The Myth of Libertarian Exit

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/the-myth-of-libertarian-exit/

by dools • 4 years ago

5 1 4 years ago

BMc2020• 4 years ago

The reviews of the book are more interesting than the author interview:

“The libertarian quest for ‘land no one is using’ inevitably finds ‘land that is used by all,’ and the ugly conflation of the two sends the champions of personal liberty in search of guns, indentured servants, and death squads.” —Cory Doctorow

If you don't care for Libertarian ideas before you read this book, you will surely despise them by the end, while gaining a better grasp of the fundamental misanthropy that animates the right wing of the capitalist class.” —Richard Walker, author of Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area

Yet, as Raymond Craib shows in this highly informative and entertaining work, it is far from glorious when the driving force is a narrow-minded concept of individual liberty rather than the well-being of the people. The ‘exit strategies’ collected here are equally fascinating and frightening. They also help us understand how free-market secessionists and gung-ho libertarians are only the most extreme expressions of neoliberal hegemony.” —Gabriel Kuhn, author of Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy

...keep the reader grounded even as the crackpot protagonists drift away into fantasy. Their anti-statist, anti-social, anti-ecological quest for ‘exit’ mirrors the logic of cancer or mental illness. Their experiments grow only to die. In these tales of delusion, we see a truly despicable cast of class elites and free market fanatics attempt to live the logic of value in motion: all barriers—physical, political, and social—must give way. And when they do, failure awaits. —Christian Parenti, Professor of Economics, John Jay College, CUNY; author of Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder

The Myth of Libertarian Exit

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