Recently an article of mine on healthcare, “Healthcare and Radical Monopoly,” was published in The Freeman:  Ideas on Liberty.  Since I wrote the article several months ago, I chose healthcare as the topic for my forthcoming C4SS research paper.

One thing I barely touched on in the article for The Freeman, that I’ve been digging into heavily since, is the absolutely astonishing levels of overhead in hospitals, and the pathological organizational culture that contributes to it.

Of course Obama’s healthcare “reform” is focused almost entirely on the insurance industry, rather than on the costs of healthcare itself.  But while insurance company price-gouging and profit margins contribute to skyrocketing premiums, it’s very much a secondary effect–mostly icing on the cake.  The main factor behind rising insurance premiums is the rising prices hospitals charge for delivery of actual services.

And the organizational culture of hospitals is the main culprit.  Standard management accounting practices are at the heart of that culture.  Under GAAP accounting rules, which Donaldson Brown played a major role in developing at Du Pont and GM ninety years ago, only labor counts as a direct/variable cost.  Capital expenditures and administrative costs go to general overhead, and are treated as fixed.

So while the MBAs obsessively try to shave off every possible minute nursing staff are scheduled, they pour money down ratholes on the kinds of wasteful white elephant capital boondoggles you might have seen in the old USSR–not to mention having a level of administrative overhead rivaling the Ministry of Central Services in the movie “Brazil.”

At the hospital  where I work, I’ve seen entire floors remodeled at enormous expense, just to make them less functional than before.  I’ve seen a perfectly functional telephone system on my ward replaced at a cost of thousands of dollars, and a totally acceptable photocopier replaced at a cost of thousands more, just because they had the money in their capital budget and couldn’t think of anything else to spend it on.  I’ve seen the hospital add a DaVinci “surgical robot” and invest in extremely expensive specialty treatments for high-end niche markets, while patients shit the bed waiting for bedpans and go five days without a bath or linen change.  Most recently, the hospital announced an $8 million expansion of ER; the money spend on that alone would probably be enough to increase the staffing ratio to one orderly for each six patients, what it used to be fifteen years of downsizing ago, and fund it at that level for ten years.  But spending that money on labor for patient care would lower “productivity,” according to their pointy-haired MBA metrics–despite the fact that the money they’re ostensibly saving from staffing cuts now is more than offset by the resulting increases in med errors, falls, and hospital-acquired infections.

The objects of capital spending remind me of Friedrich Hayek’s predictions for a centrally planned economy:

“There is no reason to expect that production would stop, or that the authorities would find difficulty in using all the available resources somehow, or even that output would be permanently lower than it had been before planning started . . . . [We should expect] the excessive development of some lines of production at the expense of others and the use of methods which are inappropriate under the circumstances. We should expect to find overdevelopment of some industries at a cost which was not justified by the importance of their increased output and see unchecked the ambition of the engineer to apply the latest development elsewhere, without considering whether they were economically suited in the situation. In many cases the use of the latest methods of production, which could not have been applied without central planning, would then be a symptom of a misuse of resources rather than a proof of success.”

In particular, Hayek cited “the excellence, from a technological point of view,” of some Soviet industrial machinery.  It was excellent.  It’s just that nobody had any idea, given the grossly distorted incentives and price signals in the Soviet economy, whether it was worth the resources put into it.

But under GAAP rules, overhead doesn’t matter because, thanks to the miracle of “overhead absorption,” it just gets passed on to the customer as a markup.  Hence the $3 bag of saline solution that’s billed for $300–not to mention the infamous $10 aspirin.  It’s what Paul Goodman called “the great realm of cost-plus”–the very same culture that gave us the $600 toilet seat at Pentagon contractors.

The only solution is to let conventional bureaucratic hospitals rot, bypass them, and start over from scratch.  It means eliminating the organizational culture of prestige salaries, mission statements, Weberian “best practices,” work rules, and job descriptions.  It means, instead of interdepartmental “quality improvement committees,” empowering those actually providing the care to act on what’s right in front of them without interference from pointy-haired bosses.

It means, especially, decentralized delivery of service and cooperative finance: small, neighborhood cooperative hospitals that bypass the insurance system altogether and operate on the same flat-fee membership basis as John Muney’s clinics in New York, or Qliance in Seattle.  This would have two primary benefits:  first, because of the flat-rate fee, there’s no incentive to mutual logrolling between specialists, padding the bill with a $6000 CT scan, etc.; second, as Muney pointed out, it eliminates the 25% or so of costs that come from insurance paperwork.

