Regular commenter quasibill, on the LeftLibertarian2 list, linked to an excellent article on Federal Reserve policy and inflation.  Here’s the money quote (no pun intended):

A popular misconception is that inflation cannot occur in an economy without wage inflation to transmit prices into all-goods prices. Indeed the Fed has waged war on wages since the early 1980s so this point of confusion is understandable…. But wage inflation is but one of a long list of factors that can create an inflation spiral.

Labor discipline, in fact, has been a central objective of Federal Reserve policy since Volcker’s recession in the early ’80s.

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Economics, John McCain says, is “not his strong suit.” So it’s nice to know he’s being tutored on the subject by one of the best. His new economic adviser, Carly Fiorina, is the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

During her stint in that company, she was a classic textbook case of MBA Disease: stripping assets, gutting human capital, downsizing, piling work on the survivors–and getting a big, fat pay package for herself.

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Libertarians and liberals probably aren’t going to persuade each other on their basic philosophical starting assumptions. Libertarians aren’t going to convert liberals to the non-aggression principle, and liberals aren’t going to convince libertarians that government intervention is ever desirable.

But we don’t have to agree on fundamental principles to cooperate in the areas where we agree. All our disagreements, as many as they are, leave a lot of room for common ground on areas where both sides agree that more liberty is desirable.

And in establishing this common ground, both sides may be a partial corrective to each other’s shortcomings.

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In the comments to Angelica’s post “Fannie’s Follies, Freddie’s Foibles,” an interesting discussion developed in the comment thread about the order in which to scale back the different forms of state intervention. We also discussed the possibility that particular regulations, even though nominally a form of state intervention, might not actually be a net increase in statism; they might be, rather, a case of the state limiting its own previous grant of special privilege, and amount substantively to a reduction in statism. In such cases, nominal deregulation may actually result in a net increase in statism. In “Public vs. Private Sector,” I discussed the class nature of the state and the meaninglessness in many cases of the distinction between nominally “public” and “private” organizations.

Both of these issues involve what Chris Sciabarra, in his brilliant book Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, called… well, “dialectical libertarianism.”

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This post starts where the first half left off: with Rothbard’s disillusion with (and abandonment of) his New Left alliance. Now I want to look at some of the people who continued the left-Rothbardian tradition.

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The conventional model of “objectivity” in professional journalism (otherwise known as “he said, she said” and “stenography”), as it’s practiced today in the dead tree media, goes back to Walter Lippmann.

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In “Libertarianism: What’s Going Right,” I mentioned Left-Rothbardianism as one possible basis for finding areas of agreement between market libertarians and the Left. I’d like to go into that in more depth now.

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I’ve appreciated very much the readers who’ve come here from Mutualist Blog, and I believe we’ve had some very productive discussions.  But there’s something I feel I have to say, as awkward as it is.

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Obama really knows how to harsh a guy’s buzz.

A while back, I expressed the hope that he was to some extent a departure from establishment liberalism.  Establishment liberalism, I had previously argued, was the ideology of the professional and managerial New Middle Class, which managed the new large organizations that had sprung up in the corporate economy of the late nineteenth century, and wanted to manage society as a whole the same way they managed their corporations.  It was exemplified by Herbert Croly who, in The Promise of American Life, called for the achievement of “Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.”

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I recently reread The Revolt of the Elites, by Christopher Lasch–one of my favorite writers. One of the most important themes in the book is his contrast of the Jeffersonian democratic ideal to the meritocratic ideal that replaced it.

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The distinction between the state, or “public” sector, and the “private” sector economy, is universal in commentary and policy analysis. But in the case of the corporate economy, it’s almost meaningless. First of all, the large corporation cannot be called “private property” in any meaningful sense. And second, the relationship between the corporate economy and the state resembles nothing so much as an interlocking directorate.

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When it comes to the “outrageous” remarks of the week, it usually takes me a while to get a handle on what all the fuss is about. (Update–the best commentary I’ve yet seen on the media reaction comes from Matt Taibbi.)  When the commentariat had their knickers in a twist back in the ’90s over Wayne LaPierre’s statements on guns and government tyranny, my reaction was, “Yeah, so?” It seemed pretty tame (not to mention self-evident) to me. And now, listening to Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” sermon, my reaction is pretty much the same: “Yeah, so?”

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The kind of thinking Jim Henley did in the period before the Iraq war, which he recounted in the excellent piece linked by Mona, is one reason why I find the Republicans’ “But everyone believed the case for war at the time!” defenses so lame. (Not to mention Hillary’s lame “But everyone believed it!” justification for accepting Bush’s case for war.)

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In “Libertarianism and Liberalism: What Went Wrong,” I gave my opinion of what was wrong with both mainstream libertarianism and mainstream liberalism (”wrong” in the sense to presenting an obstacle to an anti-authoritarian coalition of liberals and libertarians). In my last post, “Liberalism: What’s Going Right,” I discussed some reasons for hope within movement liberalism: some individuals who show signs of thinking outside the box when it comes to abandoning the worst features of the liberal establishment and finding common ground with free market libertarians. Now I’d like to do the same thing on the libertarian side.

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In “Libertarianism and Liberalism: What Went Wrong,” I tried to describe some of the features of conventional libertarianism and conventional liberalism that inhibit an anti-authoritarian coalition between them. In this post, I’d like to mention some promising trends within liberalism that offer hope for common ground with libertarians.

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Angelica already beat me to the scoop with the California homeschooling story. One thing I thought especially interesting about it was the judge’s own rationale, based on his understanding of the central purpose of public education. (more…)

Since the general theme of this blog is an anti-authoritarian entente–or even coalition–of diverse liberal and libertarian elements, one question that comes to mind is: “What are the most objectionable features of both establishment libertarianism, and establishment liberalism, from the standpoint of achieving such a coalition?”

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The economic effects of licensing and certification regimes have been the subject of a couple of recent posts by Angelica, and of extensive discussion in the comments: “Call Me Street Food Libertarian” and “The Rats of El Toro.”

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Go to the average mainstream libertarian venue on any given day, and you’re likely to see elaborate apologetics for corporate globalization, Wal-Mart, offshoring, Nike’s sweatshops, rising CO2 levels, income inequality and wealth concentration, CEO salaries, Big Pharma’s profits, and Microsoft’s market share, all based on the principles of “the free market”–coupled with strenuous denials of all of the perceived evils of corporate power because (as Henry Hazlitt explained at some place or other in Economics in One Lesson) the principles of the “free market” won’t allow it.

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My name is Kevin Carson.  I’ve been invited to blog here, and I look forward to it, because I’ve been a regular reader of both Battlepanda and Unqualified Offerings for some time.   One of my earliest contacts with Angelica was this post of hers:  “Two Flavors of Libertarianism.”  If you look in the comment thread, just about everybody in the left-libertarian blogosphere stopped by at some point.

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