{"id":31716,"date":"2015-06-21T03:00:29","date_gmt":"2015-06-21T07:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31716"},"modified":"2017-09-25T21:37:23","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T01:37:23","slug":"why-libertarianism-is-closer-to-stalinism-than-you-think-unless-you-actually-know-anything-about-libertarianism-of-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/06\/21\/why-libertarianism-is-closer-to-stalinism-than-you-think-unless-you-actually-know-anything-about-libertarianism-of-course\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Why libertarianism is closer to Stalinism than you think&#8221; &#8230; unless you actually know anything about libertarianism, of course"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Alan Wolfe, I&#8217;m reliably informed, is a highly respected sociologist and political scientist at Boston College. If this kind of thing is typical of his output, <a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/17\/why-libertarianism-is-closer-to-stalinis?utm_source=feedburner&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reason%2FHitandRun+%28Reason+Online+-+Hit+%26+Run+Blog%29\" target=\"_blank\">I&#8217;m inclined to doubt my sources<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Libertarianism has a complicated history, and it is by and large a sordid one,&#8221; charges Wolfe. It is &#8220;a secular substitute for religion, complete with its own conception of the city of God, a utopia of pure laissez-faire and the city of man, a place where envy and short-sightedness hinder creative geniuses from carrying out their visions.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d call him the Hitler of Hyperbole, but that seems, I don&#8217;t know, a tad over the top. Sort of like equating a live-and-let-live philosophy such as libertarianism to Stalinism. Which I confess it totally is. Except for the gulags, the mass murders, the forced relocations, the belief in statism, a demonstrably insane economic policy \u2014 I&#8217;m probably forgetting one or two other points of similarity.<\/p>\n<p>Predictably, Wolfe disinters the corpse of Ayn Rand and insists not only was the <em>Atlas Shrugged<\/em> author &#8220;an authoritarian at heart&#8221; but that she remains the beating heart of an intellectual, philosophical, and cultural movement that includes a fistful of Nobel Prize winners (Friedman, Buchanan, Smith, Hayek, Vargas Llosa, etc.); thinkers such as Robert Nozick and Camille Paglia; businessmen such as Whole Foods&#8217; John Mackey, Amazon&#8217;s Jeff Bezos, Overstock&#8217;s Patrick Byrne; and creative types ranging from Rose Wilder Lane to the creators of <em>South Park<\/em> to Vince Vaughn. Sound the alarum, folks! <em>Team America: World Police<\/em> and <em>Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story<\/em> are running on Comedy Central again! <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alan Wolfe, I&#8217;m reliably informed, is a highly respected sociologist and political scientist at Boston College. If this kind of thing is typical of his output, I&#8217;m inclined to doubt my sources: &#8220;Libertarianism has a complicated history, and it is by and large a sordid one,&#8221; charges Wolfe. It is &#8220;a secular substitute for religion, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,53],"tags":[67,550,332,1165],"class_list":["post-31716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-politics","tag-aynrand","tag-libertarianism","tag-nobelprize","tag-stalin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8fy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31717,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31716\/revisions\/31717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}