The future of healthcare is not Obamacare, or any other statist legislative agenda created at a table where the seats are all occupied by the people who created the problem.  If there is any hope for affordable healthcare, it lies in small, bottom-up, patient-driven institutions that route around all the inefficiencies and irrationalities of state capitalist healthcare.

At TechCrunch, Paul Carr argues for why the UK needs, if not exactly the draconian new digital copyright currently under consideration, at least something very much like it  (but with stronger procedural guarantees for accused file-sharers).

Never mind all the arguments from principle against the legitimacy of copyright law.  I’ve done that to death here.

But what really caught my eye was his utilitarian arguments.

Aside from the whole issue of IP’s legitimacy, arguments like these make me want to pull my hair out.

Guess what?  If there’s a head-on train collision, every penny spent on replacing or repairing the trains, paying the insurance claim on the cargo, hospitalizing or embalming and burying the human victims, and paying damages for any tort that happened along the way, will count as a net increase in GDP.

By definition, anything that anyone can charge for adds to the GDP by the amount people pay for it.  So the more stuff is enclosed with charges for admission, the higher the GDP will be.

In Theories of Value and Distribution, the Marxist Maurice Dobb used a classic example of artificial property rights:  the state granting to a class of people the right to erect toll gates across highways and pockiet the proceeds (not to fund highway maintenance, mind you–just to take the money for themselves).

Under marginalist economics, any production input with a price has “marginal productivity” equal to what it adds to the final price of the good.  So under that orthodox paradigm, the toll-gate owners would have “marginal productivity” equal to whatever cost the toll added to total production costs and prices, and economists would be stroking their beards and intoning learnedly about the “service” the toll collectors perform in not impeding traffic on the roads.  And of course, GDP would increase by the amount of the tolls.

In other words, anything anyone can do to make it more costly to produce anything, to increase the amount of money you have to pay to receive a given good or service, or in general to increase the cost of living our daily lives, will show up as an increase in the GDP. It’s what Thorstein Veblen called “capitalized disserviceability.”

If highway subsidies cause the neighborhood grocer to shut down so that you have to take the freeway to go to the chain supermarket on the exit, and as a result you’re unable to live without a car, you’ve experienced a net reduction in quality of life to the exact amount of the time you have to spend working to make payments on the car and pay the insurance premiums, plus the extra time you have to spend driving — not to mention the increased insecurity that comes from having yet another non-discretionary subsistence good in your life that depends on the whim of an employer.  But the GDP has gone up by the additional amount you had to pay for all that stuff you didn’t have to pay for before, despite having a higher quality of life.  You’ve done your part to increase the GDP, you old altruist you!

If someone could figure out a way to bottle air, sell it to you, and criminalize directly breathing from the atmosphere as “airlifting,” or if they could contrive some new mechanism for collecting a toll every time you tried to move a spoon from your bowl to your mouth, GDP would probably rise a hundredfold.

If your main concern is the size of GDP, it’s easy:  just find some way to use government to muscle in and force people to pay you for something they were getting free.

In the Matrix reality put before us by the corporatist alliance of big government and big business, and its corporate media mouthpieces, there are several recurring themes.  The economy we have now is the result of “free choice,” and all its specific features are the result of the free choices of individuals.  Those who complain of aspects of the existing economy want to use government to restrict freedom of choice.  Big business and big government are mortal enemies, and the main motive force behind government policy is a desire to restrict the freedom of big business and punish the rich.

Thomas Sowell manages so effectively to work all these talking points into a recent slimy little turd of a column, you’d think he was playing Neocon Talking Points Bingo.

Sowell laments the “resentment” toward excessive profits and wealth, and insinuates that it’s all part of some master plan–an “agenda”–by the “czars,” “our betters in Washington,” and politicians who seek “dangerous power.”  The goal is simply to take away “our freedom to live our lives as we see fit.”  Free to live as we please, we choose to create a corporate economy like the one we have now, and the only way to change the current corporate setup is by restricting our freedom.

In Sowell’s morality play, the struggle between big government and big business is a struggle between power and freedom.

Sowell has it exactly backwards.   The struggle between big government and big business is about as authentic as the struggle between a “good cop” and “bad cop” in a police interrogation room.

Sowell also objects to the terms “‘obscene’ wealth” and “‘unconscionable’ profits,” asking just what’s wrong with wealth and profits.  For Sowell, all wealth is by defnition good–it’s poverty that’s bad.

But he makes the unwarranted assumption that all wealth is obtained in a positive sum gain.  What if our economy, as it’s actually set up, is a negative sum game in which most large concentrations of wealth are obtained at the expense of someone’s poverty?

