A guardare bene le statistiche sulla disoccupazione ci si accorge che non solo i numeri “ufficiali” sono fuorvianti, ma anche che il tentativo della stato di controllare e dirigere l’economia è un fallimento completo. Ad aprile, 800.000 persone sono uscite dalla forza lavoro. Quasi un milione hanno smesso di cercare un lavoro. Il numero di nuovi posti di lavoro non è neanche sufficiente a coprire la crescita della popolazione, che è di quasi il 7%.

Ora, agli occhi di una persona normale questi dati statistici sono un brutto segno, significano che non c’è crescita e che l’economia è ancora arenata. Ma nella sua crociata contro il senso comune, governo e media enfatizzano quei dati statistici che fanno apparire ogni cosa meno deprimente di quanto non sia in realtà. In questo caso, le statistiche migliorano quando le persone esce dalla forza lavoro.

La statistica più diffusa tiene conto soltanto di quei disoccupati che sono nella forza lavoro. Se una persona smette di cercare un lavoro, esce dalla forza lavoro. Questo fa “calare” statisticamente la disoccupazione anche se nessuno viene assunto. Una persona è sempre disoccupata, ma i numeri trasformano la sua disoccupazione in un miglioramento statistico. Questo genera discussioni sulla crescita economica che vedono tutto al contrario. Commentatori e politici vantano il calo del tasso di disoccupazione e dimenticano convenientemente chi ha smesso di cercare un lavoro.

Quando, ad aprile, la forza lavoro è scesa ad appena il 62,8% della popolazione, il livello più basso dagli anni settanta, i dati statistici sulla disoccupazione sono calati in parallelo. Più persone uscivano dalla forza lavoro e meno persone venivano considerate disoccupate. Ad abbassare sempre più il tasso di disoccupazione è il calo progressivo di chi è disposto a lavorare, non la crescita economica. Ma lo stato non vuole che lo sappiate.

Questa bizzarra illustrazione dei dati statistici sulla disoccupazione potrebbe essere interpretata come pura stupidità dello stato. È la rappresentazione di un’illusione. La verità è nascosta in fondo alle statistiche ufficiali. È una cosa ingegnosa. Gli stati cadrebbero se la verità dovesse venire allo scoperto. Se lo stato è terribilmente patetico quando si tratta di gestire un’economia, è fenomenale nel creare propaganda. Soprattutto quando la propaganda nasconde i veri effetti dell’intervento statale. Lo stato ha prima provocato la recessione attraverso una bolla immobiliare causata dall’inflazione. Quindi ha prolungato questa recessione con salvataggi e nuove normative. Ora ha convinto la popolazione di aver risolto la recessione usando, tra le altre cose, calcoli fuorvianti sulla disoccupazione.

Lo stato esige obbedienza senza dissenso. Ecco perché l’amministrazione rifila queste statistiche e ignora altri numeri, meno generosi (ma più accurati), sulla disoccupazione. Se la popolazione sapesse che i numeri sulla disoccupazione sono solo propaganda, perderebbe fiducia nello stato. Soprattutto quando si parla del suo successo nella risoluzione della crisi. Questa limiterebbe pesantemente le politiche che lo stato può perseguire. Se la gente fosse intellettualmente radicale e mettesse in questione lo stato, quest’ultimo perderebbe tutto il suo potere.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

A deeper look into the unemployment statistics reveals not only that the “official” numbers are misleading, but also that the state’s attempt at controlling and managing the economy is an abject failure. In April 800,000 people left the work force. Almost a million people simply stopped looking for work. Additionally, the number of jobs added is too little to keep up with the nearly 7 percent increase in population growth.

Now, to a normal person, these statistics seem like a bad sign — a sign that job growth is not occurring and the economy is still in the gutter. But, in a crusade against common sense, government and media emphasize a statistic that makes everything look much less gloomy than it actually it is. This statistic that everyone refers to improves when the labor force drops.

The most popularly used unemployment statistic only accounts for the labor force and how many people in the labor force are jobless. When someone stops looking for work, they leave the labor force. This makes unemployment go “down,” despite no one getting a job. The person is still unemployed, but the statistic shows their joblessness as an improvement. This leads to the national conversation about economic growth running completely backwards. Pundits and politicians talk about how low the unemployment rate is and the amount of people who left the labor force is conveniently forgotten.

