The Digger

Excerpt: By way of background, the main current of what is called “libertarianism” in the United States, and “liberalism” elsewhere, treats the Gilded Age as a satisfactory proxy for the “free market.” See, for example, Jacob Hornberger’s  characterization  of that period as a close approximation to laissez-faire because… well, read it for yourself: So, here you have, Richard, a society where there was no income tax, no welfare state to speak of. I mean, there was land grants to the railroads, but there was no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no education grants. I think the only real welfare program was pensions to Civil War veterans. And so here you had a society where government didn’t take care of anybody. No, the government didn’t take care of anybody — except the Robber Barons who got those land grants, whose extent was larger than entire European countries. And the plutocracy as a whole, who inherited the property distribution, wage system, and other ...

Setting capitalism aside, the outrage with right-libertarian economic dogma on the "left" is well deserved and justified. What has been persistently missing and not appreciated by this, for the most part, partisan "left"  is that, to a large extent, neoliberalism - the ideology of the "post ideological" duopoly - unlike right-libertarianism which rejects the agency of the state, has availed itself of all power vested in state institutions to reify an otherwise merely pernicious and mostly aspirational political-economic dementia while, simultaneously, catapulting the only redeeming right-libertarian anti-war and anti-imperialist conceit. IOW, neoliberalism represents the more effective and far greater evil of the two. ------------ "Last Friday, November 9, saw the big  “Milton Friedman Centennial” celebration  at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. It was a big day for fans of one of the Founding ...