It’s stupid to say, without qualification, that all wealth is good–just as it’s foolish to say that all property is good.  Sowell should know better than most people that there have been unjust forms of property.  And likewise, there is unjust wealth.

The fact is, big business and the rich are on the same side as those power-seeking politicians.  The dominant corporations and large fortunes of our time result from the use of the state to restrict our freedom of exchange.  Their wealth comes from the ability to restrict–with the help of the state–the terms on which we can buy and sell, and compel us to buy and sell only on terms favorable to them (if you don’t believe it, just compare the $10 you pay for a CD of Linux or Open Office to the hundreds of dollars charged for Windows or MS office).  Their profits–most definitely unconscionable–come from state-enforced privilege, state-enforced artificial scarcity, and state subsidies.

Government redistributes income, all right:  but it redistributes it to the rich, not from them.  And our economic freedom is restricted–but to the benefit of big business and the rich, rather than to their detriment.

We have a corporate ruling class that has enriched itself at our expense, by using government to restrict our economic freedom and force us to do business with them on their terms.  And people like Sowell are their shills. We don’t need any of them.

The Freeman editor Sheldon Richman, speaking at George Mason University, raised the question of just what mainstream libertarians mean when they call a country “capitalist.”  What qualifies a country as “capitalist”?

A lot of countries with relatively low indices of economic freedom (including those ranked as “mostly unfree”) are conventionally regarded as “capitalist,” and referred to as such in neoliberal agitprop comparing them favorably to non-capitalist countries like Cuba.  And the talking heads at CNBC and scribblers in the business press commonly refer to “our capitalist system,” even though it’s doesn’t even remotely approximate a free market.

So in common usage, among establishment libertarians and what passes for mainstream “free market” wonks, any country that hasn’t adopted Marxian socialism as its official ideology is “capitalist.”

Based on these observations, Richman concludes that “capitalism” in practice “designates a system in which the means of production are de jure privately owned.”

Interestingly, Murray Rothbard relates an anecdote in which Ludwig von Mises made that distinction, or something very like it, explicit.  He asked Mises:  Given that there’s such a range of possible degrees of statism, from total statism to a totally free market, and given that no country approaches either absolute, what do you regard as the defining characteristic that divides essentially capitalist from essentially non-capitalist societies?  Mises’ response:  the existence of a stock market.  A society with a market for capital goods is essentially capitalist.

As I have pointed out in the past–a point Richman refers to in his address–it is rather odd that “capitalism” was adopted  as the conventional term for a society based on private property and free exchange. There’s no obvious reason, in seeking a name for an economy in which all factors of production are ostensibly equal and enter into free contract as equals, that capital should be singled in particular out for special emphasis.  The choice of “capitalism” suggests some special ideological agenda, as if the system were run of, by and for capital as distinguished from other factors of production.

The unstated assumption embodied in calling a country “economically unfree” and yet capitalist, is this:  an economically unfree country only ceases to be capitalist when the lack of economic freedom interferes with the ability of rich people to become richer from returns on land and capital.  So long as the lack of economic freedom primarily limits the freedom of the poor to escape poverty, but the rich are able to enrich themselves on the pattern of UFC in Guatemala or Jack Abramoff’s clients in the Marianas Islands, it’s got the Good Housekeeping capitalist seal of approval.

Mises answer to Rothbard above–aside from confusing a “market for capital goods” with a market for equity in firms–implies that, no matter how economically unfree, a country in which most business enterprise is absentee-owned by the owners of concentrated wealth, and most labor is hired for wages by such absentee owners, passes muster as “capitalist.”  Presumably a country in which wealth was so widely distributed, and self-employment and cooperative ownership were such primary forms of social organization that stock trading was marginal in importance, would fall on the “socialist” side of Mises line–even if there were no regulatory constraints whatsoever on market exchange and the free movement of prices.

This is a very telling set of priorities:  ”capitalism,” as opposed to “socialism,” is not defined by the degree of economic freedom as such; it’s defined by a particular institutional structure which is disproportionately to the benefit of a particular class of market actors.

As evidence that some forms of unfreedom matter more than others, consider the proclivity of some right-wingers for saying “Pinochet’s political authoritarianism was lamentable, but at least he made Chile more free economically.”  Never mind “minor” issues like whether reversing a land reform and returning land from the people who worked it to a landed oligarchy was a step toward “economic freedom.”  Just consider Pinochet’s authortarian suppression of the labor movement:  had it been the owners of capital, and not the sellers of labor-power, who had been tortured and disappeared, or found in ditches with their faces hacked off, I doubt they would have said the same thing.  It’s an odd distinction to treat repression of the owners of one factor of production as economic, but of the owners of another factor as only “political.”

