Kevin Carson - Criticisms

Criticisms

Economist and anarcho-capitalist Walter Block characterizes Carson as a Marxist, for his embrace of labor value exploitation theory, and argues that Carson's philosophy is full of errors, mostly due to his acceptance of the labor theory of value. "For someone in this day and age to even take this doctrine seriously, let alone actually try to defend it, is equivalent to making a similarly widely and properly rejected position vis à vis the flat earth, or the phlogiston theory. It is, in a word, medieval." Carson alleges that Block misrepresents many of his views and probably did not actually read his book.

Roderick T. Long criticizes Carson's claim that full private property rights do not stem from the concept of self-ownership, and presents an argument that if one accepts self-ownership, as Carson does, then non-Lockean proviso homesteading rights must be accepted. However, Long accepts the concept of public property as valid and writes that communities may acquire land "by collectively homesteading," which could " a basis for No-Proviso Lockeans to recognize as legitimate the property arrangements of Mutualist, Georgist, and Proviso-Lockean communities."