Survival Arts

There are libertarians in France

Sean Gabb reminds me of this fact in a recent mailing announcing this Libertarian Alliance piece by Dr. Jean-Louis Caccomo, a lecturer in the Département des Sciences Économiques et de Gestion at the University of Perpignan, France; an excerpt:

The tendency to confuse the rhetoric of racism and exclusion with the functioning of the market economy is a disturbing sign of deep intellectual regression and mental manipulation. The moral and philosophical foundation of market individualism is not a smug cult of blind egoism, but rather a commitment to judge individuals without regard to attributes such as skin colour, ethnic origin, religion, socio-economic status, or sex. An individualistic society refuses to consider people on the basis of such attributes, insisting that before one is a man or a woman, a peasant or a professor, black or white, blue or white collar, one is an individual.

A brave statement from heavily Islamic France (where I've spent a good deal of time myself, incidentally):

Let’s take the example of a restaurant owner who refuses to hire a girl because she wears an Islamic scarf. As an individual, I might be shocked by such a decision and I can decide to boycott this restaurant, yet I have no right to ask the State to compel him to hire the girl. Actually, freedom of expression means the government should not forbid any idea, any political party or newspaper but this does not mean the government should fund the press or political parties. If I find this or that TV program stupid or shocking, I can switch the channel or stop watching TV but the government must not censor any program.

Excerpted from "Affirmative Action, Social Terrorism, and Trades Union Freedom: The Failures of the Fallacious Concept Of ‘Social Justice’".

Posted by Russell Whitaker at May 3, 2003 12:48 PM | TrackBack