This assumption underlies most mainstream “free market” commentary in the business press and business news channels:  even when they explictly refer to “our free market system” in so many words, they really mean a system in which most business enterprise is nominally “private.”  No matter how statist a system of regulations is in effect, so long as they’re exercised primarily through “private” actors, and most money passes through the hands of such “private” actors rather than the U.S. Treasury, it’s a “free market” system.  Hence, the kind of “free market” agenda you see at places like Heritage and the Adam Smith Institute for “privatizing” government functions by contracting them out to “private businesses,” even when those businesses are guaranteed a profit at taxpayer expense.

And by the way, those who object to all this as a form of semantic gamesmanship should remember that Mises and Rand were responsible, from the 1920s on, for the deliberate rehabilitation of “capitalism” as a term of pro-market apologetics.  Before Mises’ time, “capitalism” was used by mainstream political economists to describe the actual system of political economy they lived under–i.e., historic capitalism.

“Capitalism,” simply put, is the most honest term for the unfree market we live under.  It’s a system of, by and for the owners of capital; so long as it retains that primary characteristic, it’s “capitalist,” no matter how unfree the market.

When neocons talk about the rate of “recidivism” among people released from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, you should probably keep in mind that “recidivism” may not be quite what you think.   Specifically, one condition of release is not to disclose things like the interrogation methods used there.   And so the actions included in those official “recidivism” statistics include the “terrorist activity” of seeking legal action against one’s torturers, or turning to anti-torture activism in a way that embarrasses the U. S. government.  So a lot of the hardened terrorists who were allegedly released from Gitmo have turned to careers of “terrorism” consisting mainly of the major breech of etiquette, always unseemly in a guest, of airing their former hosts’ dirty laundry.  Because you know, what happens in Gitmo, stays in Gitmo.

Just to make sure you have the rules down:  Is waterboarding terrorism?  Nah.  Is torture terrorism?  Not so much.   Is talking about it terrorism?  Damn straight!

That, or something like it, seems to be becoming a fairly popular meme.  Liz Cheney, whose recent public speaking career seems to be a calculated ploy to make her dad seem less repulsive by comparison, says Justice Department lawyers who “represented detainees at Guantanamo, filed amicus briefs in detainee-related cases, or were involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees” before they joined the administration are Al Qaeda sympathizers, pure and simple.  (Actually, sometimes I suspect Deadeye Dick was some kind of Manchurian Candidate groomed for office by Al Qaeda–he was certainly the answer to Bin Laden’s prayers.)

But wait!  Before she can organize a necktie party, Liz may have to get in line behind Obama’s own justice department.  According to Solicitor General Elena Kagan, arguing before the Supreme Court, a lawyer would commit a crime—material support for terrorism—by filing a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a terrorist group.  So would anyone helping a terrorist group petition international bodies.  (Presumably the “terrorist group”—what would have been called an “alleged terrorist group” before the Bill of Rights went down the memory hole—is so designated pursuant to the President’s power to declare any group “terrorist” by executive order, subjecting them to summary forfeiture of assets without due process of law.)

And what if the amicus brief or petition is in aid of a group trying to challenge its “terrorist” designation?  Defenders of torture and irregular legal process against “terrorists” have already practically institutionalized the conceptual legerdemain by which the accusation of terrorism is sufficient evidence of guilt.  But now we seem to be approaching a further stage in the degradation of all legal norms:  not only is terrorism is so serious a crime that the bare accusation constitutes guilt; it’s so serious a crime that the denial of guilt is itself a crime!

With one major exception, the tendency for the past several decades has been for police statism to ratchet upward under both parties.  The exception was the Church commission hearings and subsequent legislative restraints on executive power, passed in the atmosphere of public outrage and horror following the revelation of Richard Nixon’s abuses of power.  Nixon’s abuses pale in comparison to those committed by Bush during his eight years in office.  Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to get another Church Commission.  That would be way too partisan and divisive.

I can understand the arguments for “intellectual property.”  I don’t agree with them, but I can understand them.  I can understand, despite disagreeing with, the argument that “ownership” of an idea trumps someone else’s right to use his own tangible property the way he sees fit.

But now the Copyright Nazis are arguing that their “ownership” of ideas trumps other people’s ownership–wait for it!–of their own ideas.

That’s right.  The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a powerful umbrella organization that includes the RIAA and MPAA, is arguing that open-source should be classified as a form of piracy!  It’s arguing that the U.S. Trade Representative put countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia on the “Special  301 watchlist” as international copyright scofflaws.  Their offense:  those countries’ governments have either officially adopted open-source software for use in government agencies and state enterprises, or have recommended the adoption of open-source software by such agencies and enterprises.

