Who Plans Whom? » YouTube

It’s Things Like This, Liberals

Justin Oliver — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 17:00:33 +0000

OK, I am not condemning all liberals, but anti-authoritarian liberals should call out this blatant power grab for what it is.

Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two

Justin Oliver — Sat, 07 May 2011 17:00:23 +0000

It even includes a reference to Hayek’s “Who, Whom?” question. Bernanke’s double is great too.

Why Government Does Not Work

Justin Oliver — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:00:58 +0000

… and never will. So Frédéric Bastiat calling government “the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else” was more fitting than even he realized.

Re: People who Piss me off: Free Market Anarchists

Justin Oliver — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Ad hominem attacks aside, YouTuber hawanja’s video on free-market anarchists seems to make the point that people “naturally organize themselves into hierarchies” that require violence to be maintained, so anarchism runs counter to the human condition. It is left unstated why violence is needed or ethically justified to maintain these hierarchies if they were so natural. He further claims that a state is the historically necessary “institution that enforces order through violence.”

The first of hawanja’s misunderstandings has to do with his definition of “state.” A key distinction I and Barack Obama would make is that a state claims a territorial monopoly on its enforcement of order through violence. The insinuation of hawanja’s definition, which ignores the territorial monopoly claim, is that any enforced order necessarily signifies the presence of a state. Throughout the entire video, viewers are presented with this false dichotomy: statism or chaos. Anarchists do not oppose order. The etymological origin of “anarchy” means no ruler (not no rules), similarly how “monarchy” means one ruler. Regardless, statists generally insist on conflating “anarchy” to mean a conflict for rulership that takes place in a failed state. Anarchism recognizes that rulers are not justified in their actions and are counter-productive to a peaceful, productive existence.

Another unfounded assertion is that “this natural hierarchical structure to human beings” is justified in using force to maintain its power. After all, just as a good majority of people naturally like ice cream, I hardly think that would justify “natural hierarchical structures” enforcing the consumption of ice cream.

The Enemy of My Enemy

Another tried and true fallback in defense of the state is the canard that a state is necessary to protect us from corporations, which hawanja rightly pointed out are creatures of plutocratic state protections and subsidies. They are granted limited liability by governments and are under a legal obligation to pursue the interests of shareholders, not employees or the environment or the public. However, should the blame rest with corporations or also with their architects (governments) that created them and shield them from accountability?

He cites laws prohibiting discrimination and child labor and food safety and consumer protections as examples of good government. Of course, governments have historically been used to promote all sorts of racial discrimination, child labor, and made food and consumer protections harder to come by and more expensive. hawanja unintentionally, I presume, confirmed this point when he showed a picture of Rosa Parks, the civil rights heroine arrested for disobeying a segregationist city ordinance that ordered she give up her seat to a white passenger, when he mentioned government laws prohibiting discrimination.

I think it is all well and good that government-enforced slavery and Jim Crow apartheid, the more overt government measures used to uphold discrimination, have been removed. However, that does not do so much to help those past victims of discrimination. All the ways that governments prohibit wealth creation has meant that past victims of government-enforced discrimination continue to suffer at the hands of government-enforced poverty. As Charles Johnson summed up in his “How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It” essay, “The poorer you are, the more you need access to informal and flexible alternatives, and the more you need opportunities to apply some creative hustling. When the state shuts that out, it shuts poor people into ghettoized poverty.”

Governments are not responsible for ending child labor. As a thought experiment, just consider what would happen if child labor was prohibited by law in Nepal. It would have the same effect as enacting California-style building codes in Haiti: absolutely none, because there is no wealth to implement those laws. The credit for the advancement of human civilization rests with the grandest form of human cooperation, the wealth-creating division of labor.

Coincidentally, I would think the issue of discrimination would create another dilemma for supporters of the state. Historically, racism, sexism and slavery would have been considered “natural hierarchical structure[s] to human beings,” just as the state is said to be. Yet, left-liberals, as I suppose hawanja is, do not propose that the enforcement of racism, sexism or slavery was just. Based on what principle though? And how would that principle not equally apply to racism, sexism and slavery?

hawanja also appears to be under the impression that governments were responsible for the abolition (or near abolition) of child labor, neglecting the fact that child labor is still legal in the United States under some circumstances. More to the point, mass child labor was an example of a problem exacerbated by the heavy hand of government. Had it not been for mercantilist and protectionist Robber Baron economic policies of the 19th century, wealth creation for the average family would have been realized much more broadly and quickly so that parents could afford to send their children to school sooner. Many social problems, including institutional discrimination, that governments are credited with fixing were largely already successfully being addressed through direct action before legislative interventions took place.

Consider consumer protections against price fixing. Historic examples of consumer protection during the Progressive Era were done at the behest of business interests. As noted liberal historical Gabriel Kolko wrote of the implementation of the Federal Trade Commission, in “The Triumph of Conservatism”:

The provisions of the new laws attacking unfair competitors and price discrimination meant that the government would now make it possible for many trade associations to stabilize, for the first time, prices within their industries, and to make effective oligopoly a new phase of the economy.

