But it is an all-too-common mistake – and this tendency to underestimate the chasm between free markets and corporatism is enormously beneficial to the state, enabling a slick bait-and-switch. When free markets and government grants of privilege to business are conflated, those who are attracted to free markets are easily duped into supporting plutocracy, thus swelling the ranks of statism’s right wing – while those who are turned off by plutocracy are likewise easily duped into opposing free markets, thereby swelling the ranks of statism’s left wing. (These are the two tendencies that Kevin Carson calls “vulgar libertarianism” and “vulgar liberalism,” respectively.)

As one of the villains in The Fountainhead explains in a moment of frankness, talking about the choice Europe was then facing between communism and fascism:

“If you’re sick of one version, we push you in the other. We’ve fixed the coin. Heads – collectivism. Tails – collectivism. Give up your soul to a council – or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective.”

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What’s more, left-wing revisionists such as Gabriel Kolko have convincingly argued that suffocating and overwhelming smaller competitors has too often been just the point of new regulations — or at the very least among their prime motivations. Far from high-minded concerns about consumer protection, big business has lobbied for higher regulatory barriers as a way to rid the markets of inconvenient pests in the form of smaller businesses.

Market anarchists thus contend that the state’s role in the economy has not been to rein in the avarice of errant corporate power, but rather to harm individuals and the overall economy for a favored few. We counsel a different kind of regulation to replace the arbitrary, centralized approach of the present.

True, free markets are without regulation by decree, emanating from a small group of self-styled experts in alphabet soup government agencies. But the rigors of competition nevertheless furnish their own kind of regulation, one more narrowly tailored to the forms of protection consumers actually want and need. Should we consider the way competition operates, it will prove no surprise that the spontaneously emerging regulations of freed markets better serve the ostensible aims of legitimate consumer safety.

If it seems to be too easy for we libertarians to assert that markets simply regulate themselves, consider that in fact it is competitors who are continually regulating each other. Doubtless in a free market these competitors could band together, voluntarily forming monopolistic trusts in order to squeeze consumers. But free and open competition sans coercive barriers to entry disincentives this at every turn, whereas the arbitrary power of central government agencies virtually guarantees that the politically connected will use agencies’ rule-making authority to destroy potential competitors and accordingly form cartels.

If coercive, anti-competitive monopolies are our fear — as indeed they ought to be — we might be especially hesitant to embrace still more centralized power, to trust important decisions to the few as opposed to distributing them through networks. Under a system of genuine freedom of competition, both information and economic power are more widely and even distributed as a result of constant testing and recalibration.

Individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker even thought that competition, fully realized and unrestricted, would be powerful enough to wipe out rent, interest and profit, sources of income regarded as not based on labor. Indeed, Tucker regarded himself as a socialist in a time before that the term came to be defined in such a way as to preclude champions of free markets.

Whether or not we agree with Tucker’s prediction, certainly a free, decentralized economy — or, more accurately, network of economies — would serve consumers better than the handful of corporate titans we have at present. US history, especially in the 20th century, seems clearly to demonstrate that concentrated governmental power actually aids and abets concentrated commercial power rather than curbing it.

Fewer restrictions and regulations would mean a more vigorous, sturdy U.S. economy and more opportunity for the most disadvantaged people in American society. Such is an agenda that both left and right, Democrats and Republicans, should want to get behind, and it is an agenda that the state and its courtiers will fight at every chance.

But in this discussion, some key aspects of the way our capitalist system operates have become crystal clear. When Uber arrived in Seattle in direct contravention of city laws, the system did not react the way it does when a street pharmacist arrives in Seattle in direct contravention of city laws, or when an unlicensed barbershop opens, or a wildcat food truck is spotted. Rather than immediate and forceful enforcement of the law, the government dithered. Special sessions of the city council were held. A special committee thereof was formed. The press reverberated with debates on whether or not Uber and Lyft should be let alone or shut down or somehow accommodated without undoing the city’s taxi laws. KUOW, our local NPR station, regaled its mostly well-to-do audience with roundtables and interviews on what the city government should do.

Why is this? If I, a nurse, started selling my health care services outside the state licensed and approved system, if I put an ad on Craigslist advertising my nursing services to anyone who wanted to pay me directly without bothering to get all the mandated licenses and insurance and certifications, I would lose my nursing license and face stiff fines with very little palaver, and certainly no hour-long roundtables on KUOW. But Uber does not get this treatment. Why?

For exactly the same reason that centuries-old standards of liability were hastily undone in the late 19th century — because capital demands it. Once upon a time, individuals and companies were liable for their actions to the full extent of the damage done, but this simply would not do for the industrialists of the Gilded Age. Without the ability to belch filth into the air and pour it into the water, how could they make money? How could they survive if every peasant or proletarian with a respiratory problem from their factories’ soot could sue and win? “New” standards had to be developed.

The removal of old-fashioned obstacles to capital’s new way of generating profits was the most pressing issue of the age, and the solution was found in the regulatory state, which established both a presumption of innocence if minimum standards were met and capped liability if any harm was found. Even today, these laws protect corporations from the full consequences of their actions, as we saw in Louisiana after the BP spill and as we are seeing today in British Columbia, where the oil industry is lobbying hard to keep their liability cap intact.

