There is no such thing as "collateral damage", only murder.

"It is not simply that our national discourse rests on a foundation of evasions, complicated by equivocations, twisted by avoidance, and rendered into meaningless insignificance by an uncountable series of lies. All of that is true, but it fails to capture the quality that is most striking to the perceptive observer. That quality is one of overwhelming, oppressive and suffocating unreality. It is as if everyone knows, but will never acknowledge, that we may speak only in code, and that we may only utilize the safe, empty phrases that we have agreed are "acceptable" -- phrases and language that are safe precisely because they have been drained of all correspondence to facts."
- Arthur Silber

This is, exactly, the point.
R.D. Laing put it very concisely in Knots:
They are playing a game
They are playing at not playing a game

Nothing Comes Easy

The conditions a person lives in are a function of the prices they have been willing to pay. You like hello kitty, so you forgo that expensive meal to get the hello kitty pillow, etc. A rather venal perhaps, but concrete example. Everything has a price, because everything has a cost.
(the statement "there's no such thing as a free lunch" is a snappy, but slightly under-nuanced version of this idea)
Where people seem to go wrong and create political cleavages seems to be on their understanding of "payment".
A very wise friend of mine said something last night that I liked very much:
"Are you a giver or a taker? I'm a trader."
In any exchange between two people, the total wealth of the people increases. To take a very counter-intuitive example, to make my point, imagine a bread line in the USSR. The people waiting on line to get bread have gained, because they will eat tonight. But so too has the CPUSSR. Clearly, because if it wasn't benefiting them in some way, they wouldn't offer the bread. What they gain is a situation where there is not mass starvation.
When I give my homeless crackhead friend a couple of dollars, I am gaining something from it too. (but in these two examples, we begin to see a complexity appear in the situation, don't we?)
The one major exception to this pattern seems to be what I call "real crime"; that is to say when violence and deception are applied.
In these cases, total wealth is not increased, even though one of the parties may have gained vastly, they were trading against an ultimate value... either someone's physical integrity or their mental integrity.
In the case of the USSR, for instance, what they have taken from the people by violence, far outweighs what they give them in bread. In order to keep holding on to their position, giving away some bread is a cheap deal.
And so, maybe we can see why oligopolies are harmful, and why central banking has demolished the economy despite "growing" it.
Because what has been lost is far greater than what has been gained, but what is lost cannot be measured precisely.
In the case of banking, they pump money into the economy, claiming to be growing it, but what are they growing?
As we've seen before, much of "wealth" is subjective and immeasurable. The old situation where one bought food from a person who had agency and could decide for themselves whether to give Old Lady Cranston a discount on her sack of flour has been replaced by one where we are, with ever growing frequency, human machines, interacting with other human machines. Our sense of agency only comes through consumption, and even then we are arrayed with a pushbutton world where actual pondering and consideration of choice becomes flipping channels of very similar inanity. This sense of alienation has been observed over and over again, but it's not necessarily a function of trade, or even the separation of capital and labor, although that gets closer to the issue. People would (and do) pay a price to gain their agency back, if they are able to.

Bankers give money on the basis of money. The other forms of payment become attenuated, in fact almost impossible. The clerk at the supermarket is a n-th order agent of someone who is merely a manager for dispersed owners who have no idea what is going on except the price of their stock.
And our other social institutions have been forced, by violence masked by deception, to fit this system instead of being allowed to naturally undermine it, as they must if they were spontaneously generated, rather than engineered for an ulterior purpose. Mostly in the name of a fraudulent "growth". Real economic growth comes from transformation of a less desirable pattern to a more desirable one. Trade and production are variations of the same thing.
In our abstracted, dimensionally restricted system, what is gained in measurable cash balances and numbers of units moved is more than lost in other forms of payment.
But this all points at the larger pattern of real crime. Capital tends naturally to accumulate sporadically, by a law of diminishing returns... after that millionth or so apple sold, apples become pretty cheap. And what people desire most, what will turn a profit, is always shifting, markets are (somewhat) efficient. Without any interference, anything that turns a profit today, becomes glutted tomorrow, and the profits go down to the average return on time. And then keep in mind, that wealth is not only the seen, the measurable, but the unseen... clean water, trees, healthy living conditions, nice neighbors are all things people would pay a price for, if they could. (and do, when they can)
What is mostly going on in this pattern of alienation and impoverishment is destruction of capital for the sake of those who already own capital, to make it more scarce, not more abundant. When Keynes decried the shelves full of goods unsold, he was crying out for your impoverishment for the sake of the existing owners of capital. (the bank pumping and relief programs are a way to "patch" that capital destruction so as to prevent mass starvation, it is our equivalent of the USSR's bread lines... it is the price paid for the reproduction of labor)
This is the real reason for War, Regulation, Central Banking, all of it. Even land conservation and real-estate laws. It is to restrict the free movement of capital or to destroy it outright. On the other side, labor is encouraged to reproduce endlessly through various religions and other ideological cousins. And through inflation, taxes and various "protective" regulations, they are inhibited in the accumulation of their own capital.

It is not trade or capital accumulation which has created poverty in the midst of wealth, and environmental destruction, but very well disguised destruction of certain forms of trade or capital accumulation, through means of violence and deception. Take away that violence and deception, and in time, things would right themselves. How do we do that? Well, that's a good question. :) It's worth pondering.

A couple of things my friends told me

My friend George once told me "The cops aren't the real cops. They're just the clean up crew. The real cops are all around you, watching you all the time." And he swung his hand around and pointed out all the people around us as we were walking through a shopping mall.
My friend Aggie recently told me "There is no government, just a bunch of guys in blue uniforms with guns who will get angry if you don't pretend there is."

There are two interlocking lies that the government relies on to remain in power. The first is the lie of "legitimacy", the lie that there are some people who have the authority to do things that everyone else can't do. This lie is referenced in the second quote. This lie runs fairly deep in the heads of the populace and it's the main one that libertarians often go after.
The second lie is that of "necessity". This lie is why we keep coming back to economic arguments, even though it's kind of a trap. Because in the minds of most people, necessity is really the only reason they maintain the lie of legitimacy in their heads, why they enforce the fake laws made by this imaginary body. Their fear of what will happen if there's no government leads them to lie to themselves and everyone else and keep pretending that the government exists as such. (People do this about other things all the time, so this isn't an unknown phenomenon here.)
If these two lies are taken away, the people who want to pretend that they are the government are merely seen as a super-mafia. And at that point the market order will displace them. As it would with all other organized crime, if it weren't for the existence of the "government" and its fake laws.

Would you rather listen to your customers or some idiots in a marble building hundreds or thousands of miles away?

I think I realized how to explain what's wrong with most so-called "pro-capitalist" thinkers. They think they've figured out how the market works, and then they, performing the same act of hubris that "anti-capitalist" thinkers do, wish to engineer this mechanism themselves.
They want to second-guess the collective consciousness. But humanity as a whole, in its market order, even if most of the individuals in it were as stupid as you think they are, is way, way smarter than you (or any committee) could ever be. Because it has calculated (in the meta-mathematical sense) the revealed preferences of everyone.

You can't "fake" a cellular automaton convincingly. The closest way to do so is with a radial mirroring of a fractal outgrowth.

But that way, you only get something that looks like a cartoon of a market. (i.e. 18th Century England, the Gilded Age, etc...)
It's a very well analyzed mercantilism at best, but that quickly becomes easily critiqued by the socialist left. Because many among them will clearly see that you did not deliver what you claim to.

If you want to overcome the objections of the socialists, the only alternative that means anything is a real spontaneous order. Anarchy.

How intelligent people fall for political tricks

the pattern usually goes like this:
1. observation of a problem
2. one faction offers a context-free solution, usually involving totalitarian measures applied directly against the problem.
3. another faction (often those who have something to lose directly from the context-free solution) argues that the problem doesn't exist, contrary to all observation, and argues against the solution on the grounds of freedom
(thus confusing freedom with ignorance)
4. the original faction now appears to clearly be "in the right" on the issue
(thus making liberty look "in the wrong")
5. the second faction says "even if ___ exists, it's not a problem"
(thus making liberty look immoral or inconsiderate)
6. now the first faction takes the moral high ground
7. context-free, most likely totalitarian solution is imposed, creating all new problems, as engineered by those behind both factions.

This is called "the bishop's con" when performed by "private" con-men.

Mr. Shaffer does it again.

Only when our ego-identities become wrapped up with some institutional abstraction – such as the state – can we be persuaded to invest our lives and the lives of our children in the collective madness of state action. We do not have such attitudes toward organizations with which we have more transitory relationships. If we find an accounting error in our bank statement, we would not find satisfaction in the proposition “the First National Bank, right or wrong.” Neither would we be inclined to wear a T-shirt that read “Disneyland: love it or leave it.”

Read the whole thing. He nails it pretty well, IMO.

If you want to understand what it is, we're fighting for, in a positive sense, this is a good example:
Ordinary guy belts out Nessun Dorma

Not reality tv, the allegory of what this story is about. Regular people doing extraordinary (by our current standards) things.

In the world I'm working for, this will not be surprising.

Some good thoughts from others

Lately I've been running into some pieces that really explore the heart of what makes thoughtful people in This Thing Of Ours a bit different from rank and file "Libertarians". Now one of the interesting things is that when I posted this on my other blog (which I use to poke at various leftists and conservatives that I know), I immediately received a strongly worded, but un-thought out response from a socialist "anarchist" who was basically trying to smother these ideas in their crib. His emotional aggression was basically a signal not only that these ideas are getting at something fundamental, but also that they are a threat to the false binary as it exists, which is a necessary lever to push us toward total statism of the "Big Mommy" variety. If that false binary of "socialism or fascism, take your pick" is deflated, if we show a way out, that threatens those who want to control or be controlled in a deep, emotional way. They don't want to consider these ideas and argue about them, they want to cover them with the same old rhetoric.
And I think what makes them threatened is the hidden understanding that this approach actually offers normal, Joe Public types something they can believe in without compromising their morals or their freedom. Since deep down, the control freaks hate the middle class public and wish to degrade and/or destroy them, it would make sense that they would react strongly.

That said, here's the articles in question, it's nothing that hasn't been touched on before, but they put it together and expressed it very very well:

Actually Existing Capitalism
This is a very good wrap up of the distinctions made or not made between "capitalism" and "the free market" and why the traditional political ideologies are all wet.

Socialism vs. Regulation
This one in particular might be very controversial to some of you, but it makes sense of an intuition I've had for a while, but haven't had exactly the words to explain.
It also makes mincemeat of those who throw Europe in your face as a sort of prima facie argument for statism.

Let the free market eat the rich!
The last couple of sections explore something that I think is also going to raise red flags among the traditional libertarians out there, but I think is an essential part of what makes Allan Thornton-esque raw anarchism more viable than minarchism. The biggest subsidy the rich may have is the socialization of the costs of fighting private crime. And somewhat ironically, that re-distributes private crime to the poor and middle class.

Freedom isn't totally "free" in some sense.

In order for you to be free, your neighbor must be free, in the long run.
Eventually the mechanisms that suppress behavior you find reprehensible will be used against you too.
Eventually the totalitarian machines in far off lands will create totalitarian machines here, to fight against them, if you let that happen.

In order for the nice normal middle class people to keep their nice normal middle class life, the druggies, gays, people of color, sex freaks, hippies, etc, have to have a place to go where they can do their own thing. And vice versa.

This is the real price of freedom, not bloodshed, but tolerance of things that you don't like. And that means the responsibility to make choices and live your own life, not by default, but because you want to. You don't get to sit back and let life live you. If you do that, you're not really alive, and furthermore, you're killing the rest of us. Put the bullet in your brain, get it over with and let the rest of us go on in peace.

I suspect that the modern idea of "having it all" amounts to really having nothing at all - eliminating all choice, and thus all meaning, to anything you "have". It's a subtle form of suicide. Once you don't have to choose between this or that, what are you doing? Just existing, waiting for the body to give out. You might as well just go on heroin, it's less stressful, and it will make the time go by quicker.

Ideally, life should be an essay question, not even multiple choice. But that is still better than true or false, which is the kind of half-life that's being created for us by certain elements in our society. "You're either with us or against us, male or female, gay or straight, sober or clean, 'educated' or a 'loser', etc" And one day that will lead to a gun in your face "choose the answer we like or die" and that will be the final choice.
Which doesn't amount to much of a choice at all, in my opinion.

Impending Release and the End of No-Context

Sometimes I think liberals only hate conservatives because they make government look bad. I came across some essay somewhere complaining about how the FDA is failing to properly inspect our food (anyone reading this probably is not surprised about that at all...). He made some very cutting factual arguments, he had some interesting points. But what was missing was the context.
What makes conservatism generally a useless ideology that serves as nothing more than a red-herring, if you'll excuse the pun, is that the conservative version of "free enterprise" is a matter of cutting back government intrusion slightly to give big business more room to cut corners. Now it's arguable whether or not that is beneficial to us, it's a matter of priority, but again, the context is missing here.
Coming in on the edges of our vision, is a lesson. It's a lesson being demonstrated most palpably in Iraq. William Lind calls it "4th Generation Warfare" and Kevin Carson over at the mutualist blog has written a pretty great essay on how this can be (and has been) applied to labor relations.
But there's even more, really, to the story. The pending financial collapse. The fears of terrorism. The drug war going ape shit on the population. Peak oil, global warming, etc...
All of it are examples of the same pattern, one that was pointed out by Ludwig Von Mises a long time ago. The calculation problem, he called it. Basically, the way he put it, a central economic planner has no way to possibly calculate how to carry out the plan. A weaker variation on this was proposed later by Hayek, but really Hayek's "information problem" even if true, is superfluous. Even with access to all the discrete information in a system, without spontaneous market clearing mechanisms, there is no way to know what price will balance any particular demand curve. (And demand curves are subjective, so that kills the idea anyway.) In other words, not only is the demand curve opaque until revealed, so is the supply curve. The only way to reveal it is with a market.
The problem, and here's where I relate this all, is that the calculation problem isn't an all or nothing affair. Of course a central planner that had total control over the economy would have an infinite calculation problem. But to the extent that there is interference with market clearing, there is a partial calculation disturbance. All estimates are a bit off.
The thing that both the liberal and conservative thinker are missing is this larger picture, that the world we live in is not one of a spontaneous order with a few minor distortions.
To put it simply, if my house caught on fire, and the fire department botched the job of putting it out and rescuing me safely, while I wouldn't be entirely surprised, I would have a right to hold them responsible. Why? Because there is no other agency to turn to to perform this service. And so to understand why things are the way they are, we must answer the further question of why it is that there is no other agency to perform this service. The answer lies with the same people that run the fire department. Namely, the State.
Why are people getting contaminated food? Because the FDA has taken on the role of guarding food in such a way that competitors to their system can't operate on a widespread basis. And because the food industry has been cartelized to the point where competitors to the major food suppliers can't operate on a widespread basis.
And because the federal reserve pushes the money supply forward, making the benefits of cutting costs and operating for the short term almost irresistable, and making it unduly profitable to expand businesses beyond their natural limits of growth.

All of this leads to massive calculation problems. To some extent, up till now, there has been enough force applied to hold the system together in the face of these problems, by shifting costs downward to the weak and defenseless. Europe and the US haven't had to absorb the costs of their own miscalculations. But the "weak and defenseless" have learned how to fight back, in the face of military calculation problems.

Technology, while often used by the State and it's parasitical appendages to protect centralization, often has the side effect of equalizing power. Missiles and C4 are cheap and effective.

For the past 100 years, we've lived in a secret hidden context of oligarchy that many of us at this point have been programmed to take for granted. Food comes from the supermarket. We drive 10 miles to work or more, in cars made by "the big three" or now maybe "the big six". We sit down and work in a giant office building in cubicles. Then we go home and watch tv, broadcast by a few companies. Even our elections run on this model. Multiple choice.