He called it a triumph of conservatism because federal intervention into the economy was able to secure the existing economic structure, what Kolko called “political capitalism” and what we know today as “crony capitalism” and “corporatism.” In Kolko’s conclusion, he said:

The varieties of rhetoric associated with progressivism were as diverse as its followers, and one form of this rhetoric involved attacks on businessmen—attacks that were often framed in a fashion that has been misunderstood by historians as being radical. But at no point did any major political tendency dealing with the problem of big business in modern society ever try to go beyond the level of high generalization and translate theory into concrete economic programs that would conflict in a fundamental way with business supremacy over the control of wealth. It was not a coincidence that the results of progressivism were precisely what many major business interests desired.

Kolko’s book is something, documenting how nearly every aspect of the Progressive Era legislation — from food inspections, environmental conservation and banking reforms, for example — were used as covers to cement the existing cartelized trusts already in power.

The book does a great job of documenting the problem with hierarchical institutions, that the people who already have the most access to the government are going to have the most influence in shaping what solutions are offered, how they are interpreted and how they would be implemented. Regulators — like all self-interested creatures — are sure to implement solutions that preserve their power and prospects for future employment, since their interests closely align with those of the regulated. If regulators or politicians are corruptible with bribes, the powerful can leverage their influence to a greater degree than they could in a freer market. For just a fraction of the cost, favorable regulations worth millions of dollars can be bought with campaign contributions. On a free market, it would be more costly to bribe someone who did not have the luxury of using taxes, as government regulators can, to pay for the enforcement of regulatory or legislative cronyism.

Making More Trouble

Next, the video documents social problems that libertarians typically attribute to government. In the past, I might have been guilty of short-changing why those problems are a consequence of government intervention, so I will take the time below to make the points clear.

Food prices — Yes, governments subsidize cattle and meat production at the expense of healthier, more natural forms of food, and place restrictions on the importation of those products. It is not a market phenomenon that it costs more to purchase a salad than a hamburger. All the resources devoted to feeding cows and other animals and creating bio-fuels like corn-based ethanol could have been used to produce food for organic diets. In addition, the federal government has sealed off arable land that could be used to farm, and city ordinances often place restrictions on mixed-use property, some of which could be used for home or community gardens on abandoned property.
Low wages — The ways in which labor organizing is discriminated against is too long to list. Just to list some examples, I would point to the ’35 Wagner Act, which was championed by business interests and conservative unions to clip the more wildcat unions like the anarchist International Workers of the World. Typical demands, like collective bargaining and calling for limited strikes, that unions are legally permitted to make today are pretty meek by comparison. Before the era of having to get government recognition, when most of the historic gains of the labor movement were actually realized, unions could call for general strikes and indirect boycotts, opened union hiring halls, signed closed-door contracts or demanded worker management of the firm. Other government interventions are through occupational licensing laws, use-restricted zoning regulations, legal tender laws, capitalization requirements and capital-favored taxation policies that mean more people have to work for wage labor in the first place.
College expenses — It is not a coincidence that college tuition expenses increase at the same time that governments actively encourage people to go into debt by providing low-interest loans and restricting the establishment of new higher education options. The government and the corporate credentialism fetish is also partly to blame. One major expense of college is the cost of textbooks, which are artificially marked up do to the enforcement of artificial intellectual property claims.
Environmental conservation — It is also no secret that common law environmental tort protections were removed from courts in the 1900s, which is how pollution problems were handled until environmental legislation that legalized greater environmental damage took power out of the hands of property owners. That is not to mention that the largest polluter in the entire world is the United States federal government.
Drug safety — Yes, illicit drugs are more dangerous because of government. They cannot be made under true laboratory conditions; there is no possibility of any legal redress for fraud; and every year millions of people acting consensually are terrorized by government agents and hundreds if not thousands are killed by those government agents. The crime and escalated costs associated with drugs are a consequence of prohibition.
Terrorism — See “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” by Chalmers Johnson.

At the beginning of the video, hawanja criticized the favoritism that governments grant corporations, only later to praise the cronyism of farm subsidies for multimillion dollar farm conglomerates. He said that government protection has led to stable food prices in the United States, which is not so true of late. However, the relative stability has only come because Americans already pay much higher prices for foods like sugar than do residents of developing nations. In terms of dollars, the average American family transfers an additional $146 to large agribusinesses every year because of these policies, which do not include the approximate $300 per family given directly to mostly multimillionaires through the federal budget. The costs of milk, butter and meat products would be deflated if trade restrictions on international markets were abolished, helping to reduce poverty overseas.

Looking at the unintended consequences of those subsidies, the abundance of corn, some of which is used to sweeten sodas, has been linked to increased obesity in Americans. There is also the problem that developing nations wanting to compete in farm production are constantly being underpriced by subsidized farmers, leading developing nations to become dependent on subsidized farmers for food. That is something developed nations hold over developing nations as part of “Open Door Imperialism,” but it is not a fact I would cheer. Without government protectionism, land use could become more environmentally friendly, as well. A Reason magazine article said:

The distortions and perverse incentives of U.S. agricultural policies have encouraged practices that damage the environment. Trade barriers and subsidies stimulate production on marginal land, leading to overuse of pesticides, fertilizers, and other effluents. A central if unstated purpose of American farm policy is to promote production of commodities that would not be economical under competitive, free market conditions. This often means emphasizing crops better grown elsewhere, requiring more chemical assistance.

