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1. Steven Handel on Aug 4, 2010, 9:24 am:

   "But the division between economic and personal liberty is nonsensical anyway."

   This is true, and this is why both liberals and conservatives fail at protecting liberty.

   I have a question though:

   "Conservatives are more likely to support dictatorships than support the freedom of developing-world workers to organize for better bargaining power."

   Does this refer to "Dead Aid" of Africa and other state-subsidized foreign welfare that often ends up in the hands of corrupt third world leaders?
2. Darian Worden on Aug 4, 2010, 10:11 am:

   Steven, I was thinking about United States-backed regimes in Latin America. A radical free market take on this topic can be found in Kevin Carson's review of Shock Doctrine. http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/11/naomi-klein…
3. gene on Aug 4, 2010, 1:19 pm:

   Some great points.

   For the most part, conservative freedom is a relative freedom. Relative freedoms always require someone or some group to be less free.
4. Forrest on Aug 4, 2010, 4:42 pm:

   The common thread of modern american conservatism (as distinguished from other types, such as modern chinese conservatism) is a desire for government that is big enough to perform its proper duties -i.e., securing the life, liberty, and property of the citizens that comprise said government- and not an iota bigger.

   When you bash modern american conservatives, modern american liberals (who, in fact, are not liberal at all) are the only ones who benefit. I suggest you read Sun Tzu's "Art of War" and play a little "go", if you wish to advance the cause of liberty more efficiently.
5. Mr Civil Libertarian on Aug 5, 2010, 2:24 am:

   "The common thread of modern american conservatism… is a desire for government that is big enough to perform its proper duties -i.e., securing the life, liberty, and property of the citizens that comprise said government- and not an iota bigger."

   What a shame that The State as an institution relies upon the infringement of property rights (as well as the enforcement of pseudo-property rights such as IP), endangering the life of its citizens, and infringing their liberty.

   Given that you are on a website called "Center for a Stateless Society", don't be surprised when there is little sympathy for such minarchist ideals.
6. Darian Worden on Aug 5, 2010, 3:10 am:

   Forrest,

   When I bash any statist or authoritarian ideas, liberty benefits. Government protects power first, and protects individuals and their property mainly when doing so helps bolster government power.
7. Forrest on Aug 5, 2010, 4:50 am:

   Anarchy is an unstable equilibrium. Any student of physics knows that an unstable equilibrium will seek to collapse into a stable equilibrium. What this means is that following anarchy, society will move rapidly to warlordism, then feudalism, etc. To get back to a free society, government will have to recapitulate its evolution. This can take a long time, and should be avoided. No man is free when a gang of raiders can overrun his farm, burn his crops and steal his family without due process. The idea that you can have a world of fully autonomous individuals living in peace and prosperity is a pipe dream; all it takes is one bad apple to upset the whole applecart.

   As Milton Friedman said, "Government is positive on average." Meaning, without government, our GDP would lower. This is important, as history shows. Having a "GDP gap" with your neighbor is a good way to get invaded.

   A democratic republic with a constitution that places absolute limits on government is the way to go. I read a science fiction book once (The Diamond Age) which described a tribal anarchist (feudalistic) world order of the not-too-distant future. It was a fun read, but it defied credibility in a few places. Notably, how people of the future dealt with WMD's. According to Stevenson (the author), city-states nuked each other a few times, and then nukes just became passe', people just stopped using them. Also, feudalism failed in the end, as it must. At the end of the book, a powerful new monarchy rose in China.

   It is tempting to use an Us vs. Them mentality when talking about our government. But don't forget that we are the government. We have the power and the responsibility the whole time. If our government sucks, it is our fault, and our responsibility to fix it. Witness the current election year when the roadside is being cluttered with an increasing number of (figurative) incumbent corpses. This November, there is a good chance that Congress will be dominated by political newcomers with fresh ideals who are uncorrupted by long ties to lobbyists. If we the people demand a good performance from them, I think that we will get it.

   As the immortal Benjamin Franklin said, "You have a Republic, if you can keep it." Let's keep it; the alternative is not better.
8. Darian Worden on Aug 5, 2010, 5:10 am:

   >Anarchy is an unstable equilibrium.

   You are immediately starting with an unproven assumption. You have not proven that consensual agreements among equals would be less stable than power structures that interfere in peaceful interactions by design.

   >The idea that you can have a world of fully autonomous individuals living in peace and prosperity is a pipe dream; all it takes is one bad apple to upset the whole applecart.

   No evidence is provided to support this claim. And government has a tendency to turn apples bad, and encourage the worst apples to be the most influential. See for example gangstersinblue.org

   >As Milton Friedman said, “Government is positive on average.” Meaning, without government, our GDP would lower.

   You have not quoted Friedman's actual argument as to why government is positive on average. Nor have you shown why personal prosperity (which doesn't always coordinate with GDP) would be lower without government.

   >A democratic republic with a constitution that places absolute limits on government is the way to go.

   Constitutions don't limit government; people limit government. There is no reason people should limit the government only according to some arbitrary standard set by the most powerful elements in society when the constitution was adopted. See Lysander Spooner's "No Treason" for example.

   >But don’t forget that we are the government. We have the power and the responsibility the whole time.

   Nope. Powerful interests – big lobby groups and consultants promising to strengthen the power of those who govern – have greater ease of access to the top levels of political power than average individuals. Trying to wield power means that deals will need to be cut with those who have access to power. And rulers, like anyone else, will act on behalf of their own interests. They will conflate their personal need for power to "get the right things done" with the need for people to submit to them "for the common good."
9. Paul on Aug 5, 2010, 5:13 am:

   Forrest, your naivete would be refreshing if I hadn't already heard this kind of statist apologia for most of my life.
10. Forrest on Aug 5, 2010, 6:02 am:

    Mr. Worden suh,

    My first assumption is borne out by all the anecdotal evidence of history: No anarchy has ever lasted longer than it takes someone with a club to assume rulership of the community.

    I agree that government has a tendency to spoil apples; the more government the more spoilage. My point was that if you start with a baseline of anarchy, as soon a single club-wielder starts roaming the countryside, robbing and raping, the good-minded majority of the community of individuals will organize for mutual self-defense. The community appoints an official club wielder to stave off the depredations of the unofficial club wielders. This is feudalism.

    On GDP: GDP is, as you know, the aggregate of the individual wealth of all members of the community. Historically, a free society has much better GDP per capita than an unfree society. If you start with anarchy, you will of course have some GDP; people live and work to stay alive. If you add enough government to defend individuals against personal and property crime, individuals can accumulate wealth better, and GDP increases. Roads help too… government doesn't need to make the roads, but it does need to keep bandits off the roads so people can trade their goods and travel in peace. Either that, or we can put our faith in Mad Max to keep us safe.

    There is a curve you can look at that graphs the size of government relative to GDP vs. real GDP. You can see that, starting at zero, the benefit of adding government peaks early and then starts heading south. In the 19th century, the United States had a total government/GDP ratio of under 10% on average, even if you factor in the civil war. The 19th century in America also saw the most stable prolonged period of decent economic growth in human history. We would not have grown as much if the ratio was 0% (we may not have grown at all). Now take today: the ratio is about 40%. This is clearly WAY too high. No-government and minimal government folks can all agree we need to shift this ratio downward, right?

    "Constitutions don’t limit government; people limit government." Of course. A constitution does no good if people don't protest when it's being violated. And cows can walk through fences, too. But if a cow gets zapped whenever it tries to go through the fence, it will stop trying to do so. Government is the cow, the constitution is the fence, and the people are the electricity.

