Letter in The Guardian On the 19th December 2011, George Monbiot published an attack on libertarianism in The Guardian News Paper - "This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression" This made a number of points that struck me as stupid as well as wrong. I sent in a quick letter of rebuttal, wondering if The Guardian people would publish it. I wondered this because my letter was longer than the guidelines suggested, and it was written in a tone that was unlikely to appeal either to Mr Monbiot or the public sector/BBC/socialist intellectual classes who form the entire readership of The Guardian. Credit where due, however. My letter was not only published, but published unedited. It even gives a link to our website. The Daily Telegraph never does that! So, with brief praise to The Guardian, for having confronted and challenged my prejudice against it, here is the letter: END OF COPY Note(s) to Editors His latest novel, The Churchill Memorandum , asks what England and the world have been like in 1959 if there had been no Second World War. If you like Bulldog Drummond and Biggles and the early James Bond, this will be right up your street. Or his book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, explains how its current ruling class has turned England into a totatlitarian police state, and how this ruling class can be overthrown and utterly destroyed. Or another of his books, Smoking, Class and the Legitimation of Power , explains how the current "war" on smoking has nothing to do with making individuals healthy, but everything to do with enhancing the power of a totalitarian ruling class, and enriching its relevant client groups. You can see other books by Sean Gabb here . The Libertarian AllianceMessage Body
Libertarian Alliance Letter in The Guardian
Wednesday the 21st December 2011
Contact: Dr Sean Gabb,
sean@libertarian.co.uk, 07956 472 199
Free yourselves from the lefty ghetto
Letter from Sean Gabb, Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Wednesday 21st December 2011
Dr Sean Gabb is the Director of the Libertarian Alliance. He is the author of over a dozen books and a million words of journalism. He can be contacted for further comment on 07956 472 199 or by email at sean@libertarian.co.uk
Extended Contact Details
The Libertarian Alliance is Britain's most radical free market and civil liberties policy institute. It has published over 800 articles, pamphlets and books in support of freedom and against statism in all its forms. These are freely available at http://www.libertarian.co.uk
Our postal address is
Suite 35
2 Lansdowne Row
Mayfair
London
W1J 6HL
Tel: 07956 472 199
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Lefties, as a rule, only read other lefties. This seems to be the case with George Monbiot. His attack on libertarianism (This bastardised libertarianism makes 'freedom' an instrument of oppression , 19 December) is the usual mix of unwillingness and inability to understand anything outside the intellectual ghettoes of the left.
He claims to have asked: "Do you accept that some people's freedoms intrude upon other people's freedoms?" – as if that were some knock-down refutation never made before. Of course we do. Our difference with him isn't that we are against courts and the other modes of dispute resolution. What we deny is that social peace requires an enlarged and omnicompetent state run by his friends.
He claims we "pretend … that only the state intrudes on our liberties. [We] ignore … the role of banks, corporations and the rich in making us less free." Not quite. We do believe that the state is the foremost violator of our right to life, liberty and property. But we also observe that banks are licensed and regulated creatures of the state, and that big business in general is only big because of state-granted privileges like limited liability, infrastructure subsidies, and tax and regulatory systems that cartellise costs and flatten competition from outside the magic circle. There is a difference between believing in free markets and supporting actually existing capitalism.
You could have published an attack on libertarianism that didn't border on misrepresentation. Or perhaps not. That would have meant exposing your readers to genuine libertarian positions. And that might, in a few cases, have opened the gates of their intellectual ghetto.
Posts
