more awesome.
Long invokes the term “freed market,” which I like a lot: It says that we aren’t there yet, and that what we have now is at best an intimation of laissez-faire: It’s enough to know that increasing economic freedom seems always to increase prosperity. But we don’t know enough, yet, to know what a really free economic order would look like. Long suspects that it will look a lot like the utopia of the left — that is, no megacorporations, local and worker control over businesses, more living wages. On this point he’s gotten some criticism (notably from my colleague Will, who suggests that we can’t know this in advance). I wouldn’t dismiss Long’s vision tout court. He’s at least in good company: Tocqueville, after all, believed that extremes of both wealth and poverty were typically the fault of the state, and that the closer one approached to a natural political economy, the more everyone would tend toward a roughly equal (and prosperous) situation.
Blogfight:
Arjun Appadurai: “The Magic Ballot.”
Jason Kuznicki: “Pay No Attention to the Man behind the Curtain.”
Appadurai responds, and I reply.
Filed in The Bookshelf
I watched it a little while ago and I thought you were outstanding in the way you handled yourself. That kind of thing would really unnerve me. Though I’m usually good to go with a xanax. I have the same horror re hearing the voice but no problem seeing my ideas in print.
I don’t mind seeing myself on tape, but hearing myself is pretty odd. Do I really sound that throaty? Based on stray comments I’ve gleaned that to the median acquaintance I look like I’m still in my mid-twenties and sound like I’m in my mid-fifties. An odd combination, that.
Long suspects that it will look a lot like the utopia of the left — that is, no megacorporations, local and worker control over businesses, more living wages.
I suspect that there would still be a big, homogenized corporate core, but it would make up a smaller percentage of the economy, and the individualized edges of the economy would be even more colorful and fringy, and make up a somewhat larger share of commerce. I think Libertopia would be a lot like the future has turned out to be: different from today in a lot of little ways, but not all that different.
Note: The last paragraph of the above applies only to the 10 - 50 year time scale of the last couple of centuries. Today is very different from two centuries ago, and unfathomably different from two millennia ago.
To my ears, my voice sounds childlike and whiny. I wish everyone could hear what I sound like inside my own skull. So much better!
Everyone’s voice sounds deeper to him. I don’t much like the sound of my own voice but, being a colossal egotist, I have no problem appearing or participating in audio or video productions. Of course, I tend not to be invited to participate in them because of the broken camera lenses, the dogs howling at the sound, etc., but that’s another matter.
I wish everyone could hear what I sound like inside my own skull.
Yeah, it’s really a shame that we don’t get to fully hear what we actually sound like all the time. Inflection, tone, emphasis, we try to gear it all toward affecting the listener, but we can never quite hear what the listener does.
Great job, Jason - you have star power! And you don’t sound at all childlike/whiny.