And so the same pattern holds with Uber. Cab medallions are stupid, a vicious and damaging relic that actively harms the poor for the benefit of the wealthy investors who can afford to buy them. But when they weren’t harming anyone but the poor, no one cared to discuss them. The odd libertarian or anti-poverty activist might have raised the issue now and again, but the mass media was totally uninterested and no special committees of the city council were formed. But now, they impede capital. Now, wealthy men want to make money, and cab medallions are in the way. So now, cab medallions are an issue.

Should we hail this development as proof of an alliance between capital and freedom? Should we salute Uber as heroes of the struggle for liberation? Absolutely not. Uber is utterly dependent on different forms of state privilege — most obviously intellectual property laws, which protect its trademarks and its app, but also and more fundamentally the state’s monopoly provision of free-at-the-point-of-use roads, along with its certification of cars and drivers as “safe.” Uber is a state capitalist enterprise just as the cab companies are, and this is not a strategic alliance but a momentary convergence of interests- they need something done, and we have arguments that can help them. Of course cab medallions should be abolished. But we should not be content with letting capital set the agenda and call the tune.

Why Uber and Lyft Are Better Than Nothing

If the mainstream libertarian endorsements of Uber and Lyft are unwarrantedly enthusiastic, the liberal criticisms are utterly wrong-headed.

The anarchist opposition is somewhat understandable, if still irrational. The most important site of contention between Uber and Lyft and the anarchist community is in Oakland, set against the preexisting background of ideological polarization between the local anarchist community and Silicon Valley — expressed among other things by sabotage of the Google Bus — over gentrification and skyrocketing rents. So it’s only natural that the ride-sharing controversy would be fitted into the Bay Area anti-gentrification narrative.

But no matter how justified the grievances over gentrification, even the genuine Left’s objections to these services are misguided. The arguments from establishment liberals and “Progressives” are much worse.

To begin with, anyone on the genuine Left should be opposed to the medallion cab system on principle. It’s entirely understandable that liberals would reflexively support anything that can be characterized as “regulating business,” because in their goo-goo worldview all economic regulations by definition serve to rein in corporate greed and restrict misbehavior by the “malefactors of great wealth,” all in the name of “working families.” Liberalism sees itself, as quintessential liberal Art Schlesinger Jr. put it, as “the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community.” But in reality liberals are the dupes of big business, just as (in the classic “Baptists and Bootleggers” scenario) fundamentalist preachers who lobby to keep counties dry are the useful idiots for those who sell bootleg whiskey. You may have heard the (perhaps apocryphal) anecdote of the whiskey bootlegger who plastered his car with bumper stickers: “Keep _____ County Dry — For the Sake of My Children!”

But anarchists should not be so naive. Anarchists know, or should know, that the state is the executive committee of an economic ruling class. The main thing the state does is enforce entry barriers against competition, enforce artificial scarcities and artificial property rights, and socialize operating costs and risk and privatize profit. Regulations may be passed off as measures to restrain big business avarice for the “common good,” but most of the time they’re actually passed in the interests of the regulated industries themselves, in order to protect them from competition.

And the medallion system is a classic example of this. It’s a lot like the FCC’s licensing system, in which a finite number of licenses were originally granted; as this limited supply of licenses was bought and sold over the ensuring decades, the price of a license soared into the stratosphere, to the point that simply buying a license to broadcast — never mind building the actual broadcast facility — was a huge capital investment limited to the big players. The medallion system works the same way. In a big city like New York, the local government issues a fixed number of licenses, which are subsequently bought and sold by cab companies. The price of a medallion — the price of simply being allowed to compete, mind you, not the actual necessary costs of doing business — is around a million dollars. And as you can imagine, existing cab companies are the loudest and most strident voices against increasing the number of medallions and allowing more competition.

That’s one of the main things licensing regimes do. They don’t just set minimum safety and quality standards, and allow anyone who meets those standards to enter the competitive marketplace (although even then members of the licensed trade or business lobby to make the standards unnecessarily stringent just to restrict the number of practitioners). They actually set a legal limit on the number of licenses that can be issued, based on calculations — set mainly by the influence of the regulated industry — of “what the market will bear.”

Anyone who believes this serves the public welfare, and not the welfare of the taxicab industry, is just plain stupid. We know liberals are just plain stupid. But anarchists and others on the genuine Left should know better.

A central criticism of Uber and Lyft is that they can’t do the poor any good, because they’re available only to those who have credit cards and can afford smart phones. But as a matter of fact, 47% of those with incomes of $30,000 or below own smart phones. That really shouldn’t be surprising, considering it makes economic sense for people with limited incomes to bundle phone service, email and Web browsing into a single service package in lieu of a desktop PC.

In any case, criticizing ride-sharing services on the grounds that they only serve those who have smart phones and credit cards reflects a basic misunderstanding of how competition works. Even if the very poor can’t afford Uber and Lyft, the fact that people who can do so desert the established medallion cab companies puts more competitive pressure on those companies, both to lower their prices and eliminate discriminatory practices.

