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There’s a lesson there for the Tea Partiers who have been studying Alinsky’s tactics, should they care to explore the rest of his legacy. If they’re serious about building a real alternative to the Bush/Obama megastate, as opposed to merely being used by the Republicans and discarded as soon as the GOP is in a position to relaunch the K Street Project, the activists need to build countervailing power of their own, rooted not merely in talk radio and the Internet but in the indigenous institutions that shape people’s everyday lives. In some areas — bank bailouts, eminent domain, the crackdown on civil liberties, America’s imperial foreign policy — they might even reach across the invisible lines that separate their favorite segments of civil society from the churches and councils that mobilize people on the grassroots left, to work together on issues of shared concern even when they aren’t about to back the same candidates. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to cross a boundary …
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To print and read.
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from the comments:
Brook and Watkins: Home ownership subsidies are un-American and therefore bad.
Willkinson: Home ownership subsidies are extremely American, like a lot of non-libertarian things. But something can be American and yet stupid, and home ownership subsidies are stupid.
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I have been critical of Umair Haque in the past. (I think its mostly the tone … you cannot call your ideas a "consensus.") But I have no objections to individuals coming together to define new obligations in contractual form. But I think he possibly throws out the baby when he critiques 'too-strong' property rights. His new structure becomes questionable in that case. Although he is correct about government's interference (at the request of interested corporations) in lengthening IP rights.
I think he fundamentally understands that value is subjective and that he is proposing that ideas and people reform freely around new values. Bravo. But his approval of things like the Porter principle worry me: roadblocks may encourage innovation, but only in those areas where the roadblocks are up … its still a method to a government-selected industrial policy.
September 19, 2010
