Over the last few years, Iceland has provided a bit of counter-narrative to the anarchist critique of political government.
Most western democracies declared their pieces of the international finance sector “too big to fail” and bailed them out at taxpayer expense after the 2008 bank collapse. Iceland took the opposite tack.
Voters in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, elected an anarchist mayor, and six members of that mayor’s “Best Party,” to the city’s 15-member municipal council in 2010.
Voters in Iceland’s South, Southwest, Reykjavik North and Reykjavik South districts sent members of “The Movement” to the Althing (Iceland’s parliament, the oldest on Earth). Of particular interest is Reykjavik South representative Birgitta Jonsdottir, a Wikileaks volunteer and press freedom activist whose Twitter records were subpoenaed by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (Iceland’s Interior Minister courageously refused to cooperate with the FBI’s harassment of Wikileaks).
Not bad, I have to admit, as states go.
Alas, something is rotten in Denmar … er, Iceland. That same Interior Minister, Ogmundur Jonasson, is pushing an Internet censorship agenda in the name of protecting children.
Halla Gunnarsdottir, one of Jonasson’s advisors, is out front with the usual bait-and-switch: “This move is not anti-sex,” she says. “It is anti-violence because young children are seeing porn and acting it out.” In fact, the initiative is neither anti-sex nor anti-violence: It’s just anti-freedom.
Thankfully, some heroes can be counted upon to remain heroic: Birgitta Jonsdottir opposes the scheme. She assesses its chances of passage as “near zero” and its chances of working if it did pass as even lower. Her only sign of weakness in the matter is that she sympathizes with Jonasson, musing that maybe he just doesn’t know any better.
Be all that as it may, Jonsdottir puts her finger on the big problem with political government, even in such an enlightened nation as Iceland: “The fact is that this bill has already made many companies think twice before hosting their business in Iceland — not because they support porn, but because they fear the country’s laws could transit into the kind of full-blown censorship commonly attributed to countries like China and Saudi Arabia.”
Jonasson’s scheme, in other words, produces regime uncertainty (per Robert Higgs, “a pervasive uncertainty among investors about the security of their property rights in their capital and its prospective returns”).
Regime uncertainty is the state’s version of herpes: Its eruptions are unpredictable, it makes people think twice about intimate contact with the carrier, and yes, it sometimes literally kills babies. Among states — even Iceland, as this episode establishes — the infection rate is 100%.
The only issue I take with Higgs’s definition is that he defines it in solely economic terms and with respect to investors. I see no reason why it would not apply just as well to — for example — same-sex couples considering vacations in Uganda.
As Gideon J. Tucker put it in 1866, “no man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.” Not even in Iceland.
Citations to this article:
- Thomas L. Knapp, Et Tu, Iceland?, Batesville, Arkansas Daily Guard, 02/20/13
Your case against Iceland is based on "regime uncertainty?" "Libertarianism" really is just a minor variant on conservatism.
My recent post When others know you better than you know yourself, I call that power.
yep, I agree. birgitta jonsdottir is a hero of liberty. And Iceland has been an interesting counterfactual to the libertarian class critique of political economy and State.
I agree with the fact that this ban is ludicrous. But Is it good for children to view porn?
hardly…
thinking that people should live the way you think they should makes you guilty of the very thing you are accusing others of being
I have long argued that left-wing political correctness is not a trivial or inconsequential matter. That argument has been met with much ridicule in the general anarchist milieu. Yet here is a shining example of its consequences. A nation that is otherwise seemingly progressive, enlightened, and relatively libertarian has adopted policies and proposed policies one would normally associate with reactionary theocracies or totalitarian states. First, the ban on adult nightclubs was enacted, and now full-blown censorship of the internet is being proposed. It is this kind of totalitarian humanism that will be the primary threat to liberty in the Western world in the future. It's time for libertarians and anarchists to start waking up on this question. PC has got to go.
" Iceland has been an interesting counterfactual to the libertarian class critique of political economy and State."
Would you care to elaborate on that a bit?
from my perspective(which, btw, is certainly not an agreed upon one), it means it is an actual example of democracy not being a manufactured product of a cartelized political economic agency otherwise known as "the State," but which I often refer to as "The Firm."