A reduced pool of customers for the legacy cab companies, relative to the number of cabs in service, will mean increased competition for the customers who remain. Most people have heard anecdotes of, or directly experienced, cabs ignoring would-be fares who are members of racial minorities or otherwise regarded as “undesirable” by cabbies. They do so because the pool of competing fares is large enough for them to pick and choose. Reduce the size of that pool, and they must be less picky and nicer to those who remain.

At the same time, the competition exerts downward pressure on prices, and reduces the monopoly rents accruing to medallion cab companies. The pricing of taxicabs, in which the number of competitors in the markets is artificially restricted by the state, follows the same pattern that Henry George described in regard to land rent. Since there’s a growing number of people with more money bidding up the price of a fixed supply, the suppliers can price their product based not on the cost of providing the service, but on the consumer’s ability to pay. When you have more fares, and a larger percentage of them economically well off, competing for a fixed supply of cabs, they bid the price up. By definition, monopoly rent is an amount of money over and above what would be necessary as an incentive for the seller to bring their good to market. So if you reduce the number of competing customers and the amount of money available for them to spend, the seller must reduce the price to the consumer’s ability to pay — and the cab companies must eat the loss in the form of reduced profit, just as anything that reduces land rent comes out of the landlord’s pocket.

Some liberal criticism of the new ride-sharing firms is based on what amounts to an aesthetic affinity for managerialism and hierarchy, and a nostalgia for the high-overhead mass-production economic model of the mid-20th century. A good example is Rebecca Schuman (“It’s fine if you’re a Technolibertarian, just don’t pretend it’s progressive,” Pan Kisses Kafka, May 7), who is the education editor at Slate. Here we see the essential nature of establishment liberalism — both Hamiltonian and Schumpeterian. Despite all the greenwashed additions to “Progressivism” — the “think locally” and “small is beautiful” stuff — the core of “Progressivism” is still mid-20th century liberalism.

When I say liberalism is Schumpeterian, I mean it views the giant, hierarchical institution — as such — as inherently “progressive.” Joseph Schumpeter himself believed that monopoly capitalism was ideal for technological progress, because the size and market power of a monopoly corporation enabled it to fund large-scale R&D efforts, and pass on the cost to the public through administered cost-plus pricing. John Kenneth Galbraith — perhaps the patron saint of mid-20th century liberalism — saw the giant corporation’s central planning capabilities and immunity from market competition as the work of a “benign providence.” Liberals since have tended to view the large corporation as potentially more progressive than small, local and decentralized alternatives:  They’re large enough to be willing and able to afford regulatory compliance and relatively decent wage and benefit packages, because they can pass all the costs on to the consumer through monopoly pricing.

Hence Michael Moore’s nostalgia for a world where General Motors owned half the economy, but anyone who worked for them had a job for life with decent union wages. And hence the nostalgia — illustrated by Rachel Maddow’s spots filmed in front of the Hoover Dam — for an era in which a gigantic state fostered industrial gigantism by building enormous blockbuster projects like hydroelectric dams and the Interstate Highway System, whose main purpose was to subsidize big business and absorb surplus investment capital and surplus production capacity.

Democratic “Progressives,” in short, are every bit as pro-corporate as Tom Delay and Dick Armey; they just want an economy of liberal corporate giants run by managerial bureaucrats like Alfred Sloane and Bob McNamara, rather than a corporate economy run by cowboy CEOs downsizing their workforces and maximizing their bonuses.

At the same time, they’re Hamiltonian. That means the central focus of their agenda is anti-deflationary. The central feature of Alexander Hamilton’s policy, as Secretary of the Treasury, was to buy up all Continental war bonds at face value, even though their value on the securities market had depreciated in most areas to something like 3% of their initial price. It was a policy to keep the assets of the rentier classes — capitalists — from depreciating in value.

Since the late 19th century, industrial capitalism has been chronically plagued with a crisis of excess production capacity and surplus investment capital. Both parties, from the turn of the 20th century, have pursued policies to combat these tendencies by using the state’s purchasing power to utilize spare production capacity, or funding giant construction projects to soak up surplus investment capital. One of the main purposes of deficit spending, besides increasing aggregate demand to combat the tendency toward overproduction, is to give surplus capital a guaranteed profitable outlet in the form of U.S. bonds. The perpetual warfare state, government-funded blockbuster projects like the Interstate Highways (and the mass suburbanization and car culture that grew out of them) and the industrial model centered on waste and planned obsolescence, all are ways to make sure that the state engages directly in waste production, or encourages waste production, in order to guarantee sufficient demand for capital and labor to keep stock prices and dividends prices and maintain full employment.

Both liberals and conservatives pursue variants of the same Hamiltonian policy. Conservatives disavow Keynesianism with their mouths, while pouring money into military spending and subsidies to the car culture just as much as Democrats (although they’re more concerned about keeping up full demand for capital than for labor). Liberals, on the other hand, enthusiastically embrace Hamiltonianism.

Either way, the idea is to create as much subsidized waste as necessary, in the form of planned obsolescence or protecting inefficient production methods from competition, to keep capital and labor fully employed. This means embracing what amounts to a Rube Goldberg economy of subsidized waste, with everybody running in hamster wheels, or digging holes and filling them back in again, so that everybody has a full-time job and 401ks keep going up.