    If you accept the premise that individual citizens are powerless before the unholy cabal of elected leaders and lobbyists, you are playing into the statists hands. "They" want you to be dispirited and despondent; you are then easier to dominate. The truth is that no incumbent is safe, no matter how much money they have in their campaign coffers, as long as the people are willing to vote the bum out.
11. Darian Worden on Aug 5, 2010, 6:53 am:

    >No anarchy has ever lasted longer than it takes someone with a club to assume rulership of the community.

    Then people like you should stop wielding clubs against those who don't want to be ruled. Anarchism was not a widely-known articulated philosophy until the 19th century. Before then, numerous tribal societies, Viking Age Iceland, and Celtic Ireland stood as a few historical examples of order with relatively little hierarchical rule. It is also possible that a relatively anarchic society existed for many years in Catal Hoyuk, but I haven't found the evidence sufficiently convincing as of yet. And settlers in the American west often created anarchic agreements where state laws did not yet reach. Since the development of anarchism, anarchist societies in the Paris Commune, Ukraine, revolutionary Spain, and China were only defeated by overwhelming force of arms and deception by statists. Just like with Constitutional governments, might determines the victor in conflict. Hence the need for more anarchists and more anarchist action, as this organization and others advocate. We are far from powerless, but we need to use our power effectively.
12. joe on Aug 5, 2010, 7:07 am:

    Forrest –

    Anecdotal evidence is merely a bunch of stories, not evidence. I could wander around a country club and ask a bunch of smiling rich people if they were afraid that they may have to sleep in the streets any time soon because of financial problems, and i would be laughed at a lot and might come to the conclusion, through my anecdotal evidence gathered, that everyone in the country has housing and that "the economy is sound". That dosn't make it reality, does it? There are giant portions of history that are not available to us, because those cultures don't exist anymore, and others made up lies to cover for their crimes. Yes, that in all likelyhood means many of those cultures were killed off in various ways, or absorbed. No, that does not mean that all those cultures were short lived, or weren't 'prosperous' however you define it.

    I know of at least one anthropologist, Harold Barclay, who has done work to show anarchist tendencies throughout history, especially in his book "People Without Government". There's also James Scott's recent book "The Art of Not Being Governed, an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia" which attempts to show how people used various techniques to avoid being absorbed into the various state-making projects in Asia over the past several thousand years. Though these books have some anecdotal evidence, they are also based on actual anthropological evidence of anarchist tendencies in human cultures.
13. CF Oxtrot on Aug 5, 2010, 7:54 am:

    Forrest's straw-man labelled "Anarchy" is amusing, but wrong. Forrest seems to be using the American colloquial pejorative form of "anarchy" in which "anarchy" means "utter chaos, violence, and destruction."

    I would suggest that Forrest visit Crispin Sartwell's site ( http://eyeofthestorm.blogs.com/eye_of_the_storm/ ) for a more realistic understanding of what anarchy actually is.

    The comments which label Forrest as an apologist for statism are correct in that appraisal. Forrest may pretend to offer sentiments which dispute this statist mindset, but Forrest's working definition of anarchy shows where his loyalties are.

    I wonder if Forrest would mind telling readers why he is here commenting. If the purpose is not to disparage anarchism through disinformation, then perhaps he can be informed and his mind can be brought around to a more honest position regarding anarchism. However, if his purpose is to foment discord through logical fallacy, deception, and other forms of intellectual fraud, then perhaps other commenters will have to continue dissecting Forrest's posts.
14. James Tuttle on Aug 5, 2010, 8:00 am:

    Dear Forrest,

    > My first assumption is borne out by all the anecdotal evidence of history: No anarchy has ever >lasted longer than it takes someone with a club to assume rulership of the community.

    Do you regard the “anecdotal evidence of history” as a good reason to maintain and benefit from an inequitable social arrangement? What histories are you referring to; the histories that are written and evaluated from a statist orientation or an anarchist orientation? The anarchist could just as easily make the statement, “No state has ever lasted longer than it takes someone with a club to lay it down and begin cooperating with their community.”

    > … if you start with a baseline of anarchy, as soon a single club-wielder starts roaming the >countryside, robbing and raping, the good-minded majority of the community of individuals will >organize for mutual self-defense.

    I have no general disagreement with this presentation, but…

    >The community appoints an official club wielder to stave off the depredations of the unofficial >club wielders. This is feudalism.

    …there’s our social contract red herring. Most anarchists, for historical reasons, subscribe to some version of the “conquest theory of government” (there is still some debate as to whether this ‘conquest’ is external or internal to the conquered community, I think a little of both completes the picture) over the “contract theory of government.” And when did “feudalism” become a paradigm case for liberal democracy? I guess if you endorse a “tacit” theory of consent, you can believe anything.
15. Forrest on Aug 5, 2010, 10:07 am:

    Hey yall,

    "And when did “feudalism” become a paradigm case for liberal democracy? I guess if you endorse a “tacit” theory of consent, you can believe anything."

    Forgive me for being unclear: I did not mean that feudalism = liberal democracy. Feudalism is the next stage of government after tribalism and anarchy. In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of Rome, people in Gaul lived in anarchy. As the survivors of the apocalypse increased their numbers sufficiently, they formed tribes (ancient cities like Massilia/Marseille retained some form of local government). Then the time came when tribes which had gathered enough iron weapons said to the other tribes, "Give us some of your food and serve us in war, and we will crush your enemies." The Gauls agreed. Now they were in feudalism, or private law. The French Monarchy was actually an improvement over feudalism, because it replaced dozens of petty feudal states with one code of laws and one trade union. The French prospered, i.e., they had a better standard of living. And the French people tolerated their Monarchy for centuries, because there was no better alternative. But when the French learned of liberal democracy they tried to adopt it quickly. It took them five tries, but they adopted it. Liberal democracy is the end of government. If there is anything better out there I haven't heard of it (and if anyone has heard of it, I'd like to know exactly what it is).

    Speaking of anarchy, I have only defined the term in its simplest form: the complete absence of government. I did not use such disparaging terms as "utter chaos, violence, and destruction". Someone else said that. If someone thinks they can produce a more useful definition of anarchy than "the absence of government", be my guest.

    Incidentally, Joseph Proudhon, referred to by some as the "father of anarchism", was in fact barely distinguishable from a hard-core marxist in his disparagement of property rights. Property rights, of course, are an absolute requirement of a free society. He was the first to call himself an "anarchist", but he also called himself a "socialist".

    From wikipedia: "…he didn't approve of "society" owning means of production or land, but rather that the "user" own it (under supervision from society), with the "organising of regulating societies" in order to "regulate the market". It sounds to me like Proudon's society has a very large amount of de-facto government in charge of the economy. You can see why some soi-disant anarchists can be confused with crypto-socialists.

    Organizing the community for common defense is the origin of government and its true purpose. Anyone who agrees that individuals should form any kind of union for self-defense is a proponent of government, however limited.

    The Althing of Iceland, is the world's oldest continual parliamentary *government*. It's worked fine for over 1000 years, perhaps in part because they require a supermajority to pass legislation, so no sizeable minority ever feels shafted.

    The classical Golden Age of Ireland immediately followed the collapse of Rome. The thinking men of Europe got the hell out of the Continent and fled to Hibernia for refuge. Irish government consisted of tribalism then, but the chieftains didn't hassle the learned and wealthy foreigners, they let them be. As a result of having all these smart people living relatively unmolested by the state -or anyone- in one island, there was a golden age. But it was not anarchy. The tribal chiefs kept local dummies with clubs from bothering the sages. Later, when Ireland was ravaged by Viking raids, many of the smart folk went back to the continent, where it was once again relatively safer. This history is now repeating itself, with European businesses fleeing bad conditions on the Continent and relocating to the less oppressive conditions of Ireland.

