[ExI] Serfdom and libertarian critiques (Was: Call to Libertarians)

[F. C. Moulton]

J. Stanton wrote:
>
> My critique rests on the blindness of the Libertarian Party (and
> libertarians) towards banks and corporations. Both are
> government-granted exceptions to the rules of liability for one's
> actions and debts ('limited liability') and monetary exchange
> ('fractional reserve banking', i.e. the ability to create money from
> thin air by issuing debt) -- and both produce the inevitable result
> that institutions granted such exceptional powers control the world
> economy.
>
I am somewhat baffled by your comments because your comments ignore
reality.  Libertarians have long complained about government privileged
banking.  And obviously all anarchists by definition are opposed to
government granted privilege in commerce or any other area.  Plus
economists discuss free banking and it is easy to find.  Since I have
been providing so many text links here are some video links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P7W1G1hbiQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PyS2NtW3xA
I have not reviewed either of these but I wanted to provide some
non-text sources so I easily found these online.  I have read some of
the texts by White and found them interesting. 

> If libertarians genuinely believed what they said, the first plank on
> every libertarian's political platform would be "abolish corporations
> and banks".
>

I disagree.  As much as I oppose the current government role in banking
I strongly feel that if there is going to be a libertarian political
plank at least in the context of the USA the first plank should be to
stop the War on Drugs.  The War on Drugs has in my opinion done much
more harm.  The harm the War on Drugs has done in poor and minority
areas is terrible and we are seeing this harm in much of the violence in
Mexico. 

> Yet the LPUSA, and every libertarian I've personally met, remains
> blind to this yawning contradiction.  
As for the LPUSA  in my message of Feb 18 I warned against using LPUSA
as any source of libertarian info.  I am assuming the reason that you
are still bring the LPUSA up is that there was a delivery glitch and
that message has not arrived in you inbox yet since I am sure that
everyone on this list reads every word I write; even when I attempting a
small bit of humor.  And as for your comment about every libertarian
being blind to the situation well I suppose it is possible that you are
meeting people who call themselves libertarian but have no idea of the
history and philosophy of the libertarian movement.  But if that is the
case then it has nothing to do with our discussion of libertarian
philosophy unless of course we want to have a long digression on how
people self identify with terms about which they are clueless.

> Therefore I discard modern libertarianism as self-contradictory,
> irrelevant, and inevitably producing the same corporate/banking
> hegemony as any other statist philosophy.

You can discard whatever you want however I suggest that you do a bit of
research so that know about the issues first so that you do not mislabel
what you are discarding.


>
> JS
> http://www.gnolls.org
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