Indonesian government policy, in particular, “weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness by creating an artificial preference for companies offering open source software and related services,” and in so doing “denies many legitimate companies access to the government market.”   It fails to “allow users to benefit from the best solution available in the market, irrespective of the development model, [and] encourages a mindset that does not give due consideration to the value to intellectual creations.”  In sum, “it fails to build respect for intellectual property rights and also limits the ability of government or public-sector customers…  to choose the best solutions.”

First, let’s keep in mind how open-source licensing schemes work.  They are piggybacked on copyright law.  The holder of a copyright licenses his work under a GPL, Copyleft, or the like, so that it is made freely available for other people’s use on some condition–usually that derivative work is also freely available on the same terms.

So what the copyright Nazis at the IIPA are really saying is that owners of “intellectual property” should not be able to license the use of their own property as they see fit, on terms that make it freely available to all.  Furthermore, they’re arguing that a government that chooses to procure software licensed under those terms, in order to obtain it as cheaply as possible and without the disadvantages of buyer lock-in that go with proprietary software, is guilty of “piracy” against the owners of proprietary software.

If you look at the arguments in the quote above, the IIPA is arguing that the government of Indonesia, by selecting what it sees as the best solution available in the market, is–again, wait for it!–impeding the government’s freedom of action “to benefit from the best solution available in the market.”  And in evaluating some products as superior to others, it’s creating an “artificial preference” for the products it judged to be “the best solution available in the market.”  See?  The very act of choosing “the best solution available in the market” impeded the government’s freedom to “choose the best solutions,” while creating an “artificial preference” for what you choose.   The very act of assessing the comparative costs and value of “intellectual creations,” among those available on the market, constitutes disregard of “the value of intellectual creations.”

Got  that?  The only way government procurement operations can remain free to choose the best value without creating unfair market advantages, and recognize value in the market, is to give equal treatment to the purveyors of shit and refuse to call it what it is.

Now if you tell me that government taxing and spending, as such, constitute piracy, you’re preaching to the choir.  But to argue that it’s more piratical for the government to spend money on the cheapest and most effective product on the open market, in preference to paying a higher monopoly price for a shoddier product, or to publicly recommend the cheap and effective product over Bill Gates’ overpriced shit…

Well, you should probably be reading the Adam Smith Institute blog instead.  That’s the home of the kind of “libertarianism” that regards anything the government does as “free market” so long as taxpayer money goes to a private, for-profit business enterprise.  But for those of us who see coercion itself as the defining feature of state power, using state tax revenues to feed an additional layer of nominally private parasites is just compounding the crime.

The IIPA’s argument against open source is like an apologist for the absolute right of property in human beings arguing against a slave owner’s right to exercise that absolute dominion by freeing his own slaves, on the grounds that it creates a moral environment that undermines slavery.  It’s like an apologist for the landed oligarchy’s absolute rights of property in vacant and unimproved land arguing that the owner of a latifundio should not be allowed to open up his own land to homesteaders free of charge, on the grounds that it would reduce the rents other oligarchs can charge.

That is exactly what the Copyright Nazis at the IIPA are arguing.  They’re so convinced of the absolute right of dominion over property in ideas, that they’re willing to constrain the free exercise of that dominion in the name of defending “intellectual property”!

The slaveocracy of the old south believed so strongly in the absolute rights of property in human beings that it prevented slave owners from freeing their own property, suppressed the advocacy of such actions via the U.S. Mail, and even barred discussion of it in Congress.   Defenders of “intellectual property,” likewise, will never find their spurious property claims secure until they turn the entire society into the kind of totalitarian slave state described by Richard Stallman in “The Right to Read.”

Keith Olbermann once ridiculed a Republican politician who, in a video clip from a “townhall meeting,” told a woman with a paralyzed husband and no health insurance that the proper first line of defense was neighbors helping each other.

Now, admittedly, that politician was exactly the kind of right-wing shill who uses Norman Rockwell imagery as window dressing for his vision of an America remodeled into a banana republic, on the same basic pattern that Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff created in the Marianas Islands.  But for Olbermann, anyone suggesting the possibility of such a voluntary welfare state, based on self-organization and mutual aid, is by definition a right-wing shill.

Olbermann went on, in rather heated language, to dismiss such neighborly help as a relic of the same age as the barn-raising and the shucking bee.  In modern, progressive societies, people turn to “their” governments as a matter of course for the relief of sickness and poverty.