When the labor force dropped to a mere 62.8 percent of the population in April, tied for the lowest rate since the 1970s, the official unemployment statistic also dropped. More people left the labor force so less people were considered unemployed. The increasingly smaller percentage of people considered in the labor force, not economic growth is driving the increasingly lower unemployment rate. But the state doesn’t want you to notice.

This bizarre construction of unemployment statistics could be construed as the mere stupidity of the state. After all, it’s portraying an illusion. The truth is buried deep below the official statistic. But it’s actually genius. States would fall if the truth about their existence came out. While states are terribly pathetic at running economies, they are supremely good at creating propaganda. Especially when that propaganda conceals the true effects of state intervention. The state created the recession through an inflation-driven housing bubble. Then it worsened and prolonged the recession with bailouts and new regulations. Now the state has convinced people it has fixed the recession using, among other things, a misleading unemployment measure.

The state demands unquestioning obedience. That’s why the administration touts this statistic and ignores other, less generous (but more accurate), unemployment measures. If people learned unemployment numbers were just propaganda, they would lose confidence in the state: Specifically in its success at fixing the economy. This would be a huge constraint on the kinds of policies the state could pursue. If people were intellectually radical and questioned the state, the state would lose all its power.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Le Statistiche sulla Disoccupazione Sono Propaganda di Stato.

So long as one uses the Marxist propaganda term “capitalist” (other than in quotes to refer to the term rather than use it) one is surrendering the language to the statists. –Fred Foldvary

Au contraire. Definition: Capitalism is state rule by and for those who own large amounts of capital. Corollary: the purpose of such rule is to restrict innovation, arbitrage and re-allocation of investment, i.e, to eliminate Enterprise (that which entrepreneurs do).

Definition: Free Enterprise is unobstructed, unregulated and unintervened entrepreneurial human action, which, by its nature, cannot have any form of Statism, including Capitalism, present.

Anarcho-Capitalism should mean a social system wherein large holders of capital exist but do not attempt to use the State to capture or maintain their predominance; that’s legitimate if you also accept anarcho-communism to mean a system where Communists do not attempt to create or use a State to have everyone ruled by Communes, and Anarcho-Syndicalism to be distinguished from State Syndicalism (aka Guild Socialism or Fascism) accordingly.

Remember, the term Capitalist was invented as a pejorative by free-market advocate Thomas Hodgskin back in the 1830s and then picked up by Marx (who admired Hodgskin for inventing schools for labourers).

Freely as ever, SEK3 (Samuel Edward Konkin III) [July 24, 2000].

Michael Shermer. The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008).

If you can get past the flaws in Shermer’s book (things others might prefer to think of as my fixations, hangups, and dead horses), it’s quite an enjoyable read.

But given my obsession with the ubiquity of vulgar libertarianism, comparable to Captain Ahab’s with Moby Dick, I can’t refrain from pointing out the flaws.

Before I say a lot of nasty things about Shermer’s ideological assumptions, I have to make the disclaimer up front that he comes across as thoroughly decent and likeable on a personal level. That he takes for granted certain ideological assumptions that I have long since declared war on is no reflection on him as a human being. Shermer states, as one of his fundamental guiding principles, a dictum of Spinoza’s: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” I’ll try to keep to that spirit as closely as I can in discussing my caveats about Shermer’s book.

Nevertheless, Shermer displays a considerable vulgar libertarian element in his background assumptions. His writing, over and over, tacitly equates the phenomena of existing corporate capitalism to the “free market.” He constantly uses things like Bill Gates, Wal-Mart, and other transnational corporations to illustrate the principles of the “market,” and treats them as living embodiments of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. He equates “the market” to the existing corporate economy, quoting attacks on the evils of corporate power and then “proving” they can’t be right because “that’s not how the market works.” Implicit in his rejection of The Corporation, of Chomsky and Zinn, is the assumption that the present system, the one they’re attacking, is the market.

A parallel theme is alleged popular hostility or resistance to “free market economics,” which he assumes is motivated by irrationality. A particularly atrocious example (I’m tempted to call it a howler) occurs on page 16:

Folk economics leads us to disdain excessive wealth, label usury a sin, and mistrust the invisible hand of the market. What we do not understand we often fear, and what we fear we often loathe. (As oneNew Yorker cartoon featuring two people in conversation reads: “I hated Bill Gates before it became so fashionable.”)