So the Hamiltonian agenda — doing things as inefficiently as possible in order to fully utilize labor and capital — is fundamentally at odds with technologies of radical abundance. We of the free market Left want to use technologies of abundance to destroy the rent-extracting capabilities of the old corporate dinosaur industries, and do things with the lowest possible material and labor inputs. But we want to eliminate all monopolies, artificial property rights and artificial scarcities, and all the resulting embedded rents in the prices of goods and services, so that competition socializes all the cost savings of increased efficiency instead of letting capitalists enclose them as a source of profit. We want to eliminate the portion of housing cost that comes from absentee titles that hold vacant land out of use and from the way housing codes (written mainly by contractors) criminalize both new cheap modular housing designs and older vernacular methods. We want to eliminate the 95% of medicine cost that comes from drug patents, and the portion of the price of manufactured goods (probably a majority of it) that comes from imbedded “intellectual property” rents rather than the cost of labor and materials. We want to eliminate all the legal barriers to replacing some portion of our wage labor with low-overhead production in our own homes, using the spare capacity of household goods we already own (including our cars).

Let’s get something straight: Criminalizing self-employment isn’t “progressive.” Economic exploitation is what results when the employing class uses the state to close off workers’ access to the means of production and subsistence, so that employers no longer have to compete against the opportunity for self-employment, direct production for use, and comfortable subsistence in the informal sector. That’s the reason capitalist farmers in England pushed for the Enclosure of common pasture, waste, wood and fen — because the peasantry would only work at agricultural wage labor for as long and as cheap as the employers wanted if they were robbed of alternatives.

Schuman’s article illustrates both the Schumpeterian and Hamiltonian tendencies in spades. Consider her comments on Airbnb:

The “middleman” in the hotel world is the government, sure, but it’s also the thousands upon thousands of lower-wage workers who depend upon hotels for survival, from reservation agents to housekeepers. Those “annoying” hotel taxes that you pay go to provide resources for everyone in the city–resources you use while you’re visiting, and resources that are available to everyone, including the poor. The “sharing” economy means “sharing” wealth and resources, but only between “deserving” people. Everyone else gets cut out, and becomes even more forgotten and invisible than before.

So her ideal is to prop up enormously inefficient, bureaucratic corporate dinosaurs because they keep as many wage workers as possible on retainer — to do everything in as high-overhead a way as possible, so that everyone in society can be employed. The average person’s house and car are by far their biggest capital assets — capital assets that are often far from fully utilized. Being able to use one’s car to transport other people outside the taxicab companies’ monopoly, or host someone overnight in an extra bedroom outside the hotels’ regulated monopoly, is a way that ordinary people can use the spare capacity of their own capital assets, in the informal economy, to support themselves directly outside the wage system, and reduce their dependence on wage income, and increase their bargaining power against their bosses, to the extent that they are able to shift a portion of their wage income to self-employment.

Schuman doesn’t want this. Just like the capitalist farmers of England in the 18th century, she wants to force everyone into the cash nexus: everyone working for wages, for a boss, in order to earn the money to buy stuff from companies that pay other people to make and do stuff. No “masterless men” or cottagers living off the waste without a landlord’s permission for her. She is an ideological kinswoman to the pioneers of mass-advertising in the ’20s and ’30s who stigmatized homemade bread and home-grown tomatoes as “old-fashioned,” and the people at Nestle who convinced women in India that infant formula was modern and up-to-date.

Ironically enough, one of her commenters tried to demonstrate their street cred as a “Progressive” (brave, reverent and clean) by mentioning that they made as many of their own clothes as possible. What?! What about all the employees of the apparel industry? What about the employees of the brick-and-mortar clothing retailers? What about the taxes on store-bought clothing that go to fund those resources used by everyone? A real liberal wouldn’t do anything for herself in the informal sector that could be bought on the cash nexus. I’m just shaking my head in disgust at this crime against Schumpeterian and Hamiltonian orthodoxy.

At the same time, this model of enforced middlemen, with high bureaucratic overhead, unnecessary capital outlays and subsidized waste, is the reason that “comfortable subsistence is impossible” (Ivan Illich) and “it costs 300% or 400% times more to make or do anything” (Paul Goodman). You know, Ivan Illich and Paul Goodman — those right-wing Randroid Tea-Partiers, just like Pyotr Kropotkin.

It’s the same ideology that makes liberals like Joe Biden want to use the power of the police state to stamp out file-sharing and enforce the “intellectual property” monopolies that the gatekeeping function of the movie and record industries and the big publishing houses depend on, so they can maintain enormous office buildings full of people getting paid wages to do what anyone can now do at home with a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and software.

On top of all that, she just gets so much wrong because her liberal aesthetics make her tone deaf. She’s typical of managerial-centrist liberals who mistake themselves for the “Left,” and see reflexively dismiss anything horizontal or decentralist as “right-wing.” Much like Thomas Frank, another totally clueless managerial-centrist, she lumps together as “Technolibertarian” currents as disparate as ’90s-style Dotcom capitalism a la Bill Gates and the free culture movement of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and The Pirate Bay — never mind that the two are at odds, and the latter is actually the nucleus of the post-capitalist successor society.

