But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom two-thirds of society literally produce nothing and live entirely on the output of the rest:

I’m still trying to understand if by “the bottom 2/3″ produces nothing, we mean that people like timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees, electronics assemblers, etc. could just disappear and the world would go on pretty much as normal. If all of those people suddenly disappeared, how would an Apple or Microsoft campus get built? How would its products get built? How would they get delivered? But they should if the bottom 2/3 really produces nothing, right?

It would be amusing indeed to see how a Galt’s Gulch society would organize all the logging, truck driving, mining, construction, etc., without that parasitic 67% holding back the geniuses on Wall Street and in the C-suites. The assertion that the 67% “produce nothing” is as pig-brained stupid as the claim three years ago that the 47% “pay no taxes.” As I wrote back then, the poor pay lots of taxes — they just take the form of payments to nominally private monopolists.

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Kinsella has had a love-hate relationship with left-libertarianism for some time now. And evidently one of the things about us that sticks in his craw — especially those of us at Center for a Stateless Society and Alliance of the Libertarian Left — is our predominant view of the rich as a parasitic class who derive most of their wealth from state intervention in the economy rather than productive activity. To counter this view of things, he cites a passage from a five-year-old US News article (Rick Newman, “How the Government is Swallowing the Economy,” Nov. 9, 2009):

Economist Gary Shilling has calculated that 58 percent of the population is dependent on the government for “major parts of their income,” including teachers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and other government employees; welfare and Social Security recipients; government pensioners; public housing beneficiaries; and people who work for government contractors. By 2018, Shilling estimates, an astounding 67 percent of Americans could be dependent on the government for their livelihood.

This means, Kinsella argues on his Facebook page, that the bottom 58% (or the extrapolated 67%) of the population are “parasites” who live off the wealth produced by some other segment of the population. Never mind that Shilling never actually specified the actual income levels of members of that 58% who get money from the government, so Kinsella has no reason for jumping to the conclusion that it’s the bottom 58% in income; we’ll just stipulate for the sake of argument that it really is the bottom 58%.

In the course of this diatribe Kinsella conflates, blurs or ignores so many distinctions that the result is a big hot mess. The original “53% vs. 47%” slogan, originally created by Erick Erickson of RedState.org in 2011 as a counter-meme to Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” and then inadvertently revived by Mitt Romney during his presidential campaign, conflated payment of taxes with economic productivity (I wrote about it here, here and here).

Kinsella, somewhat similarly, conflates the receipt of direct government spending as any portion of one’s income with being a net productive drain on society, and living entirely on the production of those who don’t receive direct monetary aid from the government. To emphasize the point, he telescopes the entire bottom 58% (or 67%) from Shilling’s statistics into a category of “lowlifes” living on “WIC cheese.” Further down in the comments below his original post he explicitly states that “[t]he dregs clearly do not produce [the wealth],” and that “the bottom 2/3 produce nothing.”

But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom two-thirds of society literally produce nothing and live entirely on the output of the rest:

I’m still trying to understand if by “the bottom 2/3″ produces nothing, we mean that people like timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees, electronics assemblers, etc. could just disappear and the world would go on pretty much as normal. If all of those people suddenly disappeared, how would an Apple or Microsoft campus get built? How would its products get built? How would they get delivered? But they should if the bottom 2/3 really produces nothing, right?

It would be amusing indeed to see how a Galt’s Gulch society would organize all the logging, truck driving, mining, construction, etc., without that parasitic 67% holding back the geniuses on Wall Street and in the C-suites. The assertion that the 67% “produce nothing” is as pig-brained stupid as the claim three years ago that the 47% “pay no taxes.” As I wrote back then, the poor pay lots of taxes — they just take the form of payments to nominally private monopolists.

