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Miller on Market Neutrality, Co-operatives and Libertarianism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
Extract
David Miller's article ‘Market Neutrality and the Failure of Co-operatives’ has two principal theses. The first of these, with which I have no quarrel, is that co-operatives will have a difficult time surviving in a free market economy. The second is that the truth of the first thesis suggests that a crucial argument in favour of libertarianism is wrong.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983
References
1 British Journal of Political Science, XI (1981), 309–29.Google Scholar All subsequent references to this article are by page numbers in the text.
2 Miller might encounter difficulty in stating exactly why the desire that one's employees earn at least £10,000 per annum is not an important desire, if indeed he did wish to maintain this. If a necessary condition on desires is that they are economically feasible (so that it is not a good point against the United States' social system that it has not brought about the plan of Long, Huey: ‘Every man a millionaire’Google Scholar), then why does Miller's demonstration that co-operatives cannot compete with capitalist firms not disqualify from consideration the desire to work in co-opera tives?
3 Of course, one cannot use Miller's analysis of the economics of co-operatives to show that a bank could not compete on the free market since he has not presented it as being a co-operative institution.
4 In the libertarian view, coercing someone in order to secure the realization of that person's own long-run preferences counts as an unacceptable interference with personal liberty. See my article ‘Comment on Hospers’, Journal of Libertarian Studies, IV (1980), 267–72.Google Scholar