    It is not my concern whether a social arrangement is "inequitable". I am only concerned with whether the rights of individuals are protected.

    "…his purpose is to foment discord through logical fallacy, deception, and other forms of intellectual fraud…"

    I am indebted to anyone who can point out imperfection in me. If anyone can give me an example of me doing ANY of these things, I will be most grateful.

    "There are giant portions of history that are not available to us, because those cultures don’t exist anymore…"

    The first goal of life, written in our DNA is survival. If a particular culture is unable to survive, there was obviously something lacking in this culture. Obviously, an ideal culture would be one that included the virtue of endurance.

    “The Art of Not Being Governed, an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia”

    Sounds like a good read, but let us note what actually happened to those people (most notably the Hmong people). They were hunted down and slaughtered by communists. In order to preserve their culture the ones who managed to get away had to come to the United States.
16. Forrest on Aug 5, 2010, 12:48 pm:

    "Your entire post at 4:07 pm is a series of linkages between ideas, with such linkages not being demonstrated factually. You do not show causation. You state a “fact,” then state another “fact,”, and you imply that the second “fact” is a result –inescapably– of the first “fact.” You are engaged in a series of

    post hoc, ergo propter hoc

    charades of logical fallacy." "…you are a deceiver…"

    I know a little bit of Latin, too. As in, ad hominem attack, which is what you are doing. What this means is that, being unable or unwilling to refute my arguments logically, you are attacking me personally with baseless insults.

    Again, you merely assert, "You are engaging in logical fallacy", yet you provide not one single example of me doing so. You say I am a deceiver, but you do not point to any single statement of mine as being untrue. If mudslinging and name calling is all that is required here, Oxtrot got this under control. But if rational discussion of facts is called for, it appears someone else must pinch hit.

    I am not threatened by any ideas, but I do find an aggressive unwillingness to deal in ideas a little disturbing.
17. DarianWorden.com» Blog Archive » New Commentaries At C4SS on Aug 5, 2010, 2:32 pm:

    [...] True Economic Liberty: Not a Conservative Idea, I use a Students For Liberty post as a springboard to discussing the idea that conservatives [...]
18. joe on Aug 5, 2010, 1:43 pm:

    Forrest,

    your definition of 'civilization types' alone marks you out as a 'statist'. it also gives the distinct impression of linear historical progression, which is exactly what the 'progressives' and 'liberals' believe in, just in case you don't know (i'm not tryin to be rude, i'm just informing you). I can't speak for anybody else, but i have to say i think that it's a fairly silly idea. i think your categories of 'anarchy – fuedal – liberal democracy' is rather simplistic. that's the basis for the game civilizations iv though, so i guess it is widely held opinion. but when you get down to the lived conditions under your basic categories, there is so much variation that it dosn't actually help.

    anarchy is 'an' 'archos'. 'an' being lack of, against, contrary to, or without; 'archos' was originally a signification of 'military chief' but has also been interpreted as 'sovereign' (in the royal sense) or 'authority' or 'master'. when Antigone defies Creon's command and goes to bury her brother (who Creon declared to be an 'enemy of the state) in the greek play, she declares that she "is not ashamed to act in anarchist opposition to the rulers of the city". it is the belief that people are capable of making decisions and acting either individually or collectively (whichever the situation calls for) without being told what to do by a someone else. some people understand that from an economic perspective, and this is a good place to find those people. that's not really how i understand it, but i've found some interesting concepts here.

    as far as Proudhon is concerned, he wrote 'What is Property' when Marx was still in school, in school i think, in1840. in it he discusses 'property' and 'possession' in a fairly in depth way, attempting to overcome some of the destructive downfalls he saw in the practical use of property in his time, while still maintaining the ability to say 'this is mine', and continued to write about those and many other things for the rest of his life. Ian McKay is about to release a book of new translations of Proudhon's work, and you might find it interesting.

    and as far as the Hmong are concerned, they are a discussed in 'The Art of Not Being Governed', which as i was saying, was a look at the long histories there. It dosn't focus on current/ recent events. but on that topic, the 'communists' were only able to take hold in thai/ laos area after quite a lot had already happened in the area of vietnam. and the hmong were a majority part of the cia funded paramilitary organization in the area, which is a part of why those the cia were involved with killing might have thought of them as an enemy (not that it was really necessary for any of the whole fucking thing to have happened or that i condone the murders on any of the multi-faceted sides of those conflicts)
19. joe on Aug 5, 2010, 2:48 pm:

    forrest,

    i'm not really sure if this is something you care to know, but while Proudhon was the first to call himself an anarchist, he also began work on a school of thought that is called Mutualism. Kevin Carson, who posts on this site, has written quite a bit about it and i believe you can find most of it right her on this site. He supported a system of small, locally controlled federations built on mutually agreed upon contracts and free association. this does not in itself push him away from anarchism, though some schools of anarchist thought would have a lot to say about the nature of 'contracts', there's nothing there that the most other anarchists would argue with. the 'state' isn't just any group getting together for protection (which, by the way, is by no means the only or most important part of why people get together, don't forget that we are evolved social animals, and hence crave social interaction). the 'state' is a specific type of historically located large scale hierarchic, expansionary, and coercive organization. Not all social organizational models exhibit those characteristics.
20. Forrest on Aug 5, 2010, 4:25 pm:

    Joe,

    I thank you for an interesting and informative post. I was particularly pleased with learning the precise origin of the word, "anarchy". Hopefully you are enjoying this scientific inquiry as much as me. Now then…

    Webster and I believe that a "statist" is someone who advocates a highly centralized government which owns and/or controls what should be private property. I'm sure we agree that is a bad thing, and given this definition, I like to think of myself, not as a statist, but as an individualist, one who holds that the individual is the primary unit of society that state power must serve. Because the sovereign power of the individual is the source of state power. Therefore, anything it is immoral for an individual to do, is immoral for a state to do, etc.

    When I say state, I mean any polity with the power to levy taxes and create statutes. The governments of East Podunk, Alabama and the USA are different in degree, not type. This means that "small, locally controlled federations built on mutually agreed upon contracts and free association" are also states. That sounds good though; why can we not aspire to a large state "built on mutually agreed upon contracts and free association"? A large state with decentralized power is far more difficult to corrupt than a small one.

    Now, if you refer to anyone who does not accept the shibboleth of your clan as a "statist", that's fine. This is, or ought to be, a free country with no official language.

    But what is that shibboleth? I think I have found it, or at least an important one:

    "…it is the belief that people are capable of making decisions and acting either individually or collectively (whichever the situation calls for) without being told what to do by a someone else."

    This ground is slightly shaky at best. Everyone is certainly "capable" of making decisions in any situation. But many people, in certain situations, have a tendency to get frozen with fear and doubt. This is part of our animal condition. And you can't mean that everyone is capable of making the *correct* decision in any situation, that would imply universal omniscience. And yes, there are such things as correct decisions, sometimes. If you are defusing a bomb, which wire do you snip?

    I do believe that people should make decisions for themselves, to the maximum extent possible. I also believe that the profit or loss of an individual decision should not be forcibly distributed to others.

    "the ’state’ isn’t just any group getting together for protection (which, by the way, is by no means the only or most important part of why people get together, don’t forget that we are evolved social animals, and hence crave social interaction)"

    Social interaction is the *last* thing we need a state for. It is improper and immoral for any state to insinuate itself into social interaction between individuals. We can get along fine without it.

    Proudhon was certainly a trailblazer. "What is Property" preceded the "Communist Manifesto" by 8 years. It also seems Proudhon may have invented the modern labor union, no small feat.