…[D]on’t be fooled by the fact that some of us aren’t paying any income taxes. We pay lots of taxes — to rich takers who live off our largesse. The portion of your rent or mortgage that results from the enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land held out of use through artificial property rights is a tax to the landlord. The 95% of the price of drugs under patent, or Bill Gates’s software, is a tax you pay to the owners of “intellectual property” monopolies. So is the portion of the price you pay for manufactured goods, over and above actual materials and labor, that results from embedded rents on patents and enormous brand-name markups on (for example) Nike sneakers over and above the few bucks a pair the sweatshops contract to make them for. So is the estimated 20% oligopoly price markup for industries where a few corporations control half or more of output.

The great bulk of state-enabled parasitism takes the form, not of checks paid directly out of the US Treasury, but of nominally “private” transactions: paychecks to that 67% of timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees and electronics assemblers that amount to less than the value they produce, or checks from customer for inflated prices far above the actual cost of providing the goods and services they’re purchasing, that result from corporations, landlords, etc. being put into a privileged monopoly position by the state. Most of the taxes that most of us pay aren’t in the form of checks made out to the IRS. They’re made out to nominally private businesses that are actually branches of the state.

And as C4SS Fellow Erick Vasconcelos mentioned:

In Soviet Russia, over 95% of citizens depended on the government for most of their income. I suppose they were just a bunch of parasites exploiting the hardworking Randian heroes in the Politburo.

But what we’ve discussed so far isn’t the only example of sloppy thinking in Kinsella’s post. Take another look at the composition of that “bottom 67%” in Kinsella’s US News quote:  …”teachers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and other government employees; welfare and Social Security recipients; government pensioners; public housing beneficiaries; and people who work for government contractors…”

Let’s break that down. First of all, welfare recipients are the category that at first glance looks most like a prima facie case of parasitically living off government largesse funded by others. But as above, it’s conflating the payment of taxes to the nominal state and the receipt of nominally public funds with the real degree of exploitation or parasitism.  I have repeatedly argued, in column after column at C4SS, that most of the upper class’s extraction of wealth from society comes not from direct government transfer payments, but from corporations’ and landlords’ “private” gouging of the public in their roles of worker, consumer and tenant. The privileged classes transfer wealth upward from the producing classes to themselves, through “private” taxation in the form of state-enabled monopoly rents, with a front-end loader. When the resulting polarization of wealth becomes too economically and politically destabilizing, the state transfers a tiny fraction of it back downwards with a teaspoon to the most destitute of the exploited, to increase aggregate demand somewhat and keep outright homelessness and starvation from reaching sufficient levels to bring the system down.

Programs like welfare and food stamps — which by themselves are a small minority of total human services spending — amount to the capitalists using their state to clean up a problem they themselves created, acting through their state, in the first place. By Kinsella’s standard, it’s “parasitism” when government buys crutches for people, even though it worked in tandem with business to break their legs in the first place — and then adds insult to injury by subsidizing the crutch industry in the process.

Second, including Social Security — which may well constitute a majority of total government payments to the “67%” — is especially disingenuous, because Social Security is an entitlement funded entirely by payroll taxes on the recipients’ own wage income over their working lifetime.

What’s more, under the terms of Reagan’s Social Security “reform,” the revenue from the payroll tax increase was used over a period of about twenty years to offset the lost revenue from tax cuts for the rich. And nothing remained of the actual increased payroll tax payments but a stack of government bonds in the “trust fund.” That means that, over a twenty year period — in the name of “keeping Social Security solvent” — a major part of the tax burden was shifted directly from the super-rich to payroll taxes on working people.

Third, a good many of the categories in that list are taxpayer-funded positive externalities to big business.These are all examples of the phenomenon James O’Connor described in The Fiscal Crisis of the State, of big business remaining artificially profitable only because it can externalize a growing share of its operating costs and inputs on the taxpayer. The state is being driven to larger deficits and a growing debt precisely because it takes an ever-increasing amount of direct and indirect subsidies to keep corporate capitalism profitable.