The 'Firm" has a specific meaning that derives from a public choice methodology. Specifically, public choice applies a strategic and economic analysis(game theory, rational choice—>conflict and cooperation follow a rational model) to model political behavior but which assiduously avoids the consequence of "dominant coalitions"(i.e., ruling class) by holding to the proposition that the exchange of political favors is an exercise in free trade between more or less equally powerful bargaining agents following their own self-interest(methodological individualism). So there is no such thing as "the State," actually. Instead it is just an arena of individual actors(politicians, bureaucrats, rent-seekers and other special interests) in open competition.
"The Firm" rejects the idea of "free trade" in political trade-offs. It dispenses with methodological individualism with regards to political behavior. Instead it posits that the best way to model the State is to treat it as a unitary agency that is attempting to maximize something(the same way economic theory finds it useful to treat economic agency like corporations as something unitary that is attempting to maximize something). Democracy then in this model is just a manufactured sham.
In my opinion, the closer a State resembles a political economic entity, such as the US or the EU, the more accurate the model of the Firm. The more removed it is, the less apparent the model. But thanks to such entities as wikileaks, we know without dispute how close the satellites revolve around the parent.
But iceland is an example where the satellite relationship appears weak.
in the end, the intellectual enemy of liberty is anything that subjugates human agency to "higher purpose," whether it be moral or historical. I can almost distill this enemy down to the phrase "history is progressing towards a goal." This moral sentiment spans across the moral spectrum, from both "left" to "right," and from both atheist to religious.
"Political Correctness" is a communitarian concept, not a liberal one. It stems ultimately from Hegel. And hegel always had his left and right contingent. In the modern context, I would say PC is rooted in the problem of communitarian recognition. The best authority on this is probably Charles Taylor. Taylor would say something like there is no self outside the group but there is no group unless it is recognized by another group. So there is no identity of the self unless groups recognize one another. Thus, group identity is a type of recursion problem(g<sup>i</sup>(g<sup>j</sup>)=g<sup>j</sup>(g<sup>i</sup>) whose only reliable solution is g<sup>i</sup>==g<sup>j</sup> for all i,j.
The recognition problem is only solved if all groups are reduced to being equal to one another. This is what Political Correctness means in terms of the recognition problem. It is the very basis of the so-called "culture war," which is war over recognition, which has proven very beneficial to the Statists because both sides are explicitly communitarian and ascribe to the necessity of the State as the central orientation mechanism for defining and legitimizing human purpose.
But communitarianism is thoroughly conservative, including its "left-wing" contingent. No one would mistake its greatest proponents(e.g., Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel) as being social liberals.
This is where definitions become incoherent. Because I have no idea how "humanism" gets lumped in with political correctness and communitarian recognition. Humanism is much more reductionist, ascribes to a "universal nature," and would scoff at at the idea that it's method is no more valid than the one of religious fundamentalists or that there is no rational self.
The politically correct humanist is an incoherent contradiction. Yes, there is such a thing as "liberal totalitarianism" because the liberal method is inherently flawed. It correctly identifies the State and Politics as artificial constructs, but incorrectly posits these artificial constructs are means to secure human collective action ends, when the positive facts suggest these artificial constructs serve as means to secure ends that conflict with the ends of human agency. So liberalism is destined to follow a rational model that produces a quadrillion laws that makes every human agent a criminal a million times over a day. That's not the consequence of political correctness.
Is there any evidence that it's harmful for children to view porn? All I see is adult hysteria on the subject, which reflects (to my view) only sickness on the part of adults. Children may not fully understand what's going on in pornography, but so what? As has been pointed out many times, children are exposed to images of violence constantly, and somehow survive that.
I don't understand why you assert that regime uncertainty is a special property of states (except for semantic reasons). Just as laws change, so do market conditions… so there is no reason to expect the business environment to be more stable in the absence of states.
I can imagine that centralized states produce more drastic changes than distributed/market forces, but that is probably matched with a degree of stability in between those drastic changes. So overall, I would predict markets to be changing more continuously and smoothly, whereas states change their rules sporadically and in bigger steps.
My recent post FD: New York decriminalizes the female body: This is what it looks like