Everywhere you look in the right-wing commentariat, you see the recurring theme of the “underclass” as parasites. Its most recent appearance was the meme of the productive, tax-paying 53% vs. the tax-consuming 47%. And of course there’s the perennial favorite mythical quote attributed to Alexander Tytler, trotted out by many who should know better, about the majority discovering they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. (If you really believe the majority control the government, or that the government serves the interests of the majority, you should avoid using sharp tools without supervision.)
But mainly there’s an endless supply of resentment against “welfare queens,” and friend-of-a-friend stories about the luxurious tastes of those using food stamps at the checkout line, whose cumulative effect is to reassure the middle class that their real enemies are to be found by looking down, and not up.
If your resentment is directed downward against the “underclass” and recipients of welfare-for-the-poor, it’s most definitely misdirected.
First, let’s look at the little picture, and consider the net effects of state policy on the actual recipients of welfare. Consider how state policies on behalf of land owners and real estate investors, like the enforcement of absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, drives up rents and closes off access to cheap living space. Consider how licensing schemes and “anti-jitney” laws, zoning laws against operating businesses out of one’s home or out of pushcarts, and regulations that impose needless capital outlays and entry barriers or overhead costs, close off opportunities for self-employment. And consider how zoning restrictions on mixed-use development and other government promotions of sprawl and the car culture increase the basic cost of subsistence. You think the money spent on welfare for the poor equals that drain on the resources of the underclass?
Next, look at the big picture. Consider the total rents extracted from society as a whole by the dominant economic classes: The inflation of land rent and mortgages by the above-mentioned absentee titles to unimproved land; the usurious interest rates resulting from legal tender laws and restraints on competition in the supply of credit; the enormous markups over actual production cost that result from copyrights, patents and trademarks; the oligopoly markup (once estimated by the Nader Group at around 20% of retail price in industries dominated by a handful of firms) in industries cartelized by government regulations and entry barriers …
Now consider, out of this vast ocean of rents extracted by state-connected parasites, the miniscule fraction that trickles back to the most destitute of the destitute, in the form of welfare and food stamps, in just barely large enough quantities to prevent homelessness and starvation from reaching high enough levels to destabilize the political system and threaten the ruling classes’ ability to extract rents from all of us. The state-allied landlords, capitalists and rentiers rob us all with a front-end loader, and then the state — THEIR state — uses a teaspoon to relieve those hardest hit.
Every time in history the state has provided a dole to the poorest of the poor — the distribution of free grain and oil to the proletariat of Rome, the Poor Laws in England, AFDC and TANF since the 1960s — it has occurred against a background of large-scale robbery of the poor by the rich. The Roman proletariat received a dole to prevent bloody revolt after the common lands of the Republic had been engrossed by the nobility and turned into slave-farms. The Poor Laws of England were passed after the landed classes enclosed much of the Open Fields for sheep pasture. The urban American blacks who received AFDC in the 1960s were southern sharecroppers, or their children, who had been tractored off their land (or land that should have been theirs, if they had received the land that was rightfully theirs after Emancipation) after WWII.
As Frances Fox Piven and Andrew Cloward argued in “Regulating the Poor,” the state — which is largely controlled by and mainly serves the interest of the propertied classes — only steps in to provide welfare to the poor when it’s necessary to prevent social destabilization. When it does so, it usually provides the bare minimum necessary. And in the process, it uses the power conferred by distributing the public assistance to enforce a maximum in social discipline on the recipients (as anyone who’s dealt with the humiliation of a human services office, or a visit from a case-worker, can testify).
So don’t resent the folks who get welfare and food stamps. Your real enemies — the ones the state really serves — are above, not below.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, National opinion: It’s foolish to hate welfare recipients, Great Falls, Montana Tribune, 09/05/13
- Kevin Carson, Don’t Hate on Welfare Recipients — the Real Parasites are Elsewhere, Before It’s News, 08/07/13
- Kevin Carson, Don’t Hate on Welfare Recipients — the Real Parasites are Elsewhere, Charleston, South Carolina Chronicle, 08/08/13
- Kevin Carson, The Real Economic Parasites, Counterpunch, 08/08/13
The middle class do look down, in part because they've been encouraged to do so by well-funded messaging, and partly (in greater part, I believe) because shit rolls downhill. Surely the belief that markets are natural/inevitable/non-negotiable is driven in part by the theory that human phenomena, like physical phenomena, inevitably follow the path of least resistance. Kicking them when they're down is easier than kicking them when they're up, whether or not propaganda is part of the equation.
