Crunchy cons & agrarians vs. libertarian

A fundamentalist libertarian person called David Gordon attacks Wendell Berry and Your Working Boy as pinkos in overalls. On the traditionalist Chronicles site, Jerry Salyer rebuts the argument. Excerpt:

I am not interested in condemning the principles of libertarianism, many of which I can agree with. Yet laissez-faire libertarians worrying about the potential subversion of our economy by centralized-planners perplex me, given the centralized-state foundation upon which our corporate system has been built. I'm not especially hostile toward libertarians, I like and respect not a few of them. But it is like Ron Paul warning that the Constitution is in peril of being treated like toilet paper, like Chuck Baldwin warning that our culture is in danger of losing touch with its Christian roots, like a monarchist fretting that the influence of the British Crown may be on the wane.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but I think the frogs in all those particular slow-cooking pots have long since been boiled. Perhaps I am revealing my own "ignorance of economics", but it escapes me how anything remotely resembling our current corporate landscape could survive without massive invasive government measures. Where does the Beltway end and the gargantuan defense and aerospace industries begin? Who says all of those coerced tax-dollars should be spent on an interstate highway system? (They could, for example, just as easily go toward perfecting and streamlining local transportation systems, to favor small farmers vice agribusiness--though I hardly advocate this either.) How many coerced tax-dollars go toward "higher education," a farce mostly designed to turn kids into technician-drones at best or pompous half-wits at worst, a farce which Berry has described as "a subsidy granted to the corporations, which in a system of free enterprise might reasonably be expected to do their own job training"? (Those tax-dollars could, after all, just as easily go toward classical education--though, once again, the federal government getting its tentacles into classical education is about the last thing I would desire.)

Daniel Larison jumped into the fray early. Excerpt:

I have been a bit slow to comment on Gordon's piece, partly out of frustration with the habit of labeling anything remotely "crunchy" or agrarian as socialist. Especially at the end of a week when we have seen a plainly socialistic program pass Congress in the service of central government and concentrated wealth, the very antithesis of everything that these people believe, I have to marvel at the idea that the socialists among us are the ones stressing localism, self-sufficiency and independence.

Larison comes back at Gordon this morning. Excerpt:

I am weary of the tendency to label as statism whatever does not suit libertarians. This framing of all political questions as scarcely anything more than a struggle of the state against the individual does not take account of other institutions and more local forms of public authority, and it wrongly identifies conservatives and communitarians of various kinds as part of the statist camp.

One awaits the contribution of John Schwenkler, the crunchy-agrarian libertarian, who will settle the argument for us all. In the meantime, can I just say how much I hate that Wendell Berry and all the farmers for bringing the entire US economy and global financial system to the edge of the abyss with their financial recklessness. If only we'd had less regulation of the moneymen, like fundamentalist libertarians want, why, we wouldn't be in this fix. Right?