The main function of teachers is to impart the skills and attitudes that will transform their budding human raw material into useful, compliant “human resources” for their employers. The first state public school systems were created in the mid-19th century when factories needed workers who would show up on time, obey orders, and line up to eat and piss at the sound of a bell. The public educationist literature from the turn of the 20th century is full of explicit statements that the public schoolsl exist to fit children into their niche in the social hierarchy. If you don’t believe it, look at the role of Bill and Melinda Gates and other billionaires in promoting charter schools, Core Curriculum and the like.

Soldiers? Whose interests do you think are served by the wars they fight in? Remember the old Vietnam-era joke about General Mills, General Electric and General Motors? Have you noticed that every country defeated by the US gets a new government that rubber-stamps the latest so-called “Free Trade Agreement,” starts taking orders from the World Bank and IMF, and auctions off its economy to global corporations? How much of US security policy is dedicated to maintaining US access to the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea oil basins, keeping the sea lanes open for oil tankers, and otherwise guaranteeing “clean, safe and abundant energy” to the American corporate economy?

And of course the government contractors building all those subsidized highways that make giant corporations with large market areas artificially profitable against smaller, more efficient producers serving local markets, or promote urban sprawl and real estate interests at the expense of poor people whose neighborhoods were destroyed by freeways.

Stephan Kinsella should be fully aware of what my positions, and those of other libertarian leftists, actually are. I suspect he is fully aware that we believe looting and exploitation by the rich takes the form of monopoly rents and other forms of nominally private exchange, and not direct government transfer of revenue from poor to rich. No doubt he disagrees with that. If so, he should argue against our actual position — not disingenuously pretend that some idiotic statistic about the “67%” is a response to what we actually believe.

But you don’t get to be super-rich — to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars — by making stuff. You get that filthy rich only through crime of one sort or another (even if it’s technically perfectly legal in this society). You get the really big-time money not by making stuff or doing stuff, but by controlling the conditions under which other people are allowed to make stuff and do stuff. You get super-rich by getting into a position where you can fence off opportunities to produce, enclosing those natural opportunities as a source of rent. You do it by collecting tolls and tribute from those who actually make stuff, as a condition of not preventing them from doing so. In other words you get super-rich by being a parasite and extorting protection money from productive members of society, with the help of government.

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Of course this is pure buncombe.  It presupposes that high taxable incomes result primarily from being “makers,” when the truth is just the opposite. The higher your income, in fact, the more likely you’re a taker who’s — all together now! — dependent on government.

It’s possible to get moderately wealthy — say, an income that qualifies you for the “top 1%,” which is somewhere under $400,000, or assets in the low millions — through genuine entrepreneurship. Even at this level, of course, it’s more likely you have an income heavily inflated by membership in a licensing cartel, or help manage a highly authoritarian, statist corporation where your “productivity” — and bonuses — are defined by how effectively you shaft the people whose skills, relationships and other human capital are actually responsible for the organization’s productivity. But it’s at least possible to get this rich by being a maker of sorts, by being more adept than others at anticipating and meeting real human needs.

But you don’t get to be super-rich — to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars — by making stuff. You get that filthy rich only through crime of one sort or another (even if it’s technically perfectly legal in this society). You get the really big-time money not by making stuff or doing stuff, but by controlling the conditions under which other people are allowed to make stuff and do stuff. You get super-rich by getting into a position where you can fence off opportunities to produce, enclosing those natural opportunities as a source of rent. You do it by collecting tolls and tribute from those who actually make stuff, as a condition of not preventing them from doing so. In other words you get super-rich by being a parasite and extorting protection money from productive members of society, with the help of government.

So don’t be fooled by the fact that some of us aren’t paying any income taxes. We pay lots of taxes — to rich takers who live off our largesse. The portion of your rent or mortgage that results from the enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land held out of use through artificial property rights is a tax to the landlord. The 95% of the price of drugs under patent, or Bill Gates’s software, is a tax you pay to the owners of “intellectual property” monopolies. So is the portion of the price you pay for manufactured goods, over and above actual materials and labor, that results from embedded rents on patents and enormous brand-name markups on (for example) Nike sneakers over and above the few bucks a pair the sweatshops contract to make them for. So is the estimated 20% oligopoly price markup for industries where a few corporations control half or more of output. If by chance you do pay federal income tax, half of it goes to support the current military establishment or pay off debt from past wars — wars fought for the sake of giant corporations.