There you have it: invisible hand = excessive wealth = Bill Gates. Anybody who has problems with Bill Gates and excessive wealth must harbor an irrational fear and/or hatred for “the invisible hand of the market.” After all, it’s not like Gates could have gotten so rich by any other means, like the visible hand of the state’s “intellectual property” [sic] monopoly, could he? And we know all those other billionaires got rich through the operation of the “free market.” I mean, we hear it from neoliberal politicians and commentators at MSNBC every friggin’ day, so it must be true. This all reminds me of Dick Cheney in 2000 boasting, of Halliburton’s wealth, that “Government had nothing to do with it.”

The public mindset isn’t really all that irrational, if you keep in mind that their hostility is not so much to free markets, as to what has been called “free markets” by the usual gang of corporate apologists.

I’m about as close to a free market fundamentalist as you can get. But if I thought the “free market” meant what Tom Friedman and other neoliberal politicians and talking heads meant by it, I’d hate it more than anybody.

The average person sees Wal-Mart, Microsoft, downsizings, oil company profits, offshoring, and all the other unsavory phenomena of the corporate global economy defended in “free market” language, and his response is “if that’s the free market, then the free market be damned.” It’s essentially the same reaction as Huckleberry Finn’s. Huck lacked the conceptual apparatus to make an effective critique of the legitimizing ideology of slavery, or to debunk the Widow Douglas’s “property rights” in Jim. He took the slave system’s ideological self-justification at face value–and then said “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The average American, likewise, looks at the inequalities and injustices of our corporatist economic system, made possible by massive state intervention on behalf of organized capital, and sees it defended as the “free market.” And his response is the same: “If this is the free market, I’ll go to hell.”

Shermer asks why people reject Adam Smith’s theory of economics, despite its being so profound and proven. The answer just might be that the rhetoric of free markets, so closely associated with Adam Smith, has been misappropriated to defend a system of corporate power far closer to what Smith condemned than to what he supported. Adam Smith, like the other early classical liberals, was a revolutionary thinker who attacked the entrenched privileges of the landed oligarchy and the mercantile capitalists. It’s almost impossible to go to a mainstream “libertarian” website these days without seeing the thought of Adam Smith misappropriated to defend the modern institution most closely resembling the landed interests and privileged monopolists of the Old Regime: the giant, state-subsidized, state-protected corporation.

As I suggested earlier, most people who display egalitarian reactions against existing inequalities and concentrations of wealth may well believe that what they hate is the “free market.” But that’s only because the rhetoric of “free markets” has been perverted, for the most part, by apologists for those concentrations of wealth which result from privilege and other forms of state intervention. What they hate, they rightly hate. They’re wrong to believe that what they hate is the “free market.” But it’s hard to blame them, when you can’t turn on the TV or read an editorial page without seeing a fundamentally statist economic system of special privilege and protection for big business and the rich described as “our free market system.”

In fairness to Shermer, he sometimes tips his hat to the existence of things like corporate welfare, but for the most part he treats it as a minor deviation from a corporate economy that is, on the whole, a pretty close approximation of the “free market.” If you eliminated the subsidies to military contractors and agribusiness, what you’d wind up with is, in all its essentials, something pretty much like the economy we actually have: a global economy dominated by a few hundred corporations.

For example, he condemns the popular, zero-sum view of foreign trade as an “abandonment of free market principles.” And he cites Nobel laureate Edward Prescott on the foolish popular belief that it’s “government’s economic responsibility to protect U.S. industry….”

But in fact, the overwhelming bulk of the transnational corporate economy is a zero-sum game.

For starters, the main purpose of the World Bank and foreign aid over the past sixty years has been to subsidize the export of capital and offshoring of production from the West, by funding the transportation and utility infrastructure necessary for capital investment overseas to be profitable. The bulk of the U.S. military budget is taken up by the Navy, whose primary purpose is to keep the sea lanes open. No less an authority than Adam Smith argued that such expenses should be borne by those actually engaged in foreign trade. The United States has systematically intervened over the past century to keep landed oligarchies in power, to thwart land reform, and generally–whether by coup or by death squad– to make the world safe for Enclosure. Between this, and the helpfulness of authoritarian regimes in keeping labor docile, supplying sweatshop industry has been supplied with a labor force eager (or rather desperate) to work on whatever terms are offered.