Well, the world is about to become an essay question. And the powers that be want you to be afraid of that, because they are. People who even address the possibility of these interlocking, related systems collapsing mention it with an air of dread.
But in reality, when the destabilizing force of the giants and official experts is removed from any system, and replaced by a spontaneous market, calculation comes back and things rebuild themselves properly, stably, in a way that doesn't require more and more input all the time, but yields more and more output, because the patterns get smarter, meaning more and more amenable to our desires.
When businesses really compete in a hard way, for example, we benefit as consumers, as laborers and even as small business owners.
When many banks are issuing their own money, whatever money survives will be stable and a good store of value, making all economic calculations more accurate, allowing our time horizons to slow down, we can think long term and plan for our future.

When the US is finally forced out of Iraq, the Sadrists and Sunnis will fight to a standstill using the same 4th Generation Warfare techniques on each other, and then mark off their territory and get on with life.
And the rest of us will have gotten a lesson that will be indelible.

Will things get worse for us First Worlders in the short term? Possibly, but the division of labor is pretty remarkable and people are pretty good at solving problems when left to their own devices. On the other hand, the Third World will bloom like 3 billion flowers. And in the long run that will make things more stable and pleasant for all of us.
And with all of us having mastered these decentralized techniques for toppling larger opponents, the resulting near-anarchy will be stable. In other words, anarchy cannot arrive until it can be maintained stably and peaceably, because the means for attaining it are the means for maintaining it. So when it comes, it's coming pretty much for good. The future looks bright indeed.
It won't be a utopia, but things will be as good as they can be given our state of knowledge and development.

there is indeed a grave danger, and an inconvenient truth...

Butler Shaffer says it much better than I feel like saying it right now.

A quote:
"It is no coincidence, I believe, that the environmental cult arose at about the same time that the earlier faith in state economic planning was unable to withstand the pragmatic power of the marketplace as the generator of material well-being. Environmentalism provided an alternative vehicle for those whose principal ambition lay in controlling the lives and property of their fellow humans. There was some initial uncertainty expressed over whether we faced an incipient global “cooling” or “warming,” but there was no absence of faith in their underlying cause: to extend coercive control over all of humanity."

1 Iraqi = 1 American = 1 Englishman, etc...

"More important, all too many Americans have yet to confront the moral implications of invading and occupying Iraq. U.S. officials continue to exhort the American people to judge the war and occupation on whether it proves to be "successful" in establishing "stability." and "democracy" in Iraq. If so, the idea will be that the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, including countless Iraqi children, will have been worth it. It would be difficult to find a more morally repugnant position than that."

- Jacob Hornberger

Killing thousands of non-combatants for some sort of political goal, even if that goal seems incredibly desirable, is still MASS MURDER.
Think of it this way, if the government said "We're going to exterminate all the homeless people, welfare mothers and their children in the US in order to stabilize the economy", would you think it was "worth it"? If they failed, would you blame them for "bungling" the planned extermination?

The State IS Crime.

I was getting a bit tired of posting into the darkness, as it were. But Billy Beck pointed me to something so perfectly illustrative that I had to share:

With the blessing of officials from the Village of Port Chester, the Village’s chosen developer approached Didden and his partner with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Because Didden planned to build a CVS on his property—land the developer coveted for a Walgreens—the developer demanded $800,000 from Didden to make him “go away” or ordered Didden to give him an unearned 50 percent stake in the CVS development. If Didden refused, the developer would have the Village of Port Chester condemn the land for his private use. Didden rejected the bold-faced extortion. The very next day the Village of Port Chester condemned Didden’s property through eminent domain so it could hand it over to the developer who made the threat.

Organized crime, plain and simple. Such a clear example rarely crosses my desk.

Here there be... Something Else

In any widespread debate among human beings, there tends to be a portrayal of the situation as a binary conflict. As an example, let's take "democrat vs. republican" - not that the content matters here, but it's a common example that most of you will be familiar with. But this translates to gender, religion, sexuality, and many other human "dialogues" (note the already implicit binary)...
Most of the time it's portrayed something like this:


Depending on who is portraying the situation, the left circle might be bigger or the right or the middle more or less overlapping, but it's still a binary venn diagram of some sort. Of course what is missing from the picture is what makes this post worth posting... the Excluded Other, the Damned Thing as Robert Anton Wilson put it, the thing that is semiotically made invisible by those who fear it. In reality, though this is also an over-simplification, the venn diagram should look more like this:


Of course, it would be more accurate to portray a vast multidimensional grid of interlocking rings in all directions, but for the purpose of this post, this will suffice...

The excluded other has to fight just to get acknowledgement of its own existence, it is not debated or even scorned (except to say 'oh, that's crazy talk!') because it is not known of/acknowledged by most. It has been buried and forgotten, so that the powers that be (in whichever sphere happens to be 'in dialogue') can keep the minds of people on their two favored options. This binary portrayal may just be a function of the human brain or it may be an ontological condition of those who attempt to control debate, that it is always in their interest to keep things in a dialogue rather than a true analysis.

In the works of many whom I would consider 'in this thing of ours', there is an attempt to re-awaken an awareness of the Something Else, to remind us that there are "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy"...
This is perhaps the primary thing that draws us together - as a different kind of revolution, a semiotic revolution, a disinhibitory stimulus to reawaken the authority/judgement/reason/awareness within us, that the false rulers of our minds don't want us to reclaim for ourselves.

There are two basic understandings that buddhism (at least of the zen or chan variety), daoism and existentialism share:
1. Desire can be a trap.
2. Whatever you say it is, it is precisely not that.

In existentialism the way 2 is explained is that we are always at least one step ahead of ourselves, that to enclose the totality of our understanding, we must be larger than that totality... this totality is re-totalizing in every moment...
Thus we are always incomplete, a work in progress, which leads back to 1.
Where daoism and existentialism perhaps branch off from buddhism is in seeing this incompleteness as necessary for existence. We cannot complete ourselves. In the moment we are complete, we are no longer "here" except as an object to be used by those still incomplete.
But what we 'are' is trapped within the time span of our incompleteness. So make the most of it.

Where desire fails is when we actually strive for completion through any incomplete means. To be a 'true believer', and thus to seek this binary in which all things can be understood and collected.

More on the GWOT

I don't think I was communicating well the last time I spoke about this so I'll restate my position a bit better I hope.
I don't like terrorism one bit. Punishing civilians for the actions of their evil masters is a foul and despicable thing to do.
If there really was a Global War On Terrorism, I'd be all for it. But the government of the United States engages in terrorism all the time. They'd really be on the other side of that war. In reality what people mean though is a Global War on Radical Islamic Terrorism.

OK, I don't like Radical Islam either. I'd rather live in a fucked up Keynesian/Fabian "socialism" (as I do) than under an Islamic Sharia State. And to the extent that they promote and support killing civilians to achieve their goals, fuck them. But the GOT-US isn't really doing anything to protect us from RIT either. All that TSA garbage is just fucking with us, and does little or nothing to prevent terrorism. The incentives are all wrong here. The GOT-US gets stronger, the more RIT there is, and vice versa. If they're not directly working together, they've at least figured out the tacit rules of their game, and that game works against us both ways.
If the GOT-US really fought a War on RIT, it would tend to diminish the strength of the state itself. Because what would work is clearly things like:
Allowing pilots to carry guns. Allowing airlines to decide if their passengers can carry weapons. Making airlines tort-responsible for what happens to their passengers and planes. (if this had been the case during 9-11, American and United would probably be out of business by now...)
The airlines themselves as (quasi)private firms would be much better situated to decide how to handle their own security, especially if they knew they were fiscally responsible for it.
This of course, doesn't just apply to airlines, but to everything else. Under a fairly libertarian society, terrorism is hard to pull off. How many attacks have been successfully pulled off in the US? How many in Europe? (hint the second number is much higher)
Of course, a totalitarian country like China can stave off terrorism too. But if your answer to terrorism is to go that far, well, I think we'd be better off taking our chances with a less safe society. Hell, you like that idea so much, move to China. No terrorism there.

One thing that I find curious about "pro-war libertarians" is that they tend to support Bush even on stupid shit that has nothing to do with terrorism. This suggests to me either:
1. They are no longer libertarians. Although this is the popular answer, and technically true, it's not that meaningful.
2. They are disingenuously supporting this stuff because they think that anything that helps the Bush regime will be good for the GWOT. They even pick up Republican "talking points" on a lot of issues. This is really stupid, because if anything, Bush is bringing us closer and closer to a destabilized chaotic terroristic situation. He's been the best friend Radical Islam has had the past few years. (not that Kerry wouldn't have been worse, but it's this "all or nothing" go team go crap that is stupid and not helpful at all)

By being better libertarians, they would be fighting the GWOT the right way and would be objectively helping to reduce terrorism worldwide. But instead they're inadvertently making it worse. You want to talk about fundamentals: It is not in the interest of terrorists to make America more free. Quite the opposite, until we reach a sort of threshold of totalitarianism on the other side. It is not in the interest of the state for terrorism to dwindle away to nothing. Again, not until they reach a threshold point where they feel their rule is secure without it.

So I am the real pro-War libertarian, if the War is a real Global War On Terrorism.

Freedom is the default.

A quote from The Scotsman:
"So pervasive is poor diet that reliance on individual choice as the prime ideology in shaping food supply is no longer an adequate policy or ideology." (adequate for whom?)

Freedom is not an ideology, though an ideology can be built around an abstraction called "freedom".

How close "freedom" and freedom come to each other will depend inversely on how densely extended the ideology is.

To say that the idea that people own themselves is necessarily "ideological" or part of an "ideology" is repulsive and idiotic. At best, it blurs the line between ideology and ... well, everything else. Which makes "ideology" itself an orwellian non-word, with no particular meaning.

Now if you want to make some sort of utilitarian argument why coercion is desirable in a certain situation, well, you won't be the first and some people have come up with some pretty involved ones. But the burden of proof is still on you. Freedom is the default. It's not an ideology, its a basic part of life itself.

We're not here to fulfill some sort of greater purpose or function for anyone. There is no one to provide this function.
Unless there is:
The secret implication, that the powers that be behind statements like this don't want you to understand completely, is that they believe that we (those of us subject to "society's" laws) all belong to them ("society" or to be a bit less tricky, those who are above the law, those who make the law). That they OWN us. We are farm animals, livestock to be handled. We happen to be uppity slaves, but their mission is to get us in line.
For our own good? What does that mean? "Good" can only be revealed by our desires. What they mean is for their own good.
If they set the standards of what is (hahah) "adequate" or "proper" or "desirable", it can only come from their own desires. Not ours.
Or there would be no need to change our behavior, perhaps at most, to educate us that what we're doing won't get us what we want.

totally geeky, I know, but...

I came up with this a few days ago, and figured what the hell, might as well post it.

You code 16 functions, what do you get?
another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Linus don't you call me, cause I can't go,
I owe my soul to the company store.

When you see me pinging better step aside,
a lot of men didn't, their networks died.
One hack of iron, the other of steel,
if the syn flood don't get you, then the DDOS will.

Go North, young ma'am.

Gary North hits one out of the park today. [link]

I'm often a fan of his, though he's inconsistently good, and holds some odd beliefs.
But on economic issues, he seems to "strike the root" more than a lot of people in this thing of ours.

I don't even need to add commentary to that article (not like I have much time to do so, I've been fiendishly pressed for time lately, but I'll endeavor to get some original thoughts up here soon).

A new ally

Pro Libertate - Man, he's good.
Thanks to Vache Folle and JL Wilson for the heads up on him. I've actually followed links back to the Birch Blog before and always liked what I read there, but never actually read it on a regular basis. Now I regret that decision.

So Wm Norman Grigg, you are on my blog links.

(From my experience, the Birch people tend to be the best or the worst, depending. I mean they definitely see through the standard "left-right" spectrum. And the understanding that the Elite use the sub-proletariat for their own purposes was way ahead of its time. Sometimes they're too nationalistic and constitutionalist for my taste.)

Truth and Evasion

You know, it always makes me smile crookedly, to see discussions about this particular thing or that that the government has done, when the people discussing it don't have their tongue firmly in cheek.
Ok, I know it serves a purpose as a sort of signalling, like "ok, I think we're hitting the threshold now". But does anyone in this thing of ours still deny that the end point of all this is going to be full-on totalitarianism? I mean, open up your eyes. All three if necessary.

But seriously now. To make the point clear so that you can't dodge it:
The United States is going to become a totalitarian state, sooner than anyone expected. This is not arguable. It's surely going to happen. Europe is already there, and no one sees it.
It's not going to work the same way the old school totalitarians did it, because these guys have read all those books too.

Every day will be like every other day, for everyone, everywhere. That's what they want.
That is spiritual genocide. If you're robotically acting out a script, you're not actually alive, in any human sense.
Artificial intelligence will begin in the bodies of human beings. We are the robots.

The only way out of this is to destroy the capacity of the state to function. This will also happen, and hopefully sooner than I fear. But until it does, we're on the road to serfdom, and the pedal is to the metal. So don't be surprised when they make a law saying you have to bend over and present your asshole for inspection every day. After all, it's for your own good, right?

Bastiat, the Left-Libertarian?

Here are some quotes from Economic Sophisms (with bold emphasis by me) that I think have a direct bearing on left-libertarian thought:

In the same way, we could make a survey of all industries, and we should always find that producers, as such, have antisocial attitudes. "The merchant," says Montaigne, "prospers only by the extravagance of youth; the farmer, by the high cost of grain; the architect, by the decay of houses; officers of justice, by men's lawsuits and quarrels, Even the ministers of religion owe the honor and practice of their high calling to our death and our vices. No physician takes pleasure in the good health of even his friends; no soldier, in the peace of his country; and so it goes for the rest."
It follows that, if the secret wishes of each producer were realized, the world would speedily retrogress toward barbarism. The sail would take the place of steam, the oar would replace the sail, and it in turn would have to yield to the wagon, the latter to the mule, and the mule to the packman. Wool would ban cotton, cotton would ban wool, and so on, until the scarcity of all things made man himself disappear from the face of the earth.
Suppose for a moment that legislative power and executive authority were put at the disposal of the Mimerel Committee, and that each of the members of that association had the right to introduce and enact a favorite law. Is it very hard to imagine what sort of industrial code the public would be subjected to?
If we now turn to consider the immediate self-interest of the consumer, we shall find that it is in perfect harmony with the general interest, i.e., with what the well-being of mankind requires. When the buyer goes to the market, he wants to find it abundantly supplied. He wants the seasons to be propitious for all the crops; more and more wonderful inventions to bring a greater number of products and satisfactions within his reach; time and labor to be saved; distances to be wiped out; the spirit of peace and justice to permit lessening the burden of taxes; and tariff walls of every sort to fall. In all these respects, the immediate self-interest of the consumer follows a line parallel to that of the public interest. He may extend his secret wishes to fantastic or absurd lengths; yet they will not cease to be in conformity with the interests of his fellow man. He may wish that food and shelter, roof and hearth, education and morality, security and peace, strength and health, all be his without effort, without toil, and without limit, like the dust of the roads, the water of the stream, the air that surrounds us, and the sunlight that bathes us; and yet the realization of these wishes would in no way conflict with the good of society.
Perhaps people will say that, if these wishes were granted, the producer's labor would be more and more limited, and finally would cease for want of anything to occupy it. But why? Because, in this extreme hypothetical case, all imaginable wants and desires world be fully satisfied. Man, like the Almighty, would create all things by a simple act of volition. Will someone tell me what reason there would be, on this hypothesis, to deplore the end of industrial production?
I referred just now to an imaginary legislative assembly composed of businessmen, in which each member world have the power to enact a law expressing his secret wish in his capacity as a producer; and I said that the laws emanating from such an assembly would create a system of monopoly and put into practice the theory of scarcity.
In the same way, a Chamber of Deputies in which each member considered solely his immediate self-interest as a consumer would end by creating a system of free trade, repealing all restrictive laws, and removing all man-made commercial barriers—in short, by putting into practice the theory of abundance.
Hence, it follows that to consult solely the immediate self-interest of the producer is to have regard for an antisocial interest; whereas to consider as fundamental solely the immediate self-interest of the consumer is to take the general interest as the foundation of social policy.

