As a toddler Julia will begin a twenty-odd-year sentence in institutions designed to process her into a “human resource”: Someone encultured to view the existing institutional framework and power structure as natural and inevitable, who trusts and obeys the state and takes its self-justifications at face value. Someone who takes orders from authority figures behind desks, and has been trained — at taxpayer expense — in the skills employers want in their human resources. Both Obama and Romney enthusiastically support the need for this school-to-HR treadmill to “maintain global competitiveness.”
Once Julia comes off the human resources assembly line, she’ll look for work in an economy where most employment opportunities are controlled by hierarchical, authoritarian institutions. She’ll spend her work life selling her labor in a system designed to minimize the competition employers face from self-employment — in which the state’s avowed macroeconomic policy is to keep the bargaining power of labor (aka “inflationary pressure”) within manageable bounds.
If she tries to escape the reservation, she’ll confront a host of state-enforced artificial scarcities whose main effect is to make the means of production artificially expensive for labor, and impose artificial entry costs and overhead on self-employment. Until Julia turns 65, she’ll exist in a system where wage labor is the only alternative for all but the rich. The President, Democrat or Republican, will accept the basic presupposition of the “jobs culture” as a fact of nature.
Under market anarchy, Julia would live in a society where education was self-organized by her neighbors, her studies were shaped by her needs rather than those of future employers, and economic power was distributed and decentralized. She’d spend her working life in a market without entry barriers to using her skills in self-employment or in a cooperative shop, and where if she did consider wage employment she’d encounter potential employers as an equal rather than as a commodity pre-shaped to their needs.
As a consumer, Julia will pay prices consisting largely of rents on artificial scarcity enforced by the state. She’ll spend $200 for proprietary software CDs that cost $5 to print out, and pay a 2000% markup on medications under patent. She’ll buy sneakers with a $195 brand-name premium over the $5 the sweatshop charged to make them, and a camera whose price comes mainly from embedded patent rents rather than actual parts and labor. She’ll pay a markup of about 20% as the result of price-fixing on goods manufactured in oligopoly industries.
Local goods and services will be far more expensive because of zoning laws that protect brick-and-mortar shops by requiring the rental of commercial space as a condition of doing business, high licensing fees, and regulatory codes that criminalize small-batch production by mandating industrial-scale machinery. Both Obama and Romney strongly support all these policies.
Under market anarchy, there’d be no state-enforced cartels, entry barriers, or artificial scarcity. Competition would drive the prices Julia pays down to the actual cost of production. Julia would far more easily purchase home-grown, -baked, and -sewn goods, as well as unlicensed daycare and cab service — all of which would involve near-zero overhead because they were provided out of her neighbors’ homes with ordinary household capital goods they already owned.
Whether Julia buys or rents her home, the price of the land it sits on reflects enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land being held out of use by state policy, so that landlords are protected from competition. Neither Obama nor Romney can even imagine an alternative to this state of affairs.
Under market anarchy, there would be no enforceable title to vacant and unimproved land. Competition from freely available vacant land would reduce landlord rent, driving down Julia’s housing costs.
Throughout her life, Julia’s travels in the United States will be restricted by an internal passport system in which boarding a plane, and soon maybe a train or bus, will require submission to being either scanned or groped. Her phone and Internet history and her purchases will be constantly monitored by a government for which the Fourth Amendment is a quaint relic of history. Every business where she shops will be spying on her for the government. She’ll be liable to indefinite detention without charge, or perhaps even murder by drone, based on an arbitrary and unilateral finding that she’s a “terrorist.” If there were ever any lingering hopes that the party controlling the presidency would make a difference in this regard, Obama dashed them long ago.
Under market anarchy … Well, you get the idea.
Under either party, Julia will be a means to the ends of people utterly unaccountable to her, a tool for enriching a ruling class. Under anarchy, Julia will be an end in her own right, free to build any life she chooses in peaceful cooperation with her neighbors.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, A Vida de Júlia na Anarquia.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, The Life of Julia Under Anarchy, Citizen of Laconia [New Hampshire], 05/29/12
Hahaha, this is brilliant!
My recent post Welp (Tumblr)
Great post. I swear that Julia slideshow was one of the most unbearable and economically illeterate things I have read in ages. Lots of conservative commentators have responded to it, but this style of directly imitating it's form and translating it's true message is far more clarifying.
but what about the unicorns? http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6LTkxoqrkp4/TcE6rmT1H9I…
Magnificent!
Didn't you get the memo? Anarcho-anything is a moot point. Pragmatarianism is the new king in town. Why is it the new king? Because taxpayers would control the power of the purse. So it's a waste of your limited resources to promote a moot point. Applying market principles to the public sector will either shrink or expand the public sector.
See…do you get it? Under a pragmatarian system…Julia would have the freedom to choose how her taxes were spent in the public sector. Why would she choose to spend her taxes on things that weren't in her interests? In a pragmatarian system taxpayers would be consumers and as Bastiat said, “treat all economic questions from the viewpoint of the consumer, for the interests of the consumer are the interests of the human race."
The interests of taxpayers in the public sector are the interests of the human race. If allowing Julia to pursue her interests in the public sector does not result in anarcho-capitalism…then anarcho-capitalism is not in the interests of the human race.
My recent post Divide and Conquer the Government
'No enforceable title to vacant or unimproved land': that worries me. It's the Lockean rule that e.g. colonists invoked to take land away from the natives who depended on it. That's not to say that statists do better!
I hadn't seen that animation yet. It never occurred to me to illustrate the drab meaninglessness of life under liberal capitalism by attempting to highlight its benefits. Luckily the creative folks behind Obama's campaign overlook nothing.