Olbermann forgets, or ignores, the respectable left-wing credentials of working class self-organization, chronicled in loving detail by the recently departed Colin Ward, by Pyotr Kropotkin and E.P. Thompson.  Sick benefit societies, fraternal lodges’ relief for the unemployed, and the like, were objects of active suspicion by both the employing classes and the state, precisely because they were such effective weapons of class struggle.  Mutual unemployment relief could easily become indistinguishable from the strike fund, and self-organized mechanisms for pooling risk and cost across a large number of households were of enormous benefit to the bargaining power of labor.

But I suspect there’s a component of willful ignorance in Olbermann’s dismissal of such things, rooted in the nature of his ideology.  Arguably conventional liberals, with their thought system originating as it did as the ideology of the managers and engineers who ran the corporations, government agencies, and other giant organizations of the late 19th and early 20th century, have played the same role for the corporate-state nexus that the politiques did for the absolute states of the early modern period.

Given the apologetic requirements of their ideology, liberals are practically forced to assume that, before the rise of the total state, there was nothing.  Before the Bismarckian/Fabian/Progressive regulatory and welfare state, the whole world was just one big Hooterville.  “Formerly all was madness.  We have invented happiness,” says the Last Man and blinks.

Conventional liberals are in the habit of reacting viscerally and negatively, and on principle, to anything not being done by “qualified professionals” or “the proper authorities.” This is reflected in a common thread running through writers like Andrew Keene, Jaron Lanier, and Hedges, as well as documentary producers like Michael Moore.  They share a nostalgia for the “consensus capitalism” of the early postwar period, in which the gatekeepers of the Big Three broadcast networks controlled what we were allowed to see, and it was just fine for GM to own the whole damned economy—just so long as everyone had a lifetime employment guarantee and a UAW contract.

Olbermann routinely mocks exhortations to charity and self-help, reflexively reaching for shitkicking hayseed imagery from Walnut Grove for want of any other comparison that will sufficiently get across just how backward and ridiculous that kind of thing really is.

Helping your neighbor out directly, or participating in voluntary self-organized efforts to spread risk and cushion against sickness and unemployment, is all right in its own way, if nothing else is available.  But it carries the inescapable taint of the provincial and picayune, almost as if such efforts were administered by men in rimless spectacles and sleeve garters—very much, incidentally, like the stigma attached to homemade bread and home-grown veggies in the corporate advertising offensives of the early twentieth century.

People who help each other out, or organize voluntarily to pool risks and costs, are to be praised—grudgingly and with a hint of condescension—for doing the best they can in an era of relentlessly downscaled social services.  But that people are forced to resort to such expedients, rather than meeting all their social safety net needs through one-stop shopping at the Ministry of Central Services office in a giant monumental building with an imposing statue of winged victory in the lobby, a la “Brazil,” is a damning indictment of any civilized society.  The progressive society is a society of comfortable and well-adjusted citizens, competently managed by properly credentialed authorities, happily milling about like ants in the shadows of miles-high buildings that look like they were designed by Albert Speer.  And that kind of H.G. Wells utopia simply has no room for the barn-raiser or the sick benefit society.

There’s an entire cottage industry of writers—Mark Helprin and Jaron Lanier among them—who attack “the new collectivism” of  network culture based on its supposed violations of “intellectual property” rights and its destruction of “authorial voice.”  Chris Hedges, at Alternet (“Are Corporations Using the Internet to Accelerate Our Cultural, Political and Economic Decline?”), has the virtue of novelty in that he regurgitates every single one of Helprin’s talking points—but does so under the pretense of defending “progressive” values against corporate power.

The Internet, Hedges argues, has been hijacked by corporate interests and become a tool of corporate power because it—get this—“efficiently disseminates content, but… does not protect intellectual property rights.”   “Intellectual property” is the enemy of corporate power, see, and it’s those corporate fat cats—and not the MPAA and RIAA—who are undermining it!

In Hedges’ jeremiad, this weakening of “intellectual property” rights is somehow identified with the “new global serfdom,” in which “[a]nything that can be digitized can and is being outsourced to countries such as India and China where wages are miserable and benefits nonexistent,” where “the only professions that pay a living wage are propaganda and corporate management.”

News flash:  We’ve already had a century and a half of corporate serfdom, and people like Hedges are its useful idiots.  “Intellectual property” is the linchpin, the keystone in the arch, of global corporate power.  It’s the primary means by which our global corporate masters are currently holding onto power.