Now, the result is that each man sees the immediate cause of his prosperity in the obstacle that he makes it his business to struggle against for the benefit of others. The larger the obstacle, the more important and more intensely felt it is, then the more his fellow men are disposed to pay him for having overcome it, that is, the readier they are to remove on his behalf the obstacles that stand in his way.
A physician, for instance, does not occupy himself with baking his own bread, making ins own instruments, or weaving or tailoring his own clothes. Others do these things for him, and, in return, he treats the diseases that afflict his patients. The more frequent, severe, and numerous these diseases are, the more willing people are—indeed, the more they are obliged—to work for his personal benefit. From his point of view, illness—which is a general obstacle to human well-being—is a cause of his individual well-being. All producers, with respect to their particular field of operation, reason in the same manner. The shipowner derives his profits from the obstacle called distance; the farmer, from that called hunger; the textile manufacturer, from that called cold; the teacher lives on ignorance; the jeweler, on vanity; the lawyer, on greed; the notary, on possible bad faith, just as the physician lives on the illnesses of mankind. It is therefore quite true that each profession has an immediate interest in the continuation, even the extension, of the particular obstacle that is the object of its efforts.

Let its go back to the thirteenth century. The men who then practiced the art of copying received for the service they performed a remuneration determined by the average rate of wages. Among these copyists, there was one who sought and discovered the means of multiplying rapidly copies of the same work. He invented printing.
At first, one man became rich, while many others were being impoverished. However marvelous this discovery was, one might, at first sight, have hesitated to decide whether it was harmful or beneficial. Apparently it was introducing into the world, as I have said, an element of limitless inequality. Gutenberg profited by his invention and employed his profits to extend its use indefinitely, until he had ruined all the copyists. As for the public, the consumers, they gained little, for Gutenberg was careful to lower the price of his books only just enough to undersell his rivals.
But God had the wisdom to introduce harmony not only into the movement of the spheres but also into the internal machinery of society. Hence, the economic advantages of this invention did not remain the exclusive possession of one individual, but instead became for all eternity the common inheritance of all mankind.
In time, the process became known. Gutenberg was no longer the only printer; others imitated him. Their profits at first were considerable. They were compensated very well for being in the vanguard of the imitators, and this extra compensation was necessary to attract them and to induce them to contribute to the great, approaching, final result. They earned a great deal, but they earned less than the inventor, for competition was beginning to operate. The price of books kept falling lower and lower, and the profits of imitators kept diminishing as the invention became less novel, that is, as imitation became less deserving of especial reward. Soon the new industry reached its normal state: the remuneration of printers no longer was exceptionally large, and, like that of scribes in earlier days, it was determined only by the average rate of wages. Thus, production itself became once more the measure of compensation. Yet the invention nonetheless constituted an advance; the saving of time, of labor, of effort to produce a given result, for a fixed number of copies, had nonetheless been realized. But how was this saving manifested? In the cheapness of books. And to whose profit? To the profit of the consumer, of society, of mankind. Printers, who henceforth had no exceptional merit, no longer received an exceptional remuneration. As men, as consumers, they doubtless shared in the advantages that the invention had conferred upon the community. But that was all. In so far as they were printers, in so far as they were producers, they had returned to the conditions that were customary for all the producers to the country. Society paid them for their labor, and not for the usefulness of the invention. That had become the common and freely available heritage of all mankind.

I confess that the wisdom and the beauty of these laws evoke my admiration and respect. In them I see Saint-Simonianism: To each according to his capacity; to each capacity according to its production. In them I see communism, that is to say, the tendency of goods to become the common heritage of men; but a Saint-Simonianism, a communism, regulated by infinite foresight, and in no way abandoned to the frailty, the passions, and the tyranny of men.
What I have said of printing can be said of all the tools of production, from the nail and the hammer to the locomotive and the electric telegraph. Society possesses all of them in having an abundance of consumers' goods; and it possesses them as gratuitous gifts, since their effect is to reduce the price of commodities; and all that part of the price that has been eliminated as a result of the contribution of inventions to production clearly makes the product to that extent free of charge.

In a temperate zone where coal and iron ore are at the surface, one need only stoop down to get them. At first, I readily agree, it is the inhabitants of the favored region who will profit from this lucky circumstance. But soon, as competition develops, the price of coal and iron ore will continue to fall until the gift of Nature is available free of charge to everyone, and human labor alone is remunerated in accordance with the average rate of wages.
Thus, as a result of the operation of the law of supply and demand, the gifts of Nature, like improvements in the processes of production, are—or continually tend to become—the common and gratuitous heritage of the consumers, the masses, mankind in general.

The theory whose outlines I have attempted to sketch in this chapter still stands in need of a great deal of development. I have considered it only in its bearing on the subject of free trade. But perhaps the attentive reader may have perceived in it the fertile seed that is destined, when it matures, to eradicate not only protectionism, but, along with it, Fourierism, Saint-Simonianism, communism, and all those schools of thought that aim at excluding the law of supply and demand from the governance of the world. From the point of view of the producer, competition doubtless often clashes with our immediate self-interest; but, if one considers the general aim of all labor, i.e., universal well-being—in a word, if one adopts the point of view of the consumer—one will find that competition plays the same role in the moral world as equilibrium does in the physical world. It is the basis of true communism, of true socialism, and of that equality of wealth and position so much desired in our day; and if so many sincere publicists and well-intentioned reformers demand arbitrary controls, it is because they do not understand free exchange.

Some short things to ponder

It's late and I'll expand on things soon, but for now:
1. It's not unreasonable to believe that economics (and it's violent distortions) plays as much of a role in foreign policy as much as it does in everything else. The people involved are likely not sentimentalists AT ALL.

2. A deeper perspective on the Dot Bomb and Greenspan. This kind of blew my mind, and if you put as much significance on the financial side of things as I do, perhaps it will blow yours too.

3. Bastiat was really important to the history of left libertarianism in a way most people have never focused on (though I've seen it obliquely mentioned). Re-read "things seen" and perhaps "sophisms" to see what I'm getting at.

4. James Leroy Wilson, inspired by Lady Aster: (emphasis mine)

I will add that in many ways direct welfare payments - giving money to people for doing nothing, is not nearly as bad as "make work" programs, corporate welfare, and unnecessary military hardware.

With welfare, money is taken from person A through taxes, to give to person B. So, the economic choices of A are diminished by that amount, and those of person B increased. There are strong economic and moral arguments against this; I am not defending it, though I don't fault the recipients.

But I'd rather a person be on public support than work at a manufacturing plant that produces tanks or aircraft that the military doesn't need, but that brings profits to the corporate contractor and "jobs" to a Congressional District. Not only is he making his living from other people's taxes, his job is actually doing the economy harm. How so? $10 billion spent on manufacturing unwanted and impractical tanks is $10 billion that could have been spent manufacturing computers, x-ray machines, surgical equipment, cars, homes, or other things that people actually want and need. If we paid his salary directly and let him sit at home all day, we'd be better off. Not as well off as if he manufactured something that a free market would demand, but better off nonetheless, because precious resources wouldn't be used for expensive boondoggles.

Government redistribution of incomes is bad, but government redistribution of capital is worse.

He's on to something big there.

Et Tu, all of you?

I've decided, after being tagged multiply for this book virus thingy, that I'm flattered enough that you're still reading this thing that I'm going to do it. :)

* One book that changed your life:
The Nausea by JP Sartre.
(Unlike many of you folks, I was a libertarian before I knew I was, and I was gradually introduced to the ideas of libertarianism by a mentor.
I eventually outgrew him and became an anarchocapitalist in college. So no one libertarian book opened my eyes to anything.)

However The Nausea made me see that there's more to the world than the dry scientistic public school p.o.v.
I read it at age 13, my dad was an existentialist and he finally let me read it. It devastated me, but afterwards I knew...
There is more, and less, than most people realize out there.

* One book that you have read more than once:
The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
The subtlety and perfection of his pattern recognition only becomes more clear upon multiple re-readings.
I don't know if you can really call it philosophy, but this book is one of the greatest works of genius of all human history.

* One book that you would want on a desert island:
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce

* One book that made you laugh:
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner

* One book that made you cry:
The Nausea. See above.

* One book you wish had been written:
Equilibrium by Adem Kupi (but there's still time)

* One book you wish never had been written:
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by JM Keynes
This should be a no-brainer. Keynes was more devastating to the world than any other thinker.
I guess that's something to put on your resume... if you're an evil genius.

* One book you are currently reading:
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

* (more than) One book you have been meaning to read:
Calculated Chaos by Butler Shaffer
The Theory of Money and Credit by L Von Mises
A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism by HH Hoppe (curious, mostly)

However I'm going to spare you all and not tag anyone. So there.

3 things worth linking to.

1. Billy Beck lays it down.
(though Churchill was certainly a POS, no matter whether he got this or that point right)
For people that haven't had family living under "communism", it's hard to understand probably just how fucked it was. And the "cold war" was the excuse for the West to expand state power. In truth the world elite were running Leninism over there as an experiment to see how far they could go, to establish a hard limit. (wanna draw a parallel with the US Constitution, feel free)

Though the war of 1812 really was a massive fuckup historically, to say it was a blunder is misleading. It was all part and parcel of the Hamiltonian path. Bringing us back into the fold, so to speak.

2. Jeremy at Social Memory Complex gets to some of the meat on these bones.
"However, is the market really to blame if risky, destablilizing, and hazardous behavior is subsidized from the get-go? "
One of the best sentences you could get about the "market failure" argument.
Remember, folks, markets are really good at rolling up future risks into prices. The stupid pseudo-economists have even noticed this. If this process is inhibited, well, those who are able to take advantage of the places where it is inhibited are getting a risk subsidy that is being thrown on us.
Then that gives the state an excuse to "protect" us (from the risk they subsidized).

3.
And last, but far from least, Stefan Molyneux fires with both barrels.
"An “Arab” doesn’t exist; neither does “Israel” or “Muslim.” There are people and land and trees and sky. There are no “groups.”"
Well fucking said!
"As long as there are Arabs and Jews and Americans and Iranians, our natural brotherhood remains drowned in bloody tribal fantasies. If we refuse to give up our gods and groups and leaders, we will forever live in war and fear and hatred."
And that's it, folks. Right there.
(of course this applies to internal divisions as well... but more on that later...)

Soma is not good enough.

Good lord, people.

You have no idea what you could have been, what you could have accomplished in a free world.

You'd think it was utopia, but only because we live in dystopia right now, that is:
A world that was rationally designed to be terrible for you.

You think it's not so bad 'cause you're used to it.
That's what the people in Indonesia think too. "Oh those 18 hour days in the factory aren't so bad... it could be much worse..."

Fucking Alphas and Betas. You have no idea.

We spin our wheels and webs.

This comes out of a comment I made on the Mutualist Blog.
Someone came right out and actually stated that profits are inherently monopolistic; which is an annoying "hidden assumption" many leftists bury in their arguments. By pre-assuming it, they therefore have framed it out of being subject to discussion, which makes it hard to argue for markets effectively. In response I said:

The truth is, profits are never self-sustaining, in a milieu of open finance. Under a "capitalist" finance system, sure, because capital funding is restricted to "proven winners" and those with connections.
But under an anarchist financial system, profit can never be more than a sporadic, unpredictable outbreak. As soon as a firm becomes profitable, people will finance competitors, reducing profits back toward the general rate of interest.
As more capital is accumulated, that general rate of interest falls near 0.

Marx saw this, but didn't quite understand it well enough to draw the right implications from it.

Which is probably because he didn't pick up on marginal utility theory. If he had, the world might be quite a different place.

TO CLARIFY: By putting "capitalist" in quotes, I meant to imply the so-called capitalist finance system we are currently living under, which is actually fascistic if anything, with chartered and regulated banking. (which creates the opportunity to expand fractional reserves without being checked by competing banks)

Ahh. Where to begin?

I think if anything I've underestimated the horrors of the "Liberal Democratic" ideology. Mea culpa. That doesn't get neo-conservatism off the hook though.

I don't know if I have the time in my life to pick through the massive, fundamental delusions that constitute that mindset(either one), in order to find some sort of basic reality that can be built on. Even if there was something to be learned from observing these folks, the slimy, icky unreason coating it is too repellent to dig through.

I'm sorry, I just have better things to do. You guys, go ahead and vote each other into the ground. Just expect me to put up the best fight I can against any of it touching me or mine.

I feel like the political equivalent of one of HP Lovecraft's narrators now.

Thanks to Vache Folle for diving into the muck for me, and pulling this out:
Why Do Democrats Hate Libertarians?

Speaking of Wings,

Per Bylund is someone else who I tend to enjoy reading quite a bit, and I think he hits the nail on the head in a way that is refreshingly intuitive in this article in Strike The Root:
Free Market Thinking: Not Applicable

You might not expect this from me but I enjoy reading Billy Beck. I think he's made a few errors here and there, but then again most people have. I certainly have, I'm sure, if you go back over my words with a critical enough eye. But he's a man of reason, and I'm all for that.

On his latest post, he digs into the "libertarian-left" connection in a way that I think needs addressing, if nothing else. A quote that I think sums the thing up well:
"What I might need from them would be, say, a basic common-sense endorsement of the principle of private property, and they're never going to do that. Do you understand? That's why they're on "the left", and until they're not, there is nothing serious to "talk" with them about."

Well, this is the problem. That "the left" has come to mean "people who are against capitalism". Well, there's no way around it using modern terminology. This is a "zaxlebax problem" akin to calling currently existing "capitalism" a free market, when it's clearly not.
And this is going to be a problem for people reaching out to "the left" for quite some time. Because they themselves have internalized that definition such that it galls them on a deep level to admit that private property is inherently just, even in principle (if not in current practice), and they fear unrestrained human action, because they've also internalized the "hobbsean perspective" that people are essentially maniacs that need to be molded and restrained. Until "the left" does not subscribe to those principles, our role in reaching out to them must be primarily one of disabusing them of those notions. Go to Jim Henley's blog sometime and read some of the anti-libertarian screeds by some of the liberal commenters. This is what we're up against. People who claim that Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith were not proto-libertarian.

Now the converse, however, does not apply. Libertarians should not have much to do with what passes for "the right" anymore (except perhaps some of the paleoconservatives). We can see where that got us. They have nothing more than lip-service for "private property" if even that. And what they mean by it is more akin to "feudal property" than anything we'd endorse as "private". "Economic freedom" to them is merely a trifle, a political foil to be discarded when it becomes inconvenient to their real project (which I believe is to forge a caste system), just as "civil liberties" are for the left.
The right is more dangerous to us because they sort of talk the talk, and so they are immersed in a massive fraud and/or self-deception. Whereas most of the left just have bad ideas, but they actually mean it (with all the fuzzy-brained confusion that implies), so you can kind of argue with them about it. My approach to dealing with the right would be to expose their contradictions to a point where they admit what they really believe, and then at that point, we can "reach out" to them too.

Now as for myself, I don't consider myself part of any wing of the political bird. I just want to stop the whole filthy business altogether. Or at least, to show people what they're really dealing with, and let them sort it out.

coming soon to theatres...