The conclusion of the video makes a laundry list of mandates that hawanja thinks the free market could not provide, like affordable housing and health care, public transportation, environmental and consumer protections, expanded broadband internet coverage, protection for the homeless, protection of endangered species, food and medical safety and national security. He said that the free market cannot do these things; “we do these things because we need them to survive.” His unstated argument is that these are public goods that markets cannot provide for.

I have argued in the past that with a little creativity, public goods can be provided, assuming there is public support for those goods, which would also have to be the case in a democratic government. To quote Kevin Carson, “As always, it’s not a question of what we’ll do when the state stops solving the problem. It’s a question of how to stop the state from creating the problem.”

The problem becomes that regardless of the possibility of providing those public goods on an open market, those goods become harder to achieve with a government in place, which creates an entirely new set of obstacles for achieving those original public goods governments were purportedly created to solve in the first place. Public goods, like security and safety, are not impossible for governments to provide, just costlier and more difficult than they would be on a free market. The first new public good created by the presence of a democratic government would be an informed electorate. It is not in the average person’s economic interest to know much about the issues at hand or the candidates running for office. That is because a single individual’s vote has almost no significance in the outcome of an election, and even if a single vote could turn an election, a voter has no method of holding a politician to his or her campaign pledges. It gets worse. A single politician in Washington, D.C., is one of 535 votes in the legislature. The idea that a citizen’s vote would make any noticeable difference to the his or her life is almost inconceivable.

The second public good that must be provided for in order to solve the original public goods problems is the creation of just laws. When thinking about it, there are thousands and thousands of pages of legislation and regulation under discussion. It would be next to impossible and meaningless to read every line of every bill introduced or regulation proposed in order to find out if some special benefit is being given to this or that special interest lobbyists. Even if we could decipher what the legislation or proposed regulation meant and its impact in the future, which would be difficult enough, contacting a congressman or regulator is going to have a negligible impact on influencing policy. Even if we could change the policy, it most likely only means a savings of a few dollars or cents per voter. Special interests who stand to gain millions or billions are always going to have the time and money to devote to gaining special favors.

Since human beings are not perfect or all-knowing, market failure is possible, but as David Friedman notes, “In the political system, market failure is the norm. If you think of the political system as a marketplace, we cannot expect individual rationality to produce group-rational results.” So the idea that government would work if we could only get the right people in charge is a failed strategy in practice and beyond naïve in theory.

When a government does try to address public goods that allegedly cannot be provided by the market, policies are going to serve the powerful and wealthy. Seeing how I would actually like to see those public goods provided to people, I cannot support a government, because a government makes those products less attainable for the people who most desperately need them.

Re: The Tyranny of Property

Justin Oliver — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:00:05 +0000

In Labadie Warren’s “The Tyranny of Property,” I learned that all non-personal property “should be considered unowned.” Immediately, Warren takes a logical leap by making a moral claim that people “should” act a certain way (i.e., not enforce non-personal property rights). Without justifying logically, Warren transitioned from stating what is the case to asserting what should be the case, yet categorically, descriptive statements of fact are different from prescriptive statements about how things ought to be.

The reason I mention it is because it is arbitrary to claim that personal property is the only valid form of property. It is arbitrary because there is no reason in reality for making such a distinction between the validity of personal and non-personal property. I suppose the writer might counter that non-personal property permits “robbery, extortion, and slavery,” as is claimed. Even if true, that would only be begging the question. While I of course agree, Warren does not explain why “robbery, extortion, and slavery” are wrong. I believe that if Warren were to examine why “robbery, extortion, and slavery” are wrong, it would be because each individual has an inalienable right to his or her life. In summation, the only way of exercising that right is in material reality. Since human beings are capable of living for such long periods of time, over 100 years in some cases, it is necessary to be able to plan ahead for that eventuality. The occupancy-and-use theory to which Warren prescribes purposefully imposes on intentions to plan for the achievement of long-term values, because accumulating property for later use is not recognized. That, among other reasons, is why the occupancy-and-use theory is irredeemable. (My criticism would not necessarily justify a belief in the Lockean theory either. I will be publishing an alternative justification for individual rights on March 14.)

But say hypothetically that I am wrong and personal property is the only valid form of property. Contrary to what Warren said, personal property could allow for intellectual property of “anything an individual actively uses and is in direct possession of a good amount of time” so long as the person willfully kept the idea to him- or herself. I presume that Warren would agree that if personal property were taken without permission, the one who took possession without permission from the previous possessor would have no right to the property. If Warren believed that to be the case and if a person unwillingly communicated or transferred a unique idea to another person, the receiver might have to pay some restitution for having remembered the idea. It is absurd.