The “takers,” in short, are the people Romney spoke to at $1000/plate fundraisers, who pay Hillary Clinton several hundred grand for a speech reassuring them Wall Street’s not to blame. The entire Fortune 500, the entire billionaire plutocracy, depends on largesse from us makers — and they can only do it with government help.

In einem abscheulich lächerlichen Washington Post Kommentar („Mitt Romney: A good man. The right fight.“ 28. November) legt Stuart Stevens, der Mann, der als Hauptstratege in Romneys Kampagne gearbeitet hat, dar, dass sein Kandidat „die Mehrheit jeder ökonomischen Gruppe, bis auf derer, die weniger als 50.000$ im Jahr als Haushaltseinkommen aufweisen können, erlangt hat.“

Angesichts dieser Tatsache argumentiert Stevens, dass „jede Partei, die die Mehrheit der Mittelschicht erobert, etwas richtig machen muss.“ Stevens Behauptung gibt eine andere, einige Monate zurückliegende, sinnlose Bemerkung von Romneys Seite wieder, Romneys 47-Prozent-Ausrutscher, dass die politischen Lektionen den Republikanern offensichtlich abhandengekommen sind (nicht, dass dies schlecht wäre).

Die Kampagne, durch ihren Kandidaten, behauptete, dass arme Menschen Demokraten wählen, da sie von der Regierung abhängig sind. Nun deutet Stevens an, dass Menschen, die hart arbeiten und gutes Geld machen, republikanische Politik unterstützen. Die Ironie liegt natürlich dabei, was Marktanarchisten kontinuierlich verdeutlichen angesichts solch idiotischer Verunglimpfungen der Erwerbsarmut – dass die republikanische (und übrigens auch die demokratische) Version des „freien Unternehmertums“ ein aufgeschichteter Stapel ist, der systematisch Arbeit zugunsten von Kapital benachteiligt.

Staatliche Privilegien umgeben Big Business, schützen es vor Wettbewerb und unterwerfen Arbeiter der Gnade von Bossen, die ihnen Pennies des produzierten Dollars als Löhne zahlen können. Die Reichen können sich zurücklegen und die Spitze der harten Arbeit der Angestellten abschöpfen, da Landzuteilungen, Subventionen (direkte oder indirekte), Regierungsaufträge und teure regulatorische Auflagen gemischt die ökonomischen Interessen der Elite vor Wettbewerb schützen.

Die anzügliche Prunksucht, dass Republikaner gut ohne die Stimmen dieser ungewaschenen Massen unter 50.000 zurechtkommen, ist verblüffend anzuschauen. Stevens würde davon profitieren, das ökonomische System „republikanischer Ideale“ aufrecht zu erhalten gegen einen legitimen – und momentan natürlich rein hypothetischen – befreiten Markt, besonders wenn der Median persönlicher Einkommen in diesem Land bei ca. 40.000$ liegt.

Sollte er dies tun, würde es wohl klar werden (obwohl es Grund gibt, dies zu bezweifeln), dass „Reiche lange genug das Ziel von Wohltätigkeit gewesen sind“, wie es Ezra Heywood formulierte. Marktanarchisten würden die Privilegien der Mächtigen und einflussreichen Kräfte in der Wirtschaft beseitigen und somit das kapitalistische System zugunsten wirklich freien Wettbewerbs und freier Märkte auflösen. Freiwilliger Tausch und Kooperation, losgelöst von den Fesseln eines einst von Anarchisten so bezeichneten „Klassenrechts“, sind nicht nur unschädlich, sondern ein großer Segen.