America, Freedom to Fascism -

"FOUR STARS" (Highest Rating).The scariest goddamn film you'll see this year. It will leave you staggering out of the theatre, slack-jawed and trembling. Makes 'Fahrenheit 9/11' look like 'Bambi.' After watching this movie, your comfy, secure notions about America -- and about what it means to be an American -- will be forever shattered. Producer/director Aaron Russo and the folks at Cinema Libre Studio deserve to be heralded as heroes of a post-modern New American Revolution. This is shocking stuff. You'll be angry, you'll be disgusted, but you may actually break out in a cold sweat and feel a sickness deep in your gut; I would advise movie theatre managers to hand out vomit bags. You may end up needing one."

--- Todd David Schwartz, CBS

This is the best review really, that a movie like this could get. It means that it will impact people on a level where their SERIOUSLY EMBEDDED PROGRAMMING won't be able to filter the message. If I were to make a political movie I'd want people to leave the theatre crying and trembling with rage.
Because if you haven't said "fuck all those motherfuckers" you aren't there yet.

The Straight Dope

You know what it really comes down to?

I don't care what politics you think you believe.

Just become ungovernable. The rest will sort itself out.

Comments

I apologize for all the missing comments, people. Apparently I had "moderate comments" checked and didn't realize it. Your comments should all come through now.

So if I haven't responded to your comments, that was why (I wasn't ignoring anyone!). I'll try to do so as I go back through the posts, but you might not see them.

By the way

Sorry about the dearth of updates this month, but it seems like it's not just me.

May is crazy month, I guess. (as the first month after Tax Slavery Month, I guess maybe that might have something to do with it)

Also, sorry about the slew of unfinished multi-parters. I'll try and get all those threads woven together soon.
--------------------------------
One of my favorite methods, or techniques is the "there's no such thing as..." approach. I first encountered it when reading a book called "There's no such thing as Hypnosis". The book goes on to teach hypnosis, of course, but the idea behind the title is that there's no particular thing which you can separate out and point at and say "that and only that's hypnosis!".

Some things to keep in mind:
1. There's no such thing as "the economy".
2. There's no such thing as "a market".
3. There's no such thing as "society".

I'm sure you will encounter many more no such things, now that you know to look for them.

on inequality and its discontents, part I

One thing also that must be understood is that just as there is a black market at the bottom, there is one at the top...

The difference in effective wealth between a DuPont or Rockefeller and a successful trial lawyer is greater than the difference between that trial lawyer and a homeless bum. Far greater. The power curve looks like a capital J. I feel safe in saying that no one reading this is on the vertical part, or even on the curvy part, most likely. (which starts when you're dealing with multi-millions, I think)

We're almost all proletarians, here. Fighting the upper middle class as a class enemy is pointless.
Trying to forge solidarity of interests may go farther, but it's still a tough battle within the Spectacle.
(If the House Slaves identify with the Masters, it makes a slave revolt harder to pull off.)
This may change as "the economy" (which is many different things depending on who is saying it) gets more strained.

The government is often driven to suppress the upper middle class in order to create more equality among the proletariat, because it secures the position of the elite (those who don't have to obey "the law" made by the elite). However, this also makes the Spectacle more unstable (which is why sometimes they have to promote UMC interests against the lower classes - divide and conquer). Ultimately this instability is the thin wedge that we have to pin our hopes on. This is why exposing, mocking, analysing and denying the reality of the Spectacle* is our best tactic.

By the way, this mechanism is also fractal. There are elites within elites, untouchables among the untouchables.

Part II will deal with why the Government is a special factor in this mechanism, and why liberty is the ultimate political goal.

* - sometimes called the Matrix, Conventional Wisdom, or the Granfalloon.

Happy May Day!

Today is International Labor Solidarity Day!

Issues And Problems with Objectivism Part I

I'd like to talk about it without being snarky or dismissive. This of course could be interpreted as giving it too much credit, and thus an implicit sanction. But this kind of "meta-argument", often used by Objectivists themselves, is one of the issues I have. By not engaging something except dismissively, you leave a "back door" open for the ideas to persist and resist correction. This is why people still haven't buried "Intelligent Design" or, rather why it took so long. I think that door is pretty much closed now. A good, thoughtful satire can do the trick. But satire is more than mere snark. A good satire gets close enough to the roots of the thing it satirizes that the analogy can regress back to the original argument. Making fun of conclusions, in a "that's crazy talk!" kind of way, doesn't help, and often hurts. It just reinforces the adherents and allows them to circle the wagons, using the snark against itself.

First off, the Objectivist concept of "objectivity" leaves some things to be desired. I definitely believe that existence exists. Reality is real. But that's a vast oversimplification. The reality that comes to me through my senses is "real", in fact its the only thing I can possibly define as real without going into metaphysical speculations. However, science has shown us that the reality in my brain has been filtered and altered by my sense organs and brain. A man with myopia lives in a blurry reality. A color-blind person lives in a reality where "red" and "green" are the same thing.
To get to the bottom of what's going on between all our reality tunnels, we've developed science, to discover testable and replicable "truths" that can withstand the highest levels of scepticism. These do however rely on our perceptions of experimental data as well, but the idea is that if enough people examine the data, they'll come up with something reasonably "objective". The idea of gravity? Pretty fucking objective, if you ask me.
Outside of this kind of objectivity the only other kind is objectivity of necessity. This is the realm of say... Austrian economics. Predicated on ontological necessities, and logically valid, the foundations of austrian economics are, IMO, pretty much unassailable and objective.
I think that many Objectivists get these two kinds of objectivity confused. (For that matter so do some Austrian economists) Now deriving a philosophical base from ontological necessities, requires that you have some. The ones that Austrian Economics derives from are pretty solid: "there is scarcity" and "people act to reduce this scarcity".
One of the mistakes Objectivists make in their ontology relates to the confusion I spoke of above. Not only does existence exist (and therefore, being as well), but they believe that the naive empirical reality they see is an objective perspective.
(now the more sophisticated ones might claim that only a perfectly functioning person will perceive Objective Reality, but I have some problems with that too)
This is almost a variation of Anselm's ontological proof, except with Objectivist man as the self-grounding causa sui. Maybe if the Objectivists studied Existential ontology, they could shape up their philosophy a bit.
But it gets worse. They claim that things have "natures" and that everything acts according to its nature. Well, in a definitional sense that's true. An orange is an orange because it's a round orange citrus fruit. But here, I see a lot of them making the mistake of swapping Identity for Definition. In other words they slip into a sort of pseudo-platonism, in which an orange is a round citrus fruit because that is the nature of an "orange".
This is how they can separate themselves from being "Libertarians" (and the weird claim that libertarians are worse than communists, etc... is that on the grounds that "libertarians" make liberty look bad by trying to justify it with bad reasoning?).
But definitionally, "Libertarian" means someone who supports Liberty. So by definition all objectivists are libertarians. In fact, if they were right about having the one true justification for liberty, they'd be the only real libertarians.
Of course, most 'libertarians' make the same identity vs. definition error, and are not libertarians at all, no matter what they say.
You can call a cantaloupe "an orange" all you like, but that doesn't make it one.
In general, the pattern I get from reading them, is that Objectivists make a lot of oversimplifications, extend their arguments beyond their proper scope, and think that they are hooked into Objective Reason.
There's also a very strange tendency because of this to have very skewed political/social/economic views. Usually, their logic might well be very tight, but their premises are almost always based on variations of the identity error and oversimplifications. They tend to use the "lesser of two evils" argument way beyond any reasonable scope. (thus the ridiculous blood-thirsty republicanism of some Objectivists) One might wonder, if they were living in Germany in 1927, for whom they would vote. (I'm not casting aspersions about crypto-nazism, btw. They might well vote for the communists as the lesser of two evils. But after they did so would they promote communism as a force for good in Germany?)

One question that I've never heard of an Objectivist giving a good answer to is why we should have a government. Now, I'm not arguing that we don't know the objective limits to when force should or shouldn't be used. We do. Defending self-ownership, is a pretty good, albeit short way of putting it.
The problem is this:
I am self-owning. This is where my rights come from, including my right to self-defence. I may, if I wish, hire an agent to better protect my rights, to delegate that task to them, so to speak. However, I am not obligated to (nor do I have a positive right to get defense services for free). And there certainly can be no one pre-determined agent that has a claim on this job (what makes them so special?).
Now, as I've said, if a minimal self-defense state were maintained by robots, or maybe REALLY integral, intelligent people, it could be morally permissible to have one. But it still doesn't seem mandatory or necessary to have one.

There's more on all of this, and I might need to flesh some of it out, but this is a good starting point.

Unbundle the Zaxlebax!

As I mentioned in my previous post, Roderick Long is one of my favorite people at the Mises Institute.

Recently, he gave the Rothbard Memorial Lecture at the Austrian Scholars Conference.

The whole thing is wonderful of course, but the part that struck the hardest for me was when he spoke of anti-concepts and package-deal terms. This is an enormously important thing for everyone to understand, and not only in the context of socio-political thought. I think this is one of the patterns that trips people up all too frequently. It is a fundamental building block of critical reasoning.
Of course, I would say (and I think Prof. Long would agree) that this thing of ours, is essentially critical reasoning properly applied to the socio-political sphere.
In that realm, I find that the biggest stumbling block to speaking clearly with anyone about politics seriously, are these package deal terms.
Most of my real life friends would, if anything, call themselves socialists. A few consider themselves capitalists. But almost all of them end up endorsing positions that are, if they could think about them clearly, terrible and inhumane. But they can't think about them clearly, because they've already absorbed a metric ton of presuppositions about how the universe works that clearly aren't possible. Yet unfortunately, cognitive dissonance and social pressure keep them frozen in their boxes. If you point out the contradictions, they become uncomfortable, and you seem like a "crazy idealist" or something like that.
Public schooling is largely to blame for this, and of course that's why it's one of the really unassailable institutions in our society. I mean, you can criticize it all you like, but if you talk about abolishing public schools, people freak out.
As I've said before, I think that hard reality is the only ally we really have. Underneath it all, people's desire to survive and thrive is stronger than their ideology. Only when statism becomes untenable will it be demolished. And in that post-collapse gap, that's when we have a chance to keep it from reviving.

Theories of Value, Part I

Recently, Kevin Carson's Studies In Mutualist Political Economy was featured in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, edited by Roderick Long, one of my favorite thinkers among the Mises Crew. The JLS was the Austrian response to the Studies.
Though some of the responses (notably Reisman's and to some extent, Block's) were a bit silly, most of them focused on his revised Labor Theory of Value. This is the biggest theoretical difference of opinion between Austrian and Mutualist economics, most likely. (the other being discussed by Prof. Long, the difference between usufruct and lockean homesteading approaches. It's not that big a difference that a non-economist would likely notice it.)

As you may have guessed, either from the title of this blog, or by reading enough of it, I don't exactly agree with either approach. Yet, I believe that they have more in common than one might think. (I certainly don't wish a pox on either the Neo-Austrian economists nor the Carsonian Mutualists, btw. I think between them, there is an almost complete reconstruction of a general social science, in fact.)

I think the roots of all production cost are time, energy, natural resources and luck*. A "good" that requires very little of any of these to produce will not be as scarce, and in general its marginal value will be lower, than a "good" that requires more of any of these to produce, given the same desire for it. Now desire is the most subjective factor in all of this. No matter how hard it is to make a feces-covered brick, I don't want one. And things that are more desirable, will command a higher price, given the same difficulty of production.
Value, or marginal scarcity, is a very complex factor depending on raw expenditure of production and desire, and comes from both. Both of these are "subjective" but bound each other. I'd love a supercomputer, but I don't want to break my ass too much for one.

* chemistry and cooking are two fields where luck comes into play in successful production.

A new ally

"I could also point out that if libertarianism were to try to dismantle the state while selectively attacking social benefits for the poor while ignoring the structural advantages of the rich, the result would be that the working class would make one great rush for the local state socialist party's recruiting office while classical liberalism remained the party of a few intellectuals and middle-class eccentrics out of touch with social reality. I rather submit that this is what has been happening for the last 150 years or so." (emphasis mine)

- Lady Aster

Exactly! And so well put.
One interesting pattern that I bring up when speaking with state socialists of the Euro-phile variety is "liberate the worst first". Because the blindness I see in them is that they make the same mental error of the conservatives, which is the belief that the poor are actually objectively inferior to the rich. Their answer is to paternalistically care for them rather than kill them off. The libertarian rejoinder should be to liberate them first, and see what they can do for themselves. Then we'll be in a position to liberate the next stratum. Of course it would be best if we all woke up free and peaceful tomorrow, but if we have to make a trade off, let's liberate the worst first.
And more specifically, let's focus on bringing liberty to the third world, and the pockets of the third world which have blossomed in the first world. (when I heard those terms for the first time, I always wondered "what's the second world?" )
If through inflation and licensing and "petty" tyranny, the worst off among us are kept down, we'll never really be free. Unless you advocate starving them out or killing them off in wars, in which case you're an Archon and my objective enemy, plain and simple.

While we're at it...

Let me point out that there was a half-million person mobilization against HR4437, and that it was largely self-organizing. This is something that fills my heart with joy to see and I am in full solidarity with it. (sorry had to cut out the pics, too much load time)

Reiteration and Clarification, Part I

I'd like to re-iterate, and hopefully clarify, my position on this thing of ours, so you know what you're getting into.

First of all, I'd like to say that I am a libertarian by definition, not by identity. What I mean here is that I am only a libertarian because the definition fits me. I don't make a conscious effort to fit into a libertarian set of check boxes. (I used to, but I've grown past that, I think, or I just grew tired of it maybe)

What I do believe is that everyone owns themself. No one else owns anyone else, even in tiny little parts. You can try to nit-pick that with me, and that can be a fun game, but I'm certainly not going to take it seriously. That is the line in the sand that I've drawn. And I mean this in an ethical sense. In any other sense, ownership of another person is ridiculously impossible. You can't get me to do anything without my consent on some level. All you can do is constrain my physical situation. Doing so in a way that tries to assert ownership over me is unethical, IMO. Because it's based on a lie.
Because of this, I see fraud as much more dangerous and fundamental to crime than force. Force is the end point, the bottom line of last resort. But force creates counterforce as the United States government keeps revealing, though they don't seem to be learning the lesson very well. What is more difficult to overcome is being tricked into giving up some piece of life force for ersatz goods. This is the fundamental scheme that the financial criminals and governments use to assert their primary dominance over the people of the earth.
Liberty, in my opinion, is merely the absence of Crime. Crime, not as defined by legislature, which is another form of fraud, but the normal, everyday intuitive sense of crime. Murder, assault, theft, rape, swindles, that sort of thing.
A perfect Liberty is a situation where such things do not exist at all. This is probably not an achievable situation, but it constitutes an asymptote, a limit towards which true libertarians wish to carry society above all else. And I reserve the right to use the phrase "true libertarians" because I mean people who are libertarian by the definition of the word, not people who identify as libertarians. This is not a "no true scotsman" argument.

Anarchy on the other hand is a situation where no one is given the authority to commit crimes. They might still get away with it, but by and large people don't believe they are entitled to. Every Archon is a criminal. By definition. Someone who convinces you to do something honestly isn't a ruler over you but simply a wise man. No one wants to believe that they are not free, that their world is a lie. So it is easier for a lot of people to think that they are being led by statesmen.

The job of the anarchist is to point out that this is not so. What people do with that information will vary, as do people.

And so in all of this, my position on various issues is informed by these ideas. To get rid of the swindle, and secondly to reduce crime. This is why I have no qualms about supporting either the student protests in France (maintaining self defense against plutocratic crimes), nor the "Harass the Brass" direct action campaign to end the war.