    Anarchy means "against authority", and I am certainly against authority for man to coerce man. But let us not forget that nature possesses indisputable authority, and any consistent and useful ethos must submit to her laws.
21. CF Oxtrot on Aug 5, 2010, 6:04 pm:

    Your entire post at 4:07 pm is a series of linkages between ideas, with such linkages not being demonstrated factually. You do not show causation. You state a “fact,” then state another “fact,”, and you imply that the second “fact” is a result –inescapably– of the first “fact.” You are engaged in a series of

    post hoc, ergo propter hoc

    charades of logical fallacy.

    From where I sit, you are a deceiver. Perhaps your schtick works well among people who lack intellectual strength and discernment. I wish you well in your disinformation schemes; it seems that is your aim, and I hope you find what you need in this avenue of intellectual fraud you are travelling.

    I wonder what it is you find so threatening here at C4SS. Obviously it’s something, or you wouldn’t be engaged in this gambit.
22. James Tuttle on Aug 5, 2010, 6:23 pm:

    Hat tips to CF Oxtrot. I will leave you the field, you got this under control.
23. joe on Aug 6, 2010, 9:06 am:

    forrest,

    when i said ‘you sound like a statist’, it was not as a shibboleth. you do. at least amongst the community you are in at the moment, you do. it sounds to me like people here simply have more ‘faith’, or however you would prefer to describe it, in the individual than you. In my opinion, you contradicted yourself when you say that the individual is sovereign yet they make up the state. in order to enter into the ‘social contract’, one must surrender their sovereignty to that of the state, which is what makes the state sovereign. that’s why the ‘state’ has the right to try you and toss you in jail for whatever it feels like (and in nj, where i grew up, that’s exactly how you end up in jail, at the whims of a dumb pig who chooses not to like someone for whatever reason, which is why most of my childhood friends are in or recently got out of jail).

    it does not concern me how the webster’s dictionary defines state. it also defines anarchy as ‘chaotic disorder’, as well as many other lingual misinterpretations that can be found within it. it can be useful as a baseline agreement for simple conversations, but just like your ‘civilizational types’, the deck of cards collapses in the face of lived realities, which is why i usually don’t bother with it. at this point, many wikipedia definitions are more comprehensive and nuanced than most official dictionaries, which isn’t surprising to us anarchists since the wiki model is essentially, though not totally, anarchistic (and one of the founders is an anarchist, whom i met when i lived in florida. he left the group because the others wanted the ability to freeze wiki pages when they reached a certain amount of comprehensive detail, and he didn’t want to restrict free flow of shifting knowledge/ information). as i said before, the ‘state’ is a specific type of social organization. some have even described it as a specific type of social relation, that we can only get rid of by entering into different social relations.

    as i am alone in sharing this kind of info with you (in reference to the others on this site who were more aggressive, we are accustomed to being told are ideas would never work and it gets really annoying after a long time), i am obviously missing important pieces of what others understand of anarchy and anarchism. honestly i don’t really think most people on this site’ll agree with all that i say, because i am much more of a ‘social anarchist’. i come here to learn what about ideas i am unfamiliar with, and economic understandings that are absent on other anarchist sites.

    i think some of the most important ideas in anarchism are decentralization, individual autonomy (in the field of economics i suppose this might be understood as workers control), direct action, and horizontal federalism. What Proudhon actually described, in his own long-winded french way, filled with stories and metaphors, was a federalism built up from the individual. not in the sense of the individual tacitly agreeing to a social contract of some sort or another, but in the sense of they actually make decisions and agreements amongst their community, which makes agreements with the next community, in such a way that everything is decided at the local level first, and them transmitted to larger levels. he argued that europe was far too big to be a confederation, it could only be a confederation of confederations (which i don’t personally think would be able to accomplish much, since i do truly think that individuals need to control their own lives). This has later been described, by people like Colin Ward (a social anarchist if there ever was one), as ‘horizontal federalism’, which would maintain a network structure as opposed to a statist pyramid structure in which decisions are transmitted downwards, be it by a dictator, ‘communist’ party, or liberal democratic supposed ‘representative’. This might look something like the model that the Zapatista’s are operating on, though they call their own ideas “zapatizmo’ and refuse the labels of anarchist, marxist, or liberal. I think that any pyramid structured institution is easily corrupted, no matter what it’s size, but large ones are easier because those who are corrupted do not have to sleep in the house next to those they fuck over. if they did, they may think twice about what they do.

    i understand what you mean what you mean when you say that the ‘state’ should stay out of ‘the social’. but that is also precisely what i meant. the ‘state’ is a specific type of social organization, designed for coercion and control of large populations. i believe people are not only capable of, but should, enter into different social organizations that are just as capable of social protection and resource distribution within society without detrimental institutions that hold up the state, like permanent standing armies and armed police (which no modern state could survive without). and when i say resource distribution, i am referring to the institutions which develop in all cultures to enforce distribution of available materials, and in our current situation this distribution almost always goes straight to the top of the pyramid.

    defusing a bomb requires specific types of intricate knowledge. cooperating with your neighbor for the benefit of both does not require the same level of specialized education. sometimes creation situations may call for specialized knowledge, which is why knowledge should be freely distributed. i personally think that people revert to frozen fear mode most of the time because we have, for many generations, been trained to defer immediately to specialized authorities. i do not think that this is a permanent state of human nature, nor is it true for many who live in areas where ‘state control’ barely penetrates. coordination may sometimes be more complicated, but the results are usually far better and more comprehensive. this does not mean that competition is bad, they are both necessary. but either brought to extremes fails us all. notice, in contemporary US, most of us are expected to simply compete all the time, while the giant corporations and the governmental structures cooperate with each other to control all of those competing. as far as nature and ‘her laws’ go (is that a Gaia reference? i must say, i’m surprised, which is not to say that i disapprove), Peter Kropotkin, who was a geographer, scientist, and anarchist, responded to Social Darwinism as soon as it became a theory. he wrote a book called “Mutual Aid”, which describes how nature is not simply ‘the survival of the fittest’, and that while there is mutual competition in the natural world and all it’s relationships, there is also quite obviously ‘mutual aid’, or cooperation, and that evolutionarily a species that develops relationships of cooperation is far more likely to survive in the long run than species that develop relationships of competition with themselves and surrounding species.
24. joe on Aug 6, 2010, 9:26 am:

    forrest,

    see, i told you that since i was saying all this alone, i’d forget important pieces. i just recalled that another part of Proudhon’s idea of federalism that he continually stressed, was the idea that parties entering into a contract had to be undertaking reciporical obligations, which was one of his main objections to the social contract theories of his time. he said something along the lines of entering into a ‘social contract’ with the state was totally unbalanced, in that the state gives far less obligations to the individual than the individual gives to the state (ie the individual’s sovereignty). I should also say that i am in complete agreement with what James said earlier, in that I (and many anarchists) do not see states as arising from social contracts, but from conquests. i don’t really think there was anything ‘organic’ about the imposition of the state model throughout history, it was always imposed upon populations with various techniques.
25. joe on Aug 6, 2010, 11:14 am:

    i’m doing research for my dissertation, so i have been looking around at a lot of random things. i just ran across this in John MacKay’s “The Anarchists”

    ***He now saw what it was that Proudhon had meant by property: not the product of labor, which he had always defended against Communism, but the legal privileges of that product as they weigh upon labor in the forms of usury, principally as interest and rent, and obstruct its free circulation; that with Proudhon equality was nothing but equality of rights, and fraternity not self-sacrifice, but prudent recognition of one’s own interests in the light of mutualism; that he championed voluntary association for a definite purpose in opposition to the compulsory association of the State, “to maintain equality in the means of production and equivalence in exchange” as “the only possible, the only just, the only true form of society.”

