“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, April 15, 2013

Libertarian Metaphysics of Presence

Courtesy of Paul Krugman. Awesome. Enjoy it: 

"Goldbugs and bitbugs alike seem to long for a pristine monetary standard, untouched by human frailty. But that’s an impossible dream. Money is, as Paul Samuelson once declared, a “social contrivance,” not something that stands outside society. Even when people relied on gold and silver coins, what made those coins useful wasn’t the precious metals they contained, it was the expectation that other people would accept them as payment."

The brilliant point is that despite their forward thrusting rhetoric, some libertarians of the right wing persuasion are actually freaked out by capitalism. Marx also couldn't get his head around the gold thing.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Gold is our very own hyperobject, no?

Unknown said...

Gold -- our very own hyperobject!