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Title: Sympathy for the Devil Author: Kevin Carson Date: December 22, 2005 Language: en Topics: right libertarianism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/sympathy-for-devil.html
In the comments on “WTFWWTOD?” an interesting discussion sprung up over
which think tanks and publications were most prone to vulgar
libertarianism. The emerging consensus seems to be that most are a
mixture of good and bad. But Mises.Org, for some reason, is a place of
extremes, combining the best of the best with the most vulgar of the
vulgar. As an example of the latter, Joel Schlosberg links to an
especially awful piece, “In Defense of Scrooge,” which seems to
resurface around Christmas every year at Lew Rockwell or Mises.Org. Now
you might wonder why, of all people, Levin picked Scrooge to defend. Oh,
wait, I know--because he’s rich! And as we all know, “free market
principles” mean defending big business and the rich. Geez, I wonder why
so many liberal Democrats instinctively reject libertarians as “greedy
Republicans” in sheep’s clothing, and why we have so much trouble
promoting libertarian ideas in their venues. The answer, Mr. Levin, is
in the mirror.
Levin’s article includes this gem:
So let’s look without preconceptions at Scrooge’s allegedly underpaid
clerk, Bob Cratchit. The fact is, if Cratchit’s skills were worth more
to anyone than the fifteen shillings Scrooge pays him weekly, there
would be someone glad to offer it to him. Since no one has, and since
Cratchit’s profit-maximizing boss is hardly a man to pay for nothing,
Cratchit must be worth exactly his present wages.
Note the standard vulgar libertarian pose of defending existing wealth,
on the assumption that this is a free market. Now where have we seen
this before? “Wal-Mart can’t be exploiting workers or competing unfairly
against small retailers, because the way a free market works is blah
blah blah blah blah....”
Now, mind, Dickens’ setting is an England where the Combination Laws and
Laws of Settlement are still fairly recent, and large-scale waves of
enclosures are still a living memory for many. In the previous two
centuries, a majority of English peasants had been robbed of copyholds,
commons rights, and other customary forms of tenure, and transformed (by
state violence in collusion with the owning classes) into a propertyless
proletariat. Any worker in an overpopulated parish of London who
attempted to vote with his feet and seek work in the underpopulated
industrial districts of the north, without permission, was a criminal
under the terms of the internal passport system known as the Laws of
Settlement. But voluntary movement being prohibited, the parish Poor Law
overseers were more than happy to auction off denizens of the
poorhouses, by the gross, to factory owners in said underpopulated
industrial districts. Voluntary association to bargain for higher wages,
likewise, was criminalized by the Combination Law--enforced, not by
juries, but by administrative law with none of the customary common law
protections for the defendant.
To summarize: the vast majority of English had been robbed of their
property, society forcibly reconstructed from above, and the working
majority put under totalitarian social controls by a plutocratic
government, exactly as an occupying power would have done to a conquered
population--all in order that they might be more easily exploited by the
rich. The situation of the English working class during the Industrial
Revolution, in other words, was slavery.
What next--a “free market” defense of wage rates in the Warsaw Ghetto?