My name is Gardner Waldeier and I am a jack of all trades from Maine. My purpose for setting up this blog is to look at how various topics - political, economic, ecological, etc. - relate the to libertarian/anarcho-capitalist Austrian School of Economics that I find so appealing.
Personal liberty, private property rights, and a non-interventionist foreign policy are the foundations of this school of economic thought; through this blog, my hope is to get more and more people interested in questioning their beliefs on these sometimes radical subjects.
My obsession with wild animals, nature, evolution and invasive species in particular when I was younger, led me to notice the parallels between the spontaneous order that takes place in nature and the way free markets work.
Thanks for reading. I hope to keep you engaged and strongly encourage any and all comments.
Gardner
Hey G-Force, Nice blog, you call yourself a jack of all trades, I call you a well rounded human being. To paraquote(!?) someone " specialization is for insects" Tom B
ReplyDeleteHey man,
ReplyDeletecan you do a post more about the economics (tax free stuff, money based on metal reserves...). I don't know much about that stuff and want to read your perspective.
I would be wary of nature metaphors. Naturalizing your perspective is a very powerful way to silence your opponents by putting your desired outcome beyond the realm of human action and decision-making, but it doesn't actually make your perspective true. Markets (free or unfree), are fundamentally human creations. If markets are highly regulated it is because we (humans) chose to regulate them. If they are relatively free, it is because we went through all of the negotiations and (yes) created all of the regulations necessary to make them that way. Appeals to some "natural balance" is a very powerful discursive technique, but don't be deceived into thinking that it is anything more than that. People have used nature metaphors to claim all sorts of things. Social darwinists used it, but so did the anarchist Peter Kropotkin in making the exact opposite point. I think that as a general rule we should automatically become highly skeptical the moment that someone claims their perspective to be validated by nature.
ReplyDeleteMadeleine,
ReplyDeleteI find the correlation between the two(spontaneous order in nature as well markets) interesting, compelling, and obvious, but that does not mean that my arguments for the benefits of free markets, private property rights and anti-war foreign policy are based solely on this connection. In fact, it was well after I started reading the works of Ron Paul, Hans Herman Hoppe, and most importantly Murry N. Rothbard, and really started understanding the concepts of the Austrian School of economics, that I began to perceive parallel. So I think you need not be highly skeptical of everything I say regarding politics and monies simply because I am interested in both these topics.
To your point about markets being human creations being regulated because we(humans) choose to regulate them. Did you(human) choose to drop an atomic bomb on two cities in Japan populated by civilians? Do you really think that we as a species make perfect decisions as an entire population? 7 billion people!! Is it not possible that big choices that effect millions of people are sometimes made for dubious reasons by a very small, very powerful minority?