“Stockholm syndrome.” Ouch. If I’m not mistaken, the more erudite phrase you are looking here comes from Antonio Gramsci: cultural hegemony. It would be interesting if the Creative Commons and Open Source people were to get serious about advancing their position in the cultural mass media but it’s all pretty pointless unless it goes to preparing the field for [hmmm, what’s the euphemism I’m looking for…] vigorously assertive reformation.

As an aside, do you suppose you could provide a proper definition for that phrase you used, “running with the hares and coursing with the hounds”?

Also: “we have our own automechanical hang-ups”—that’s one heckuva Scunthorpe problem, dude! Do you not have a whitelist back there?

150 years of libertarian

Ah, well, I guess it is easier for the right (and the authoritarian left) to paint the libertarian left (radicals such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, etc.) out of socialism…

Because that seems to me to be the sticking point here. The reason Kelly’s argument is unhelpful is that we usually think of sozialismus as the redistribution of scarce resources. By saying that sharing information is sozialismus, he’s implicitly conceding the idea that there’s no real difference between property rights in information, and other sorts of property. Given that Lessig’s spent a good deal of his professional life trying to explain why that simply isn’t so, you can see how he might get a little tetchy.

And isn’t it fair enough to say that Hayek was perfectly into the idea of “masses of people who own the means of production [and] work toward a common goal and share their products in common, [people who] contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge”, so long as all they’re producing and sharing is information? The point of “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is precisely that markets are a great way of sharing information. and he also had some very unkind things to say about the idea of intellectual property (somewhere in Individualism and Economic Order).

Now affluent college professor Sozialisten, on the other hand…

So Sozialisten allow squatters in their summer houses? Cool! Any of the Sozialisten here got nice summer houses, preferably in the Mediterranean or anywhere in France? I’ll be in touch.

Researching a capsule biography of Helen Keller, I was amazed to find how much of a crossover there was between Wobs, Debsian Sozialists, what we’d now call liberals and the Left of the Republican Party. Keller was all of the first three, and she was personally funded by Andrew Carnegie (who knew she was a Sozialist but obviously thought she was the harmless kind; he once threatened to spank her for it). Planned Parenthood, NAACP and the ACLU were all good Republican causes – and they all brought those pencil-necked city libruls in contact with rather hairier Leftists.

The failure of the Progressives did a lot to change that; the Great War did a bit (the far Left was pacifist) and Woodrow Wilson’s Red Scare finished it off. Eheu.

(Obama: Progressive Republican. Discuss.)

Jason – I agree that carcereal archipelagos blight the societies that they dot, and require a great deal of coercion to maintain, but still incarceration can’t possibly be a perfect proxy for coercion by the cubic meter: if someone were to tell me that DPRK actually has no prisons because everyone is too scared to commit crimes, I would conclude that DPRK was even more coercive than I had previously thought. (Broadly speaking, when you need to punish someone, you have already failed to coerce her.)

That aside – it’s a non sequitur, if we are both interested in whether Lessig is being wrong-headed, to concede that maybe we have different ideas about the degree of coercion that Sozialismus entails. Surely these differences would be empirical differences, ultimately settled by reference to the actual practice of coercion in more and less sozialistisch societies, and cannot be the same as differences about which sorts of societies are more or less sozialistisch.