And given her ideological predilection to see anything identified with “government” or “regulation” as ipso facto “Progressive” and “anti-business,” she’s utterly incapable of perceiving the capitalist nature of the regulatory regime. For example:

…what’s got these startup circle-jerks particularly Ayn Randy is that these “sharing” services have cut out the middleman–i.e. the evil government that evilly taxes and regulates what should be left entirely to consumers and the invisible hand of the market.

Um, no. The middleman is the evil taxicab companies that use the government to evilly protect them from competition and evilly price-gouge.

So Schuman’s idea of “Progressivism” is enforcing the monopolies that enable giant corporations to extract rent, protecting the wage system against self-employment, and forcing everyone into the cash nexus.

Because they’ve drunk so much of their own “Democrats Care” and “The Government Is Us” Kool-Aid, liberals like Schuman are absolutely ideal as dupes for capitalist rent extraction. They have been completely socialized into the official ideology of the capitalist state. The central means by which capitalists extract profit from workers and consumers is the artificial property rights, artificial scarcities and entry barriers enforced by the state. And liberals, with their naive acceptance at face value of any regulation purportedly aimed at restricting business misbehavior, are the best shills corporate interests could ever have for promoting their interests.

Liberals like Rebecca Schuman make the best capitalist apologists of all.

Why Uber and Lyft are Nevertheless Evil and Must Be Destroyed

Nevertheless, Uber and Lyft must be supplanted and destroyed. They are commonly viewed as p2p services, but they are in fact capitalist corporations masquerading as peer-to-peer. They are guilty of the very same crimes as the medallion cab companies — only they use “intellectual property” rather than local licensing regulations to extract rents from their drivers and customers. Uber and Lyft are proprietary, walled garden systems. And I suspect that, if someone came up with an open-source app that directly linked drivers and riders without a corporation skimming off the top, local governments would hit it — unlike Uber and Lyft — like a ton of bricks.

So what do we do? Call in the state to regulate Uber and Lyft? Yeah, that worked out so well with the medallion system. Adam Smith wrote that whenever the state undertakes to regulate relations between workmen and their masters, it has the masters for its counselors; and likewise, when it undertakes to regulate business, it has the business owners as its counselors.

No. As Director James Tuttle of Center for a Stateless Society (the outfit that pays me to write this) says, there are three things we need to do: “hack the app, salt the service, fight the competition with better competition.” That is, we create free and open-source, cooperative alternatives to the proprietary walled garden systems, and if necessary take a black market approach to do as much of it as possible outside the state’s surveillance. We salt the corporate ride-sharing services, Wobbly-style, with drivers who will agitate and organize against Uber and Lyft, and fight to reduce the share of their labor-product the corporations skim off the top. We do to Uber and Lyft what Uber and Lyft are doing to the medallion cab companies — but we make what they did to the cab companies look like a kiss by comparison.

Al writes:

In economics, both orthodox Communism and Libertarianism are equally wrong, callous, and dangerous examples of ideological blindness, a set of principles taken to an extreme that caused many people to die. Both are more alike than either set of fanatics (as both set of true believers are) would want to admit. Both fall back on the same defense of “there has never been a true or pure form”of their system. Both systems clearly failed. Communism only lasted 70 years in the first nation to have it, and killed tens of millions with purely man made famines and extreme repression. Libertarianism and its influence on US conservatism takes the greatest share of blame for extreme economic inequality, the Great Recession, and most financial elite crime waves of the past 30 years.

As usual with many critics, he fails to take account of different brands of libertarianism. He only refers to a seemingly singular “libertarianism”. This will be written from a left-libertarian market anarchist perspective. The cliched “you claim your system has never existed in pure form” is trotted out. Democracy has probably never existed in pure form either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t viable. There have been particular libertarian policies implemented with some success such as drug decriminalization. It may be true that the full libertarian package has never existed in systematic form, but this doesn’t mean it can’t exist. Liberal democratic societies never did and now do.

It’s partially unfair to pin economic inequality on libertarians, because they have hardly been in charge. Some libertarians will justify inequality, but there is good reason to think that freed markets would produce less inequality. That will be the subject of a future blog post. As for blaming the Great Recession on libertarianism; it’s once again worth pointing out that libertarians aren’t in charge. A detailed examination of why libertarians aren’t to blame for economic recessions or depressions will have to come later though. Libertarians oppose fraud by financial elites or anyone else, so it’s silly to blame us for the crime wave emanating from said people.

The question then becomes, to what degree should there be a mixed system? The slogans of libertarians and many conservatives that “government is the problem” or “regulation doesn’t work” are easily proven wrong, and fairly foolish falsehoods.