Global corporate serfdom is only possible through corporate ownership of “intellectual property,” which permits them to maintain control of the outsourced production Hedges complains of.  Corporate ownership of patents and trademarks is absolutely essential to the Nike model of outsourced production.  Does Hedges really not know this?

Hedges complains, in the same terms as Lanier and Helprin, that original work is copied and mashed up, and deprives content creators of a source of revenue.  Content aggregators (he mentions Google specifically) are especially blameworthy.  So Hedges takes his stand alongside “progressives” like Rupert Murdoch.  Golly, it’s a good thing Newscorp isn’t one of those nasty old corporations, like Google!

Hedges displays some confusion in his critique of Internet culture, ironically echoing earlier leftist critiques of the mass culture associated with mass production industry and mass consumption at the height of twentieth century Consensus Capitalism.  But in fact networked culture is diametrically opposed to it.  It used to be said that the First Amendment guaranteed our right to a free press—so long as we were rich enough to own a printing press.  The desktop revolution and the Internet have brought the  cost of a printing press down to a few hundred dollars at most.  Writers like Robert McChesney and Noam Chomsky once lamented the fact that the U.S. media was controlled by a handful of giant corporations.  It was the Internet that brought about an end run around this corporate control of the media.

If you doubt the political significance of this, just compare the size, level of organization, and public profile of the antiwar movement before the first Gulf War with its counterpart before Bush II’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Compared the detailed, merciless dissection of mainstream corporate reporting, which liberal bloggers like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein do on a daily basis, to the world of twenty years ago where such analysis was only available to people with a subscription to The Nation.

Hedges quotes Lanier’s Weimar America scenario (apparently borrowed from Thomas Frank), in which a population of angry white men, impoverished by Internet-enabled outsourcing and downsizing, and manipulated by the Tea Party politics of some new Karl Rove, organize through the Internet to take over the legislatures and burn down abortion clinics.

Well, I have a scenario of my own.  When the world is on the threshold of abundance, and the capital outlays and work hours required to produce a comfortable standard of living are imploding, our corporate feudal lords snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by using totalitarian government controls—draconian digital copyright laws, industrial patents, ubiquitous Internet surveillance—to maintain the artificial scarcity rents on which their parasitic livelihoods depend.  And they do so with the help of “progressive” useful idiots like Hedges.  That’s exactly what the “progressive” cognitive capitalism model of Bill Gates, Bono, Paul Romer and Richard Florida is all about:  an attempt to capitalize improvements in productivity, through artificial scarcity and artificial property rights, as a source of rents for themselves.  It’s what Tom Peters is talking about when he gushes that nine tenths of the price of his new Minolta comes from “intellect” rather than the actual labor and material costs of production.   They want a world in which nine tenths of the hours we work are to pay tribute to our corporate masters.  And if they succeed, it will be with the help of unwitting stooges like Hedges.

Fortunately, they won’t succeed.  The technologies of abundance are blasting the foundations of the old corporate order Hedges defends, and the legal framework it depends on are becoming utterly unenforceable.

It’s common, in jeremiads against filesharing and free culture “communism,” to earn some populist cred by sympathizing with the little guy.  Sure, they say, big artists with name recognition can make money from “Freemium” (i.e., using free content to promote the sale of paid auxilliary goods).  But the little guy can’t do that.

I’m more than a little skeptical of such claims.  I’m more inclined to credit Cory Doctorow, who says that for the little guy, obscurity is a lot bigger danger than “piracy.”  I suspect a lot of them are pretty unimaginative when it comes to thinking of alternative ways to monetize their products.

All they’re thinking of is the stuff the record companies can’t charge money for to pay them.  They’re not thinking of the new possibilities opened up by all the things they can now do for themselves, at virtually zero cost, that formerly only a highly capitalized record company could do for them.  Their entire view of the world is still shaped by a time when producing and selling records required capital assets costing many millions of dollars, and the way to make money from music was to convince some such giant company that your work was worth producing and marketing.

What’s more, even assuming that filesharing really does cut into the total revenues of the little guy who’s trying to make a full-time career out of music, that’s looking at only one side of the picture.  It neglects what Bastiat called “the unseen.”