    Auban now saw the distinction Proudhon made between possession and property.

    “Possession is a right; property is against right.” Your labor is your rightful possession, its product your capital; but the power of increase of this capital, the monopoly of its power of increase, is against right.***
26. Forrest on Aug 6, 2010, 2:43 pm:

    Joe,

    Thanks again for some high-toned provocative thoughts.

    If you insist I resemble a term you regard as pejorative, I get it, nice to meet you, too. Also, I never once said, “civilization types”. For that matter the metaphor, while it applies to Civ I – III, does not apply to Civ IV. In Civ IV, rather than discrete “government types”, there are five different categories of “civics” with five choices in each one, for a total of 3125 different ethoses. Personally, my prefered combanation (in game terms) is Universal Suffrage, Free Speech, Emancipation, Free Market, and Free Religion. Civ V is slated to be even more complex. One version, perhaps Civ X, will actually approach being a useful history simulator.

    Games aside, I do think that politics can one day be as precise as physics. I believe in the existence of an underlying “ethical calculus” by which one can describe a policy with the mathematical precision of a parabola.

    And when you denigrated the notion of “history as a linear progression” as some kind of liberal conspiracy, my head spun around so much I forgot to reply. What is history, if it is not the story of every individual and their interaction with their environment? Is not a human life a story of linear progression? Granted, there are lateral dimensions to history as well. Some say that history is moved by spirits and mysterious forces, or even that “history” is some kind deity that creates avatars like Napoleon or Marx to work its will on earth. Bah humbug. Even if we can’t see all the underlying data, history is nothing more or less the aggregate sum of individual human action, and weather. And no matter how many dimensions our universe is made of, each dimension is itself linear.

    It is true that I have no faith in anything. Webster (there’s that old s.o.b. again) says that faith is a belief in something for which there is no evidence. I only believe in that for which there is evidence that gives me confidence of truth, with no reasonable doubts.

    I never proposed that individuals “surrender their power” to authority in a republic. In a proper republic, people engage in direct democracy -a la New England’s Town Meeting Day tradition- on a local level, and on the state and federal level, people explicitly choose representatives to *borrow* their power and aggregate it for them, so that it can wielded more effectually. All these representatives serve at the pleasure of the people, and if the people disapprove of their actions they can lose all the power that was entrusted to them every other November. America has no permanent ruling class, and if the people so desired, we could have a radically different kind of government every two years.

    Let’s try to be more sympathetic to police… don’t fear the dog, fear the master. A cop is merely a public servant (who, according to anecdotal evidence is dumber even than the average public servant), who is sworn to carry out the laws of his employer. If you, like me, find some police actions to be objectionable, our grievance is with the legislators who make the laws the police enforce. And beyond that our ultimate grievance is with the people who elect the legislators who make the laws the police enforce. In short, the people are to blame. If these and other evils are to be corrected, the people must be corrected. How?

    For this, I shall send up two pinch hitters to give me some base runners:

    Machiavelli: “You must deal with people as they are, not as they should be.”

    Bismark: “Politics is the art of the possible.”

    Someone who is serious about reforming society must ask themselves two questions: What is my goal? What must I do to realize this goal? When you have answered these questions to your satisfaction, all that remains to be done is act.

    I know you can’t claim to speak for anarchists in general, who can? But I am more curious, not in what you are against, but what you are for. What is the ideal size of a community? What is the ideal form of social organization? How is this reconciled with unavoidable factors which are external to the community?

    Mutual aid is implied in voluntary agreements, is it not? If an agreement is not voluntary, someone is usually injured. Or as Lincoln said, “It is the old serpent: ‘You work, I’ll eat’”.

    I think we can agree that as much power should be relegated to the local level as possible. In fact, with our present level of technology, this is possible to an extent unprecedented in human history, and we should take advantage of this. As the IXth amendment says: “The enumeration of certain rights is not to be construed as to deny the people unenumerated rights.” More strictly, the Xth amendment says, “All powers not specifically granted to the federal government by the constitution are exclusively reserved to the states and the people.” See? If the constitution was actually being followed to the letter, most of things that piss us off about the state would not exist. The massive attenuation of national power over private life would lead to a new renaissance of individual initiative and happiness, and our 50 states would be so much more diverse, that if one state rubbed you the wrong way, you could be sure to find a different state that you would find much more agreeable (another social advantage of a large federal republic: variety).

    A state’s (or social relation, whatever you wish to call it) proper role is to protect individuals from any form of coercion. As Ayn Rand says, “Civilization is a process of setting man free from men.” When the state commits the moral absurdity of protecting someone from *themselves*, that is where tyranny enters into the social relation.

    And no *human* institution to “enforce the distribution” of material wealth is required: Mama Nature (I am being slightly irreverent to say that, but not a bit disrespectful) can handle the distribution on her own. All we need do is remove coercion from the natural equation. “Survival of the best club wielder” is not a practical method for the human animal to survive and thrive. In fact, if wielding a club is all you’re good at, you’re kind of screwed in a civilized society, unless you can get a job in Major League Baseball, and there are very few of those jobs to go around.

    “…knowledge should be freely distributed…”

    If you apply this to all knowledge, the proposition becomes problematic. Some knowledge is more valuable than others, and someone who comes up with a new idea that benefits everyone should be rewarded in a manner they find agreeable. If all knowledge is free, then the incentive to share new ideas with your fellow man disappears, and society stagnates. People didn’t stop thinking in the Dark Ages, they just stopped sharing (unless perhaps you shared with your fellow expats in Ireland). Far from not being rewarded, beneficial ideas were *punished*. Even DaVinci, living at the end of the Dark Ages, wrote all his thoughts in code. He did not want to share with his fellow man, he wanted to share his thoughts with *us*, with people from a distant, more moral future where he would receive his due of respect. If you want the greatest minds to “share” their wisdom with us, they must be assured we will “share” right back in proper measure.

    This reminds me of an anecdote. An Indian Chief said to an Englishman, “I had a dream the other night that you gave me a cow.” The next day, the Englishman gave the Chief a cow, and there was much rejoicing. During the festivities, the Englishman leaned over to the Chief and said, “I had a dream the other night that you gave me 100 square miles of land.” The Chief frowned sadly and said, “You may have the land, but I will not dream with you anymore.”

    The idea of not letting people charge interest and rent is bunk. Ditto with people keeping the product of their manual labor, but not the product of their thought. Marx himself was enough of an economist to realize, “Wealth, before it can be redistributed, must be produced,” and furthermore, that a free market, in the classical sense, was the best way to produce wealth that there was. Marx was a smart man, but where he went astray was when he made the wild assumption that the system that was required to create wealth, was not required to maintain wealth, or that at some point in the future, when “enough” wealth was produced, we could simply switch off capitalism, hand out all the goods, and everyone would sing Kumbaya. On sober reflection, this seems little short of madness. Plus, it’s a personal rule of mine to not take economic advice from a man whose children all starved to death.

    Once again, thanks for the enjoyable discussion.