But if that’s for starters, it’s still barely a start. The elephant in the living room is the role of “intellectual property” [sic] in the transnational corporate economy. Despite Prescott’s exasperated lament quoted above, the central function of government in the present system of global trade is to protect transnational capital from competition. One of the most important functions of the GATT Uruguay Round’s industrial property provisions, with their long patent terms, is to lock Western TNCs into control of the current generation of production technology, and thus to prevent the emergence of native-owned competition and lock Third World countries into a permanent position of supplying sweatshop labor and raw materials. It’s also probably not a coincidence that all the profitable sectors in the corporate global economy are those whose business models are dependent either on IP (entertainment and software), direct subsidies (armaments and aviation), or both (agribusiness, biotech, electronics). “Intellectual property” serves exactly the same protectionist function, for transnational corporations in today’s global economy, that tariffs served for the old national industries.

The corporate global economy, in other words, is a statist construct to its very core, and has no more to do with “free markets” than Stalinism had to do with workers’ power. And Shermer explicitly refers to agreements like CAFTA asexamples of “free trade.” The primary practitioners of the “mercantilist zero-sum protectionism” he decries are the transnational corporations themselves. It’s no wonder the public hates “free trade,” if it hears it identified with such practices.

Fortunately, given my background as both a dissident free market libertarian and a dissident libertarian socialist, I’m pretty good at “eating what I want and spitting out the rest,” even when it’s embedded in an ideological framework I disagree with. I’ve had to do this with thinkers ranging from Marx to Mises. And once you get past my hangups, there’s a lot of useful and fascinating material in Shermer’s book, presented in a very engaging manner.

If you enjoy the work of Desmond Morris and similar evolutionary approaches to human social behavior, you should thoroughly enjoy this book. Shermer discusses the apparent irrationalities of human economic behavior, and how the same behavior would make perfect sense from the standpoint of the behaviors selected for in a small primate hunter-gatherer group.

I especially enjoyed his discussions of egalitarianism and reciprocity, and found much of it relevant to the material I posted earlier in draft Chapter Eleven: The Abolition of Privilege.

My main disagreement with Shermer on this subject is with his assumption that such predispositions are contrary to the ideally rational behavior of a utility-maximizing market actor.

He is not entirely wrong on this, of course. There are some ingrained human cognitive biases that do result in irrational behavior.

But for the most part, I believe human instincts for reciprocity and egalitarianism work entirely with the grain of a genuine market. The real-world phenomena that people condemn, on the basis of values of reciprocity and egalitarianism, in fact result from violations of genuine market principles.

In Chapter Eleven, I discussed why I believe a genuine market, absent the zero-sum effects of privilege, would result in a comparatively egalitarian outcome. The human instincts for reciprocity and egalitarianism do not operate at cross-purposes to the market, but are the behavioral basis for it. Reciprocity and equal exchange are the normal outcomes of a market operating free from interference. People are most likely to say “That’s not fair” precisely when equal exchange has been thwarted, and a zero-sum situation created in its place, by state intervention on behalf of the privileged.

A good example comes immediately after the Bill Gates howler quoted above.

In most countries, [consternation over income polarization] leads to political policy to raise the poor and lower the rich, because during our evolutionary tenure we lived in a zero-sum (win-lose) world, in which one person’s gain meant another person’s loss….

Today, however, we live in a nonzero world….

Um, no. We would live in a nonzero world, if we actually had a free market. What we have, however, is a system of political capitalism in which the state has systematically intervened in the market to raise the rich and lower the poor; to subsidize the operating costs of big business; to enforce artificial property rights like patents and copyright, and absentee titles to vacant and unimproved land that ought to be open to homesteading; and otherwise to protect giant corporations from the competitive dangers of a genuine market. In such an environment, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that fortunes in the billions or hundreds of millions have been acquired at somebody’s expense. It’s entirely reasonable, when you see a turtle on a fencepost, to suspect he didn’t climb up there on his own.

I hope my Van Helsinglike fixation on the vampire of vulgar libertarianism hasn’t obscured the real value of this book. Even if I just can’t let the neoliberal ideology go, it’s really not central to the book. What is central is the evolutionary roots of human economic behavior, a subject on which Shermer provides a wealth of information. The information itself, for the most part, can stand by itself without regard to Shermer’s ideological framework. I found much of it, particularly the parts on reciprocity and egalitarianism, to be quite useful–although perhaps not for the purposes the author intended. At any rate, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And if I could enjoy it, with my neurotic obsessions, surely any normal person will enjoy it that much more.