Another logical leap is to claim it would be necessary to possess something “a good amount of time” before becoming the owner. Unless there is some other floating criterion I am not aware of, someone who had not possessed an object “a good amount of time” and is thus not the owner would have no greater moral claim to use force to prevent it from being taken or destroyed by another person. Additionally, no objective (empirical) standard exists, only personal arbitrary whim, to determine when “a good amount of time” has passed.

Warren added that opposition to non-personal property would entail opposition to rent, interest and profit. I do not see how that could be. It might entail opposition to the coercive enforcement of rent and interest, but I suppose people could still contract on the basis of non-coercive reputation management. Most poor people today do not have access to courts or to police enforcement of their agreements, but their agreements are formed all the time, particularly in the black and gray markets. They typically are limited to the exchange of personal property in part because of poverty-creating government policies have prevented them from acquiring non-personal property. I also do not understand how the exclusion of non-personal property would lead to an opposition to profit, unless trade itself were prohibited too. When people exchange, each person does so under the expectation that he or she will benefit. That is a form of entrepreneurial profit and creates wealth. The only seeming justification for an opposition to profit would be if one person’s profit necessarily results in someone else’s loss, a centuries-old fallacy.

All in all, Warren offered no substantive arguments against non-personal property and inadvertently makes a case for intellectual property and the theft of personal property.

Re: Thoughts on Individualism (Why Libertarianism is Wrong)

Justin Oliver — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:00:26 +0000

William Pierce, who according to Wikipedia, was a white nationalist and founder of Cosmotheism, “a religion based on white racialism, pantheism, eugenics, and National Socialism.” Until his death in 2002, he was probably most well-known as the author of “The Turner Diaries,” which depicts a violent revolution leading to the overthrow of the United States government and extermination of non-Caucasian people.

In the vast majority of political circles, he has no credibility, except to say that his arguments append pretty smoothly to arguments for generic statism. Both incorporate the same premises, only Pierce believes the white race is the standard of moral value, not society as a whole. First notice that Pierce in the video (above) did not deny that he was a collectivist in this 1998 broadcast; he was rather pointed that he thought “that all of us have a responsibility for the future of our race, that we should put the welfare and security of our people ahead of personal considerations.”

That certainly is an assertion. To substantiate that assertion, he would have to demonstrate how he bridged the is-ought gap from a description of what is (facts of reality) to the prescription of what he claims morally ought to be (me taking “responsibility for the future of our race”). Of course, he has no basis for making such a normative statement. Even if it were possible to validate his claim, it would be meaningless for me to take responsibility for the actions of other people with their own free will since that is an impossible task.

Pierce continued, “What happens to our people is more important than what happens to any individual.” Later he added, “Perhaps some of our own individualists will realize their own lives can have no lasting value or meaning, no matter how rich or famous they become, unless they are a part of something larger and more enduring than themselves.” This is the epitome of collectivism.

I have to say that Pierce was pretty accurate in his portrayal of normative individualism (as opposed to methodological individualism) in the scenarios he gave, except when he said that individualism promotes selfishness and irresponsibility. Admittedly, the logical rubric for individualism, which is based on the idea that the concept of moral “value” is derived from and contingent upon the concept of “life,” which only exists in individuals, is the basic foundation for individualism. While individualists can practice crass or myopic behavior sometimes, it is empirically the case that being free to act in one’s rightly understood self interest promotes the interest of everyone in society. It could be summed up by the rational egoist phrase “Doing good by doing well.”

That is not to say that egoism and individualism are not necessarily synonymous. One could support normative individualism on the basis that people ought to be free to practice altruism (or self-sacrifice). Until which time as people are free to practice self-sacrifice without being compelled to do so by the government, then a person cannot freely express his own will to make moral decisions.

The reason Pierce supports using collectivism to accomplish his racist agenda is because he does not trust other whites to abide by his creed. The collectivist’s final salvation rests with authoritarianism, that is, aggression and indoctrination. That is telling. Maybe I am wrong, but Pierce would have likely agreed that I would have no obligation to “take responsibility for our race” if I had no means of taking responsibility for myself. For example, a newborn baby would have no such responsibility, I presume. So really, this obligation of Pierce’s is contingent on people who have earned their wealth or talents to share it with the race. Such a system would mean that a person can only act to the extent it serves his or her race, that individuals are the property of the race. The whole idea is self-defeating and stands in opposition to freedom, for it is nonsensical to be responsible for something which owns you, as if ontologically that were even possible.

Pierce was correct to be alarmed by the explication of individualism. It threatens the deepest recesses of his collectivist charade. Throughout the video, Pierce never bothered to address — and for good reason, there is none — how it came to be that white people ought to take responsibility for “our people.” All he had to offer were empty assertions, which appropriately enough is what his life and ideas have amounted to. Pierce has long past; may his premises and presuppositions soon follow.

Rand Paul, a More Tender-hearted Master than Most

Justin Oliver — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:00:40 +0000

In his inaugural speech (also on YouTube) as a United State senator, Rand Paul gave an inspirational talk about the virtue of not compromising on issues of morality.

He gave a telling of the political career of former Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, who helped orchestrate the extension of slavery into the Western territories of the United States. Paul contrasted that with the actions of Clay’s abolitionist cousin Cassius Clay.

