Who is Stirling Newberry?
His insight brings me to new peaks of excitement:
No movement in the
history of mankind has produced more words for free than the
libertarian movement. And yet, its fundamental ideology is that people
do everything for money, that being how markets send signals about what
makes people happy – giving money to the people who do them. One could
understand communists or Christian missionaries – but free marketeers?
Either they must believe that there is so much prosperity waiting for
them on the other side of the revolution that years of unpaid labor is
worth it, or they don’t really believe what they say they believe.
For a clear argument, try this:
To generate a Reactionary movement, all one needed to do is create a
demon, a nomos and a boundary that separated the two. Rhetoric falls
out of this almost immediately, since it is all about either
emphasizing the evils of the demon, the self-justifying good of the
nomos, and the importance of having an absolute and simplistic boundary
between the two. This means that not even a speck of evil can be
tolerated, not a single example. It also means that whatever is inside
the tank, once all corrupting influences are removed, must be pure
good, and therefore even questioning it is evil.
The essential insanity of the last decade has been this – by creating a
vast dollar glut, the United States has managed to create an
inflationary rev up of the world economy. By moving much farther up the
curve of diminishing returns of oil production, it has manged to create
a small amount of extra growth, and a great deal of extra profit and
ownership for those involved in the oil production.
He blogs "economics" on TPM Cafe. You can peruse this post for more. He is also a composer. I thank an avid reader of Stirling for the pointer.
As Robin Ficker used to say: "Josh Marshall, telephone…!"
Addendum: Here is another dose of Stirling…