I read this yesterday and almost fell off my chair laughing.
As ever, George Monbiot remains totally clueless about the ideas, motivations and complexities of the free market movement. Not knowing his David from his Milton Friedman he has clearly never read Mises, Rothbard or Hoppe. He wouldn’t know his Socialist Calculation Debate from his Bastiat. Nor would he know what to make of a Kevin Carson or writers such as Frank van Dunn; free marketeers who are more consistently opposed to the corporatism and underpinning architecture of big business than even your most rampant anti-capitalist.
The older I get the more I realise that people such as Monbiot are actually simple and essentially poorly read characters. They probably consider themselves to be informed and insightful but in reality they are intellectual babes in the wood. That is why they comfort themselves by defaulting to simplistic tales of big business, self-serving interest and billionaire plots. As with many Conservatives looking at the left, they see opponents as an amorphous mass devoid of understanding. Crucially, such thinkers avoid the real meat of the story and in military terms they make the ultimate mistake. Time and again they demonstrate that they simply don’t know what many of their perceived enemies actually believe. And as such, they fail to engage with a more exciting but challenging reality.
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