    P.S. If you liked Civ IV, you may also like the “Fall From Heaven 2″ and “Legends of Revolution” mods. But if you’re working on your dissertation, it’s probably not a good idea to try them.
27. joe on Aug 7, 2010, 7:44 am:

    forrest,

    i’m glad you got the joke about how civ may be funny but it is lacking in it’s depiction of reality. sorry about getting the version wrong, it’s been a while. and you are right, i shouldn’t go near one anytime soon. but this has been a decent break from my work.

    i think part of our problem here, and possibly a part of why so many people took your comments as attempting to cause a fight, is that we are starting off on a very different understanding of things.

    i do not, nor have i ever really thought that politics is perfectible. i don’t think it’s a science. one of my professor’s once told me that it was a science because “it’s an organized body of thought”. that’s a load of complete shit. anyone who’s taken a few courses in political science can see that there are lots of different perspectives and ideas that are all called ‘politics’, many of which contradict each other. i got an undergraduate degree in the us in political science. i disagreed with all of my teachers pretty much all the time. well, sometimes we agreed on what happened, but we never agreed on why it happened. i went to school in england for a masters, and as far as my professors there are concerned, everything i was taught in the us all fell under a single political perspective, neo-realism, and they tried to show me other perspectives. needless to say we ended up disagreeing on many things and perspectives as well. i personally think that the art of politics is the art of arguing. several of my friends tell me i should be a politician because “i make the most ridiculous ideas (ie,we can all get along) sound so reasonable”. and that’s what politics is about, convincing people you’re right and reasonable.

    i think that methods introduced to political science from economics have ushered in an era of ‘political scientists’ tinkering with formulas, like psychologists trying to find the perfect combination of drug sequences to make us docile and obedient. i don’t think these methods address any of the underlying systemic issues we currently live with, they just measure voting patterns really.

    which brings me to voting, and the old anarchist saying “don’t vote, organize!”. i don’t really think that mass scale representational politics are worth any more than dogshit in a park. did you honestly think there would’ve been a difference between mccain and obama? i thought the difference would be the ratio of american soldiers in iraq and afghanistan versus mercenary forces, with more troops under mccain and more mercenaries under obama. looks like i might’ve been right. the new governor of florida is just as bad as the old, and he looks more plastic. the local sheriff in nj where my family lives has been reelected for years, even though many of us hate him, because he’s mafioso and they rig the damn votes.

    beyond all that physical examples of my recent problems with voting, i think it is disempowering on many levels. just like capital, over several generations it accumulates power into certain areas and creates a ‘representational class’, if there wasn’t one ready to be used to start with already. don’t forgeet that we have ‘dynasties’ in the us too. the kennedy family is one example, the bush family is another. there is the ‘possibility’ of voting a few out, but the system as a whole protects it’s investments, those politicians who have been groomed by various factions around the system. it is easier to change things on more local levels, but those local levels are disempowered by further removed levels so that too much ‘damage’ will not be caused. china’s recent moves towards so called ‘democracy’ are a good example of this.

    while i know that you didn’t say anything about surrendering your power, what i am saying is this is exactly what the social contract calls for you to do. the individual surrenders their sovereignty to the state, hence the state is sovereign. reread Rousseau, he’s fairly explicit about it, and he wasn’t the only one. this is one of the problems with all formulations (that i am familiar with) of the social contract. i believe the same is essentially true of representational politics. you surrender you’re ability to voice your own opinions on how things should be done to support someone to represent your case, as do many other people. and i don’t think that person has as much incentive as you seem to to listen to those who ‘hired’ her/him.

    mutual aid may be implied by contrast (in your understanding of contracts), but i doubt it’s understood like that by military recruiters who lie to poor people to get them to sign up for the military. i know a few people who only did it to be able to afford college, and low and behold, one is dead, and the others are still pretty much told “no, you can’t go to college” by the military that made promises to them, promises it usually doesn’t plan on keeping. and kropotkin was talking about a natural occurrence, something that is just done, not something we have to agree to. do dogs sign contracts before entering into a pack?

    the words ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ are not insults to me. i was using them in a joking way, to see what you’re reaction was. but what i actually said was “historical linear progression”, which i didn’t make up. it’s a term (from philosophy i think) that refers to the pervasive belief that history is both unitary and linear, and that it is progressing towards a specific ‘end goal’. as you maybe be able to tell, i don’t believe any of those things. i was referring to your comment on history progressing from “anarchy -tribal -fuedal -liberal democracy”, though you did seem to allow for some room for shifting back a step and then going forward again. i know you didn’t refer to them as ‘civilization types’, but it was the only way i could refer to it in short hand.

    i think history is exactly that, “his-story”. it is stories told, usually by a conquering faction, about how great they are. up until very recently it was only male voices, and always the upper class of whatever culture was involved in writing it. what i am trying to say is that history as we know it is always partial, and it always takes sides. to be the “aggregate sum of individual human action” it would have to actually involve the opinions and actions of a majority of the human race, and it never has. if you go study the “vietnam war” in vietnam, you’ll find that it’s actually the “american war”, and you’ll probably learn a lot of things you didn’t learn in history class here. some of it will be pure propaganda. but how is that any different from what you learned in the us? it’s a partial and biased story, just told from a different perspective.

    about being sympathetic to police… i suppose you’ve never had to deal with the receiving end of police attention. i’ve been beaten up by police. i’ve had my possessions, my “property”, taken from me by the police, both in official capacities as state funded thieves, and as a way of showing me that they can do whatever they want when they find me on the street. you’ve obviously never experienced this. you may think it is a fluke, not common. you are wrong. this is how people end up acting when you give them weapons and authority as their ‘job’. training may make them more polite to old ladies and those who raise funds for them, but it doesn’t change how they act towards ‘excess parts of the population’. their job is to keep some segments of the population obedient, or at least quiet. they are their to protect property, property in the sense that proudhon was talking about. that is what they evolved to do as an institution in the 17th century in europe, and it is still their job. i think people should protect their own communities… if only the people in the us knew enough of their damn neighbors to do it. but there have been a few attempts to start ‘police-free’ zones in the us where small communities take care of themselves.

    on the constitution, if you read through all the federalist papers and lots of american history, you may notice that the point of the constitution was actually to create a more centralized government that could withstand things like Shay’s Rebellion, which was scaring the shit out of the upper class of the colonies. i guess telling people they were fighting to rid themselves of taxes, and then not paying them and also asking them to pay taxes was a bad idea. also notice how unimportant the “letter of the law” is to those constitution worshiping republicans who now want to rescind a part of it that is annoying them, the 14th amendment. i’m sorry but nothing’s ever going to convince me that a country founded on the worst episode of slavery that world histories have currently on record, along with the fairly close to complete genocide of the native inhabitants, is a ‘good’ country founded on ‘good rules’. that’s a part of why i left.

    you misunderstand me (i think) when i say enforce distribution. there are modes of distribution ‘enforcement’ modes built into any economy. any economy requires infrastructure, whether that be a shoddily built shanty market or a global internet backbone. any infrastructure is necessarily built to guide things to certain places, unless we live in a world with lots of sci-fi stuff like teleportation (and even then probably…). when the logic of where certain things are guided to is questioned by those who are probably not getting the better part of a deal, those who are benifiting will probably find a way to convince them to be quiet, while still allowing themselves to benefit greatly. you may not think of these as human institutions or infrastructures, but humans built them, and therefor some humans made decisions about how it should work.

    by the way, ‘civilization’ is the word used by the greeks to describe how superior they were to those they were planning on going out to kill and enslave the next day. all words have histories, and those are important to how we understand things. hence why i understand the concept of “state” the way i do. like i’ve said before, the ‘state’ has a history, and i think it is a history of imposing it’s rules upon people, not a history of people entering into agreements. people living in states were forced into those agreements after their own capacity to help themselves was taken. you don’t have to agree with me, like i said, history is “his-story”, you have your opinion and i have mine. i’m just glad that this has been civil.

    i would talk more about what i think society should be like, but i think that in our own heads, our starting points are too different for you to understand what i really mean when i would attempt to describe it (attempt being the operative word, i don’t know if i am capable of fully explaining my own ideas on it yet). i’ll leave you with what little i think may help, in that anarchism actually is a theory of social organization, starting with the premise that we are and should be in charge of our selves
28. Forrest on Aug 7, 2010, 11:32 pm:

    Joe,

    I’m what you might call a paleo-realist, or just plain realist for short. I won’t come out and assert, “Reality is X”, unless I’m sure beyond doubt, but I do think that there *is* an X, and that X is within our power to comprehend rationally.