I give Paul all the respect in the world for honoring integrity as a virtue and bucking conventional political wisdom. The thing with morality is that it cannot be compromised, only abandoned. Paul utterly supports abandoning moral principles, as he made evident in his speech.

He straightforwardly condones extortion via taxation. Now, supporters of taxation might respond that voters are eligible to elect lawmakers who abolish taxation. I suppose that could happen. In any case, majority vote is no evidence of justice.

Paul also condones deficit spending, indebting future generations who are not of age to vote. The proposed budget he introduced earlier this month would add trillions of dollars to the federal government’s debt in the coming years.

Whatever criticism Paul has of Henry Clay is equally applicable to Paul’s own politics. Clay supported the more overt practice of confiscating the labor of others by way of chattel slavery; Paul would just rather people’s future labor be confiscated by politer means and on a more general scale.

For anyone not familiar, the post’s title comes from a Frank H. Knight quote:

The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation.

Re: Bigotry & Libertarians

Justin Oliver — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:00:24 +0000

There is one thing that YouTuber franks2732 got right in his video “Bigotry & Libertarians.” Capitalism, which I take him to mean the exchange of privately owned goods, would not prevent discrimination. For good or bad, people discriminate all the time among various choices, of course. If they are wise, people discriminate between those things that are injurious to their health and those things that are beneficial.

Even for the type of racial discrimination addressed in the video, a society of free exchange could not prevent racism. Nor could a free market prevent people from calling others hurtful names or falling in love with losers. For that matter, a free market could not guarantee that people would make good decisions either.

Those are only things that people can do. They have to take responsibility for their actions, and in free societies, individuals bear the responsibility for their deeds.

The YouTuber may not be aware of this, but it simply is not the case that “Laws passed by governments because people want to bring about social change to a society do [prevent discrimination].” Prior to the Civil Rights era, most of the government’s laws “to bring change to society” actively promoted discrimination against women, blacks and other racial and religious minorities.

In Jim Crow America, racial discrimination was de jure the law, including in many parts of the South as early as the Reconstruction Era in the 1870s.

These laws were heavily enforced for the very reason that existing government-privileged markets for labor, transportation and education could not be sustained under even a modicum of honest competition. White racists were not willing to trust that voluntary compliance among other privileged whites would maintain racial segregation. When the law was not enough, Klu Klux Klan terrorism was visited upon businesses not willing to keep blacks “in their place.”

To franks2732′s credit, he is not completely oblivious to this idea, even citing how the legal enshrinement of apartheid provided for systematic racial discrimination in South Africa.

In Montgomery, the bus company had unsuccessfully petitioned the city to repeal segregated riding after a prolonged boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr, whose later arrest gave prominence to a nationwide civil rights movement. Think how much more beneficial those protesters’ actions were than if they had simply sought a political compromise with the city. The bus company’s motivation was not to bring about greater social solidarity, but simple self-interest. It may not have been the most honorable intention, but it was the right thing to do.

franks2732 completely bypassed the fact that nonviolent civil disobedience rendered a great number of racist laws unenforceable. Through direct action, people were able to achieve a lasting social movement (before ultimately being co-opted). As Charles Johnson noted,

Woolworth’s lunch counters weren’t desegregated by Title II. The sit-in movement did that. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott onward, the Freedom Movement had won victories, town by town, building movements, holding racist institutions socially and economically accountable. The sit-ins proved the real-world power of the strategy: In Greensboro, N.C., nonviolent sit-in protests drove Woolworth’s to abandon its whites-only policy by July 1960. The Nashville Student Movement, through three months of sit-ins and boycotts, convinced merchants to open all downtown lunch counters in May the same year. Creative protests and grassroots pressure campaigns across the South changed local cultures and dismantled private segregation without legal backing.

Another claim in the video is that anti-discrimination laws have rendered racial conditions such that “There are no more discriminations” [sic]. I am puzzled by what he could possible mean. He either meant that racial discrimination no longer exists, which is laughable. Or he meant that racial discrimination is no longer formally legal.

Neither is true. Racial discrimination is still covertly practiced; it is just not as blatant as it had been under Jim Crow. In the private sector, racial discrimination just takes other, legal forms. Meanwhile, governments actively target blacks in the United States through various drug prohibitions, minimum wage laws, licensing regulations and zoning restrictions.

That leaves us with a problem. How then can racism be ended? As a practical concern, we cannot rely on the state to solve the problem. That would just give more incentive for government agents to make the problem worse so that they would accumulate greater authority.

In the past, I have been guilty of just saying that the market’s economic incentives will put an end to racial discrimination, and to a large extent that may still be the case. We have to remember also that we are the market; the market is just a nexus of our decisions. If racism is to end, laws are not going to do it. They may come after the fact to give a social movement the government’s endorsement. But racism and all other forms of authoritarianism will come to an end (or completely be marginalized from society) when people are not longer willing to tolerate it. In a fully libertarian manner, social and economic pressures, such as those employed in the civil rights struggle, returns power back to individuals and not to the state.

Bill O’Reilly Thinks God Creates the Tide

Justin Oliver — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:00:23 +0000

I thought he was joking — at first. But no. Bill O’Reilly really does not know that the moon’s gravity causes the oceans’ tide.