Conservative protestations against government are often hypocritical and insincere. It’s also true that these questions require defining what constitutes a problem and by what standard of value doesn’t regulation work. The New Leftist historian, Gabriel Kolko, documented the purpose regulations served in concentrating economic power and resources:

As Gabriel Kolko demonstrates in his masterly The Triumph of Conservatism and in Railroads and Regulation, the dominant trend in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth was not towards increasing centralization, but rather, despite the growing number of mergers and the growth in the overall size of many corporations,

toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial leaders, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible trends under control. … As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could [control and stabilize] the economy. … Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly which caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.1

He also writes:

This article argues some basic humanitarian principles should be applied to economics and the human and humane spheres or politics, ones so obvious it seems absurd to have to make them explicit:

1. Helping people obviously helps people more than not helping them.

2. Watching out for and preventing or stopping abuse and harm is obviously better than not watching and not stopping abuse and harm, or even refusing to look and denying harm exists.

3. Generosity and selflessness are obviously better than stinginess and selfishness,

4. Democratic control obviously is better than elite control.

There is nothing in these four points that a libertarian could not embrace. There are ways of helping people that don’t require government or state intervention. These approaches are known as mutual aid societies. The prevention and stopping of abuse is compatible with libertarianism, because we believe said action is a justifiable response to rights violations. Some libertarians are egoists, but this is not the only ethical viewpoints that has been adopted. The rational egoist definition of selfishness as elaborated by Ayn Rand is not what you typically refer to as egoism. It pertains to not sacrificing others to yourself or yourself to others. Libertarians have an admittedly uneasy relationship with democracy, but the left-wing market anarchist position is democratic in the sense that it grants everyone an equal right to control their own lives and make decisions affecting them. That’s all for now. Stay tuned for my next blog post on this article!

Oggi finalmente questa eterna, dolorosa distorsione sta per dissolversi. Con una complicazione, però: l’edificio sta crollando non tanto per lo sforzo delle organizzazioni di base, ma attraverso il potere di due giganteschi speculatori, Uber e Lyft, che con un proprio capitale politico sono in grado di contrastare gli interessi monopolistici radicati in varie città.

Uber e Lyft non sono santi, e per molti versi anche loro confidano sui privilegi di stato. Le riserve inimmaginabili di capitali speculativi che li proteggono dalle pressioni del lavoro organizzato e della comunità affondano le radici nelle enormi rendite estratte con la proprietà intellettuale e il settore bancario. Questi profitti non esisterebbero senza l’aiuto armato dello stato. Il modello imprenditoriale dei Uber e Lyft, inoltre, prevede che gli utenti – in questo caso i tassisti che vogliono essere indipendenti – siano rinchiusi in “giardini murati” centralizzati online al fine di estrarne la rendita.

A parte ciò, però, il fatto che sfruttino carenze delle normative dei taxi e l’apertura della professione ad autisti indipendenti che non hanno pagato cifre esorbitanti è indubbiamente positivo. Certo, niente garantisce che Uber e Lyft non cercheranno di mettersi d’accordo tra loro per tagliar fuori la concorrenza, così da poter depredare clienti e aspiranti tassisti dalle possibilità limitate, ma le porte della concorrenza, basata su un modello più decentrato e cooperativo, sono state aperte. Le cose stanno finalmente cambiando.

Purtroppo tutto ciò è stato accolto con sdegno dalle fila meno radicali della sinistra.

È comprensibile che i tassisti che si sono già imbarcati in grossi investimenti con le attuali normative siano atterriti all’idea che la professione possa essere aperta agli esterni. La concorrenza farà sicuramente calare le tariffe, e con le regole attuali, con tutto quello che devono pagare tra controlli e norme, molti tassisti riescono a malapena a pareggiare i conti. E anche se riuscissero a liberarsi dalla rete di predatori che attualmente li avvolge per servirsi delle nuove possibilità, vedere che altri entrano nell’attività senza oneri può essere umiliante.

Il tentativo di spacciare le normative dei taxi per garanzia di “professionalità” non è che l’ultimo capitolo nella storia di sindacati conservatori che fanno guerra ad altri lavoratori, invece che ai boss e allo stato, cercando di limitare l’accesso al lavoro con mezzi come le leggi che proibiscono agli immigrati di svolgere certi lavori “per questioni di standard”. È questa mentalità miope che dà la precedenza a chi ha già un lavoro e manda a quel paese tutti gli altri.

Nel tentativo di salvare i posti di lavoro esistenti, la sinistra ingenua finisce per proteggere il lavoro salariato in sé.

Se si vuole una vera soluzione radicale bisogna smettere di aspettare lo stipendio che arriva dall’alto; bisogna smettere di stare attaccati ai datori di lavoro, in attesa che arrivi la rivoluzione nel lontano futuro. Occorre invece generare lavoro per conto proprio. In un mondo in cui la gente ha creatività e capacità, l’insensatezza della disoccupazione e della precarietà di massa sono possibili soltanto se si permette ai guardiani di stabilire chi può fare qualcosa per gli altri. Questo è l’inevitabile effetto perverso delle “normative” della sinistra; quelle che permettono ai parrucchieri di fare lobby per vietare ad una persona di fare le trecce in cambio di denaro se non spende migliaia di dollari per una certificazione.

