My Mother Is A Fish

Freedom Is Not "Public Policy" - Mises Institute: "If what you desire is true free-market reform, don’t call it privatization. We need to stop the present racket. Under real market reforms, no one would be looted and no one would be guaranteed anything. The slogan should be: stop the theft. In Poland, large factories shouldn't have been 'privatized.' The state should have just walked away from them, selling the assets to the highest bidder, or turning them over to the workers and managers, and permitting the new owners to do with them whatever they want."

Aside from the error of considering it legitimate for the state to sell assets to the highest bidder--that is, to the most politically connected segment of the private sector--rather than to simply abandon the assets to those who legimitately control them already, Rockwell makes an interesting thesis, in arguing for freedom as a radical alternative to an array of state-policy options. Freedom is not a way to empower the nominally 'private' sector over the nominally 'public' sector, nor a way to empower the state, but rather the bowing out of the state from the affairs of rightful owners.

It is , perhaps, like if someone were to argue that rape should be confined to the household rather than to the public sphere of streets and alleyways, as a strategy for making patriarchy more viable, and to call this freedom; then, to witness the same institutions of families as they exist under the status quo ante, the observer will despair at the privatization of rape and perhaps prefer the old way..... Perhaps the analogy fails, I don't know. At any rate, with Rockwell I agree: "It [the consideration of freedom as a public policy] further implies that the purpose of freedom, private ownership, and market incentives is the superior management of society, that is, to allow the current regime to operate more efficiently."

Still--and maybe I fail to take Rockwell to heart sufficiently--maybe I don't agree. (Haha.) Not with the title, that is. Freedom is not a /state/ policy, I couldn't agree with his analysis more. But there is a politics beyond the state, as I've learned from Long and Johnson in their essay on Libertarian Feminism, and accordingly, a public policy beyond the state. Strikes, boycotts, protests--and perhaps: freedom itself--is, after all, public policy of a kind that may be entirely respectable.

Accordingly, privatization may be considered a dirty word for reasons beyond what Rockwell writes. Not simply is it true that privatization implies a mere change of ownership rather than of principles of governance, but, furthermore, there is nothing particularly private about true freedom. True renunciation of state control (or: freedom) means both private and public control. To hazard myself in a return to the analogy with patriarchy, true freedom--or whatever the word is for a broader meaning of renunciation of male dominance than simply renunciation of abuse and rape--means that men and women control their own bodies in privacy, but also that they may appeal to agencies outside themselves and the market in pursuit of public appreciation of and rectification of injustice, such as shelters.

So, in conclusion, let freedom be considered a radical alternative to state policy, but let us remember that it encompasses both public and private domains, nonetheless.

(Bah, my apologies to my reader for some humbug.)