Let’s move from music to writing and consider my case.  I  don’t waste time pissing and moaning about the sharing of pdf files of my books at torrent sites, or how much money it’s costing me.  To me, the proper basis for comparison is the money I still can make that I never could have made at all in the “good old days.”  In the good old days, I’d have painstakingly put together a manuscript of hundreds of pages, and then put it away to gather cobwebs when I couldn’t persuade the gatekeepers at a conventional publisher that it was worth marketing.  Never mind whether online file-sharing’s costing me money (I don’t think it is–I believe the ebooks are more like free advertising).  More importantly, if it weren’t for digital publishing technologies and free publishing venues on the Internet, I would probably have lived and died doing menial labor with nobody anywhere ever hearing of my ideas. Thanks to digital culture, I’m able to make my work directly available to anyone in the world who has an Internet connection.  If only a tiny fraction of the people who can read it for free decide to buy it, giving me a few thousand dollars a year in royalties, I’m richer by exactly that amount than I would have been in the “good old days” when my manuscripts would have yellowed in an attic.

For every small full-time musician who has a harder time scraping by, and may have to supplement his performing revenues with a day job, I suspect there are ten people like me who would have spent their entire lives as (if you’ll pardon the expression) mute inglorious Miltons, without ever making a goddamned cent from their music or writing, but who can now be heard.  And for every blockbuster writer or musician, who has a few million shaved off his multimillion dollar revenues as a result of online “piracy,” I suspect there are probably a hundred people like me.

I’m sure there are plenty of people like Jaron Lanier and Mark Helprin who wouldn’t consider it any great loss had my work been stillborn in a world without the Internet.  I’m just another one of those “hive mind” people who write like Popeye talks, destroying authorial voice, and yada yada yada. Well, fuck ‘em.

Lily Tomlin used to say “I try to be cynical, but I can’t catch up.”  Dystopian science fiction, similarly, has a hard time keeping up with the actual growth of the police state.

In the Illuminatus! Trilogy, written back in the early ’70s, Hagbard Celine spoke of the efforts of Illuminati conspirators within the government to create the pretext for a full-scale police state crackdown, and provoke public support for it, through a systematic campaign of political assassinations and terror.

The Illuminati grip on power, Celine said, was still weak.  Although they’d made serious inroads toward creating a corporatist economy and laying the legal groundwork for full-scale dictatorship, they were prevented from fully implementing their plans by the threat of a public backlash.  The goal of their black flag terror and assassination campaign was to make the public beg for totalitarian control “as a masochist begs for the whip.”  The result would be that, “in a few years,” they would have the American public under tighter surveillance than Hitler had Germany.

I think Wilson, writing tongue in cheek, seriously underestimated just how easily the public could be brought around to scream “Non habemus regem nisi Caesarem!”  The Drug War and the War on Terror have served very nicely, from the police statists’ perspective, in playing out a sort of Reichstag Fire/Enabling Act scenario in slow motion over the past twenty or thirty years.

Just take a look at the actual measures Celine predicted:

*Universal electronic surveillance.
*No-knock laws.
*Stop and frisk laws.
*Government inspection of first-class mail.
*Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime.
*A law making it illegal to resist even unlawful arrest.
*Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives.
*Gun control laws.
*Restrictions on travel.

The only one that’s still completely (give or take) out of bounds for the government is inspection of first-class mail.  Even there, I was once told by a postal clerk that the local postmaster might open packages with “media mail” postage to verify that they qualified for it.  And there are recurring “smart stamp” proposals aimed at making it  impossible to send anything anonymously by mail, or to use the mail without a permanent address.

As for the rest of it….   Although “illegal wiretapping” became a prominent issue under Bush, Echelon’s automatic surveillance of phone and Internet traffic, and the harvesting of keywords by the NSA’s mainframes in Ft. Meade, have been standard practice for decades.  No-knock warrants are standard for virtually any drug-related offense.  Stop and frisk?  One word answer:  Giuliani.  I believe fingerprinting and drug tests have been automatic for arrestees in many jurisdictions for a long time, and are routinely carried out now even in many emergency rooms.

I once Googled “resist even unlawful arrest” and found that exact phrase in a district court opinion establishing a duty of automatic compliance with all pro forma demands by persons in uniform.   Besides, if you ask to see a warrant they’ll probably just stomp the shit out of you and then claim it was in “self-defense”; the police commission, after a few weeks of paid leave, will find “no evidence of wrongdoing.”

The McCarran Internal Security Act provided for detention of “subversives” in the event of a “national emergency,” and a wide range of subsequent executive orders did likewise.  I’m pretty skeptical about tinfoil hatters’ allegations that camps are being deliberately built for that specific purpose in any particular case–but the Japanese nisei learned in 1942 that the government’s pretty good at improvising such things at very short notice.

Gun control?  Do I really even need to comment?

Restrictions on travel?  The TSA, with wandings and no-travel lists probably spreading to trains and buses sooner than later.  Random DUI roadblocks.

In short, R. A. Wilson’s “science fiction” turned out to be a fairly lowball estimate of what’s actually happened.