In un’epoca in cui abbondano guide del consumatore affidabili e largamente diffuse come Yelp, oltre a sistemi di certificazione decentrati, l’urlo disperato degli statalisti, “Occorre una regolamentazione!”, è morto e sepolto. Ciò che impedisce servizi e condizioni di lavoro standard sono le oligarchie. Le barriere all’ingresso e le finte scarsità create in punta di fucile (di poliziotto) non sono amiche della classe lavoratrice, e chi a sinistra le difende è incoerente e reazionario.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

The researchers focused on jobs in Utah with median yearly earnings below $40,000 (the state’s average) so as to exclude doctors, lawyers, financial professionals, accountants and other specialized professions that are universally licensed. As Economics 21 explains:

The authors then determined the primary gender of those who worked in the thirteen occupations that fell in this category. Their results are clear— in Utah. Approximately 70 percent of the people who needed licenses to work in these professions were women. Of the 13 occupations examined, 9 licensed more women than men and 6 were over 80 percent female. These occupations included dietitians (98 percent female), court reporters (80 percent), cosmetologists (94 percent), and estheticians (96 percent), to name a few.

Similar results can be seen in public interest law firm Institute for Justice’s state-by-state rankings of licensing requirements. The firm regularly fights on behalf of women whose livelihoods are endangered by regulators. For example, even though African hair braiding involves zero dangerous chemicals or implements, Dr. JoAnne Cornwell faced losing her business, Sisterlocks, because she hadn’t spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours learning irrelevant, outdated techniques. The truth is Cornwell had developed a new method of braiding which threatened existing businesses. IJ was successful in striking down the arbitrary, cronyist legislation.

According to IJ, the profession with the most onerous licensing requirements out of all the low- and moderate-skill professions is interior design, an overwhelming female field. To design interiors in Nevada, Louisiana, Florida, or the District of Columbia costs $364 and an average of six years of required experience. But it’s hard to understand how ugly rooms threaten public safety.

Right now IJ is fighting for Trisha Eck’s right to allow her customers to use her teeth whitener in her office, though a board of Georgia dentists wants to shut her business down. And in Arizona, Celeste Kelly and IJ are fighting for her right to operate her animal massage business.

There’s abundant evidence that attempts to mandate equal pay can actually hurt women. Legislation always carries with it unintended consequences, no matter how well-intentioned.

The truth is neither side has it right. The left says the gender wage gap results from discrimination. The evidence for this is shaky at best. The right says the gender wage gap can be chalked up to women’s choices. But this doesn’t take into account how government-mandated barriers such as the high cost of child care and occupational licensing laws influence those choices.

Who knows what choices women might make if they were allowed to work without needing permission slips from, essentially, their competitors? There can be no doubt that up-front costs of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to even get started in a profession effectively thwarts many women’s career hopes and dreams. By ignoring the problem of women’s underutilization in the work force, or trying to fix it with overbroad, blunt legislation, we miss opportunities to fight to simply government out of the way so women can succeed.

Ralph Nader discusses a potential left-right alliance.

Vincent Navarro discusses the Mondragon worker cooperatives in Spain.

James Peron discusses how people who hate gays also hate capitalists in the context of the businesses refusing to discriminate against them.

Qatryk interviews Roderick Long in Poland.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the death penalty.

Danny Haiphong discusses the left flank of U.S. imperialism and respectability.

Kevin Carson discusses May Day.

Kevin Carson discusses the governmentalist educational establishment and equality.

Stefan Haus discusses the rise of the right in Europe.

Ron Keine discusses why ending the death penalty should be a conservative priority.

Sheldon Richman discusses how the U.S. blew a chance to reconcile with Iran.

Tessie Castillo discusses a Georgia mother who arrested her own daughter for heroin.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses racism in government programs.

Sheldon Richman discusses the thick and thin libertarian debate.

Travis Wilson discusses why he uses the word voluntarylist rather than anarchist or libertarian.

Ron Jacobs discusses the failure of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Mateo Pimentel discusses the U.S. embargo on Cuba.

Justin Raimondo discusses the non-interventionist sentiment among the American populace.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the continuing Cold War against Cuba.

Zenon Evans discusses the drug testing of teens at three private high schools by a company with a CEO that is a brother of the principal of SEHS.

Robert Fantina discusses U.S. terrorism against Cuba.

Steve Chapman discusses the secrets and lies of the American drone war.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the ticking time bomb scenario and torture.

Cathy Reisenwitz discusses how government created the campus rape crisis.

Christopher Westley discusses e-cig manufacturers who support regulation.

David Stockman discusses why the warfare state must be dismantled.

Magnus Carlsen beats Anand before the World Chess Championship.

Magnus Carlsen beats Boris Gelfand.

After discussing Benjamin Tucker’s four big monopolies, the next big thing to discuss is that of contemporary mutualist/individualist anarchist – Kevin Carson. I already made use of some of his stuff, but I want to highlight the innovations of Kevin.

Kevin discusses how government subsidies to transportation help big corporate interests ship long distance. This leads to artificially big markets and centralized economic actors. The ensuing concentration of wealth leads to more inequality in the economy. As Kevin puts it:

Spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to “externalize its costs” on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses.

He goes on to describe the centralizing effect of state built and funded infrastructure:

Every wave of concentration of capital in the United States has followed a publicly subsidized infrastructure system of some sort. The national railroad system, built largely on free or below-cost land donated by the government, was followed by concentration in heavy industry, petrochemicals, and finance.

