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.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.