    If politics (which I take to mean not just the art of getting elected, but also the much more difficult task of having a society, and figuring out which policies will do the most good, or at least do no harm) is not perfectible -at least in theory- that means there are no standards by which to judge if a certain policy is good or bad, better or worse. This is an amoral and nihilistic outlook that says, “Just get elected by any means, and if elected do whatever you want; might makes right.” I think we can do better than that. Hence, I prefer to believe that even if not truly perfectible, we can at least continue to approach perfection in our civic conduct.

    What do I think is perfect? From the federal government, all I want is a suitable figurehead in the Executive to conduct personal diplomacy with other nations, an objective judiciary to resolve disputes and enforce contracts according to common law, a military to protect my rights against foreign coercion, and a representative legislature to put its imprimatur on the tiny budget this would require every year. From the state government, a governor that mostly does nothing, but can coordinate relief efforts in case of large-scale disasters (example: In the great flood of 1927, when practically every road in Vermont was washed out, President Coolidge [a Vermonter] called up Governor Weeks and said, “You need any help from the federal government?” Weeks said, “No thanks, Cal, we take care of our own.” And we did. We straightened out the whole state without a dime of support from Washington. How different things are today. For local government, direct democracy can take care of most things. I think roads etc. could be privatized, but if my town government wants to keep the roads plowed and take care of the potholes, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

    “i don’t think these methods address any of the underlying systemic issues we currently live with…”

    What exactly are the underlying systemic issues we have that politics does not or can not address?

    “…did you honestly think there would’ve been a difference between mccain and obama?”

    A little bit. I have a fairly simplistic approach to evaluating how proper the government is: What % of the GDP is consumed with government spending, how big a slice is Big Brother eating off out plate? If you look at historical data, from the Roman Empire, to the French Monarchy, or the 3rd Reich, or the Soviet Union, you know that all these states collapsed. What is the common factor of their collapse? At some point, the government share of GDP reached an unsustainable level, and the life-affirming will of the individual citizens was drowned out by delusional power-mad bureaucrats, and the state died. When the % of government is kept as low as possible, the will of private citizens dominates our civic life, and we endure, as all living creatures seek to endure.

    For the love of Gaia (if you like), even Fidel Castro is firing millions of government employees and turning them loose to fend for themselves. Even old Fidel has realized that the government % of GDP in Cuba has reached an unsustainable level, and in his dotage, he is seeking to rectify it. And that’s sort of the difference between Crazy Old John and B.H. Obama. W Bush’s policies were at best suckily mediocre, but fiscally speaking, they were not disastrous. At worst, McCain would have muddled along with similar policies, but Obama has gone off the deep end. 2008 was the worst year of the inglorious W Bush administration, with a budget deficit of $0.5 trillion. The next year, Congress, under the Obama administration, tripled the deficit to $1.5 trillion. From the frying pan into the fire. If we do not correct this pattern, the country will die. Although maybe you would welcome that. If it comes to Mad Max time, look me up; we will have a palisaded compound with a large vegetable garden. And lots of guns.

    The deal with police in this country, is that like public school teachers, they are all heavily unionized. In states where the mafia is strong, the local unions (and the Democrats) are more beholden to the Machine. So police in Sopranoland are more likely to be jerks than police where I come from. Up in Vermont, the only real Mob connections are a few families I shall not name who launder money and provide hideouts.

    But as I said, I have reason to resent “pigs”, as you say. I was at my friend’s bar one time, and I had 3 Bombay Sapphire & Tonics and drove home, around midnight. A bored cop was parked across the street from the bar, so when he saw me drive out, he followed me, and pulled me over because “my license plate light was not functioning properly”. He smelled the gin on my breath and hauled me out of the car to take a sobriety test. That sobriety test was one of the best performances of my life. I danced; I swooped, I spun and twirled in a dazzling manner, and I nailed it. I blew 0.08 (the legal limit), and the cop said, “You’re under arrest.” So he hauled me off to the station where he chained me to the wall like a beast and proceeded to interrogate me. I dragged the interview as long as I could, using every shred of sagacity I possessed. After half on hour, he caught on to my delaying tactics and got angry. I slightly upped my appearance of cooperation at that point to keep things cool. When the interview was over, I said, “I want to talk to a lawyer.” It was 2 in the morning then, but that’s my right, right? Disgruntled, the cop got a phone book so I could bother lawyers; that bought me another 20 minutes. By the time he hooked me up to the official BAC machine, I blew 0.076 (a good year). By all rights, he should have let me go, but he said, “I’m charging you with DWI.” But that was not the end of it. I lawyered up and dragged it out; my lawyer conspired with the DA, etc.

    The sweetest moment came when I was sitting outside the courtroom on a bench, and the arresting officer -who would not make eye contact with me- came sputtering out having given his testimony and said, “This is bullshit, I’m on a shift from 1 am and then I have to come out here and do this!” It was all I could do to bite my tongue and not blurt out, “Sorry to have inconvenienced you!” I won.

    Per the 14th amendment: The impetus of this amendment at the time was to ensure that all African-Americans in the country at the time, and their children would be ensured of all the rights of any other citizens. But now we have an epidemic of “baby tourism” where people from all over the world fly in to have their babies here, in part because we have the world’s best hospitals, but also so they can have their kids tagged with US citizenship, which guarantees them the cushiest life on earth. We should consider this. Personally, my immigration policy is that if you have no communicable diseases, no seriously violent criminal background, and a sponsor, come on in and stay, the more the merrier. In my opinion, the “Brain Drain”, by which we co-opt the most able people from all over the planet, is the USA’s greatest power, and we should do all we can to nurture it.

    Per slavery: 600,000 Americans died, North and South, many horribly, bayoneted, gutshot with a minie ball, clubbed in the head with a musket, withered with nasty disease, starved, etc., so that the USA could remain one, and all in her borders would enjoy the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. My great-great grandfather and his brother Moses stepped up to the firing line in that war, for the good guys. And they came back to Vermont with a disease that killed everyone in the family except for my great-great grandfather and his little brother, Elmer. Slavery was allowed to slide in our nation’s founding because we figured, lets get a country first and fix it later. But Benjamin Franklin saw the storm 70 years away and said, we’d better nip this in the bud. No one listened. As far as I’m concerned, our nation’s sin of slavery has been expiated by an ocean of blood, and that settles it, in my opinion.

    The founding fathers were like you and me: they instantly recognized that rulership by priests and monarchs was evil, and they wanted to build a new society that would be free from these ills. It was Thomas Jefferson who said, “Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

    If you are interested in the Civil War, I heartily recommend Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War”. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It is 2700 pages long. Best wait until you’ve finished your dissertation.

    The Kennedys are well on their way to fulfilling the old american adage, “From dust to dust, in three generations.” When old man Joe (who came from nothing) died, he left a fortune of $850 million. The last I checked (about ten years ago), the Kennedy fortune had dwindled to $350 million. Unless they check this trend, the Kennedys will become indistinguishable from any other derelict tribe of South Boston.

    Any social compact whatsoever requires individuals to aggregate their will toward a common purpose. And society is impossible without some kind of communal arrangement whereby the common good is secured, however limited and strictly defined the arrangement is.

    The power of the gun and the power of money are very different. One is voluntary, the other is not, and we would do well to distinguish between them.