Republikaner, Demokraten und der Rest der verfassungsgebenden Teile des politischen Systems dienen solchen missbräuchlichen Privilegien – das ist ihre Aufgabe auf einer wesentlichen Ebene. Statt ihnen Ehrerbietung oder selbst Beachtung zu widmen, sollten wir uns daran machen, die Gesellschaft zu schaffen, in der wir auf einer gegenseitigen Basis leben wollen, mit unseren Freunden und Nachbarn, praktische Politik für eine Weile verwerfend, oder sogar für immer.

Der ursprüngliche Artikel wurde geschrieben von David S. D‘Amato und veröffentlicht am 01. Dezember 2012.

Übersetzt aus dem Englischen von Achim Fischbach.

¿Conservador? ¿Todavía descorazonado por la elección? Éste artículo es para usted. Más específicamente, siéntase especialmente aludido si usted es el tipo más serio de conservador que ya estaba acongojado por la nominación de Romney, el tipo de conservador que todavía está de acuerdo con Barry Goldwater en que el «extremismo en la defensa de la libertad no es un vicio, y la moderación en la búsqueda de la justicia no es una virtud.»

Mi objetivo es simple. Quiero convencerlo de que preocuparse por si un republicano del establishment que se presenta a sí mismo como conservador gana una elección no hace nada por la causa de sus ideales. De hecho, le recomiendo olvidarse del conservadurismo y las elecciones completamente. Lo mejor que puede hacer para defender sus valores es convertirse al anarquismo y promoverlo, haciéndose parte de la izquierda radical.

No hay dudas que esto suena absurdo. Pero es exactamente la transición que muchos han hecho. Entre ellos, Karl Hess, que escribió ese discurso legendario de Barry Goldwater cuyas palabras todavía arden en los corazones de muchos conservadores. Cuando se transformó de autor de las plataformas 1960 y 1964 del partido republicano a autor de textos anarquistas con títulos como “Poder de Barrio” y “La Muerte de la Política”, Hess encontró que su primer impulso vino de la “la familiaridad de lo que se decía en los círculos anarquistas. Descentralización. La devolución a la gente del poder político real – de todo el poder”.

Como ex conservador, sé que sus preocupaciones por los derechos de los estados y gobiernos locales son genuinos, que no son una cortina de humo de la intolerancia. Usted sabe mejor que un burócrata en Washington lo que es mejor para su comunidad. El problema no está en su entusiasmo por estos temas, sino en no llevarlo aún más lejos.

¿Por qué no deshacernos de los estados en lugar de defender sus derechos? Burócratas en Anchorage, la ciudad de Oklahoma, Montgomery, o en cualquier lugar donde opere su gobierno estatal, puede que conoczcan mejor su comunidad que los que esán en Washington, pero tno anto como usted. Hay que llevar la necesidad de autodeterminación hasta sus últimas consecuencias.

Cualquier cosa que su estado y gobierno local pueda hacer, su comunidad puede hacerla mejor por su cuenta. Si necesitan topes de velocidad en las calles, instálenlos. No pierdan tiempo arrodillándose ante el ayuntamiento.
Si está preocupado de como puede funcionar ese principio frente a problemas de gran escala, recomiendo leer acerca de los esfuerzos del Common Ground Collective después del huracán Katrina. Más recientemente, el movimiento Occupy Sandy en Nueva York está mostrando una determinación similar.

Algunos de ustedes quizás piensen que todo eso está muy bien, pero todavía se sienten incómodos sobre eso de «ahacerse parte de la izquierda radical.» Al fin y al cabo, ustedes creen en los mercados libres. Sin embargo, aunque parezca extraño, esa es exactamente la razón por la que deben encontrar terreno común con la izquierda radical.
Alguien como usted, quien quizá haya participado en los Tea Parties originales anti rescates bancarios, o que al menos simpatizaba con ellos, probablemente no necesita que se le recuerde que el estado hipertrofiado tiende a ayudar a las grandes empresas a expensas de todos los demás.

Imagine como sería un mundo donde tengamos mercados verdaderamente libres. Parece razonable considerar la idea de que el poder corporativo se derrumbaría completamente sin el apoyo activo que recibe del gobierno.
Los progres de limosina no sermonean a todo el mundo solo porque tengan un complejo de mesías; también lo hacen porque les interesa mantenerse en una posición donde pueden sermonear a la gente.

