Picked this up from Brandon’s twitter, I think. Benjamin Wallace-Wells reviews two fresh books on libertarianism and btw offers an account of the movement’s ups and downs.
The Long Afterlife of Libertarianism (The New Yorker)
His writing, which at points radiates a contained contempt, makes for an easy read:
Von Mises, among the crankiest of the originals, was once summoned to a small conference in Switzerland with a handful of libertarian grandees—the few other people on earth who actually agreed with him—and stormed out because they didn’t agree with him enough.
I also felt a throwback to an undergraduate course on European Political Economy (hey P.P!) and the dichotomy between “neoliberals” (Hayek) and “libertarians” (Nozick)":
[Rand, Rothbard and Nozick] had a different goal than Hayek and Friedman did: shrinking government not to advance economic efficiency but to protect the rights of property owners. This was a critical distinction—to see each economic question as a matter of fundamental rights obliterated the possibility of compromise.
If you fancy some encore, I discussed that conference (and another one, preceding it), here.
It turns out, “the familiar and specific dread that people experience when they get the inkling that they’re ‘being a sucker’” has a name: Sugrophobia.
Don’t let them fool you (Aeon)
This fear has been documented at the “micro” level (with experimental/ behavioral tests, like the Trust Game). The author, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, maintains further that:
In a Trust Game or out in the real world, the prospect of being a sucker warns people off. It cautions them not to share, not to cooperate, not to engage. In risky financial scenarios, the stakes are clear and they are on everyone’s mind, no matter how the situation is described. The fear of being a sucker is automatic. But sometimes, the ‘sucker’ framing is a rhetorical choice, a weaponisation of the sugrophobic tendency.
That is, it also scales to the “macro” level:
If members of a marginalised social group are seen as genuinely asking for equality, then they are making a deep moral claim that’s hard to dismiss. Morally and intuitively, the right response to inequality is solidarity and cooperation. But if those people are instead perceived as asking for ‘special favours’, then it seems morally optional to grant what they want. And if they are thought to be asking for special treatment but pretending they only want equality, that just seems like a scam, a reason to reject them out of hand.
Not a thorough explanation of discimination interplays, but definitely an interesting - and illuminating - angle.