He also engages in novel thinking about economic value theory. His notion is one of a subjective labor theory of value. An integration of the labor approach to value theory with the Austrian subjective approach. He states:

A producer will continue to bring his goods to market only if he receives a price necessary, in his subjective evaluation, to compensate him for the disutility involved in producing them. And he will be unable to charge a price greater than this necessary amount, for a very long time, if market entry is free and supply is elastic, because competitors will enter the field until price equals the disutility of producing the final increment of the commodity.

Other aspects of this approach to economics worth mentioning includes the effect of regulatory government or the state. The consequences of said regulations tend to involve the creation of oligopolies and monopolies. They remove areas of quality or safety from competition and thus produce standardized “markets” without dynamism. Roy Childs Jr. made use of the New Leftist historian, Gabriel Kolko’s work to drive home this point:

As Gabriel Kolko demonstrates in his masterly The Triumph of Conservatism and in Railroads and Regulation, the dominant trend in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth was not towards increasing centralization, but rather, despite the growing number of mergers and the growth in the overall size of many corporations,

toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial leaders, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible trends under control. … As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could [control and stabilize] the economy. … Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly which caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.1

Other types of economic interventionism that benefit corporate actors include direct taxpayer funded subsidies or corporate welfare. A report mentioned on Alternet discuses how the Fortune 100 companies have recently received 1.2 trillion dollars in corporate welfare. Economic interventionism also takes the form of the U.S. military forcibly opening up markets for U.S. businesses. This is mistakenly considered a part of “free trade”. It’s also worth mentioning the use of the police or military to break strikes as a form of pro-business interventionism. This was particularly true of the allegedly free market gilded age.

What does all the above say about the primary role of the state or government as an actor within the economy? It supports the idea that the state or the government is the executive committee of an economic ruling class to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx. It may also engage in secondary activities like the provision of social welfare for the poor and unemployed, but the level of support is far below that given to dominant corporate actors which often have a multinational reach. These actions don’t mean the state or government generally genuinely cares about the well-being of the least well off. The primary actions of the state or government serve to concentrate money in gthe hands of a ruling class. The secondary ones attempt to clean up the mess created by the drastic inequality created. That ends our analysis. Until next time!

Today, finally, this remarkably sharp and long lasting perversion is on the verge of being dissolved. Yet there’s a twist: The dam is breaking not through the longstanding efforts of grassroots organizers, but through the power of two venture capitalist juggernauts, Uber and Lyft, with their own political capital capable of contesting the entrenched monopoly interests in various cities.

Uber and Lyft are not saints, in many ways they too rely on the state privileges. The unimaginable reserves of venture capitalist money that protects them from labor or community pressures have their roots in the extreme rents extracted from the intellectual property and banking sectors, profit that wouldn’t exist without the gun of the state. Further the business models of Uber and Lyft involve corralling users — in this case would-be independent taxi drivers — into centralized “walled gardens” online and extracting rents.

Nevertheless their exploit of holes in taxi regulations and opening up of the profession to independent drivers who haven’t paid exorbitant fees is an unqualified positive. While there’s no guarantee Uber and Lyft won’t eventually try to cut their own deal to exclude competition and enable them to prey on customers and would-be drivers with limited options, their steps have opened the door to competitors with more decentralized or cooperative models. The tide is finally turning.

Sadly this has been greeted with outrage among the less-radical ranks of the left.

It’s understandable that taxi drivers who’ve already sunk a deep investment in the present regulation regime would be horrified at anything that might open the profession up to outsiders. The competition is certain to drive fares down, and in the present regulation regime many drivers are barely breaking even paying huge cuts of their income to dispatchers and regulators. Even if drivers could easily extricate themselves from the web of predatory ties that currently bind them and take advantage of new possibilities, watching others enter the industry without similar burdens can be galling.

Yet attempts to frame defences of taxi regulations as a matter of securing the “professionalism” of the industry are but the latest chapter in a long sad history of conservative unions fighting other workers rather than the bosses or the state by attempting to limit the labor pool through means such as laws that forbade immigrants from getting certain jobs “out of concern for standards”. In this incredibly short-sighted mindset organizing existing workers comes first and the devil take everyone else.

In the name of saving existing jobs the naive leftist ends up protecting the wage labor system itself.

The actual radical solution is to stop relying on bosses to provide us with income; not to cling to them tighter waiting for some distant revolution but to generate jobs ourselves. The insanity of mass unemployment and precarity in a creative able-bodied populace is only possible when gatekeepers control who’s allowed to do anything for anyone else. This is the inescapable perverse effect of liberal “regulation”; where hairdressers lobby to make it illegal to braid hair for money without spending thousands of dollars on a certification.

In an age of robust and widely-used consumer reports like Yelp and decentralized means of certification, the statist cry “How would you regulate that?!” has long grown defunct. What most imperils standards of service and working conditions are oligarchies. Barriers to entry and fake scarcities created at the point of a policeman’s gun are no friend of the working class, and leftists that defend them are incoherent and reactionary.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Barriere all’Ingresso e Finte Scarsità.