    History ought to be, if it isn’t, moving toward an ideal state where all humans will enjoy the rights which are their birthright. Life, liberty, and property. Or as the Wiccans say, ” an it harm none, do as you will.”

    I actually don’t mind “liberal” so much; I wear the tag, as it was represented in the 19th Century, with pride. “Progressive”, on the other hand, has been bunk from the beginning. The first hard-core Progressive president, Wilson, exemplified the denigration, “The ‘Beautiful People’ are not content with sermonizing Americans on how they should live, but they feel it is their duty to instruct everyone in the world how to live,” when he annihilated the Monroe Doctrine of non-interference by sending 200,000 doughboys into the meat grinder of a European war.

    Our intervention in this conflict, compounded with the indifference of Roosevelt and Chamberlain to gradual German re-armament, was primarily responsible for the holocaust of 50,000,000 killed by battle, and 13 million civilians who were worked to death or executed for no good reason.

    Trotting out that “his-story” stuff is unworthy of someone soon to hold the title of Doctor of Philosophy. I will of course agree with you that all historical accounts are biased, and that nearly all direct data of the total aggregate of human intercourse are forever lost to us (there’s 6 billion people on the planet now, but around 67 billion humans have existed). But we can safely assume that in the life span of our species, things happened that really happened, and that you and I, by examining the available evidence, and adding our own unique observations, can approximate a useful model of history.

    “i would talk more about what i think society should be like, but i think that in our own heads, our starting points are too different for you to understand what i really mean when i would attempt to describe it”

    This sounds a lot like what Jazzman so-and-so said when asked, “What is Jazz?” The Jazzman said, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” That may be true of Jazz, but I do not believe it is true of politics. Why don’t you give me credit for being as perspicacious as you are, lay out your plan for a better society, and I will be as kind and generous in my evaluation of it as I possibly can, pinky promise. Best,
29. joe on Aug 8, 2010, 9:49 am:

    honestly forrest,

    this has been interesting, but as i said before, i have much work to do, so this has to be my last response for now

    i don’t think anything is perfectible. and theories that make things sound perfectible are foolish pipe dreams that will likely lead to some bad consequences (eugenics anyone?). i responded as i did to your idea of politics being perfectible, because it sounded like, and still does sound like, game theory style rhetoric that became popular in this past half century, and has brought to political science a bunch of economists who think that people really are rational maximizer who can be predicted through models. and i don’t buy a word of it. i’m much more in agreement with complexity theory on that one. check out a short paper called “many damn things simultaneously” by Rosenau if you’d like a small introductory tour. i think you’ll find it quite interesting.

    what you describe as your perfect government sounds like the happy world version of exactly what we have, which is ok. if you feel that way, then you should work on making what we have more like that, and i think we’d be better off for it. i will work for far more than that though, and that will be ok too. i think you’re vision has far too much coercion and is likely to revert back to what we currently have. though i like that you at least think we should have direct democracy on a small scale. i think that’s how everything should be, and that’s what i will always work for (and more) but i’m a dreamer i guess. for instance, i think standing militaries are time bombs waiting to go off. and guess what, so did your founding fathers! (i don’t really like to think of them as mine, i personally disagree with a lot of what they did, and i would have gone over to native’s side if i was there, even knowing what eventually happened).

    and i noticed that you only responded to the slavery bit. the world’s most effective currently recorded genocide isn’t easy to swallow or respond to, is it? how about the fact that native americans that survive are currently the poorest category of peoples in the whole US? they live in the poorest conditions, have the poorest health, and yet, because of all the resources on their ‘reservation’ land (uranium, boxite, oil, coal, platinum, etc.) they are technically the richest group of people per capita in the whole country. if only the bureau of indian affairs hadn’t been fucking them over since it’s inception, while ‘administering their wealth’ (ie, deciding how much everything is worth and then selling those assets to itself while screwing over a vast majority of natives) as it still currently does.

    the civil war was not fought over slavery. lincoln explicitly said that he wanted to save the nation, and if he could do it without freeing the slaves he would, and if he could do it by only freeing only one slave he would. slavery as an issue was added near the end for a final push against the south. the civil war was fought over two economic models and who got to control the model, the (newly) industrial north and the plantation south. i doubt that me saying that will change your mind, but i have read Foote, as well as other things, and I understand that war the way that i’m telling you now.

    while i can understand what you mean about how to judge a government, i also don’t agree with you, because frankly, i’m not an economist, nor am i a market anarchist. i understand that economic matters are important, especially in describing the modern system, but i do not think that everything is a consequence of the economy or production. i judge the US and other states by many standards, and gdp is far down on the list. most people in economics classes in the schools i’ve been to hate talking to me, because i annoy them when i say things like that.

    on ‘baby tourism’… the US has done many, many, many disgusting things around the world. it’s not that noone else has, it’s that the US gets away with far more of what’ it’s done than others. the fact that there have been political prisoners in isolation cells in the US for decades is not a topic of discussion when cuba’s political prisoners are talked about. the fact that all of the torture techniques, used in guantanamo and the so called ‘black sites’ that were the subject of debate for far too short a time, were learned and perfected in domestic prisons is not common knowledge (except by those incarcerated, who are ignored). the fact that various US intel agencies have participated in overthrowing more than 60 governments in the past century is not discussed. there is a great deal of blood on the hands of the US government, and US citizens benefit greatly from this. i have absolutely no problem with people who have been fucked over trying to have their child born in the US so that that child may benefit in some small way from the monopolistic horrors that the coercive apparati, endorsed by the ‘patriotic’ portions of the US population, have perpetrated on the world’s population. if its people from mexico you’re refering to, don’t forget that the reason half of the US has towns named in spanish, is because the US launched an aggressive war (started with an excuse that has since been shown to be false, but would have been inexcusable anyway) and took over half of mexico. considering that a majority of the mexican population is ‘mestizo’ or of mixed spanish and native blood, they have far more right to be there than you or I. it was their ancestors that ‘made the land productive’ for millenia before we got there.

    but all of this brings me back to my other point last time. what i am talking about is the flexible stories that all come under ‘his-story’. you understand history differently than i do, because we have learned different versions of it. I learned you’re version in school, and then i went out and learned that much of my schooling was actually indoctrination into a particular way of thinking. in order to ‘look’ at history, you have to decide what is important to the story, and what is not. some details have to be left out. that means it is always from a perspective. if it is always from a perspective, then it is always partial, and therefor you’re model will always be inaccurate. you can make a model, just understand that other people will disagree with you (like me), and they have every right to, because your model can never take into account their knowledge of history. that is what i mean about it not being unitary. different histories lead to different models and different conclusions. that dosn’t make it pointless, it just means that you damn well better know that none of it is absolute, and you damn well better make sure that that comes across when you write it, or other people will take it as absolute.

    last thing… union does not equal mafia let me say that again, union ? mafia some unions are mafia controlled, and some unions have mafia members. nor does union equal democrat. unions were originally far more radical, and as things continue to go down the shitter in the US, unions will hopefully once again become more radical (no, i do not put anywhere near all my hopes in unions, i just think that they can be helpful). but the union as the mafia image comes from a time when the ‘right-wing’ elements of organized power in the US were concerned with destroying union power, to solidify corporate control over the workforce. you may not have meant it in this way, but the image is so pervasive that i and many others cannot help but see you as meaning this. but for example, statistically speaking, it is far easier for me to say that government equals corruption, because you can find corruption in every government. but you cannot find the mafia controlling every union. if you don’t want me to not just equate government with corruption in simple dialogue, you should not equate the mafia with unions.

    it’s been fun and interesting, but i have to get back to work (damn! i spent longer thantwice as much time as i alotted just writing this!) sorry to cut off an interesting dialogue, but i’ll be around here at other times too

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