From a long and impassioned post by Kevin Carson on his Mutualist Blog.
As Sean Gabb argued, it's about as legitimate to identify the existing neoliberal model of corporate globalization with "free markets" and "free trade" as it would be to call the Soviet oligarchy under Stalin with "workers' power." The transnational corporations and financial elites, and the neoliberal court intellectuals who service them, have appropriated the language and symbolism of the classical liberal movement to legitimize their corrupt power interests. In much the same way, Stalin appropriated the libertarian and humanist symbolism of the nineteenth socialist movement to legitimize the exploitative class system under the Party apparat.
The neoliberals have no more right to the heritage of the classical liberal movement--to the thought of Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and Franz Oppenheimer--than Stalin had to the red banner and the Internationale. The language of free market liberalism ought to burn their filthy mouths; by their very use of the term, they set themselves up as an abomination of desolation in the holy place.
Well worth reading as an effective counterbalance to the usual right-libertarian apologias for the de facto cartels in control at the moment - supported generously by governments with our money.
