And while we are on the topic of political labels that people like to throw around as insults (yes it was you Matthew Tempest!) and while this week I am totally trashing my rule about not blogging about blogging, I can’t avoid pointing out a brilliant piece from our genuinely libertarian friends at Samizdata.
Committed ideological libertarians, like committed Marxist-Leninists, know that everything, but everything, can be explained through the prism of their ideology. Now when I was a student and the liberatarians of the Federation of Conservative Students were at the peak of the Thatcherite Revolutionary tee-shirt madness, we commies used to have little jokes about how the FCS chaps would manage to explain everything, but everything, in relation to either a market stall or a corner shop.
So while we were demanding subsidised beer in the students union (served by unionised staff being paid a fair wage), they were insisting that the management of the bar given the autonomy to test prices in the market place – if the beer was too expensive, the customers will not come again and the bar staff will have to adjust their prices., they demanded.
But not even those retrospectively hilarious discussions can compete with Perry’s piece on Why Blogging is not democratic:
But you, the reader, do not get a vote on what get written in the articles on Samizdata.net. You may agree with what an article says or you may utterly disagree, but what gets written does not depend on how popular those sentiments are. We write what we want to write.
Where you do get to choose is whether or not you decide to come back and read us again. Much as in an open market, I might decide to try and sell my fruits and meats to those who pass by, yet I cannot force them actually purchase any of my goods if they do not wish to. They cannot stop me offering for sale those things I think makes economic sense but if I am wrong about what the market wants or if others make a better offer, then the passers by will choose to shop with someone else……
Can I enter the spirit of this debate for a moment? I consider this blog to be produced by vanguard elements, carefully selected on the basis of their steely and tried and trusted commitment to the movement. It is not a popular, broad, democratic organ, but rather concise propaganda aimed at the level of the advanced worker, that key strata from which the revolutionary cadre will be drawn. Those who read this blog and turn away to more popular sources are rejecting the objective reality that we scientifically present and are in fact suffering from false consciousness……………………
