Random musings from other blogs

I've been busy this past week with some changes to my schedule and whatnot, which is why I haven't been blogging. I've also written a column about that atrocious Supreme Court ruling regarding eminent domain that'll be published at Ebong.org in the near future. It's the first installment of what'll be a somewhat regular series of rants over there about politics and current events by yours truly.

I don't really have much to blog about at the moment, so I'll just provide some insightful quotes from other blogs that I've been reading the past couple of days.

This first one goes out to all the people who get on my nerves by claiming that we live in a free market society. From Kevin Carson::

But we don't live in a free market. We live in a state capitalist economy where the state has cartelized most industries: by anti-competitive regulations; by subsidies to operating costs that render corporations artificially profitable at sizes far above maximum economy of scale; and by subsidies to capital- and skill- and R&D-intensiveness that artificially increase the minimum feasible size and otherwise raise entry barriers. We live in an economy, in short, where the average corporation has all the internal inefficiencies and irrationalities of a planned economy--but is able to survive because the taxpayers foot the bill for so many of the diseconomies of scale.

There has been a lot of discussion lately in the blogosphere about revitalizing libertarian engagement with the left along with posts concerning the history of the Movement of the Libertarian Left. Here is a bit of what Wally Conger had to say in one of his many recent posts on the subjects at hand:

As Knapp says, principled libertarians now stand at a crossroads. Both the Cato Institute and the so-called “Libertarian” Party and its “New Libertarian” faction, all front groups for the warmongering right-wing, have hammered a wedge into the libertarian movement. There is no better time than now for a libertarian rapprochement with not the “leftists” of the Democratic Party but the vital, rebellious, antiwar, anti-state Left of CounterPunch and other radical journals. We have a lot to talk about, and I look forward to the dialogue.

Plenty of good historical analyses have popped up in the past few days. One of them comes from BK Marcus and is called We're all Bismarckians Now. It deals with the rise of the welfare/warfare state and the differences between left-wing and right-wing socialism, including a brief discussion of fascism.

Another interesting historical post comes from a new blog hosted by Shawn P. Wilber called In the Libertarian Labyrinth. In the post titled Confessions of a latter day mutualist, he comes to terms with the mutualist label by means of discussing the various factions within the early socialist/anarchist movement, more specifically the First International.

Finally, while my thoughts about the recent Supreme Court ruling are not online yet, here are a couple of good blog entries from others on the subject:
From Thomas Knapp:
Well, that about wraps it up for property rights
From Blaggle (link via Karmalised): Home is Where the Home Depot Is.