Friday, May 11, 2007

Little Stuff

I spent some time thinking about politics, and there are only a couple of leetle things that keep me from being wholeheartedly libertarian.

The first, and likely foremost of those is this: if libertarians would abolish the personhood of corporations and require personal, individual responsibility for corporate acts, perhaps I'd be more of a libertarian.

You see, escaping from consequences by hiding behind a corporate shield is anathema to me. Corporations kill people with impunity. There's no death sentence for them, even when they act with malice.

There are enough little flaws in a libertarian system that I could write a book. Augh! Mimus! See what you've done?

[crosspost @ The Medley]

6 comments:

Karen McL said...

the Libertarian philosophy has a few other *teensy* problems too...I'd suggest taking it with a grain of salt or two!

Scorpio said...

Yah ... as I said, the little problems could fill a book.

Will Shetterly said...

Check Wikipedia--or any source you like--on "libertarian." It comes in many flavors. The capital-L Libertarian Party is only one--they're rightwing libertarians.

Scorpio said...

Sure. In most political quizzes I tend to be classed as "libertarian left", which can be loosely defined as someone who favors the maximum in personal liberty while supporting strict regulation and oversight of corporations.

That's me, all right.

BTW, thanks for stopping by. I like your writing.

:)

Anonymous said...

You must be getting your definition of "libertarianism" from the pseudo-libertarians in the Republican Liberty Caucus. So far as I've been aware, it's always been a tenet of genuine libertarianism that Corporations (creations of the State) be abolished.


Take a look at the Wikipedia articles on "Agorism" or "Anarcho-Capitalism"; they're closer to what I've always understood the word "libertarianism" to mean.

Anonymous said...

The number one problem with libertarianism as commonly understood is that libertarians think it's fine for some people to charge access to natural resources which they had no hand in producing.

See "Are you a real libertarian or a Royal libertarian?"

http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html