On the GWOT

This explains my position on the "Global War On Terror" very succinctly. <- link, click it

Now, I don't like terrorism at all. But my definition of it is probably different than the "official" one (surprise surprise). Yet mine encompasses pretty well, I think, the intuitive understanding of what "terrorism" is.
That definition is "the infliction of damage on non-combatants for a strategic goal".

Part of what galls me about it is that the terrorist mindset recruits everyone into a position against their will (you're either with us or against us). And that's kind of the root of my anarchism, that no one should be forced to participate in something they don't agree with. Let the fighters fight, and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

My solution to terrorism, arm everyone and let people form privateer squads to take out terrorists. It would totally work, of course, and that's why it will never happen under statism. Because just as the drug lords use their ill-gotten gains to fund the 'drug war', the terrorists use theirs to fund the 'war on terror'.

"Oceania has always been at war with Terrorism"

The way Howdt

Dr Lenny at the Zone mentioned me on his blog, so I checked him out. Very nice science/natural resource stuff. He's got an interesting approach to his thought processes that I like. He goes well with To Herd or Not to Herd.

He wrote something that got me thinking about why I'm doing this. Really, what we're all trying to do here is to keep crosslinking to each other to leverage each others ideas. In this way, the more unique our particular approach becomes, we might get fewer readers, but they'll be different ones, different entry points into the crosslink network. And ideally at least some of them will become one of us. Eventually we can reach that turning point faster than you might imagine.
But either way, it provides sustenance to all the other pro-liberty activities going on. It gets people to think in new ways about their ideas and to go off in new directions hopefully.

Interestingly, Kevin Carson just posted something really good about Pharm and Patents, which I think Dr Lenny and his readers might dig.

Steam Engine Time

One thing I've noticed is that as communication becomes more dense and interactive, certain concepts pop up out of the blue all over the place at once.

One of these is a reification of the idea of what a 'market' is. Statists and anti-statists alike often seem to fall into the trap of taking the metaphor of a market too literally and treating it as a noun, as a specific institution the way a 'school' or a 'hospital' is. And this leads to all kinds of weird attempts to fix it or replace it with something else. But the primary concept has already been lost, you're working on an abstraction of an abstraction at that point. What a 'market' is, IMO, is a metaphor for trading in the aggregate. But Sunni Maravillosa had a very elegant (and entertaining) way of making the point:
Markets and Marketplaces

Some other links that are illustrative here:
Kevin Carson on the "Crunchy Cons"
Inadvertent support for free markets in an anti-capitalist reader

More Poxes for everyone!

Lew Rockwell, in quotes, from his latest article, with commentary by me.

Against the Left:
"The typical response of the left is to say that they want a state that does only good things such as share and care, and not bad things such as steal and kill. But this cannot be. We might as well wish for a lion that only purrs and cuddles, or a rattlesnake that only provides percussion accompaniment to mariachi music. The very nature of the state is that it exists only through and for compulsion. To imagine otherwise is not to face reality."

And even its "sharing and caring" functions are at best iatrogenic.
Civil society could do anything the government does, if people wanted it to. But it's easier to let someone else handle it. (especially because we ourselves are under the gun, and have so little time and energy to help others with)

Against the Right:
"The question we have to ask ourselves is whether a society that fails to learn the art of civilization will erect and sustain a state that will impose civilization on the people. I submit that history also teaches that when a people are brutal and uncivilized, the state is even more so. The state is rarely and maybe never better than the people it rules; in fact, it is almost always worse."

I would add, that the state through its propaganda/mind control engines (education, PR and inflation), invariably makes the surrounding culture worse and worse, thus creating more clamor for "order" imposed from above.

The Bad News:
"Thus do we have the central bank to create money for the state. Thus do we have paper money that can be created in unlimited quantities. Thus do we have deposit insurance to make banks failure proof, so that the masses will never doubt that the credit pyramid is immortal. Thus do we have the fed's power to manipulate interest rates and control the flow of credit to the system."

The "evils of capitalism" do exist. But their source is at the root of the money/credit system itself. By definition, "capitalism" is not free trade, but a system whereby the means of production is in the hands of capitalists, or in other words, financiers. This condition can only come about through violent/fradulent intervention.
It is an unfortunate orwellianism that "capitalism" has come to mean both our capital finance system and free trade. They are not the same thing. IMO, "socialism" (in its orwellian meaning - the means of production in the hands of the state) is merely an advanced stage of "capitalism" (in its orwellian meaning). The oligopoly getting replaced by a monopoly. Ironically as this "progression" occurs, it creates a semi-cooperative society among the ruling class where they agree to share our slave labor amongst themselves.

The Good News:
"If any state could rule without propaganda, it would surely do so. Why then do states find educational control and the propagation of the civic religion in their interest? Because at some level, every state, in all times and places, is required to seek the tacit consent of those it governs. No state can control a society by use of the sword only and alone. It must also seek some degree of ideological conformity with its own goals. Otherwise its rule becomes threatened and destabilized." (italics mine)

All we really have to do is generate the understanding that the state is a form of organized crime. The rest will take care of itself, as people act spontaneously to avoid and free themselves from this uber-mafia, to the extent and by the method and form that they wish to.

PS - is anyone still reading this? Heh. I feel so Nockian lately...

I've never done one of these on this blog before, so apologies in advance if you find it jarring. :)
But I was kind of flattered to be tagged (by Brad Spangler), and I don't talk about my self much if at all here in general, so this might be a good way to release some small bits about me. So here it is, the "Meme of Fours":

Four Jobs I’ve Had
1. Roofer (fixing roofs on houses)
2. Java Programmer
3. Waiter
4. Network Technician

Four Movies I can watch over and over
1. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
2. Serenity
3. The Ninth Configuration (find it watch it love it)
4. The Matrix (the first one)

Four Places I’ve lived
1. New York City
2. Brooklyn, NY
3. New Haven, CT
4. Anchorage, AK

Four TV shows I love:
1. Deadwood
2: Cowboy Bebop
3. Firefly
4. Futurama

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven’t seen (much of):
No thanks.

Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Nakhon Ratachasima, Thailand
2. Denver, CO
3. Cologne, West Germany (it was still west then)
4. Seattle, WA

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Filet Mignon / Hanger Steak
2. Bacon
3. Chicken Ceasar Salad
4. Grilled Swordfish

Four sites I visit daily:
1. Achewood
2. Lew Rockwell
3. Mutualist Blog
4. Strike The Root

Four places I’d rather be right now:
1. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
2. Amsterdam, Netherlands
3. Lake Lucerne, Switzerland
4. Costa Rica

Four bloggers I’m tagging:
1. Black Guile
2. Jeremy
3. Vache Folle
4. Wally Conger
(I tried to pick people who might actually do this)

Disciplined Minds

This is the title of a book written by Jeff Schmidt, who worked for 16 years at Physics Today and was fired for writing it.

The subtitle is "A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives"

Christopher Bradley wrote a very interesting review of this book over [here]

Let me pull out some choice bits:

Schmidt hits on the head when he talks about "constrained curiosity". They are disciplined to have internalized the system to such an extent that they are free to "do what they want" -- because they have been so rigorously vetted by the system, in the first place, that employeers know that very few professionals are capable of framing a thought that is incompatible with the system they serve. So a journalist working for the New York Times is simply incapable of writing a story that doesn't support the status quo; by the time they are even considered for employment by the NYT their ideological credentials have been demonstrated a thousand times in a thousand ways; any ideologically incorrect thought that such a journalist presents is likely a transient misunderstanding of the desires of the NYT management and swiftly changed (and by that time, likely without even a twinge of remorse). Professionals are workers that the management, the employeers, the people in charge of the system, can trust.

----------

That's a big difference and it explains why the education system is designed the way it is -- to eliminate so many from professional jobs. Most people can't do it. They might be able to turn off their consciousness and just do a job for eight or ten hours a day, just pass the time in thoughtless repetition of the job, but to be at work for eight or ten hours a day and to be thinking would draw their attention time and again to the strangeness of what it is they're doing. Get too many people like that together in an office, thinking but not thinking about the creative task at hand, and you're asking for a revolution. So people in these creative jobs, well, a different sort of compulsion is required. The non-professional worker the employeers can just compel through force (not just the stick to the head, but the slower but equally deadly unemployment); the professional worker has to be tricked into accepting their role in the system because their creativity and energy are needed in specific ways that different qualitatively from non-professional workers. Since most people lack the ideological discipline necessary to be professionals, well, you gotta get rid of them. Efficiently and in a way that doesn't reveal the ideological nature of the selection. Through the use of the "neutral" arbitrarion of education and professional credentials to create the illusion that when a student fails it's "their fault" -- because most people believe education is largely value free.

----------

The book is explicit that most people actually learn the technical skills on the job -- the education and certification process is largely ideological; so, if every physicist on earth vanished today the technicians who set up the experiments, grad students, interested amateurs and the rest could largely pick up where the "professionals" left off with little trouble. For me this was an important piece of information, as well. I have long felt there is an arrogant bias in the professions concerning the depths of their knowledge, but often when talking with professionals I have felt sorta surprised about how little they know. Or, rather, they seem to know a great deal about a very narrow sub-set of a field and often lack what I'd consider to be the basics and often lack an ability to qualitatively describe what they're doing, or have done.

I mean, I've known for a while now that professionals aren't necessary for a field to continue and advance, and often a hinderance to it -- but only historically. The example I use is the massive glut medical knowledge that happened in Revolutionary France when all the learned aristocrats were thrown out of medical practice. The quality of medicine dramatically improved when the doctors were fired . . . or, y'know, executed 'cause it was Revolutionary France. There are other examples as well -- like the reason why 19th century German chemistry and physics was so much better than everyone else's was because Germany opened up their universities to the middle classes, letting a large number of people with different values into the system to its great benefit.

...anyway you should probably go ahead and read the whole thing.

On private defense agencies

What I think is a good basic way of understanding how private defense would play out:

McDonalds makes way more money than Sardis.

I have a feeling that most of the vulgar libertarians are right to be afraid of anarchism, because it's not going to result in a world that they (or their heroes/bosses) will be very comfortable with.

At least in the early stages, when the nature of property rights manifestation is worked out, there will be something akin to the dreaded "class war" going on. However, the hope for the soft landing is that, knowing what we do (and I mean 'we' as 'all of humanity in general'), this will be a cold war.

There may be enclaves of plutocracy that hold out quite a long time, but for most of us, it will be much more of a worker's paradise than that. Not that everyone will be utterly equal, but that someone from our current society wouldn't be able to tell the moderately rich from the moderately poor. They would suspect we keep all the poor people locked up somewhere slaving away in the satanic mills. "Nahh, we've got machines to do that..."

More on Currency, Part II

To pick up from where I left off, I'm not saying that there should be either of these "options" at all.

What I'm saying is that even if the "unthinkable disaster" of deflation actually did what they say it will (which it won't, because money isn't wealth) it would hardly constitute a disaster for most of us.

What the "economists" actually claim, once you get through the bs, is that by shortening people's time horizons, you are compelling them to accellerate production. And this is true, in so far as it goes, but that's not really a good thing. It's a keynesian/bureaucommie way of looking at the economy, like there's some "production machine" that just churns things out willy nilly and you're turning up the accellerator on it.
But the only reason to produce something is because someone wants it. Otherwise you're just wasting capital and land that would otherwise be used to make things people do want.

Sooner or later prices get all distorted because you've got a surplus of all this crap that no one wants and not enough of what people do want, in a nutshell. This is a simplification, but not an erroneous one. It's basically like that.

But even this claim is not the real reason why economists get paid to promote inflation. Yes the accelleration factor means something to the ruling class, but it's who gets that newly printed money that is really important to them.
They want the price structure to be distorted in just the right way. Which is why they hire these "economists" to figure this stuff out.

I mentioned time horizons before, and I'll get more into that in the next post in this series. It's an important, maybe the most important, semi-obscured factor in the Inflation Game.

The subjective value component.

"Each of us, unless we are infants or otherwise incompetent, is the best judge of what we want or need. It is arrogant to suggest that one knows the needs of another better than that person. "

Exactly. The basis of it all. If you read the Allan Thornton piece, you know what I'm talking about.

from this very good post by Vache Folle, on the St. George Blog.

More on currency, Part I

When I linked to the Iranian Oil Bourse article, I don't want to imply that dollars are backed by Oil, in some sort of 1 to 1 correspondence. I think the guy is overstating the case.

The economic fact of the matter as I see it is, if nothing is backing the dollar, then that means that everything is backing the dollar.

In other words, all the goods and services that can be bought with dollars are "backing" the dollar. Think about it. When you take a $20 out of the ATM, you do so because you expect that you can buy something with that. And you have a pretty good idea of what that something will cost. That's the only reason why you want that bill.

This adds a little more weight to the metaphor of wage slavery as well. Because our labor is being farmed by the banking system, in an indirect way. We're holding up the dollars that they are printing for themselves with our labor. In a real sense, we're backing up their debt with our labor.

This is why it is important to them to avoid deflation at all costs. The neo-classical economists will often claim that deflation would be a "disaster". Well, it would be a disaster for the ruling class. And in the economists' minds, what's good for GM is good for us, and vice versa. They have compressed that shortcut in their minds such that they don't really question it. Which is why they deserve the ridicule they get from skeptics... this is also why they constantly speak of "growth" without really going any further. Because in their minds, it is obvious that "growth" is a good thing for "the economy" (whatever that is).

But the question of distribution changes things a bit...
Consider this scenario. Imagine if you will (it's not too hard) that 5% of the population owns 90% of the wealth.
Now imagine that there are two policy options.
Option A will increase the amount of wealth by 3% across the board for 10 years.
Option B will decrease the total amount of wealth by 3% for 10 years, but will reduce the share held by the top 5% to 75%.
For 95% of the population, Option B is the better option.

Which option do you think the ruling class prefers? What do you think a mainstream economist would say about Option B? "A disaster!"

A name I was unfamiliar with...

Upaya quotes Virgil Storr today and it's worth a read:

Let me make the point another way. If I were to walk into a room full of people and rob them at gun point, it's unlikely that I'd be able to convince them that now, after my crime, we should respect each others property rights and only engage in voluntary exchanges going forward. And even if I were to convince them, perhaps by gun point as well, they're not likely to be happy about it. Certainly, any moral case for establishing a free market that I attempted to make in that room under those circumstances would be sensibly rejected.

The Enrons, the Bechtels, the WorldComs and their champions in the Republican Party want free trade even less than the Steel Workers Unions and the Greenpeaces do. Why? Because markets are the only effective check on corporate greed, corporate excesses, corporate profits and corporate power. Being pro-business is not synonymous with being pro-markets; in fact, those two positions are diametrically opposed to each other.

All the right notes

Got a hold of this link from Jomama, whom you should be reading, if you're really into this thing of ours.

This puts all the pieces together in an eloquent way, without any excess ideology needing to be trimmed:

The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse

See the Mises quote in one of my previous posts for a concise statement of the mechanics of this.

And remember that the way our banking system is set up is fractal. And then all the weird, seemingly ad hoc political stuff clears up quite a bit.
That, and the "good cop, bad cop" mechanism are two good filters to look out from.

Another recommended read

Over at Austro-Athenian Empire (which by the way, is the home of a great library of links to stuff you really ought to read), Roderick Long happens to make a clarification in the fractional reserve banking issue that I think makes many good points, and an expansion of some things Brad Spangler and I kind of breezed over:
Platonic Bailments

In response to this post, I sent an email, which I'll quote here:

I agree that fractional reserve banking in and of itself is not objectionable, from a (natural/common) legal standpoint. I.E. there's no reason to ban it legally.
On the other hand it is taking advantage of the gullible on some level. If the level of reserves is high enough that there is a reasonable chance that you will get your money back when you need it, it's not so
bad.
In some ways it's kind of a form of gambling.