Since your brand of mutualism emphasizes the role of the cash nexus, it should also be noted that migrations from rural to urban (or worse, suburban) life are migrations, if not into the cash nexus from outside it, migrations to a place where it counts for more. It's no coincidence that the era that pushed the African diaspora into various places under circumstances not necessarily consistent with personal choice, is also the era that produced economic buzzphrases such as "non-farm poverty level." Necessity creep can be a bitch. Like almost every feature of the status quo, it serves the interests of the rich. But it's not unheard of that the weight of local middle class opinion falls on the cashless, the homeless, even the carless. For which, again, I won't let (those members of) the middle class off the hook.
I don't think it's fair to say my brand of mutualism emphasizes the cash nexus. If anything, I expect Kropotkinian mutual aid, risk- and income-pooling arrangements, etc., to reduce individual dependence on the cash nexus. And I expect cheap, small-scale production tech to shift a major part of our needs from the cash nexus to self-provisioning.
While it's correct to speak of rent and rentiers, it doesn't get to the root cause of the problem, which is government entitlement. Before the industrial revolution, the entitlements were, of course, titles of nobility and the landed aristocracy, who had been granted the privilege of enclosure by government.
In the modern corporate world, the basic entitlement involved is the limited liability corporation (LLC). Before LLCs were invented (by the Devil) and chartered (by government), the principals in any business enterprise were 100% liable for tort caused and debt incurred by their enterprise. Their entire net worth was at risk under common law. This was as it should be. When people act, alone or in concert, in a way that damages people or creates debt, they have a responsibility to indemnify their victims or creditors.
Through LLC charters, government grants a special class of people (those with a little surplus money to invest) the special privilege to share in the potentially limitless profits of an enterprise, while having their losses limited to their initial investment. The unpaid liabilities of a bankrupt LLC are externalized to its victims, creditors and society at large. Over decades, investors so privileged can collect dividends worth many times more than their initial investment, and none of that profit can be "clawed back" to pay the debts of a bankrupt corporation, even if the investors knew or should have known their elected directors and officers were committing criminal frauds and abuses.
This is the original sin of which right-libertarians are either unaware or choose to ignore. I suspect frequenters of this site may be a little more receptive to the idea and may be able to spread the knowledge to well-meaning libertarians who are simply clueless and not evil.
Excellent article! Thank you Kevin. I wish more libertarians looked at things this way. Alas, it often seems that over the years that so many libertarians have become less interested in defending the rights of individuals in favor of worshipping the rich and famous (regardless of how they got that way).
Kudos also to Bill Rood for his comment — seldom have I seen corporatism explained so clearly and vividly!
If the welfare state is designed to relieve the suffering the poor so they don't revolt, why does most of the welfare state shovel money UP.
Do you deny that a majority of people are ultimately dependent upon the state and therefore have no particular motive to dismantle it? Even more so in the case of people who are directly dependent upon state handouts?
And do you deny that the state survives mainly because of popular support?
Can you guess where I'm going with this…?
I'm with you on most of this but something jumps off the page. I write for a living and I rely on copyright to protect my property so I can earn a living. Of course I don''t like the low-tech, sledgehammer Statist method of IP protect but it's the only game in town. A Free society would provide more granular and more flexible protection and licensing of IP.
But are you implying that IP protection itself is somehow wrong? Should I work to create a book, song or software then wait for you to unilaterally assign the rules under which it is made available in the marketplace? Or must those terms be mutually agreeable to the innovator and the buyer? (I ask because some apparently believe zero IP protection is the path to paradise.)