Since he asked, I can think of reasons why a non-believer would still attend a religious service he or she does not hold is true. There are financial and cultural pressures to keep up the facade of belief. It may also be the familiarity and belonging that worship service provides.

The “tone” argument used against atheists is a little tired and counter-factual. But it plays into a victimhood mentality that some people (including atheists) like to cling to. It is diversion from the real issue, which is not the style of argument, but that there is an argument at all.

Free Cabs for Drunk Cops

Justin Oliver — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 02:00:05 +0000

This is just too much. I am almost beyond words.

CBS News reports (also on YouTube) that Dallas police officers will have the cost of their cab fare paid with union dues if they have had too much to drink.

Arresting peaceful people and depriving people of their property can take its toll, so I can understand why they would turn to the bottle.

Constitution Hissyfits

Justin Oliver — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:46 +0000

Conservatives are getting into a big huff about Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein telling the truth about the United States Constitution. For all the talk about the constitution clearly setting forth limited, enumerated powers for the central government, that is hardly the case.

As some people would like to think the framers of the constitution favored smaller government, their actions say otherwise. Legal tender laws, the granting of patents and infrastructure subsidies were all part of the original deal. After all, the reason for abandoning the Articles of Confederation was because they did not think the government was powerful enough. They were traitors to the Revolution.

Now I do happen to believe that some the Federalists (like John Adams) intended to delegate only select powers, but intent is not good enough. There are all sorts of loopholes, from the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause and even the taxing power. The fact remains that there was never a consistent interpretation even among the Federalists as to what the centrals government’s powers would entail.

It would not have mattered if there was a consensus then or now. Laws and constitutions do not enforce themselves. Once approved, they fall under the domain of those who enforce it, and they are going to enforce laws in a manner that serves their ends. Laws and constitutions also do not interpret themselves, so the same problem ensues.

When it comes down to it, Kevin Carson said, “Law isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

Re: Rand Paul is Obama’s New Wife

Justin Oliver — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 18:00:17 +0000

In her own way, commentator Diana Wong [above] made some good points about Rand Paul. [Note: I encourage everyone first to watch to the video, which was also uploaded to YouTube; otherwise, this response might not make sense. The title for the video apparently comes from another video posted by Lyndon LaRouche supporters that laughably claims Barack Obama is a supporter of the Austrian school of economics.]

Wanting to privatize Social Security, if that indeed is Paul’s position, would be a complete boondoggle on behalf of the politically connected who would manage the program and serve to centralize wealth into corporate hands more so than it already is. Often times, governments create dependency on their programs or crowd out alternatives from springing up, so it is not as easy as saying that the welfare rolls should be dropped immediately. I have said before that my problem with government welfare is not the welfare, in and of itself, but the means by which it is funded. A more fruitful and politically expedient solution might be to offer alternative funding sources that do not violate the rights of others.

Wong recognizes that indeed the Austrian school of economics is a threat to the existing American system of political economy, and so it could be characterized as anti-American in the same sense it is anti-Canadian, anti-French, anti-Russian, and so forth. Principally, it is individualistic and peaceful, everything government is not. Characteristic of Lyndon LaRouche and his supporters, Wong’s modus operandi is to call someone a fascist. LaRouche called Paul “virtually an animal” and a “strict fascist, no question about it. And he has to be taken out of office, or neutralized” for his “Hitler-like policy.”

The ironic thing is that LaRouchites are closer adherents to anti-austerity Keynesianism, which John Maynard Keynes, though not a socialist himself, acknowledged is “more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a lance measure of laissez-faire.” In addition, Ludwig von Mises, who was Jewish and a pillar of the Austrian school, was hunted by the Nazi out of Europe. That is why he moved to America.

I cannot speak to the “physical breakdown crisis” since I do not know what that is, and only the most vulgar Austrian thinkers who hold to private property universal absolutism would tolerate anything like free-market feudalism. I also do not know what was meant by the vague reference to Hayek denouncing the Renaissance. In “The Road to Serfdom,” he praised the Renaissance for its development of individualism, which he said was responsible for “the respect for the individual man qua man.” After all, the American-inspired constitutionalism that Hayek favored was an offspring of that time.

I know for sure that “The Counter-Revolution of Science” was completely misrepresented in the video. Hayek’s point was to criticize economic positivism and scientism (in the strong sense), not that “individuals are incapable of scientific discovery,” as the video claims. He was making an epistemological criticism, not a metaphysical one. In that way, Hayek was driving a Kantian model that empirical objects depend (to some degree) on a priori knowledge derived beforehand.

Hayek, correctly I think, rejected the view that human beings are ordered about as molecules are in the natural sciences, which was thought to give license to the state to begin treating society like a lab experiment. Murray Rothbard said, “[I]t is the essence of human beings that they have goals and purposes, and that they try to achieve those goals. Stones, atoms, planets, have no goals or preferences; hence, they do not choose among alternative courses of action.” As Rothbard pointed out, people are capable of learning, of changing their mind to pursue different values, including none at all.