---

The big problem is fractional reserve banking under a fiat currency, because under a fiat system, currency is relative, a kind of zero-sum game. Price levels float to adjust to the amount of currency in the economy because there's nothing to "check" the currency against.
As Big Bill Haywood sagely put it "For everyone who gets a dollar they didn't sweat for, there is someone who is sweating for a dollar they won't get". I think
he meant it in a different context, but it really applies amazingly well to the problem of a fiat currency economy.
For instance, if I get paid 5 "dollars" to do a certain amount of work on the free market, ostensibly I've created 5 dollars worth of value. (or no one would pay me that much) So everything evens out.
If I get paid 6 dollars, my extra bidding power is driving up the price of everything I spend it on, and everything the recievers spend it on, and so on.
Because there's only 5 dollars extra value in the economy, but 6 extra dollars.
Under a commodity-backed currency, these situations quickly correct themselves because someone somewhere will at least threaten to redeem their currency.

PS - I recommend that everyone who is interested in this thing of ours, and has some spare time, read Murray Rothbard's A History Of Money And Banking In The United States. Prof. Long's post is to some extent in reaction to Rothbard's idea of bailment.
But the book is a marvel in its clarity and focus on history within a theoretical frame. You will learn some really cool stuff you probably didn't know about, like the Suffolk Bank.

Made from Concentrate

Kevin Carson makes a great post: The So-Called Green Revolution which not only applies to agriculture, but in its general pattern, points out a lot of the myths that our modern age labors under.

It's admittedly a long read, but very much worth it. I think it's really the economic questions that need to be worked out in order to dispel the lie of necessity, which is really more fundamental to most people these days than the lie of legitimacy. The veil of legitimacy is worn very thin, and I think most people that try to assert it really hold onto it only because of fear.
Most people think of themselves as pragmatic utilitarians underneath it all. And nearly everyone has to know in some part of their mind, that these "leaders" are all a bunch of crooks, nothing more or less. But as long as people think this bunch of crooks is necessary to live a happy, healthy life, they will do whatever it takes, even lie to themselves, in order to preserve them.
It's the "good cop/bad cop" scenario taken to the next level, really.
But anyone who's had any experience at all can tell you - don't trust the "good cop".

some folks I found, while clicking around

This is right on the money.
So is this.
And this (don't mind the disclamation of "libertarians" please)
EDIT: dont want to forget this one either: Plugging the Single Tax

---

and something else, too:
"I should note here that one of the most important, perhaps defining, tasks of the Libertarian Left is communication of the point that problems the conventional left typically blames markets for are in actuality the result of government coercion distorting those markets so that they take on an oligopolistic aspect."
- Brad Spangler

Not only direct coercion, but government cartelization of primary feeds into the economy, such as farming and financing.
Money is a good different from all others. This is because it is not a piece of capital, labor or land itself, but a placeholder that "translates" between all other forms of capital, labor and land so to speak. This is why it is called a "medium of exchange". The problem is that if anyone is given control over this medium itself, they can warp ALL economic transactions.
Financial crimes are the root crimes that enable the others to take place. I can't emphasize this enough. Murray Rothbard spent a lot of time harping on fractional reserve banking because he saw it as the elephant in the middle of the room, and so do I.

Second Edit: Brad brings up an important point, that fractional reserve banking per se isn't so much the problem as its protection by the state. Under a free banking system, competition and money arbitrage would reduce fractional reserves to the minimum necessary to function as a bank. And the reserves themselves could be anything: Land, Labor, Gold, Sea Shells, as long as people valued them universally enough to use as money.
Again this is a situation where "protection" by the state is actually protection of the ruling class.
But this doesn't invalidate the main issue, which is that bank fraud is the root of much (most?) of what we often perceive as "the Evils of Capitalism".

In an economy where money is no longer "translatable" into anything else, such as in a fiat currency regime, all value becomes relative in terms of money, bidding power. So by feeding money to the large corporations under their control/influence, they create bidding power for resources that creates cartels everywhere in the economy. To some extent, I can't compete with GM, because I can't possibly get enough funding to go into business against them, even if I have a design for the best car ever.

As I have said before, under an inflationary system, there is a universal robbery of everyone by those with the highest credit ratings.

If theft was legal, it would still be a crime.

When I say that government is just a kind of mafia, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about...

New York's Real Transit Crisis
by Robert Fitch

If you're going to talk about how business is corrupt, realize that the people who don't play along go out of business, unable to compete in that kind of situation, or even forced out by byzantine regulations, which are only enforced when they need to get someone out of business.

As Peter Schilling sang, it's a world of lust and crime, and people who aren't criminals have a hard time. When I talk about "they", it's no one tiny cabal in particular, it is all the real criminals, "legal" or otherwise, who have taken over the world.
No one else is going to fight them for us.
Anyone who would will be replaced by the criminals themselves.

If we don't learn to be skeptical and take risks, then we've handed the world to them.

The advantage that 'evil' (such as it is) has, is that it doesn't need to follow any rules, so all possible tactics are open to it.
Its disadvantage is that of fracture - evil can never trust evil. Thus evil people often push loyalty, as a tactic, but constantly try to undermine it for their own gain.

And thus the pattern of an evil revolt against an evil oppressor is created and re-created over and over again.

And thus my restatement of "A pox on all their houses". Recent current events are illustrative of this point.

Anyone who is pushing you to 'take sides' should be viewed with suspicion. Either they are confused or...

Just do what you think is right, and if others show up to help, so much the better.

A dime's worth of difference?

"I'll make you a deal. Get the Democrats to oppose government policies that benefit the rich and the wealthy. We do away with all of the programs that create an uneven playing field in favor of those at the top.

Libertarians will vote for Democrats because they'd be the only party pushing for reducing the size of government. After we've done everything we agree on, we can agree to disagree and start fighting again. It's like in Europe, where two parties will form a coalition to focus on issues they agree on, and then after a few election cycles they'll start to fight again." (emphasis mine)

- Logan Ferree over at dailykos, on some diary page comments (thanks to Kevin Carson at the mutualist blog for the reference)

and yet, no one took him up on this idea and ran with it, or even criticized it, instead continuing to bash the straw-man version of libertarianism, as if they didn't read a single word of what he said. Has "Liberal Rage" set in so badly, that they've become the mirror-image of the neo-conservatives? Have we openly declared abdication of all reason?

Paraphrase of Proudhon

Anarchy is impossible

Let me start by quoting myself:
In reality though, all "anarchism" means to me is that there is a general understanding that "the government" is just a big organized crime operation. The rest is a matter of the people organizing spontaneously to resist this (and all other) fraud and violence.

It is not possible for all crime to disappear. It will arise intermittently as noise in the pattern. And if it is not snuffed out quickly, it may organize. Also, the meme of "government" may never be totally eliminated from our minds, just as "religion" has not. But it has been attenuated, and will continue to be so attenuated and abstracted away, as we learn to see it more clearly.

Anarchy is inevitable

When you have the awakening I spoke of before, the myth of government becomes just that, a myth, one that has an impact in the material world, but it is no longer a government for you. The air of legitimacy is gone. Then you realize that we are always in a state of anarchy and it is a matter of fighting crime, without resorting to crime.

Anarchy is liberty

If we had a "night watchman" state that consisted of perfectly functioning robots that prevented all coercive actions, minarchism might work (depending on how those robots were programmed to define coercion, and how well they can recognize fraud, which is a tricky thing for robots.).
In the meantime, in the world of humanity, the best way to secure freedom from crime, which is what liberty actually amounts to, is for all of us to watch over all of us. This is the ultimate end-point of "democracy". The power actually in the hands of the people, the real, individual people, not some abstract "representative" body.

Lew Rockwell, and why I respect him

Lew does some stuff that I think is bad use of language, like calling the free market "capitalism", when he actually means, a free market. Other stuff of that ilk, too. He gives Wal-mart far too much credit...

But he has a lot of guts (being one of the first libertarians with any following to use the "F" word consistently about both FDR-style interventionism, and the neo-con republicans, for example) and a good eye for how things are actually going down.

He posted something on mises.org that I really like, because it gets to the core point really well:
Society Needs No Managers
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Some nice quotes(emphasis mine):

Libertarianism doesn't propose any plan for reorganizing government; it calls for the plan to be abandoned. It doesn't propose that market incentives be employed in the formulation of public policy; it rather hopes for a society in which there is no public policy as that term in usually understood.

The nation needed no Caesar, nor president, nor single will to bring about the blessings of liberty. Those blessings flow from liberty itself, which, as American essayist Benjamin Tucker wrote, is the mother, not the daughter of order. This principle was illustrated well during the whole of the Colonial Era and in the years before the Constitution.

There are many examples of this awful concession operating today. In policy circles, people use the word privatization to mean not the bowing out of government from a particular aspect of social and economic life, but merely the contracting out of statist priorities to politically connected private enterprise.
Indeed, the contracted-out state has become one of the most dangerous threats we face. A major part of the Iraq war has been undertaken by private groups working on behalf of government agencies. Republicans have warmed to the idea of contracting out major parts of the welfare state by putting formerly independent religious charities on the public payroll.
After the abysmal performance of FEMA after hurricane Katrina, many lawmakers suggested that Wal-Mart play a bigger role in crisis management. The assumption here is that nothing important is happening unless government somehow blesses the effort through a spending program that goes directly to a particular group or interest.

Getting up to speed

I've updated my links selection to reflect my current blog-reading habits...

I'll be posting soon with some new stuff and a giant link fest.

Aggregated Anti-aggression

Kevin Carson made a really wonderful post, which sums up a lot. Much of it from other sources, but that's how we humans do this thing. Some quotes I like:

Time to wake up, time to grow up. We’re not children. We do not need to ask permission to live like sane, reasonable, thoughtful, compassionate human beings. We do not need to beg or bow or kneel. We do not need to look to government or to experts or to the rich and famous. Whatever we need, we can get it ourselves. Whatever we want to stop -- we can stop it ourselves. Whatever must be done, we can do it ourselves. We do not need them; we need each other. "
- Joe Carpenter

Our beliefs in equality, etc.. are not shared by them; they are the ruling class, and keenly aware of it. They are, I suspect, exactly like Jane Austen's gentry - sensitive to their standing among their own, but without guilt or compassion at all for the vast majority of the planet's population; everyone not at their level is weather, workhouse, rubbish and landscape.
- Col. Chabert

Well, what I think they are keenly aware of, and what the wisest amoing us have known, and what they are always trying to suppress, more than anything else is:
They need us. We do not need them.

Where Orwell went wrong in 1984 was in fearing that the masses would not inherit the earth. The truth is, in the long run, the Party must fail. This is the good news of Hayek and Mises.
The masses will outlast the classes, if nothing else. But we can help ourselves along, by making each other a bit more aware of the situation, while we still can.

Stuff and Things

So on Freeman, I read about MDM's response on Upaya, to a blog post on Liberty and Power by Gus DiZerega. (all of these are worth reading, and are necessary background for my post below. In fact this is an expansion of my comment in freeman's blog.)

Mr. DiZerega makes a criticism of "Anarcho-Capitalism", and is sort of taken at face value, then argued around... (personally, it almost seemed as though people were treating him with kid gloves)

To some extent though, I think almost everyone involved in this debate is being very nitpicky about making this distinction between "the market" and ... other things (notable exception being Stephan Kinsella, not someone I usually agree with much). I guess one way that I would put it is that "there's no such thing as 'the market'".
My first gut-level response to Mr. DiZerega's Disney example is that, in a free society, something like Disney wouldn't exist to do that.
To be more technical, in a "homesteading" society, anyone who wanted to buy up large tracts of land would have to buy them from the local community itself, so if none of them wanted to sell that land, the would-be 'developer' wouldn't get it. These 'holdout' cases happen so frequently even in our corrupted system of property that there is an "eminent domain" controversy. Without eminent domain and with stronger property definitions, those sort of undesirable development projects just can't happen, unless large numbers of local inhabitants are willing to let them, in which case, where's the beef?
I think a lot of these criticisms of free-market anarchism underestimate the effect that our current monetary/credit system has in facilitating large-scale economic behavior.
IMO, a free society couldn't sustain large monolithic organizations, but spontaneous networks would develop when people needed/wanted to work together on larger projects, and then dissolve when no longer necessary/desirable.

I also disagree strongly with his caricature of anarcho-capitalism. Market anarchism is not a political philosophy cobbled out of bundles of contradictory beliefs, in order to promote the interests of a certain class. Most others are. This may be why he describes it in such a way, from certain conclusions that some market anarchists come to, instead of the essential framework of its definition.

I quote:

" As an ethical system, anarcho-capitalism depends on the following assumptions, all of which are wrong:
1. The market is a neutral means for facilitating voluntary exchange, and so simply reflects the values of those entering into voluntary transactions.
2. People's values are adequately reflected in the exchanges they make within a market order.
3. Some non-controversial theory of property rights is possible that is able to make all possible voluntary exchanges into either market exchanges or simple verbal agreements (science, marriage, etc.)"

My immediate response to that is:
1. My above post covers that a bit. What is this market you speak of, Kemosabe?
2. Impossible that it can be otherwise, in a FREE market. In a "market order"?? well, that can be used to describe a lot of things... Certainly all of my values are not currently expressed in my voluntary transactions, but that's because a bunch of thugs are distorting my options.
3. Anarcho-capitalism doesn't rely on this assumption at all. (or the other two for that matter, but there are stronger criticisms for the other two)
In fact, property will be defined by the people as they go along, as they desire to. The difference is that no one definition will be forced on anyone who rejects it.
The other part of the statement is also not necessary. As long as a transaction is UNANIMOUSLY voluntary, it really doesn't matter one bit what it "looks like", which seems to be what Mr. DiZerega is spending a lot of time arguing about...

History Explained

"Let us assume that the international [monetary] authority [currently, the Federal Reserve of the United States] increases the amount of its issuance by a definite sum [of credit or paper money], all of which goes to one country, Ruritania. The final result of this inflationary action will be a rise in prices of commodities and services all over the world. But while this process is going on, the conditions of the citizens of various countries are affected in a different way. The Ruritanians are the first group blessed by the additional manna. They have more money in their pockets while the rest of the world's inhabitants have not yet got a share of the new money. They can bid higher prices, while the others cannot. Therefore the Ruritanians withdraw more goods from the world market than they did before. The non-Ruritanians are forced to restrict their consumption because they cannot compete with the higher prices paid by the Ruritanians. While the process of adjusting prices to the altered money relation is still in progress, the Ruritanians are in an advantageous position against the non-Ruritanians. When the process finally comes to an end, the Ruritanians[Americans, since 1944] have been enriched at the expense of the non-Ruritanians[non-Americans, since 1944]." -Ludwig von Mises (brackets mine)

That's it. The scam in a nutshell. It's about time, and time's relation to matter/energy.
Of course, violence is the iron fist hiding in the background, preventing the rest of the world from simply saying "fuck off" and refusing to take dollars...
And this pattern also applies within the borders as well. The people with the best credit rating are literally stealing (or at least, accepting stolen goods) from everyone else.
Really free trade is only possible in a non-inflating economy.

A lot of things we think of as arising from a natural order are actually the result of subtle coercive social engineering. Which things those are exactly, is difficult to talk about. But I'd be very surprised, given the depth and breadth of organized fraud and violence, that much of what we consider "normal" is actually what people would enjoy, given their drothers.

I mean, if people do want to reproduce that voluntarily, I have no problem with them doing so, and those things might exist for a little while until we realise "oh shit, hey, we don't have to do that anymore..."

In reality though, all "anarchism" means to me is that there is a general understanding that "the government" is just a big organized crime operation. The rest is a matter of the people organizing spontaneously to resist this (and all other) fraud and violence. To the extent that they do, we will have "anarchy", as far as I am concerned.
But the awareness is what is important. People have to give up the illusion that there is a bunch of special people called "the government" and it's ok for them to do certain things, but not for anyone else to do them.