My recent post Why Intellectual Property Is More Important Than Physical Property
Pete,
It all starts with the question of whether IP is, in fact, property.
And it ends with the fact that it isn't.
I'm a conservative who's wandered into your site, but what I've read above chimes with a conversation I had last night with friends, father and son, who are plasterers here in rural NSW. Both are excellent and in demand, yet we all agreed that, without the wife's extraordinary ability and patience with paperwork and bureaucratic tangles, their business would not exist. In fact, they would be better off right now as employees of another tradesman, who would himself be better off as an employee etc etc…
Everything, especially the extended and abstract secondary education foisted on canny and energetic young males who want to use their hands, points us toward the Corporate, whether it be government or the Coca Cola Company. It's getting harder and harder to distinguish our vaunted free enterprise culture from old Mother Russia.
I'm a conservative, and a pretty typical one. Obviously, I'm not going to agree with all that's in the article – but it's an article worth the writing and the reading. Well done.
That means my labor is not my labor and I'm a slave to you. Same deal as having a coercive State. The dilemma with your position is it isn't mutually agreed. So how do you get my IP when I don't agree the price is zero? (BTW, as soon as Rowling is finished writing Harry Potter, is it yours immediately or what?)
My recent post Persuasion vs Coercion in a Contractual Republic
I agree. Large corporations have paid politicians to build barriers to entry for small competitors. In a truly free market it would be nigh impossible to become nationally dominant, let alone globally. Most industries now are under de facto control of 3-5 companies all in league with States. And, yes, the education system is a giant conformity machine that sends kids down the funnel in service to interests other than their own.
My recent post Not Being Governed
Your labor is entirely your labor.
And my mind is entirely my mind.
If you don't want me to have your "intellectual property," don't put it in my mind.
Once you HAVE put it in my mind, it's MY "intellectual property," not yours.
That's funny. Don't put my property in your brain (or your garage) without my permission.
Although you and others who don't consider your work to be property would be Free to live in a Contractual Republic, I fear it would end up where all social systems based upon theft from producers ends up.
My recent post Individual Responsibility And Why You Don’t Have It
I unquestioningly accepted the idea of "intellectual property" for most of my life.
When I finally did question it, I gave its proponents a long time to offer an argument in its favor that consisted of anything more complex or compelling than "because I waaaaaaaaaaaaannnnttt!!!"
Still waiting.
That your argument?
On that logic you own the rights to all music, movies and software on earth? Wow.
My recent post Individual Responsibility And Why You Don’t Have It
You have it backward.
No, I don't claim to own "the rights" to all music, movies and software on earth.
What I claim is that,
1) In the absence of any credible argument for the existence of such "rights," there's no reason for me to pretend that such rights exist; and
2) "But Pete Sisco WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANTS!!!" is not a credible argument as called for in (1).
Gee, I guess I'm just lucky you haven't unilaterally defined my car and my gold as yours too.
But I suppose that comes later – when your communism is collapsing and then all property is yours.
My recent post Can You Own An Idea?
You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "too." I haven't defined — unilaterally or otherwise — ANYTHING as "mine."
All I've stated is that if you want something to be treated as property in general, and as your property specifically, you need a better argument for it than "I waaaaaaaannnnntt."
I won't hold my breath waiting for such an argument from you.
Even the great imperialist Winston Churchill saw what Kevin is talking about:
"Some years ago in London there was a tollbar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work. The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted on so large a proportion of their earnings appealed to the public conscience, an agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the ratepayers the bridge was freed and the toll removed. All those people who used the bridge were saved sixpence a week. Within a very short period from that time the rents on the south side of the river were found to have advanced by about sixpence a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted. And a friend of mine was telling me the other day that in the parish of Southwark about £350 a year, roughly speaking, was given away in doles of bread by charitable people in connection with one of the churches, and as a consequence of this the competition for small houses, but more particularly for single-roomed tenements, is, we are told, so great that rents are considerably higher than in the neighbouring district. All goes back to the land, and the landowner, who in many cases, in most cases, is a worthy person utterly unconscious of the character of the methods by which he is enriched, is enabled with resistless strength to absorb to himself a share of almost every public and every private benefit, however important or however pitiful those benefits may be."
http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Churchill_TPL.h…
Thanks for your excellent analysis of how LLC were created by governments to privatize profit & externalize costs. Funny that a great many right-libs actually defend LLC. even though they should still be applauded for opposing bail-outs.
