Libertarianism 7. Kevin A Carson

The most interesting development in recent years in Libertarian circles has been the ideas of Kevin A Carson, who has taken standard theories of the state and applied it to modern day corporations demonstrating that these modern day corporations operate with much of the inefficiencies of states, the reason why they are so dominant in our present society is that they are given massive privileges by the state through limited liability laws, transport subsidies, artificial property rights like intellectual property and using government regulations to raise entry barriers creating in effect credit and land monopolies.

Such laws result in an economy dominated by a cartel of a few large corporations, which due to the absence of genuine competition that would exist in a free market can and do abuse their monopoly position to engage in exploitative practices such as raising prices above the cost of production to the ability of consumers to pay (Drug Companies are notorious for this) and strengthening the bargaining position of employers relative to labour.

The result has been an economy where despite massive increases in labour productivity in the last 30 years the standard of living of the working population has remained stagnant or in some cases gotten a lot worse. The productivity increase has been entirely aborbed by the richest 1% of the population, who have obtained it via exploitative practices.

Having highlighted this Kevin Carson argues that in a political economy dominated not by free market exchange but power, unionism of the labour force and the welfare state must be seen as positive fight back by labour in order to recover their slice of the pie that has been stolen from them by the corporate cartels. Ultimately, however, Kevin Carson argues the ideal solution lies in the abolition of power relations by taking away the state privileges the corporate cartels hold and returning to a genuine free market, where labour enjoys the full fruits of its productivity.

The sort of society that would emerge from the abolition of corporate privilege would be an economy that would be vastly decentralised in which the majority of the population would be self-employed or be part of worker cooperatives and where production was geared to serve local markets. Without the inefficiencies and exploitation of corporate cartels today's standard of living could be achieved by working only 20 hours a week.

The NLF finds only a few faults with Mr Carson's work, firstly Mr Carson is an anarchist, secondly nowhere in his work can be found of the exploitative practices of mass immigration and thirdly the NLF is skeptical of the claims of peak oil. Otherwise the NLF is in substantive agreement with Mr Carson on the matters of political economy, it is a theory that validates standard nationalist critiques of globalisation and the supposedly 'free market', yet shows how nationalistic ideals can be created through the genuinely free market.