Jim Harper

UK Libertarian Party: My ‘Car Crash’

I was hoping to comment on a UK Libertarian Party blog post called “Car Crash Cato,” but the blogger.com comment function has never worked for me: The CAPTCHA doesn’t display and/or I’m supposed to sign up for and log in to something. Thanks - I’ve got enough logins.

The next first solution is to send a note to the author, but Patrick Vessey at the UK Libertarian party doesn’t seem to have made any contact information available.

SO, here’s my response to a UK Libertarian Party blog post criticizing the Cato Institute for giving the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to Yon Goicoechea and for my recent Cato@Liberty blog post “L-1 and China - Oh, Nevermind - Naomi Klein.” (You’ll want to read the post first . . . .)

Thank you, Andrew [another commenter], for handling the Venezuela issue very nicely.

As for my posting on the Cato@Liberty blog - it’s my post, reflecting my thinking, not any Cato Institute policy - let me urge you to read the piece I wrote about L-1, which I linked to in that post. Concluding there, I wrote, “A corporate lobbying operation can do as much harm to liberty as any government agency or official.”

This is not a story about which “Cato obviously does not want to hear” - I’ve been writing about it at Cato. I was disappointed when Klein took an issue that I feel passionate about - and muddied it with her confused and divisive ideological dreck.

I agree that the corporate form of organization is a subsidy - a government-imposed transfer of risk from owners to the general public - but that does not give L-1 any coercive power that’s relevant here. Only L-1’s combination with government power - in the U.S., China, or anyplace else - gives it access to legal coercion. The necessary condition for what Klein, you, and I find objectionable is the exercise of government power.

In fact, I’ve yet to understand what “corporate power” is, because once you de-link a corporation from access to government power, the corporation is just a legal construct, an entity that anyone (who’s not lazy) can walk away from and suffer no repercussion (risk-transfer aside).

I don’t know anything about the UK Libertarian Party, but I do find it strange that a person associated with it would be unclear enough on the nature of power to side with Hugo Chavez and Naomi Klein over the Cato Institute and me.

May 25, 2008 | Comments |

Viewing 11 Comments

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    In fact, I’ve yet to understand what “corporate power” is, because once you de-link a corporation from access to government power, the corporation is just a legal construct, an entity that anyone (who’s not lazy) can walk away from and suffer no repercussion (risk-transfer aside).

    2 Comments:

    1. That 'de-linking' part is easier said than done Jim. In particular note the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, where very many on-trade related items are made part of Treaties, Treaties which are ultimately backed up by the US military. The book 'Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins details the way that the US military is called in whenever the assest of a corporation are threatened by democratic government. Recall what happened to Mosaddeq:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Mosaddeq

    2. Even Delinked corporations re-assert their power, witness, for example, the spying program of Hewlett-Packard.
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    Jim -- you've now got my email. Do you mind if I cross post your comment back to the original post, and reply there?
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    Hugo Chavez won two elections, which is two more than GWB won.

    http://www.gregpalast.com/madhouse/
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    Sure, Patrick. Nice to reach you/hear from you. (I was a little exasperated with blogger.com . . . .)

    1. I agree, e_f, that disentangling corporations (and anyone or anything else for that matter) from the use of government power is difficult. 2. What I know of l'affaire H-P does not involve the use of government power - just frauds, contractual violations, etc. among legal equals - board members, executives, and the corporation itself. If the corporation made some use of government coercion to advantage itself against others, of course I think that's wrongful behavior as well.
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    2. What I know of l’affaire H-P does not involve the use of government power

    Jim that's my whole point--corporations don't always need the help of government to basically become fascist instrumentalities. The idea that only a government can do wrong, implicit in much of libertarian thought,is a pernicious denail of reality.
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    just frauds, contractual violations, etc. among legal equals - board members, executives, and the corporation itself.

    No, there were also journalists, not a party to any contract or other relation to H-P who were spied on.
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    Spying on journalists is also ordinary wrongdoing among legal equals, not use of government power, and it has nothing to do with facism.

    Perhaps you were careless in your phrasing, but there’s no premise in libetrarianism that only government can do wrong. It’s a basic premise of libertarianism that they can do wrong, and the government exists to prevent or punish that. (Perhaps this point gets lost because it’s so basic - we don’t sit around discussing it because there’s nothing interesting about it.) When government goes beyond defending against violations of individuals’ rights, including by corporations, libertarians object to that, particularly because government uses its legal monopoly on coercion for tasks beyond its proper role.

    That’s all from me on this thread, e_f.
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    Thanks, Jim. I'm going to respond to the two areas of contention separately. I've just posted about the Friedman Prize here:
    http://lpuk.blogspot.com/2008/05/car-crash-cato...
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    Spying on journalists is also ordinary wrongdoing among legal equals, not use of government power, and it has nothing to do with fascism.

    I don't see how, in the contemporary legal environment of 2008 USA, you can consider a corporation like H-P, with its army of private investigators, lawyers, 'pretexters' to be the equal of a private individual. Maybe in some abstract de jure sense, yes, but in the real world, that assertion doesn't make sense. The journalist couldn't 'walk away' from those spying on them. What's next, corporate bounty hunters?

    I don't restrict my definition of fascism to oppression done by governmental agencies alone; taken to its extreme, an implication of your line of reasoning would be that, if Nazi Germany was incorporated, it would not have been a fascist entity. I don't think you would agree with that, would you?

    The film the Corporation paints a pretty convincing picture of the modern corporation as an "unregulated private tyranny" as Noam Chomsky described it, and I have seen some corporations that are like that. I will say that not nearly all of them are.

    Now, the Libertarian Party, is a *capitalist* party. It's in favor of what *I* would regard a *particular form* of authoritarian control. Namely, the kind that comes through private ownership and control, which is an *extremely* rigid system of domination -- people have to... people can survive, by renting themselves to it, and basically in no other way... I do disagree with them *very* sharply, and I think that they are not..understanding the *fundamental* doctrine, that you should be free from domination and control, including the control of the manager and the owner.

    Chomsky's remarks are on the same line of reason as Amartya Sen, who distinguished 'procedural freedoms' (like due process, or freedom of speech) from substantive freedoms (like freedom from involuntary starvation) Sen takes libertarians to task for make the basic informational exclusion of not considering the value of substantive freedoms, and I think he is right.

    The bottom line for is that someone who has a fundamentally freedom oriented approach should beware the concentration of power in corporations.

    The the setting of the book Oryx and Crake paints a fairly credible picture of what the world could look like if corporate power goes unchecked.
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    Did I bail out at the right time or what? WooHOO!
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    OK, even though I’m not commenting on this thread any more, here’s an article about the punishments meted out to various parties in the H-P spying scandal - parties subject to law, not in league with the law-giver. That’s a very important distinction that careful thinkers don’t gloss over.

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