Frederic Bastiat highlights this point in “The Law.” He said:

It is no wonder that the writers of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artificial creation of the legislator’s genius. … To these intellectuals and writers, the relationship between persons and the legislator appears to be the same as the relationship between the clay and the potter.

Alas, I would have more solidarity with Wong if she were not so openly pandering on behalf of institutionalized state violence.

Free Grafton Elects Ambassador, Abolishes Prohibition

Justin Oliver — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 18:00:06 +0000

Last week’s election results are official, and by a vote of 31-7, prohibition of any substance has been overwhelmingly abolished in the geo-political entity known as Free Grafton.

Bob “Weeda Claus” Constantine (Free State Party) easily defeated Misty the Cat (Maoist Party) to become ambassador-elect to unfree Grafton and other coercive forms of government, announced Emperor Evan. Free Grafton sovereigns — who pledge to refrain from the initiation of violence — gave Constantine 16 votes, with Misty the Cat only garnering nine supporters.

Escaping the Poverty Abyss

Justin Oliver — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 17:00:46 +0000

A resurgence of scholarship documenting the structural causes of poverty has been surfacing, according to the New York Times. I think researchers are making some valid insights into the causes of poverty, which sits atop a 15-year high and reaches 44 millions Americans, but they have a huge blind spot for the underlying reasons for the generational poverty of those in the inner cities.

Some of the latest studies have concentrated on the “culture of poverty,” which predominantly has been the domain of conservatives for the past 40 years to rest blame for the plight of the poor. As the Times reported, today’s studies differ in that they assign blame for the “destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.”

Though I am not one to reject the historical legacy of racism that denied blacks equal opportunities and equal treatment under the law, I tend to reject both conventional liberal and conservative explanations for poverty. That is, I do not believe poverty is a result of the market, nor is it the result of laziness.

Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson said the “poverty trap” is “related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think,” again according the article. Sampson conducted a study whereby he dropped stamped, addressed envelopes in different neighborhoods to see how many were returned. The results were dramatic. In a former housing project, no envelopes were returned, but more than half were returned in another neighborhood with a similar income demographic. He said the differences were due to cynicism people had about their communities.

Others are looking into how growing up in a violent neighborhood reduces socialization and hinders the development of linguistic abilities by some six IQ points. Family structures are also an important piece to understand the persistent state of inner-city poverty. One-parent families are much more commonplace today than ever before, which reduces the level of parental development and caretaking.

I have to say that these latest studies are a blessing, even if the researchers are not yet hitting on the root of these problems — statism.

A lot of the cynicism stems from a genuine distrust of the law and the people trusted with enforcing the law. Those trapped in poverty have no alternative justice services to support, as allowing competing justice services would compromise “what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is the monopoly on violence,” Barack Obama acknowledged.

Just in Dallas County alone, a dozen people who were serving prison time have been exonerated based on DNA evidence. These are just a few of the thousands of cases in which DNA evidence was available. Most people languishing in prison are there for petty, non-violent crimes in which no one was put in danger. The drug war has disproportionately hit black men more than any group, so of course there will be more single-parent homes in predominantly black neighborhoods. Welfare programs also incitivize mothers to stay single, according to Mary Ruwart’s book “Healing Our World.” In fact, a Heritage study said that children who recieved aid show “cognitive abilities 20 percent below those who had received no welfare, even after holding family income, race, parental IQ, and other variables constant.”

Additionally, if you do not expect to receive justice, what good is there to care about the law, particularly when the law itself if so unjust? What hope could there be?

Drug prohibition, just like alcohol prohibition, is the cause of rampant amounts of violence and corruption among the police and politicians. For instance, during alcohol prohibition, the murder rate roughly doubled from its pre-war high. Since the war on drugs began in the 1970s, murder rates have nearly doubled again. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but it does put to the rest the idea that prohibition lowers crime.

Well-intentioned welfare-statism is not helping the poor much either. Most liberals recognize the income disparities and economic distortions created by government intervention on behalf of corporate interests. Instead of focusing on doing away with those government actions, in the name pragmatism most liberals insist on creating further distortions with the hopes of balancing the playing field, heaping further counterweights on an already unsustainable system that mostly benefits the program administrators. Economic distortions like the minimum wage do little to provide a safety net, but instead place a hurdle in which young people must leap.

That attitude, though counterproductive, is somewhat forgivable. It is nearly impossible to shrink the state; people in a monopoly government are more inclined than most to expand power and deflect blame in order to amass more control. It becomes evident that two wrongs cannot make a right.

While petty handouts are contemptuously put forth as a show of compassion, the big-ticket criminals who run this cartel can waltz home with a clear conscience. That is what the state does. “It bites with stolen teeth,” as Friedrich Nietzsche explained. You might too say it gives back your bootstraps but only after taking your boots.

Image credit: DG Jones, with a Creative Commons license

Idle Tea Party Politics

Justin Oliver — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 17:00:37 +0000

I attended the Wake Up America Tea Party in Fort Worth on Saturday as part of a nationwide tea party event. While volunteering at the Campaign for Liberty booth, I got a lot of positive reaction talking with attendees about conventional constitutional ideals.