Si realmente quiere asustar a esa alianza entre los progres y las élites empresariales, pruebe con apoyar una campaña local de sindicalización como las realizadas por los Trabajadores Industriales del Mundo. Los políticos demócratas adinerados quizá tengan un interés en complacer a los sindicatos rígidamente burocráticos que malgastan los fondos de sus miembros en contribuciones de campaña. Sin embargo, probablemente no se alegrarán demasiado de ver un sindicato combativo que ve el gobierno como categóricamente opuesto a sus metas y distribuye un folleto llamado «Como Despedir a su Jefe» [PDF].

No espero que usted transicione de vicepresidente del comité local del Partido Republicano a izar la bandera negra de la noche a la mañana como resultado de leer este artículo. Pero tengo la esperanza de despertar su interés lo suficiente como para que empiece a buscar más información que le ayude a vencer la reticencia a camibarse de bando.

Artículo original publicado por Jason Lee Byas el 15 de noviembre de 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Wade Craig, editado por Alan Furth.

According to C4SS Senior Fellow Kevin Carson, “This school of libertarianism has inscribed on its banner the reactionary watchword: ‘Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get‘.”  Carson adds, “In every case, the good guys, the sacrificial victims of the Progressive State, are the rich and powerful. The bad guys are the consumer and the worker, acting to enrich themselves from the public treasury.”

Tuccille was alarmed at a recent Gallup poll showing that just 33 percent of respondents considered wealth distribution in the US to be “fair,” while 59 percent considered it “unfair.” 52 percent of those responding favored taxing the rich to redistribute wealth. Tuccille responded to the poll results with condescension, a common tactic of vulgar libertarians:

“That’s not fair,” is the plaintive cry of every toddler ever born, though my own son quickly memorized my constant response: “Not getting your way isn’t the same as ‘unfair.'” I may need five minutes alone with the American public, however, since many of my countrymen apparently think it’s “unfair” that other people have more money than them — and they want the government to give them some of what the other guy has.

One would assume from Tuccille’s sneering tone that we live in a “free market” meritocracy (we don’t) where  government doesn’t pick winners (they do) and everyone has a shot at their little slice of “The American Dream” (a myth invented by the privileged). Did Tuccille consider that increased calls for redistribution might be a sign that more people are becoming aware that the state capitalist system is rigged?

Tuccille concludes his sermon to us unruly wage slaves with a threat straight out of Atlas Shrugged: “Then again, if the United States becomes a country that punishes success, and so drives the ambitious elsewhere, or underground, perhaps the resulting leveling downward will be perceived as more … fair.”

Damn J.D., you’re going to take your ball and run off to Galt’s Gulch because of a Gallup Poll? Who’s pouting now?

Doy por hecho que ningún político es merecedor de otra cosa que no sea desprecio y escarnio, de que casi la totalidad de ellos representan un sistema de poder y privilegio que equivale al robo legalizado a gran escala. Bueno, dicho esto, los republicanos — por su alucinante habilidad para apartarse de la realidad — podrían conseguir el premio a los más desconectados de ésta.

En un execrablemente ridículo artículo de opinión en el Washington Post (“Mitt Romney: A good man. The right fight.” 28 de noviembre), el hombre que trabajó como jefe de estrategia de la campaña de Romney, Stuart Stevens, señala que su hombre “llegó a la mayoría de cada grupo económico excepto en aquellos con ingresos familiares inferiores a 50.000 $ al año.”

Dado este hecho, argumenta Stevens, “cualquier partido que capte a la mayoría de la clase media debe de estar haciendo algo bien.” El argumento de Stevens refleja otra observación estúpida de hace meses desde la parte de Romney, la metedura de pata de Romney y el 47 por ciento, las lecciones políticas por las cuales los republicanos están, obviamente, superados (no es que eso sea algo malo).