Privilege

Benjamin tucker used the term “monopoly” to describe areas where government intervention allowed some people to monopolize critical economic functions. As Charles Johnson writes [1] Benjamin Tucker described “four great areas where government intervention artificially created or encouraged ‘class monopolies’ – concentrating wealth and access to factors of production into the hands of a politically-select class insulated from competition, and prohibiting workers from organizing mutualistic alternatives.” He identified these as the Land Monopoly, the Money Monopoly, the Patent Monopoly, and the Tariff Monopoly.

Considering the common use of patents to monopolize sectors of economic activity, the patent monopoly ought to be examined here. As Kevin Carson explains in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy:

The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of Western corporations…

Patents are also being used on a global scale to lock the transnational corporations into a permanent monopoly of productive technology…

Only one percent of patents worldwide are owned in the Third World. Of patents granted in the 1970s by Third World Countries, 84% were foreign-owned. But fewer than 5% of foreign patents were actually used in production. As we saw before, the purpose of owning a patent is not necessarily to use it, but to prevent anyone else from using it. [2]

The company that owned the patents for nickel metal hydride battery technology, which could have been useful in developing better electric cars, was purchased by oil company Texaco in 2001. Texaco was later purchased by oil company Chevron, who owned the battery patents until 2009. [3]

Whether or not this represents some petroleum executives’ plot to kill the electric car [4], it is certainly a case of using government privileges to monopolize the production of energy. Nobody but Chevron was allowed to experiment with the technical information that Chevron owned during the time its subsidiary held the patents. Chevron used a government privilege to insulate itself from competitive innovation.

There is certainly a demand for alternative energy vehicles. After noting the difficulties that car companies placed in front of eager buyers, and the less-than-enthusiastic advertising for electric cars, reporter Matt Coker concludes:

“No one wants electric cars? No one—except just about everyone who has given one a test drive (including a certain guilty Caddy driver) and got on a waiting list for one or is about to have one taken away from them.” [5]

The excitement surrounding Tesla Motors’ electric vehicles [6] would seem to bear this out. So there existed a significant demand for electric vehicles that is still not being met, which should point to some kind of interference in the market.

Statist Oil

As Sheldon Richman notes [7], petroleum “has long been a top concern of the national policy elite, most particularly the foreign-policy establishment.” Influence over the substance that powers armies, industrial production, and the transportation of the workforce is an immense source of power. Because the goals of politicians involve exercising power over events around the world, it is not surprising that they would want to have a hand in energy production.

It is widely acknowledged that oil was a major consideration in Axis offensives during the Second World War. More recently, war profiteering by Haliburton and fighting in the Niger Delta have involved oil in a major way. World conflicts could bring to mind Mad Max II, but with better equipped gangs.

If more electricity was produced using neighborhood generators or individually-owned solar arrays, it would significantly decentralize the production of energy, leaving less for politicians to preside over and compensate campaign contributors with.

What does the state offer oil companies? Only the state that can claim massive amounts of land by force, and cut deals with companies that rotate employees between corporate and government ranks. Without the power of the globe-spanning offensive US military, it is unlikely that oil fields in Iraq could be secured. Without the state, it is also less likely for a risky prospect like offshore drilling to be accepted by the neighbors of the proposed well – those whose source of production it could threaten. And if they did accept it, they would have greater incentives to focus on safety than the government regulators and BP, neither of whom hold much accountability.

Because government, not local people own the environment, environmental regulations will be based on who has the most political pull, not on who is most immediately affected. And those with the most political pull are those with the power and wealth to give politicians what they need. [8]

The concept of “regulatory capture” is important. As Sheldon Richman writes in The Freeman:

Regulators and the industries they oversee develop mutually beneficial relationships that would appall those who idealize regulators as watchdogs. The rules that emerge from those relationships tend to foster more monopolistic industries.

It took the Deepwater Horizon tragedy to bring out the fact that a single federal agency, the Minerals Management Service, is “responsible for both policing the oil industry and acting as its partner in drilling activities,” writes the New York Times. “Decades of law and custom have joined government and the oil industry in the pursuit of petroleum and profit. The Minerals Management Service brings in an average of $13 billion a year. [9]

Lobbyists are another way that energy companies are linked to the state. When industry representatives are consulted to write government policy, they obviously have their companies’ interests in mind.

Liability caps socialize the risk that drilling companies would be held responsible for in the absence of government interference, raising incentives to engage in irresponsible activity.

