Grey wrote on Nov 3
rd, 2013 at 6:58pm:
Beware the Free Market
Quote:The philosopher Hegel, Edmund Burke's contemporary, saw precisely this. He, too, was a witness of the birth of the new middle-class order in France; and he, too, spotted something terrifying at its heart. The name he gave to this terror was absolute freedom - or, as he scathingly called it, 'the freedom of the void'. Bourgeois society dreamed of a freedom so pure and absolute that it could tolerate no boundaries or restrictions. And this, in a creaturely, constricted world, was bound to present itself as a form of terror. In the end, this pure freedom even became an obstacle to itself, and thus ended up devouring itself, like the Jacobin Terror. Eventually it was the revolutionaries themselves who filled the carts trundling their way up to the guillotine.
Absolute freedom eats itself up. Yet its violence, today as in Hegel's time, continues to infiltrate the daily life of capitalist societies. Absolute freedom means negative freedom: a freedom from all restraint, which can see limits only as barriers to humanity, not as constitutive of it. The world is imperilled not by hard-nosed cynics who insist that nothing is possible, but by wide-eyed, 'can-do' idealists for whom anything is possible. Most of these are known as Americans. When the ancient Greeks encountered this kind of blasphemous overreaching, they called it 'hubris' and looked fearfully to the skies. And it is from the skies that it has had its tragic come-uppance.
Socialism is not about reaching for the stars, but reminding us of our frailty and mortality, and so of our need for one another. In contrast, absolute freedom regards the world as just so much pliable stuff to be manipulated in whatever way takes its fancy.
The fear of freedom, the easiest way to keep the cows in the fence on their way to the abattoir, is to convince them there are wolves hiding in the forest instead of freedom from whence they came.
I don't like the way the section you quoted equates freedom from state coercion as "freedom from all restraint", I can't stand when socialists talk with such absolutism about something that is far from black and white. We put constraints on each other and ourselves through universal moral truths. You don't need regulation to tell people not to jump the queue, we know it's wrong and if you jump the queue you can be ostracized and they can refuse to serve you.
When criticizing freedom, why do people ignore incentives, why do people ignore morality, why do people think peace and order can only be kept with a central monopoly of violent coercion holding a gun to everyone's head telling them to do what the gunman says they should do?
You're an Anarchist Grey, how do you intend to keep people from participating in free market capitalism? Or are people free to do so? I always worry about the Anarchist transition method in respect to property, how well they intend to respect the opinion of others.