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April 19, 2003
The Oz collective libertarian blog Libertarian.org is going great guns. New writers, lots of attitude, substance and style. Good on you guys. Keep it.
Here is an easter challenge from a lefty schooled by ye ole Marxist philosophers at Flinders University of South Australia.
The Austrian School argument was successful against the central planning of the old Soviet-style socialism. But in 2003 the thesis that socialism is the embodiment of a boot stamping on a human face in the mud is wearing a bit thin, especially with the formation of the environmental state within liberal capitalism. What has been bequeathed to us by Hayek is the duality of socialism and capitalism as opposites.
But history did not end in 1991 with the defeat of socialism and the triumph of liberal capitalism.
You guys do not have much in the way of a good reason to show why we should escape the environemental state. From what I can see you offer property rights, competitive markets and a spontaneous liberal order as a way to meet the ecological crisis (eg., the Murray-Darling Basin in Australia). Negatively, its cheapshots at knee jerk environmental populists.
Is not the newly forming environmental state fundamentally at odds with the ethos of egalitarian individualism?
Do you have a good reason to show why we should escape the environmental state as the new form of the iron cage of liberty?
Without a good reason it seems to me that you guys face political defeat.
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Well, I can't speak for the libertarians, but my I would first ask how you are going to 'entice' people to embrace the 'enviromental' state. I think that it's attractions to us 'common folk' are pretty minor when compared to the loss of jobs and livelihoods that it seems to entail.
As for 'iron cage of liberty' well, what can you say to that? Margo Kingston wanted to try and start the left/right dialogue afresh, but what can you say when 'liberty' is an iron cage?