La campaña, a través de su candidato, decía que la gente pobre vota a los demócratas porque son dependientes del gobierno. Ahora, Stevens sugiere que la gente que trabaja duro y gana un buen dinero apoya las políticas republicanas. La ironía, por supuesto, es una que los anarquistas de mercado continuamente plantan en la cara de este tipo de insultos imbéciles a los trabajadores pobres — que la versión republicana (y casualmente demócrata) de la “empresa libre” es una baraja con las cartas marcadas que sistemáticamente perjudica al trabajo en favor del capital.

Los privilegios estatales rodean a la gran empresa, protegiéndola de la competencia y dejando a los trabajadores a merced de jefes que pueden pagarles unos centavos por dólar producido como salario. Los ricos pueden recostarse y llevarse lo mejor de la parte dura del trabajo, gracias a las cesiones de terreno, los subsidios (directos e indirectos), los contratos con el gobierno y una combinación de costosas obligaciones normativas para proteger de la competencia los intereses económicos de las élites.

La pomposidad de insinuar que a los republicanos les va bien sin los votos de esas sucias masas que ganan menos de 50k es asombrosa. Stevens se podría beneficiar de sostener el sistema económico de “ideales republicanos” contra un legítimo — y actualmente, por supuesto, estrictamente hipotético — mercado liberado, especialmente cuando los ingresos medios por persona en este país son unos 40.000 $.

Si lo hiciera, le podría quedar claro (aunque uno pueda dudarlo) que, como dijo Ezra Heywood, “los ricos ya han sido los sujetos  de la caridad el tiempo suficiente”. Los anarquistas de mercado eliminarían los privilegios de las fuerzas poderosas e influyentes  dentro de la economía para así disolver el sistema capitalista en favor de una competencia y unos mercados realmente libres. El  intercambio voluntario y la cooperación, cuando son liberados de los grilletes de lo que los anarquistas una vez llamaron “legislación de clase,” no son sólo inocuos, sino una gran bendición.

Republicanos, demócratas y el resto de las partes constituyentes del sistema político sirven a estos abusivos privilegios — ese es fundamentalmente su trabajo. En lugar de concederles deferencia o incluso atención, debemos ponernos manos a la obra para crear la sociedad en la que queremos vivir de manera común, con nuestros amigos y vecinos, desechando la política práctica por un tiempo, incluso para siempre.

Artículo original publicado por David S. D’Amato el 01 de diciembre 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Tomás Braña.

In an execrably ridiculous Washington Post opinion piece (“Mitt Romney: A good man. The right fight.” November 28), the man who worked as the Romney campaign’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, points out that his guy “carried the majority of every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income.”

Given that fact, Stevens argues, “any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right.” Stevens’s argument reflects another witless remark from the Romney side months ago, Romney’s 47 percent gaffe, the political lessons of which are obviously lost on Republicans (not that that’s a bad thing).

The campaign, through its candidate, was saying that poor people vote for Democrats because they’re dependent on the government. Now, Stevens suggests that people who work hard and make good money support Republican policies. The irony, of course, is one that market anarchists continually point out in the face of this kind of imbecilic insult to the working poor — it’s that the Republicans’ (and Democrats’ incidentally) version of “free enterprise” is a stacked deck that systematically disadvantages labor in favor of capital.

State privilege surrounds big business, protecting it from competition and throwing workers at the mercy of bosses who can pay them pennies on the produced dollar in wages. The rich can recline and skim off the top of labor’s hard work, because land grants, subsidies (direct and indirect), government contracts and costly regulatory obligations blend to protect elite economic interests from competition.

The pomposity of insinuating that Republicans are just fine without the votes of those unwashed masses making under 50k is amazing to behold. Stevens would benefit from holding the economic system of “Republican ideals” up against a legitimate — and now, of course, strictly hypothetical — freed market, especially when the median personal income in this country is about $40,000.