Hi everyone!

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, life has been kind of crazy (as usual, but more localized right now). I have something in the pipeline. In the mean time, I've republished one of my favs that might have gotten overlooked.

The Security State vs The Skeptical Society

In a better world, people would not trust other people without a lot of supporting evidence. The Security State makes it too easy for people to stop thinking. In fact, it penalizes "over-thinking" by shortening time horizons. We just don't have time to think too much about anything, and we don't have enough options to weigh. They've done the thinking for us and pre-limited our options. So everything becomes safer at the margins, but more and more worthless. If it goes on and grows more intrusive, at some point we will have pre-defined scripts for every action we take, and life per se will cease to exist. Because life is choice. We cease to be ourselves if all of our choices are made for us.
In the skeptical society, on the other hand, trust has to be earned, and people will rely on their local social networks to provide them with accurate information. Honesty, and not bullshit, will become the most valuable commodity. "Authority" as such will be scorned, unless it is backed up by a great deal of legitimate evidence. People will think more and do less, because that will be the only way to deal with risk. In the process, wealth will localize. No more vast towers of concentrated power. Production will become more interdependent, and decentralized, because no particular group will be able to sustain large-scale production, and thus no one will be denied the opportunity for small scale production. Prices will drop, and yet stabilize in the absence of large scale spending. The inequality of wealth will decrease, as everyone takes a hand in building everything.

The current growing ratio of noise to signal is putting pressure on the world to become more skeptical, which will put pressure on societies to shift away from guaranteeing security. They just won't be able to do it effectively. The idea of managing anything larger than a local area will become preposterous. Our current states will collapse, or kill us all in the process of trying to hold themselves together. When it becomes clear that the rulers will only be ruling a pile of rubble if they continue, they will be forced to retreat.

This is a promise and a warning.

To you, who still think of tribes and teams, leaders and followers, shepherds and sheep. Who still believe in obligations and privileges, plans and projections,
To you who are still pack animals looking for direction...
good luck.

Though you've grown wily and wise, perfecting your schemes as far as you can, you will find yourselves imprisoned, alone and afraid, in your own security systems.

And to my brothers and sisters, who are transactionalists, trans-patternists, dynamic existing beings.
To you who have learned to share that which is mutual, and let go of that which is not.

Take heart. Our time is always inevitable. Through our means itself we shall achieve our various ends.

We are the new daoists, balanced yet dynamic, we see the living dao, not as an unalterable stone sitting at the heart of it all, but a spherical river flowing in all directions at once. We are the new gnostics, who can discern the patterns of the all while sitting at our desks, or walking down the street.
We do not wish to control, direct, prohibit or contain. We wish to burgeon, and discover, grow and transact. Our defense is our skill, our security is the knowledge that we can handle the risks. We will share with all, but only that which is shared mutually, value for value. We are similar in our means, but individual in our ends.

We have no designs on your power. But if you attempt to control us, you do so at your own risk.
We are not men. We are not women. We are not geeks. We are not freaks. We are not black. We are not white. We are dynamic, existing beings, capable of surpassing any cognitive traps that would contain us.

I hereby reject out of hand all recruitment drives and guilt trips and psychological bondage routines.

We will bypass their fortresses which inevitably become prisons.
We will remix them into oblivion.

This is a promise... and a warning.

In Wartime, Rulers Come Alive!

Well, I've decided that I really ought to link to this:
The Political Economy of Fear
by Robert Higgs

One of the better articles I've seen on mises.org in a while, plus it fits in with where my last couple of posts have been headed...

Some choice bits:

Large parts of the government and the "private" sector participate in the production and distribution of fear. (Beware: many of the people in the ostensibly private sector are in reality some sort of mercenary living ultimately at taxpayer expense. True government employment is much greater than officially reported [Light 1999; Higgs 2005a] .)

All such reports agree, however, that a crisis looms and that more such studies must be made in preparation for dealing with it. Hence a kind of Say's Law of the political economy of crisis: supply (of government-funded studies) creates its own demand (for government-funded studies).

Even absolute monarchs can get bored. The exercise of great power may become tedious and burdensome—underlings are always disturbing your serenity with questions about details; victims are always appealing for clemency, pardons, or exemptions from your rules. In wartime, however, rulers come alive.

What is to be done?

I don't think there are "solutions" in the sense most people seem to mean it. I think that a sort of general awareness of, and thus hopefully disgust with, the whole process of how our lives have been corrupted by the myths we have been fed, is about the best we can push for right now. This will eventually lead to "sedition, sabotage, and slack" which is probably the best way we can beat the Powers That Be. The thing they are most afraid of, I think, is that we will all stop giving a shit about them.
When a significant margin of the population just slows it all down and stops trying to pay for all this erzatz crap they don't need, or even scarier, starts saving money, that's when they will know it's time to hang up the hobnail boots and go home.
How long that will take, I don't know. To some extent I am a Nockian "superfluous man", but I hope that with this crazy(and it is) global communication grid we've got, we can hurry the process up at least a little bit.
If could afford it I would rent out billboards and airships(just because I love them so) that just said "It's all lies" in giant black letters on a white background. But for now, this blog will have to do.

EDIT: also, in a similar vein, sort of(at least the last bits), but mainly just because I haven't linked to it yet,

Laws of the Jungle
by Allan Thornton

"Better" won't make your life better...

I think it's plainly obvious to just about everyone out there that this society is dying.
The exceptions are the cheerleading "conservatives" who think that once we wipe out the deviants and poor people, everything will go back to the wonderful 1950s, forever. Not worth addressing right now.

There are also the techno-determinists that think that if we can hang on a bit longer without blowing ourselves up, technological advancement will save us. Nope. It is the application of technology that produces wealth, not technology itself. The current copyright wars should be evidence to this effect. Or the trap that the ruling class set for the internet purveyors. Or pollution.

What is to be done?
It is my belief that there is no possible solution that involves a keynesian/mixed-economy society. It's not a matter of patching up something that is working pretty well. It's not going to work, at all, no matter what. We've eaten all the seed corn, just about. The past few years have been about trying to squeeze labor to continuously produce more and more wealth, to make up for the dead-weight losses. We can't intentionally create scarcity as a policy and expect to survive that way forever. And we can't go back to the 40s-50s. When TPTB initiated this game in the early 1900s, we had been generating and accumulating capital at a historic pace for about 100 years. Now, it's all almost gone. Only modern day pyramids and paper trails are left... the "wealthy" are playing a game where they basically just steal our labor power to keep themselves going. But we can't work 90 hours a week. Eventually something will give. We cannot tame the big corporations and make them "play nice". Their very size makes them steal just to stay afloat. We either kill them off or we trundle into Soviet-style economics, bread lines and all. Or both, depending on how we do it. And the unions at this point are just Labor, Inc. Either GM, Boeing, Archer Daniels Midland and IBM (etc) must collapse or we will.

The neo-conservative answer is to literally go somewhere and steal capital from other countries. But that's not working so well anymore either. We've destroyed large portions of the world trying to do this and failing.

All those euro-socialist fantasies should go too. They are in the same boat as us, they are doing pretty much the same thing as we are, but tweaked differently. But they have the distinct advantage of not having had to spend as much on defense for the past 60 years. (War is about the worst thing you can possibly do to a society, even the "winners" in a war lose, except for the elite). So it will take more time, but they will completely fall apart too.

You can't get the magic wand. You can't make one central pattern work for millions of people, all different. And you can't force people to re-shape themselves to the pattern. What you gain in "efficiency", from those you can get to, you lose in creativity/division of labor/real production efficiency. And it's one of those things where, even if you win, you lose. A life where everyone is molded into a perfect citizen laboring tirelessly for the "common good", whatever the technocrats decide that is, is not a life.

We have to learn that risk is ok. Race car drivers face a lot of risk, but probably die less frequently in auto accidents than everyone else, because they adapt to that risk.
We have to accept the fact that we cannot guarantee jack shit to anyone, but we can make conditions as favorable as possible to everyone, and trust them not to utterly fuck up. And that's it.
Bad things will sometimes happen to people. People will do bad things to each other. Guess what? Bad things are happening to people now, not only despite Control and Security, but more often, because of them. A certain amount of BAD is inevitable. But the way to minimize it is to let go of trying to control it. That sounds nuts to modern Merkins, but it is really the only way.
The rest is up to us as individuals to adapt and figure shit out on our own.
Throughout history, with everything against us, we've always found a way to do that, nonetheless. If we stop creating roadblocks in our own path, there is no reason to think that we will not be able to do anything necessary to prosper and thrive.  And then some...

Impressive... most impressive...

...but hardly surprising.
Kevin Carson does it again over at the mutualist blog with this one:

Corporations, State Capitalism, and International Trade

He himself references a very good article by Mike Hoy. The end of the article states:

Most of the books pointing out the just plain wrongness of pretending that corporations are “persons” are written by people who are considered to be on the “Left” politically. And their “solutions” to corporate dominance of the individual are so naïve as to be almost frightening - they seem to honestly believe that somehow “government” (the same government that is owned by corporations) can pass laws that will restore corporations to whatever proper place they might have in a society based on individual rights. They seem to be blissfully(?) unaware of what the Marxist-oriented writer Gabriel Kolko demonstrated in his 1967 book The Triumph of Conservatism: that government regulatory bodies inevitably become controlled by the very industries that they are supposed to be “regulating.”

I maintain that it is up to “Libertarians” to take the lead in questioning the corporate form of enterprise, and come up with "solutions" to restore economic power in America to its rightful practitioners: individual people.

So how about it, “Libertarians?”

How about it indeed? We're working on it, a minority of Austro-Libertarians and mutualists and left-objectivists... and we will inevitably succeed, if we are wise enough to follow the advice of Bruce Lee and "accept what is useful, reject what is not" from all corners of the social criticism gradient.

Islam is the new Communism

All over the world, people are rebelling against the corrupt piece of shit governments that the Corporate-State nexus uses as their front line in the war on humanity. People are angry. And rightly so. We think we're angry, but things aren't even so bad here(yet), in the vanguard home of the capitalists. But in these shitty third world countries, run by truly evil assholes, things are REAL FUCKED UP.

So people get angry. Sooner or later, they get angry enough to rebel. "Communism"(wink wink) was a good scheme for some would-be Takeover Artist to channel this rebellion for his own ends. But the bottom started to fall out after the USSR proved that it was a dead end. Now it's "Islam", which is even better, because you don't even have to make living conditions much better. In fact, you can claim that prosperity itself is wicked.

The world-wide revolution is coming one way or another. If we don't give them something worth fighting for, the scumbags waiting in the (left and right) wings will.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind63.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind60.html

Mutual Aid, blogosphere style

One of the best, most interesting writers in this thing of ours is Arthur Silber. He blogs over at The Light of Reason. Truly a refreshing perspective.

I'm going to link to some of what I think are his Greatest Hits. But in the spirit of mutual aid, I would appreciate it if anyone reading this who is capable of donating a bit to him, to do so. It's rational self interest here. I don't want him to stop writing, but he's on the brink. I've been there myself quite often in the past few years, which is why there's not a lot of volume on my blog... yet.
So this is also out of a feeling of solidarity and understanding. Anyway, see for yourself. Read this stuff, and decide. Why should Glenn Reynolds, of all people, be able to make a living blogging, when people like Arthur fall into deep poverty? (probably a sophisticated information asymmetry, and that's what I'm fighting here)
So, go ahead and decide. Read, and do as you will.

The Roots of Horror, Part I - Linked Series, read em all.

Why You Should Protest The Torture And Abuse Of Children

The Apocalyptic Crusader Psychology

I Accuse - To those who pave the way for the New Fascism - Linked Series - this is a masterpiece

The Culture of the Lie

DON’T “CURE” US! JUST LEAVE US ALONE!

There are always 3 sides to every story in the Real World

One thing that always befuddled me was the strange blindness that most "Right-Wing" libertarians have in favor of Big Business, and the corresponding blindness that "Left-Wing" libertarians had against the Free Market.
When I would see people who should know better talking about how great some fascist behemoth like Nike is, to pick a name from a hat, it always seemed weird to me.
And if you're an anarchist, you can't avoid the free market. How are you going to stop people from trading stuff or services? And why would you?

Eventually, I realized that there was the Elephant in the middle of the room, which was Banking/Finance.

But, just like with Ginsu Knives, there's even more!
Not only does fraudulent, oligarchic finance distort all property, many of the right-wing libertarians don't realize/admit, that the particular reductions in the state that they support the most, are just changing the shape of intervention.
It's like anti-socialism, where the rich are still protected but the poor aren't. And then the left-wing libertarians believed them.
But a few people, in this thing of ours, see through that towards an asocialist, acapitalist non-interventionism. You can't have central banking, but take away welfare. You also can't increase regulation of industry, without increasing war, or corporate subsidies, or massive inflation.
So if we have to progress gradually toward freedom, we must be careful in how we do it.

To me, having "free banking" is a no-brainer. The elephant must die.

Beyond that, we should think systemically. To take from the rich to give to the poor is counter-productive and inefficient. It drains the total level of wealth in the society. But at least, it is a negative feedback loop. It would be certainly no worse than shooting the wealth into space...

HOWEVER, to take from the poor to give to the rich, is an abomination. And it's a positive feedback loop, which may amount to the same thing.

So we need to be careful... farm subsidies should go near the top of the list... paying farmers not to grow food seems really bad.

the new old thing in town

"Neolibertarianism" - the ?new? attempt at a pragmatic libertarianism created by the "Q and O" bloggers. These guys were inspired by Irving Kristol, of all people, so you kind of know what this is all about. Shoring up the powers that be by not actually fighting them very much but pretending that they are the only sane opposition to the status quo. A bit more "good cop" than the neo-cons, but a bit less literate as well.

I couldn't help feeling, when I was reading the posts where they introduce this splinter ideology, that I have had this argument about 53498789073 times with people who were trying to defuse the logic of full-on liberty.

One problem is that they also call themselves "New Libertarians" which actually refers to an entirely different movement which was foundational to radical libertarian thought, and especially those of us who think that total liberty is where the left and right meet, so to speak. Not some sort of monstrous hybrid of statist ideas. (though I suppose that is a meeting point as well, just not a logically consistent one) We don't want to lose more terminology to the Orwellian Process. It's hard enough to talk about anything these days, as it is.

A quote from Tom Knapp , with proper links for the purposes of correcting the memetic record:

Since the crux of the conflict is the term "New Libertarian," those interested in defending
the history of our movement against temporary and transient "rogue informational waves" can do so by the simple expedient of linking the term, from their own blogs and web sites, to sites more representative of its real, historical meaning than that of the "neolibertarian" journal.

Some examples:

"Samuel Edward Konkin III, 1947-2004," by Jeff Riggenbach, is a moving tribute to the life and work of the authentic New Libertarian.

"A Fannish Tribute to Samuel Edward Konkin III," by J. Neil Schulman, covers similar ground, with more emphasis put on the science fiction fandom interests and activities of the real New Libertarian.

LeftLibertarian is a Yahoo! Group created by the original New Libertarian.

And, of course, there's The New Libertarian Manifesto, the seminal explanatory work on SEK3's ideas.

compassion comes from within

government redistribution of wealth != altruism
it is at best, guilt relief.
but for the most part, simply power consolidation, like most things the government does.

doing something that you are forced to, carries no moral value at all.
we are not a nicer or better society because we are forced to give wealth to the government, of which the needy get some small fraction.
and in fact, we are more cynical for the pretense.

"I gave at the Congress" should never be something someone can get away with saying.

