I don't think it's the same person.

I don't know, I don't read the New York Times.

It's strange, Ayn Rand seems to be a household name in the USA. In the academic literature, she is hardly influential at all. As is often the way. I had been studying libertarianism for a long time before I had even heard of her. Robert Nozick is of course a milestone, but I would recommend Murray Rothbard and David Friedman as an entry point. Rothbard's 'The Ethics of Liberty' and Friedman's 'The Machinery of Freedom' are both very good, and all a lot more profound than Rand.

Of that, I have no doubt. May I ask which right-libertarians you have read?

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I'm not being a bitch about anything. I'm just pointing out that for me to say 'Socialism is morally bankrupt' is the easy part. Justifying it is the hard part. Isn't that what this place is for?

Well, 'morally bankrupt' is quite a serious charge if you don't have anything with which to back it up. 'I wrote a book but then deleted it' isn't too impressive, you understand.

Great, can I see the book?

Where have you outlined your views?

Wow. Talk about pulling a Chomsky.

Understandable. Coercion always looks attractive when the 'good guys' are doing the coercing. The problem is that coercion is always a predatory activity, which improves the situation of one party only at the expensive of another. It follows that a State, which is by its very nature an agency of coercion, can never 'represent' the people simpliciter but will always be wielded as a weapon by some against others.

Anti-Statist and indifferent about it.

Haha, fair enough.

You sound like you'd be fun to debate.

May I ask (as a non-logician and a non-native speaker of English) why this does not commit the existential fallacy? I agree that A, B and D do not follow. But I do not see how C follows, either.

As I understand it, the existential fallacy is where a proposition with existential import is inferred illegitimately from a proposition with no existential import, e.g.

'All unicorns are horned'
Therefore
'Some unicorns are horned'

Where 'Some unicorns are horned' is roughly equivalent to 'There exists at least one x, such that x is a unicorn and x is horned'. The problem is that 'All unicorns are horned' does not have any existential import. It simply states that, if there is an x such that x is a unicorn, then x is horned. But there is no commitment to the truth of the antecedent. So we do not have license to infer that there really are any unicorns.

Now, if I understand your explanation, you take P2 to be the negation of P1'. That is, you take 'All people are dinosaurs', when negated, to produce 'There exists an x, such that x is a person and x is not a dinosaur'. From this, you take it that C follows.

I see that C does indeed follow from P2, but I do not see P2 as being the negation of P1'. The reason being that P1' does not seem to me to have any existential import, where P2 assuredly does. The negation should surely be 'It is not the case that all people are dinosaurs'. But, since this does not have any existential import, C would not follow.

Thoughts?

No, I think I am making largely the same critique of both, but the problem is more pronounced with Chomsky. The writings of many of Chomsky's syndicalist heroes, like Rocker and Proudhon, have not aged terribly well, and so making uncritical appeal to them, as Chomsky seems to do, is not all that impressive. It would be a worthy use of time and ink, it seems to me, for Chomsky to bring these ideas up to date, and to present them clearly in his own modern treatise, and it is disappointing that he has not done this over the span of his extremely long career.

Of course, it is not a trivial undertaking if he is right, but whether he is right remains to be seen. It's not unreasonable to hold him to the same standard as many of the political philosophers he critiques, given that he himself has a political philosophy, even if he does not articulate it or seek to justify it in the same systematic way. Maybe it is a matter of starting point. I imagine that, if you are already in Chomsky's camp going in, you will find his critiques impressive, whereas if you are not, you will find them rather empty as I do.



I think you might have misunderstood me. I have not said that you should not critique the status quo unless you have an alternative solution. Chomsky has an alternative: anarcho-syndicalism. What I have said is that levelling a barrage of critiques against the status quo presupposes a political philosophy, but Chomsky has not laid down or argued for that philosophy in a way that aims to convince someone who might disagree with, or simply be ignorant of, his first principles. The result is that, in my view, Chomsky does an awful lot of preaching to the converted. This is unfortunate since, among anarcho-syndicalism's rivals, especially on the right, there are such clear systematic works of political philosophy.

I don't know, it seems a little cheap to me. Critiquing the status quo - even voluminously or insightfully - is a relatively trivial undertaking. Justifying the principles by which one does so in the battle of ideas, where one has so many competitors, is more ambitious. Until he does so, he is leaving the substance of his philosophical system open to the reconstruction of an interpreter, and Chomsky's inner consistency, and even his first principles, are still very much in question. Simply, it is just not at all clear that Chomsky is right.

Take his critique of modern right-libertariansm. He asserts confidently that it is really no such thing; not really 'libertarian' at all, because it actually endorses coercive institutions. Now, a claim like this is far easier to assert than to justify. Even if it is true, it is not obviously true, and even if it is obvious to some, it is not obvious to me. As with his hero Rocker before him, these things are simply stipulated. Hearing him critique Nozock's 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia', a work of extraordinary breadth and ambition (even if misguided in places), makes me want to see if Chomsky can respond in kind, which he has not done.