Rick Perry’s Government: “Inconsequential” as a Ball and Chain
Posted by Kevin Carson on Sep 16, 2011 in Commentary • 9 commentsWe already know Rick Perry uses words in a rather, um, idiosyncratic sense. For instance, he’s the kind of “pro-life” governor whose supporters cheer him on for executing an innocent man. So when he says he wants to “make government as inconsequential to your lives as possible,” we should probably be on guard for any possible private meanings or mental reservations he attaches to that phrase.
To take just one example, I wonder how inconsequential the the Gardasil that was forced on girls in Texas public schools was to them. Merck certainly didn’t consider it inconsequential at $360 a pop (I mean, seriously, would they have been pushing it on Perry if it wasn’t under patent markup?). And I think it’s fair to say the folks at Merck who contributed to the Perry campaign and hired his former chief of staff Mike Toomey as a lobbyist wanted to make government more, not less, consequential to themselves.
More broadly, in the words of Sarah Bufkin at Think Progress, “Perry’s legislative agenda bears a strong resemblance t0 ALEC’s corporate-backed model bills” (August 4, 2011). ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) provides model bills — bills drafted mainly by industry lawyers and lobbyists — for state legislatures.
Perhaps the most egregious of Perry’s ALEC bills was his so-called “tort reform,” with its loser-pays provisions. Such provisions work like plea bargain blackmail in the criminal law, creating an asymmetrical power relationship between those with nothing much to lose and those with everything to lose. For a deep pockets corporation — apt, aside from food libel or “intellectual property” cases, to be the defendant anyway — averaging out the costs of a settlement here and there is no big deal. But for a small plaintiff, losing a suit to protect her rights against a corporate malefactor could mean financial ruin. That means civil tort action to secure compensation for wrongs by criminally negligent business enterprises becomes insupportably risky for all but the very rich.
Remember that, for free market libertarians, a vigorous and robust tort law regime is the favored alternative to the regulatory state. The regulatory state has preempted common law standards of liability to an enormous extent, supplanting the old principles of public and private nuisance and strict liability with a much weaker regulatory regime.
The courts generally treat these least-common-denominator standards as safe harbors; a business can cause serious harm, but if it meets the regulatory standard it’s immune to lawsuit for any damage it caused. This amounts to license for big business to impose negative externalities on society, so long as it meets the minimal dumbed-down standards of the regulatory state.
A return to the common law’s standards of strict liability for all harm would undo this state of affairs. “Tort reform” is a way of making sure that doesn’t happen, a deterrent against citizens exercising their rights: “If you sue us and fail, we’ll destroy you.”
Perry, like Arizona governor Jan Brewer, has also supported draconian anti-immigration bills written by the Corrections Corporation of America, which hopes to make money providing a private gulag to house those rounded up for not having their papers in order. Private prison corporations, you see, view the detention of “illegal immigrants” as their next big market. And to top it off, companies like CCA can hire out their inmates for pennies an hour to outside industry — you know, kind of like the slave labor we criticize China for.
You better believe the industry lobbyists who write legislation at ALEC, and the industry representatives from Microsoft and the record and movie industry trade associations who write copyright law, expect that legislation to be consequential — consequential for their own bottom line. From this it follows, as surely as night follows day, that the legislation will be equally consequential to the average person.
If privileged corporate interests use political means to profit at the expense of taxpayers, workers and consumers, it follows that government carries negative consequences for ordinary people. As the Wobblies’ founder Big Bill Haywood put it, “for every man who gets a dollar he didn’t work for there’s a man who worked for a dollar he didn’t get.”
Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is a mutualist and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.
Libertarians like to say that open borders equals freedom but the fact that the children of immigrants become equal citizens with the native-born (or stakeholders with equal standing in a stateless society) surely means that the native-born have a stake in who comes in. Shouldn't they therefore have the right to regulate the matter? Or is sovereignty a prerogative of telegenic brown and black people?
What do you mean by "comes in?"
Your conflation of crossing imaginary lines drawn on the ground by street gangs with delusions of grandeur, within which said gangs claim and attemps to maintain monopolies on force on the one hand, and membership in a voluntary group which claims no such monopoly on the other hand, is a false start at the whole issue.
I know libertarians believe in a magical world wherein the initiation of force and fraud does not exist but to refute them, a skeptic need only point the surprising ambiguity around the concept of "injury".
Some examples:
Teenage sex. Should teenagers have freedom of sexuality or do they tend to be defenseless, naive youths who need protection from sexual exploitation at the hands of their elders?
Vagrants. Should vagrants have freedom to roam? Or are they trespassers on other people's property, harassers of people who want to be left alone and frauds who abuse alcohol, tabacco and other drugs while fradulently portraying their plight as not at all their own fault?
Your answers to these issues are less important than the fact that different people have different views on these issues based on differing concepts of what an injury is. In practice, he or she who has the power defines what an injury is within a community. And yes, I said "within a community". Because a community represents a web of relationships and such relationships cause unbearable conflict until the community decides on the identity of (or is forced to accept) someone who has the power and thus decides who defines what an injury is.
Within this context, a nation is an union of communities that officially agree to work together in deciding such issues over a legally defined piece of territory–thus nations have had a tendency to enforce "the union" and to repress secession as treason even within liberal democratic republics. Clearly then, who is in and who is out is an important issue!
You seem to "know" a surprisingly number of things that don't happen to be true.
There will always be initiation of force and fraud. The question is whether institutionalizing them and giving their practitioners fancy titles, funny hats, shiny badges, etc., tends to ameliorate or exacerbate the problem.
Hobbes, and you with him, seem to think said institutionalization reduces the problem. The facts on the ground seem to indicate the contrary.
So why was the Islamic Courts Union of Somalia able to garner support to form a state in a stateless vacuum of power? Remember that the ICU would have united Somalia if the United States and Ethiopia hadn't worried about Islamic extremists controlling a strategic region in the Horn of Africa.
P. S. It's not so much a question of whether the initiation of force and fraud will be institutionalized. Nature abhors a vacuum so it will eventually be institutionalized by somebody. But if the government sympathizes with the ends you value, then naturally you will believe that force and fraud aren't really initiated on anything like a regular basis.
But you say, "No government would sympathize with MY values!"
But if the anarchy you guys advocate brings Somalia-like chaos (as it would if it took place), then in the struggle for power between factions, you and Carson would doubtless support the mutualist faction even if it committed actions that you guys would consider crimes when committed by the state. After all: "The mutualists have the right to defend themselves from the aggression of others." And then if your side won, it would become a government that "institutionalizes" the "initiation of force and fraud" that unlike all other government would possess the full support of C4SS's visionaries!
I guess it depends on what you mean by "support" and "united."
Keep in mind that per Rasmussen, even a supposedly consent-based state like the United States only enjoys the "consent of the governed" from about 1 in 5 of those it claims as its subjects.
The whole "vacuum" notion begs the question — it incorporates the assumption that institutionalization/monopolization of force is the natural state.
Sovereignty belongs to the individual, not the state. Every human being is a native born stakeholder of Planet Earth.