AND NO, PEOPLE WON'T STARVE BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT ISN'T GIVING THEM STUFF.
in fact, quite the opposite. anything the government is going to give out, it has taken much more first.
and other than direct money transfer, any other thing the government gives is going to be a shoddy, near-worthless substitute for the real thing.
if people really want to help the poor, as so many seem to want to, (enough to vote for all these welfare-spending politicians) and they have all that stolen money back in their pocket,
they will find a way to do so that is far more efficient and effective than any statist welfare scheme. (in fact the history of the original workers' movement, before it was crushed and co-opted by the state, is full of examples of such.)

which may well be why the powers that be don't want it that way.

the trick to it all is the belief that somehow, everyone else won't pay their "fair share" without being forced to. but if everyone that wants welfare just contributed the equivalent amount that they pay out in taxes to a private version of welfare, the poor would be far, far better off.
as for the rich, well, the government takes for its own "costs" far more of the money that comes out of people, than it gives out. even if the rich folks contributed nothing at all to private charity, the amount of real value that eventually gets back to the poor would most likely still be way more than it is under the current system.
I mean, private non-profit orgs are way way way less corrupt and more efficient than any government bureau. The only possible argument I can see is perhaps, that we should roll back the state gradually, to give private society a chance to rebuild itself, now that it has been disrupted so much already. But that's about the best you can say about government. That it is iatrogenic. Much like the modern corporation, who hold their employees hostage. Another beast that can be replaced by private alternatives. (no, corporations aren't really private, despite Republican rhetoric.) The idea, for instance, that GM will get bailed out by the government, because they are holding their own workers hostage, makes me really really bitter.

Doesn't anyone else want to live in a world with no large institutions? Doesn't this appeal to anyone? Or has everyone bought into the myth that bureaucracy is somehow mystically "necessary" or "inevitable" now and cannot be dispensed with?
Personally, I think we'll do just fine without it. Whatever benefits accrue (to a certain cross-section of society) from it, will be far out-weighed by having efficient, flexible, responsive(and therefore, responsible) networks of production, rather than giant, immobile, static, pyramidal behemoths.
I want to wake up one day in a world with no GM, no AT&T, no European Union, no AMA, no FDA, no DEA, no US Army, but just us, and our various communities trading and sharing with each other.
And if I live long enough, I will.
The real question is how we are going to end up there, and who will have to suffer in the process of getting there. If we don't build that world peacefully, then we will end up there through sheer exhaustion and collapse. Violent control is non-sustainable.
Then again, the history of the world is one of just such collapses, and then sooner or later the predators reorganize (once society has built up enough surplus to make it worthwhile/possible for them) and start all over again. But knowledge accelerates. We have begun to directly record history, more and more efficiently. So maybe we can hold out better this time.

Another angle on this thing of ours...

Selling the Store? - by the always insightful Kevin Carson.

I would say that by taking the stated approach of always pointing out how the government is protecting the ruling class at the expense of the rest of us, in regards to any particular issue people care about, it will engender a sense of general non-legitimacy to the state, a skepticism that could undermine the security trap. If people stop believing in this legitimacy, the state's goose is rather cooked. Not that people will, en-masse, revolt or throw down their tools. People are too opportunistic and utilitarian for that. But the people on the margin right now will move closer to our position, and so on. They will continue to spread this general malaise. Malaise, under the conditions we live in right now, is just about the right attitude for the average non-ideologue to have. If it grows powerful enough, the boogey-men of the statists will no longer frighten people into clinging to Big Brother's shirtsleeve.
Lao-Tsu said "When rulers take lives so that their own lives are maintained, their people no longer fear death. When people act without regard for their own lives they overcome those who value only their own lives."

Of course the powers that be, having only a hammer, have moved on to the vague threat of torture in order to keep people in line. (see: Alberto Gonzales)
This may be why we were allowed to see the Abu Ghraib photos. "See what we will resort to?"

Perhaps the worst thing that could happen is for the next administration to be "soft tyrants". The Good Cop to the Bush Administration's Bad Cop. But that threatens to unleash a revolution of rising expectations. So it's a game of brinkmanship. Even with all of their Ivy League educated experts, they can't do the impossible, which is to rationally plan things from the top down in a way that does not eventually collapse. Planned societies are un-sustainable, economically and ecologically and sociologically. These things are not un-related. Economy is human ecology. Social Psychology is constrained by material conditions. (i.e. whether or not you have a "propensity to consume", you can't spend what you don't have. And having less will program you to consume less of it. People might be somewhat irrational, but we do learn.)

Personally, I think the one lever we should lean the hardest on, all of us, whether mutualists or rothbardians or anarcho-marxists or anarcho-empiricists, is that of Central Banking. It is the cause, directly or indirectly, of most of the evils of modern life. And this immediately cuts off the "but without the government, big business would crush us all" argument dead in it's tracks.
In a world of constantly falling prices, where credit bubbled upwards instead of downwards, there wouldn't be "big business" as we know of it.
It also answers the "social decay" arguments of conservative working class people. It is not that hard to demonstrate how monetary inflation creates moral corruption in society, both of the licentious type, and the empty consumer-culture type. Weimar Germany provides a beautiful historical example to use.
It is a great way to reach out to "ideological cousins" who just can't accept the whole consistent philosophy of anarchism. Let's get rid of central banking first, and then we can mop up the rest.

Remember me?

Yeah, I'm still alive.

I've been using my other (non-blogger) blog, it has more readers and it's more secure, but I will continue to post stuff here, that I would like the wider world to see.

I guess it was all too easy to just let this one go, but I think I have found a use for it.

There's fear in the atmosphere these days among the Neoconservatives... there always has been. Fear is the strong drink that gets their minds right, their morning constitutional. If you look at their words, on a clear-headed day, you can see the fear behind their attempts at philosophy or ideology or what ever passes for reasoning among them.
Necessity, necessity, necessity. Never questioning, or even really illuminating or explaining, the murky premises under their rhetoric. Which is what makes them very tricky little devils indeed. Though I'm not one to go all into the "Straussian Connection", certainly in this way, his influence has touched them, methodologically, if not ideologically (which becomes difficult to prove one way or the other, given this very methodology).
Keep things grey and dark and cloudy, but push the fear button.

But what I am talking about is a different kind of fear... not the invigorating fear of terrorism or islamic ascendancy, or liberal social values, but a paranoiac sweat, a shaky hand on the reins of hegemony. The neocons are starting to realize what those of us who have a Certain Awareness have seen for quite some time - namely:
They are losing ground. Their time draws near to a close.
What neither they nor their Neoliberal opponents can see clearly however, is why.

They've done everything they can do, regardless of any moral or long-term pragmatic considerations, to ensure their grip on the world, or at least the parts of it they have access to, and yet, they can almost smell their own defeat. They sleep less soundly these days, and the one word goes through the twists and turns of their nihilistic minds over and over, unceasingly: "Why?" Why is it all starting to crumble, and why so quickly? The more practical among them must have known, just from a cursory glance at history, that they couldn't keep it up forever... but the vast rottenness of their foundation is startling even to them. The Orkin man can't save it.
One thing that has often puzzled "left-wing" observers of the neo-con ascendancy is why there is this bitter infighting between the neo- and paleo- branches of "conservativism". The quotes offer a clue. The reason is that either one or the other is not actually conservativism. Which is which really matters little, a semantic cat-chasing-tail. The neo-conservatives and neo-liberals are opposites only in the sense that your reflection is "opposite" of your actual image. That's why they are able to hold onto power, because they are "the same thing, only more so" compared to the "liberals" in this society. There are differences. The neo-cons are more ruthless and less subtle about how they go about things. The neo-libs don't mind taking the abject poor along for the ride, in fact, they want to create more and more of them to take care of. The neo-cons on the other hand are more open in their contempt for their victims. But underneath both of these wings of the same bird, there is the body of Statism. Social democracy without the pesky civil rights getting in the way, really. The Managerial/Technocratic class whether "public" or "private" have reached and in fact surpassed their apotheotic moment.
But paleo-conservativism is something else altogether, it is much more of a real opposition to this "vital center". And this opposition has its roots in the classical values of whatever was good about America in the first place. Paleo-conservativism basically understands that Society and the State are two different forces competing for the same space in people's lives. Traditional social order is destroyed, not bulwarked, by the growth of the State. And many (not by any means all) of the paleo-conservatives are well-read enough, and thoughtful enough, to put up solid reasoning behind their criticism of politicising society. That makes them both a danger to the neo-cons and a potential ally to the right kind of libertarians. You could see paleo-conservatives as proto-libertarians. Or rather, libertarians are what you get when paleo-conservatives liberalize. And by libertarians I don't mean the variety co-opted by the state as "loyal opposition". Now even among the libertarians, you get a lot of lunk-headed simplistic people who are into it for all the wrong reasons, like you do with any movement.
For those of us in This Thing of Ours, our attachment to liberty is not a cause, but a by-product of a certain larger viewpoint about the universe.
We value the libertarians of the left and right (yes both kinds exist -> read this if you don't believe it: http://www.mutualist.org/id10.html) for their commitment to a consistent philosophy of liberty - even when they stumble, they are at least walking in the right direction.
Increasingly, the philosophy and ideology of liberty is coming under fire. There is a sense of panicky haste in these attacks.
While in drier times, there have been at least arguable, reasonable critiques of libertarian thought, these are not among them. It's not the "neo's" style anyway. But the focus of neocon smear campaigns has begun to turn away from the leftist varieties of social democratism and towards libertarians and quasi-libertarian "conservativism".

Because that's who they are afraid of. If the populist ideas about civil society and the natural order get linked to libertarianism, that is extremely dangerous for neo-con hegemony. For one thing, it represents a real option that does not hand the game right back to them. But beyond this, it scares their masters, and shit rolls down hill.
Even the most brainwashed flag-waving thugs are starting to back-pedal. In general most people tend to be mostly utilitarian in their thinking. And the media is having a really really hard time covering up the fact that this modern way of life doesn't work so well in the long run.
Libertarian ideologues are not "winning the war of ideas", even though they are mostly right, on the issues that they define themselves by. Reality is winning the war against idealism. The simple historical truth is, for the past 100 or so years, America (and thus our dependents as well, like Europe) has thrived by stealing resources, as much or more than by improving patterns of production. And in the past 50 or so years, that theft has started to tear away at those patterns of production to an accelerating degree. We've been addicted to inflation and passing costs along to the third world for far too long, and it is biting us in the ass now. We have only gotten this far by being really really good at this game of brinksmanship. We have some of the smartest people in the world, trained to outsmart everyone else, keeping this game going. But as the complexity and underlying instability mounts, we are coming to one of those moments where a collapse is imminent. You can't outsmart the laws of thermodynamics.
The libertarians are now becoming a threat because they seem sane compared to more of the same of this crap. Or at least the libertarians that understand how liberty actually works. The others will be just as shocked as everyone else, when the stock market implodes and real wage growth drives profits close to zero.
The only thing the neo-cons can offer at this point is "if violence doesn't solve our problems, we must not be applying enough of it..."
But their overlords don't want to rule over a pile of rubble. They will try to work out some third way, some new way to simulate freedom enough to keep themselves on top. They might even pull it off for a little while longer. But they are running out of time and space. If the simulation gets too realistic, people will make the connection. If it is not realistic enough, it won't work.

It's a trap

We're all really anarchists... we just haven't let go of our fantasies of "molding the world" to our specifications

I mean right-wingers hate left-wingers, and vice versa for the same sorts of tyranny.
They have the same false assumptions. There's not a dime's worth of difference.

You can't possibly force everyone to do "the right thing". So give up now.

The "center" are just people that don't want to think about it at all, but the ideologues push them to, so they choose the middle as a "safe" option... but it is hardly safe, it's just a slower bleed.
Sure, is that the best we can hope for? A slower decay?

Let us go, you political dichotomists!! You never understood if you consider me among you. I am trying to collapse the whole game here.
Neither side offers any possibility of escape: imposition of order --> escalation of chaos
imposition of chaos --> escalation of order
stop it.

It's no accident

"The occupation of Iraq is presented as "a mess": a blundering, incompetent American military up against Islamic fanatics. In truth, the occupation is a systematic, murderous assault on a civilian population by a corrupt American officer class, given licence by its superiors in Washington. Last May, the US Marines used battle tanks and helicopter gunships to attack the slums of Fallujah. They admitted killing 600 people, a figure far greater than the total number of civilians killed by the "insurgents" during the past year. The generals were candid; this futile slaughter was an act of revenge for the killing of three American mercenaries. "

- John Pilger

Markets vs. Status

(crossposted to The Reluctant Anarchist)

To be fair, this post is inspired by something I read on Catallarchy, though I don't remember quite what it was right now. Too much meat world extraneous stuff going on to really be that involved right now. Which is why you haven't heard from me in a few days.
This is also inspired by something my girlfriend Ridgely said a long time ago. She is awesome and has her own thing going on here. She's a genius, but she's got her own (and sadly, much more entertaining) style and focus than I do. However, we share most of the same fundamental values and root ideas - and knowing that is a clue, for the diligent and wise, as to what you are going to read here.

A market is a mechanism for rationing scarce goods. (there is a deeper and more fundamental way of seeing what a market is, but others have said it better than I can right now, and it is not necessary to grok this post...)

In other words, people want X, and there is only so much X available, so people bid for their supply of X using tokens we call money. (or sometimes through direct barter, but that is not as effective)
Aside from all the other reasons why you might think markets are awesome, this is the truly miraculous, amazing thing about this mechanism: people that really want something have a better chance of getting it. In other words, production is driven by consumption, and the people get what they want.
That, aside from everything else, is the prime, ne plus ultra, awesomest justification for having a market economy. People get what they want. They don't get what they don't want.

Now when markets are restricted, for instance if there are price controls or heavy regulations, what determines who gets what first?
Status. Connections.
If there are only 10 of these thingamabobs and you can't sell them at the price people are willing to pay, how do you decide who gets them?
1. First come, first served. This is probably the most fair non-market way to distribute things, which is probably why statists hate it second only to the market. It is still basically an inefficient and unfair way to distribute things.
2. Random. It's random. Nuff said.
3. Status. This is the system that will most likely win out in the long run, because it's a way of paying without paying. This is how playground social dramas are worked out, and because of socialism/fascism, it is how the wider world tends to work.

One day, Ridgely and I were walking down Central Park West, past all the awesome apartment buildings there. We started talking about the approval boards for getting into one of those places and Ridgely said (one of her ancestors is a Livingston, another is a Hewitt) "Bill Gates couldn't get into the Dakota, but we could".
And that made me think. The conspiracy which is not a conspiracy is basically the result of replacing market transactions with connections. The "evils of capitalism" are mostly really the evils of mercantilism. If you look at the Forbes 400, very few of the old money families are near the top. Yet I don't think they just shriveled up. What they did is to store their power in a different form. They don't need that much money, because doors open to them, wherever they go.
It has been my belief for quite some time, that the statism which has infested America has been instigated by the most powerful members of society. In a sense, we live in a neo-mercantilism or subtle fascism. This makes sense because for them, markets are not the best way to distribute goods, but rather the hook-up system is. In fact markets threaten their status society. Reading a history of NYC recently, I got some evidence to that effect. The Metropolitan Opera was built by new money that couldn't get the good boxes at the old Academy of Music.
In a world of zoning and regulations, that kind of end-run around the ruling class is no longer possible, or at least highly improbable.

The past seeks to institutionalize itself at the expense of the future. Don't bow down to it.

Hello

The title of this blog is based on a quote from Shakespeare:
"A pox on both your houses"

and that pretty much sums up my attitude toward the disconnected bundles/group conflict mentalities that pass for the "Left" and the "Right" today.

Do not become an Archon, in order to free people from the current Archons.

You might as well stay home then.