Showing posts with label kevin carson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kevin carson. Show all posts

Thursday, August 19, 2010

weblog

Unpaving is Progressive - Kevin Carson @ The Center for a Stateless Society
"The system of subsidized infrastructure on which the car culture and the long-haul trucking industry depend is unsustainable. Absent intensive maintenance, asphalt highways deteriorate rapidly until axle-breaking potholes render them impassable to eighteen-wheelers. As state and local governments are plagued by increasingly severe fiscal crisis, as part of the death spasms of corporate capitalism, and Peak Oil drives up the price of asphalt for roads, governments will defer maintenance on more and more “secondary” roads, retreating and regrouping to a smaller and smaller core of highways that are maintained regularly enough to support heavy trucks."

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

weblog

Class warfare in explained in a paragraph - Center For A Stateless Society (Kevin Carson)
"Injustice is at the heart of our economic problems. By making capital and land artificially scarce and expensive, the state forces workers to sell their labor in a buyer’s market and thereby reduces the bargaining power of labor. The owners of land and capital are thereby enabled to collect scarcity rents."

Sunday, July 18, 2010

weblog

“Free Market Capitalism” is an Oxymoron - Kevin Carson (C4SS)
"The state played a central role in creating the defining characteristic of capitalism as we know it: the wage system. Had free markets been allowed to develop peacefully, with the peasant majorities remaining in control of their land and with free access to the means of subsistence, labor markets would likely have taken a much different form. Employers would have had to compete with the possibility of self-employment, available to the vast majority of the population. But thanks to Enclosures and similar land expropriations over a period of several centuries, the majority of the population was turned into a landless proletariat totally dependant on wage labor for its subsistence."
"First, he says, shrinking cities must accept that they're not going to regain their lost populations anytime soon. Abandoned houses and buildings should be leveled and replaced with parks, urban gardens, and green space. Eventually, incentives can be used to lure residents into higher density neighborhoods that have been reinvigorated with infill housing and rehab projects. While there are no hard numbers, local governments could save money by reducing infrastructure costs, and the housing market would stabilize, if not improve." Progress? Sounds more like triage.