A law passed in response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska [which still harms the area] makes BP responsible for cleanup costs. But the law sets a $75 million limit on other kinds of damages.

Economic losses to the Gulf Coast are likely to exceed that. [10]

No wonder BP took shortcuts and ignored hazards. [11]

BP, the company responsible for spewing millions of gallons of oil into the ocean over the past month, has a noticeably statist history. Looking at the well-cited historical segment of the Wikipedia article on BP, one finds a history of colonialists fighting nationalists for control of resources through covert operations, assassination, and the installation of puppet dictators [12]. For many decades the British government held a majority share in BP until the Thatcher administration sold the government’s shares [13].

Competition

Government reduces diseconomies of scale and socializes costs. This increases the difficulty for small production of new technologies to compete with large production.

As Benjamin Darrington notes in Government Created Economies of Scale and Capital Specificity:

An overriding theme of economic policy is the protection and furtherance of the interests of monopoly capitalist corporations. The production techniques necessary to overcome the multiplicity of grave flaws inherent in gargantuan operations such as these would be uneconomical if not for the government’s constant efforts to pay for them publicly, either by defraying the cost of developing and using of these technologies, or expanding the advantages of large firm organization so that it offsets the massive costs of using this flawed system. The immense mass of privileges granted to the operations of the monopoly corporations generates non-market driven economies of scale and skews competition in the favor of bigger firms.

The capital developed for and, of necessity, employed by these firms has a strong tendency towards certain characteristics including a high degree of use specificity, and geographical concentration. These features would prove a great liability to the companies that use them if it were not for the government’s frequent actions to stabilize market conditions, soak up excess supply with public expenditures, and bailout insolvent corporations when what should be minor economic upheavals turns into catastrophic disaster under the brittle and inflexible capital structure of the corporatist economy. [14]

When government issues grants for alternative energy technology, money will likely go to big, established firms. Sometimes the same companies that collect subsidies for fossil fuels will be the ones who are able to control new technologies through government privilege.

Freedom

An industry relying so much on government privilege, with links to government policy is really just another arm of political authority.

State control locks competition out of the economy, and those who want to share the controls are very willing to play along. Undermining them requires innovation and a desire to decentralize or abolish power entirely. A free economy containing strong, empowered demands for freedom and healthy environment will produce things that satisfy these demands.

Notes

[1] Johnson, Charles “Rad Geek”. “Bits & Pieces on Free Market Anti-Capitalism: the Many Monopolies” http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/05/10/free-market-anti-capitalism-the-many-monopolies/

[2] Carson, Kevin. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Ch 5, Sec C, pgs 189,192,193

[3] Wikipedia. “Patent encumbrance of large automotive NiMH batteries” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries

[4] For opposing views on corporate attitudes toward the electric car, see

Hari, Johann, “Big Oil’s Vendetta Against the Electric Car” http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-big-oils-vendetta-against-the-electric-car-443388.html and

Woudhuysen, James. “The Electric Car Conspiracy … that never was” http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/01/woudhuysen_electric_car/

[5] Coker, Matt. “Dude, Where’s My Electric Car?” http://www.ocweekly.com/2003-05-15/features/dude-where-s-my-electric-car/1

[6] Market Watch “Tesla Beckons to the True Believers. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-beckons-to-the-true-believers-2010-05-21

[7] Richman, Sheldon. “The Goal Is Freedom: Self-Regulation in the Corporate State: The BP Spill” http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/bp-spill

[8] For an example of government policy hindering environmental cleanup, see

Johnson, Charles “Rad Geek”. “The Clean Water Act Vs Clean Water.” http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/05/17/the-clean-water-act-vs-clean-water/

[9] Richman, Sheldon. “The Goal Is Freedom: Self-Regulation in the Corporate State: The BP Spill” http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/bp-spill

[10] Werner, Erica. “Federal Law May Limit BP Liability in Oil Spill” http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2010/05/05/109562.htm

Note the Wikipedia article on the Exxon Valdez spill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill

[11] Granatstein, Solly and Messick, Graham. “Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml

[12] Wikipedia. “BP”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BP

[13] Funding Universe. “The British Petroleum Company plc” http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/The-British-Petroleum-Company-plc-Company-History.html]

[14] Darrington, Benjamin. “Government Created Economies of Scale and Capital Specificity” http://agorism.info/_media/government_created_economies_of_scale_and_capital_specificity.pdf