Animals are more efficient in many ways than people in using their muscles; a person's advantage over animals is his or her brainpower. Yet your anti-IP, anti-employer bias assumes that the intellectual labor by which a person obtains intellectual property or ownership of a firm is actually LESS valid than the muscular labor of the most unskilled worker. And yet you use the tools up to the very advanced computer generated by brainpower (but that, I guess, is not real labor like good old muscular labor).
I guess Ayn Rand had a point then when she said that Socialists tend to be "muscle mystics"!
However the government cartels operate invisibly due to the fact that is hard to calculate indirect costs. A business owner can easily see how much he is paying into taxes. He can see how many and how much of his taxes are going to the "welfare state programs" based on superficial budgetary break downs.
This same man cannot figure out with any precision how much the poor are stolen from via absentee property rights, zoning regulations, and other murky nearly invisible state sponsored skullduggery. However web sites such as numbeo give me a particular idea about how to combat this very human perceptual difficulty.
People tend to take hard numbers seriously. Hard numbers are very difficult to work with and require a certain amount of creativity. For most people hard numbers are the difference between a foggy intellectual notion and hard facts to be taken seriously or acted upon. We need an internet utility that takes the foggy hard to describe indirect costs upon the poor and attach is a dollar/ gold gram value to all of these costs. A percentage of income calculation plus or minus shown against the value of all government money that actually reaches the poor could put into stark relief where the net flow of value is actually going.
The website I propose would actually have to put these numbers into a visual bar or pie chart graph form, so that people with average numerical abilities, would not have their minds discombobulated by the crushingly boring raw numbers. The mathematics of crushing institutional theft are mind numbing to the average man. We want these numbers to become as serious to the average person as the image of a mountain lion crouching ready to launch themselves upon a passerby.
Let's leverage the concrete bound neolithic construction the human mind. To present numbers in ways that actually produce an emotional response and create a desire to take concrete action based upon concrete numbers represented in highly visual ways. What the vast majority of the population cannot measure they cannot manage, leaving such management to evil and duplicitous elites. The Wizard of Oz after all appeared to be an all powerful sorcerer until the curtains were pulled back.
Until we have visual data metrics so easy to understand that even "joe six pack" can pinpoint financial skulduggery almost at a glance. The reign of counterfeiting fraudsters will continue without challenge. I call to any of you on this forum who have experience in visual data, who have experience in financial management, and a little free time. Working together we can crack this human perceptual problem who knows their may be money to be made in selling data which is actually useful to people who are not sociopaths.
My recent post Confessions of A budding Sci Fi novelist
People in a neolithic environment did not have to deal with the kinds of leeches we have today. Cavemen would hoop and holler and run from predators they noticed in the grass. Since we are all cavemen and cave-women under the surface, stand to reason most people will not react numbers that signal theft from our persons and our lives. Threats to our existence were more clear cut back then. Right now the machines of inflation and evil regulations are biting out heads and eating our children's entrails and we do not react because we evolved to react to obvious predators we could SEE.
My recent post Confessions of A budding Sci Fi novelist
Actually, LLCs are able to externalize costs to those who agree to do business with them – if you don't like the risk, don't deal with them or insist on personal guarantees (which, of course, are only good so long as the debtor does not go bankrupt). Or are we now looking at sending debtors again to prison? Life is never without risk. Stop being babies and live in the real world. Of course, many people prefer certainty – the certainty provided by a totalitarian society, and they are quite willing to deliver themselves and other to the precipice of the Gulag. Freedom entails risk and requires the use of your rational faculty – by your nature as human beings, it is the fact that your life is conditional that demands its use. The issue is freedom or totalitarianism; the choice to be rational, or to evade the effort.