I knew there would be a fair share of Republicans hitching onto the liberty message, so I thought it was important to present a more comprehensive small-government message, even if I do not subscribe to those views myself. Mostly, I emphasized the importance of decentralizing political power and scaling back American foreign policy.

I was there with Debbie McKee, the CFL state coordinator in Texas, and her daughter Adrienne. Our most popular item was CFL’s newly released pocket constitution that included the Declaration of Independence and the Kentucky and Virginia nullification resolutions written by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively.

A few people scoffed when the saw Ron Paul’s Revolution or End the Fed on our table. We also had Bruce Fein’s new book American Empire. (I have not read Fein’s book, but here is an interview with Scott Horton on Anti-War Radio.) However, many more I spoke with expressed that they thought the government’s belligerent foreign policy was doing more harm than good.

The most talked-about speakers were Bridgette Gabriel, who preached the dangers of “Islamic supremacism,” and conservative commentator Ann Coulter. They received the loudest applause lines I heard from the booth outside the auditorium. From a post on “The Whited Sepulchre,” Gabriel asked all the military veterans to stand and take an applause, which garnered a thunderous applause. The veterans obediently remained standing well into her speech.

Debra Medina, the founder of We Texans, spoke of the declining freedom in Texas. She said that Texas has went from a top-10 state in terms of economic freedoms and has fallen 23 spots to 31st in the nation since Rick Perry has been in governor’s office. Despite an impressive showing against establishment candidates in the Texas Republican gubernatorial primary, Medina had a distinctly less friendly reception because she highlighted that conservative rhetoric does not match the empirical evidence of a decade of Republican rule in Texas.

A few minutes before I was planning to leave, a man who described himself to me as a “constitutional conservative” wandered to the CFL booth and said he did not want to listen to Coulter. I gave a sympathetic nod. He said that he wanted nothing do with the Coulter and went on the explain that she attends meetings with pro gay-rights groups. That, he said, was unacceptable.

He talked about the source of this information, and how a website had been tracking Coulter for the past 18 months. As I recall, he went on to say “There is no place in the Republican Party for homosexuals or anybody with them.” From my reading of the state party platform, he is probably right. I guess he felt comfortable confiding this nugget of bigotry with those of us at the booth.

I kindly asked if he supported making it illegal to practice homosexuality. Without hesitating, he said he would and that it already is according to the Bible. I asked, then “would you think that all sins should be made illegal under political government?” So I asked about divorce. I went on the say that the Bible calls divorce a sin, and I asked if he thought it should be illegal too.

He danced around the question, so I asked again. He said that couples who have underwent counseling before marriage and before splitting up should be allowed to divorce on the condition that they would forfeit custody of their children to already-married couples.

After some prompting, he reiterated that the Republican Party was a party for Christians only, and that I would have to do some “soul searching” before becoming a genuine Republican, which I have no desire of becoming anyway. He said I should become a Democrat instead. I didn’t bother telling him, but neither sound that appealing. I should have told him, “Fuck You (Very Much).”

Completely devoid of historical evidence, he then went on to explain for a second time that libertarianism and socialism were spawned by Karl Marx in “his communist books” and the political environment of revolutionary France.

Tea Party Reflections

The tea party has no founding principles on which the movement is based, and most of its grassroots members are political newcomers who have a deep-seeded resentment for the direction that the country is going. It does not take long to realize that the government has been royally screwing up, and not just for the last 20 months.

Originally, the tea party movement was focused on excessive government spending as a reaction to the bailouts of the same large financial bodies that enabled the current economic collapse. The loudest voices were crying “Socialism” when Barack Obama was just adding to the same policies of his predecessor. Even still, so long as the movement was a reaction to fiscal mismanagement, there was some possibility that it would affect positive policy changes. But more and more, the tea party has less to do with battling run-away spending than it does with embracing cultural conservatism. The undertones of the currently embodied movement are based in the fears of white Christians of losing political power, fear that the same government many white Christians have exploited to their own advantage will be turned against them. “To take back our country.” That is the root cause for the present wave of backlash against Muslims and immigrants.

A poll [PDF] published in March from the University of Washington said that those who strongly support the tea party had more hostile views of gays, racial minorities and immigrants. On average, tea party supporters consistently thought less of the intelligence, trustworthiness and work ethic of blacks and Latinos than did the average Republicans. In a separate poll [PDF], and for all their talk about liberty, supporters of the tea party were far more likely to favor indefinite detention without trial of anyone accused of a crime, less privacy, and racial profiling. They were also less supportive of equal rights.

Even for the self-described constitutional conservative I talked with, he was more than willing to set aside any pretence of a modern society for an opportunity to enforce his morality on peaceful people. The momentum I witnessed Saturday will springboard into big electoral gains for Republicans, including many of the same responsible for this mess, in the mid-term elections. It will not amount to many policy changes for more liberty. No major tea party candidate is calling for cuts to any of the largest expenditures, not the military empire nor entitlement programs like Social Security.

It is a sad reality, but the ditching of any libertarian sentiments is inevitable so long as tea partiers are concerned with gaining the reins of power instead of abolishing that power altogether.