My recent post The Life of Julia
We can all escape this fate within the paradigm right now, in a great great sense. What it will takes is balls and heart.
Let me make something clear. We are NOT "anarcho"-capitalists. We are not anything like them. We are individualist anarchists; Proudhonian mutualists; left-Rothbardians; agorists; voluntary socialists; dialectical anarchists; well, you get the idea. But we are not 'anarcho'-capitalists. We are of the Left, not the Center or the Right.
Second, I freely admit I and my fellows may be tilting at windmills. I always think that one ought to listen to honest criticism, which you seem to be aiming at. Indeed, given the current system, what you propose is the next best thing. It does assume some doubtful premises, but that can be handled in another reply. However, there remains for those of us who think that small reforms while welcome are not satisfactory.
Well, that is the Lockean principle (can be modified by his provisio)-but, a mutualist/individualist approach is occupancy & use. Again, this is an area of debate among us-what is the right approach to property? And there are more approaches than the ones I listed!
I think you're being too hard on libertarians who call themselves anarcho-capitalists. They are market anarchists like you. Most of them have simply never heard or understood the left-libertarian criticisms/perspective before. When they hear "socialism" they are thinking about Marxist state-socialism, not the kind talked of by Tucker, Proudhon, etc.
There was a time I would have agreed with you. However, with the rise of Ron Paul, those types are increasingly hard to find. I once saw on Twitter one guy with an image of the constitution under neath the black section of the anarchist flag. I have seen 'voluntaryists' canvas for Ron Paul, who don't seem to know that they are supposed to be nonvoters on principle.
Then you have the TP 'libertarians'. I will not say much more.
At this point, most intellectually honest 'an'-caps have heard the arguments, either answering them or even changing sides. All one has left are the true believers, who actually seem to think-along with some fellows on the Left-that this whole thing is a ploy, as opposed to a distinct position.
However, I suppose I do go overboard. Ideological posturing, internet tough-guy antics, etc is just not cool in the end.
However, in the big scheme of things you are right. My harshness will just push more people to the right. The political is not personal, and I need to keep that in mind.
The about page here includes anarcho-capitalism under its umbrella… http://c4ss.org/about-market-anarchism
What doubtful premise is pragmatarianism based on? Are you saying that pragmatarianism represents a small reform?
If you get a chance it might help to read these two posts where I focus on the "left"… http://pragmatarianism.blogspot.com/2012/02/tax-c… http://pragmatarianism.blogspot.com/2012/02/pragm…
My recent post We, The People – Jack C. Haldeman II
Brilliant. If anything deserved to be parodied it was that patronising, contemptuous piece of offal from the Obama campaign.
Why would they name her Julia? They're just asking for it!
In evil Realworld Julia has a living / in Fictionworld Julia lives happily ever after.
Why prsume the present is evil? The lot in Julia's life for most of history would have been – grow up doing chores, staying chaste, marrying and making babies, expect most of her babies to die shortly after childbirth and she, herself would probably die giving birth. And that's no including the inability of women to work, own personal property, assume positions of leadership and generally not have an opinion or do anything except via the permission of her father and then her husband.
Fair enough. It is important to discuss how much life has improved for women. Indeed, I do not look back at some sort of Golden Age.
I am looking for a brighter future.
Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist. You say you are a left-Rothbardian, but not "anything like" an anarcho-capitalist?
We don't need factionalism. I am proud to say I am of the left, but I wouldn't disparage anyone who identifies as an anarcho-capitalist. What they call "capitalism" and defend is not what you and I call "capitalism" and attack.
I am not a left-Rothbardian, but you are right about the whole factionalism thing.
Very well. That doesn't mean we're all anarcho-capitalists here.
I helped process Juilas, and her male counter parts. I was a teacher. No longer, as I lost my job thanks to budget issues and a tight market where I would want to teach. But the down time, and time teaching actually made me reflect on just what I was involved in. There were certainly great teachers. I had a few, and I had a fair share of crappy ones. On the inside, as a teacher I would say little had changed since I went through the “system.” I admired the “pros,” and would sit in and watch some of them engage a room of 30 or more kids– or get them to work together and learn and think independently, maybe even debate and evaluate the conclusions they had drawn. But there was something amiss. This wasn’t the norm. The norm was teaching to state tests. The norm was scrambling to meet specific “state standards” and learning objectives- “mastery” of content by the test date (not to mention some mastery of sitting compliantly and taking orders). Some of these I didn’t have an issue with e.g. Newtons laws of motion, genetics proficency etc….It was the time constraints that made “making” critical thinkers out of kids hard. Some times I think its conspiratorial, other times just a bunch of idiots mastering us about. Anyway, thanks for another good post to raise my blood pressure and wonder what I can do for change, because I think I may have been doing more harm than good. There were plenty of students that understood this, but like many good things there numbers were few compared to many– it did give me some hope though.
"Under a pragmatarian system…Julia would have the freedom to choose how her taxes were spent in the public sector," but who writes the menu?
Who writes the menu? Are you concerned with items being added to the menu? Are you concerned with Julia having more CHOICES when it comes to what she can spend her taxes on? Are you concerned with things being removed from the menu? Are you concerned with the government having less responsibilities?
If you're certain that the chef couldn't prepare a decent dish to save his life…then why be concerned with what's on the menu? Just concern yourself with the fact that you're not actively promoting allowing consumers to choose which dishes they spend their taxes on.
A pragmatarian is a libertarian/anarchist that actually understands how the invisible hand works. What concerns me is how few pragmatarians there are!
My recent post Troy Camplin's Critique of Pragmatarianism