If he did so, it might become clear to him (though one has reason to doubt it) that, as Ezra Heywood said, “Rich people have been the subjects of charity long enough.” Market anarchists would remove the privileges for powerful and influential forces within the economy and thus dissolve the capitalist system in favor of real free competition and markets. Voluntary exchange and cooperation, when delivered from the fetters of what anarchists once called “class legislation,” are not only innocuous, but are a great blessing.

Republicans, Democrats and the rest of the political system’s constituent parts serve those abusive privileges — that’s their job on a fundamental level. Instead of granting them deference or even attention, we ought to get down to the business of creating the society we want to live in on a mutual basis, with our friends and neighbors, discarding practical politics for awhile, even forever.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Privilegio y pomposidad en la política.
• Deutsch, Privilegien und Prunksucht in der Politik.

That prompted Klein to ask:

These folks… are purportedly very data focused, very good at assimilating new information. So I find it genuinely scary that neither Romney nor his super-rich backers had any idea he was going to lose. All the polls, all the models, all the betting markets said he was likely to lose. How did a group of people who, in their jobs, have to be willing to read and respond to disappointing data convince themselves to ignore every piece of data we had?

Freeland described it as “astonishing” and “mystifying,” adding that these same people had made the same miscalculation in their roles as managers and investors:

… it was also the case that all the smartest guys in the room managed to lose a lot of money in 2008 and managed to convince themselves of a set of very mistaken beliefs about where the markets where going to go. It was a lot of the same people on the wrong side of both bets.”

But there’s really nothing astonishing about either case. That these people with MBA degrees and long careers climbing management ladders could be so abysmally wrong in their predictions is a textbook example of how power, by its very nature, creates stupidity and irrationality.

As Freeland observes, Romney and his backers have internalized a legitimizing ideology in which all the things that are best for the American economy are — entirely coincidentally — also in their own self-interest. The very act of getting rich (“my success,” as Romney put it) is “an act of civic virtue.” They’re the “job creators,” after all. Billionaires see themselves as a class of the best and brightest — tough thinkers who make the hard, thankless decisions, “having an extremely unique set of skills that sets them apart from everybody else, and it’s partly brainpower, but they all see it as crucially including an ability to judge and take risks and work very hard.”

This social and political ideology is a powerful form of groupthink that filters what its adherents perceive about the world. It’s just as powerful inside institutional hierarchies like the giant corporation as in the political arena.

One central function of a hierarchy is to filter the upward flow of information — to tell naked emperors how great their new clothes look. Power distorts information flow because, as R. A. Wilson observed, nobody tells the truth to someone with a gun. Authority relations result in one-way information flows, preventing decisionmakers from receiving accurate feedback on the real effects of their decisions. As Kenneth Boulding put it, those at the tops of hierarchies tend to live in almost completely imaginary worlds.

As a result those at the tops of pyramids generally communicate much more effectively with their peers at the tops of other pyramids than with their subordinates in the pyramid below. CEOs tend to make policies based on the “best practices” of other hierarchical institutions in the same industry. They evaluate their effectiveness based on the enthusiastic propaganda from other CEOs about how well it’s working in their own organizations — despite the fact that those other CEOs are equally clueless about the real effects of their policies.

I’ve lost count of the number of columnists and talking heads who observed that Romney visibly bristled when debate moderators like Candy Crowley talked back to him. He was used to being surrounded by subordinates who were afraid to tell him anything he didn’t want to hear. Seriously, how would you like to be the person on Romney’s staff who tells him his proposal is a stupid idea, or why it didn’t work?

How are businesses run by managers like this gang of idiots able to stay in business? The same way Soviet factories and industrial ministries were able to stay “in business”: By playing in a rigged game.

The U.S. economy isn’t a free market. It’s a corporate capitalist market, heavily cartelized and subsidized by the state, so that each industry is dominated by a handful of giant firms sharing the same pathological culture. The system is designed to socialize risk and cost, and privatize profit, so that natural born idjuts (excuse me, “successful job creators”) like Mittens can spend their entire lives living in bubbles, being told exactly what they want to hear, without suffering any ill effects.