Do read the whole thing, wouldja? Follow the links too.

Even back when I was only surface-level on libertarianism, the ways that people like Spangler & Kevin Carson had described a free-market was rather close to what I defined one as. The common assumption is that “capitalism” — as people refer to the free-market who haven’t climbed into the world of Libertarian Class Theory yet — inherently means an economy run entirely by walking corporate stereotypes as if the world has become the movie Wall Street. In reality, a free-market would be one that was legally neutral between different structures of market exchange — whether a completely worker-controlled syndicalist collective or a common business wouldn’t matter, may the best salesmen win.

At one time I had focused my reading on historical economics, analysis of markets before the modern political era. Everywhere there was a free-market, I noticed two things: the trappings of it looked virtually nothing like what the average person today thinks is a free-market, & many of the actors formed in a way that the uninformed would consider “socialist” nowadays. To say this differed from the picture portrayed in public schools to this day would be an understatement.

I used to constantly argue with leftists that under the political order that I advocated they’d be free to organize however the hell they wanted. Now I realize why they argued otherwise: neither one of us at the time knew who we were really dealing with. In the long run, within the sphere of a Rothbardian lasseiz-faire setup, libertarians & anti-state socialists would have no further reason to argue with each other, as the tools to violate either of us wouldn’t be available.

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