The US Department of Defense is the nation’s single largest consumer of fossil fuels. From arms production to the grand machines of war, the military emits more greenhouse gas than any other state institution. War also wrecks natural ecosystems. Ongoing interventions have damaged forests and wetlands across the Middle East. According to CostOfWar.org, Afghanistan has lost 38% of total forested area to illegal logging. This deforestation is associated with warlords who rise to power from the ashes of military campaigns that continually destabilize the region. This plunder eliminates beneficial ecosystem services to surrounding populations and gives rise to further conflict and violence as people are left with depleted resources. Forest loss also reduces the amount of available habitat for a number of species, including avian communities, currently experiencing a precipitous population decline — a dangerous precedent in the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

The state organism is continually exalted by those in positions of power as the only legitimate mechanism of social organization. We are told only the state can ensure peace and sustainability in an increasingly complex and ever fragile world. But given the role of the nation-state in the world, as an economic and military power, it is time to acknowledge the organism is a global threat to peace, security, liberty and the environment.

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La guerra non è compatibile con la sostenibilità. Per affrontare seriamente il cambiamento antropogenico occorre la pace.

Gli Stati Uniti sono in uno stato di guerra permanente. Il nuovo attacco dell’amministrazione Obama contro Isis ne è una prova ulteriore. Nessuna novità. Appena un anno fa alti rappresentanti dell’amministrazione dicevano al senato che esiste un “ampio consenso” sulla necessità di estendere le operazioni militari in Medio Oriente. Un altro decennio di guerra, forse due, in “forma illimitata”. E a quel punto gli Stati Uniti sarebbero a metà strada nella guerra al terrore globale. Così si diceva prima che l’Isis diventasse argomento da salotto.

Questo stato di guerra è responsabile del massacro di innocenti, dell’inasprimento del terrore e della distruzione; e tutto mentre si propaganda l’azione sul clima. Una cosa è certa: sul clima lo stato non sta andando a “battere un colpo”.

Il dipartimento americano della difesa è da solo il più grande consumatore nazionale di combustibili fossili. Dalla produzione di armi alle grandi macchine da guerra, le forze armate emettono più gas serra di ogni altra istituzione. Aggiungeteci la distruzione dell’ecosistema naturale portata dalla guerra. Gli attuali interventi hanno danneggiato il patrimonio forestale e lagunare in tutto il Medio Oriente. Secondo CostOfWar.org, l’Afganistan ha perso il 38% delle aree boschive a causa del taglio illegale. Questa deforestazione è legata ai signori della guerra che salgono al potere sulle ceneri delle campagne militari che continuano a destabilizzare la regione. Questo saccheggio elimina quei benefici che l’ecosistema dà alle popolazioni del luogo, generando scarsità di risorse che a sua volta fa nascere ulteriori conflitti e violenze. La riduzione della superficie boschiva, inoltre, restringe l’habitat di un gran numero di specie, compresi i volatili che attualmente subiscono un forte declino; un precedente pericoloso nel mezzo della sesta estinzione di massa.

Chi sta al potere esalta continuamente lo stato come unico sistema in grado di organizzare legittimamente la società. Ci dicono che solo lo stato può assicurare pace e sostenibilità in un mondo sempre più complesso e fragile. Dato il ruolo dello stato nazione come forza economica e militare, è ormai tempo di riconoscere la sua natura di minaccia mondiale alla pace, la sicurezza, la libertà e l’ambiente.

Lo stato non è in grado di agire sul clima. Lo stato nazione funziona come un essere razionale, mira al proprio interesse. Cerca di espandere il proprio potere, per lo più sfruttando le risorse naturali. Esiste un conflitto di interessi all’interno di uno stato: quello che ha più territorio è anche quello che ha più risorse disponibili al consumo. Ecco perché la guerra (che sia militare o economica) rappresenta il benessere dello stato: perché garantisce il monopolio su un territorio, e dunque sulle sue risorse.

Tutto questo mentre da 300 a 400 mila persone marciavano davanti alle Nazioni Unite e in tutto il mondo per chiedere protezione per l’ambiente. Il progresso inizia per strada, ma un vero cambiamento si può avere solo con con un’attività ambientalista quotidiana a livello di vicinato. Questo potere sociale può rendere inservibile lo stato con tutta la sua autorità illegittima. Non limitatevi a darvi una mossa. Marciate sulle ceneri del potere.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

War is incompatible with sustainability. Serious engagement of anthropogenic change demands peace.

The United States is a permanent wartime state. The Obama administration’s new military engagement with ISIS is yet another testament to the fact. This should be no surprise. Just over a year ago senior administration officials told the US Senate there exists a “broad consensus” that military operations in the Middle East are to be extended, in their “limitless form,” for at least another decade, possibly two, before adding the United States has reached only the midpoint in its global war on terror.  This was before ISIS became a topic of dinner table discussion.

This wartime state is responsible for the mass slaughter of innocents, exacerbation of global terror and property destruction — all while advancing anthropogenic climate change. Rest assured, the state will not be “going to bat” on climate.

The US Department of Defense is the nation’s single largest consumer of fossil fuels. From arms production to the grand machines of war, the military emits more greenhouse gas than any other state institution. War also wrecks natural ecosystems. Ongoing interventions have damaged forests and wetlands across the Middle East. According to CostOfWar.org, Afghanistan has lost 38% of total forested area to illegal logging. This deforestation is associated with warlords who rise to power from the ashes of military campaigns that continually destabilize the region. This plunder eliminates beneficial ecosystem services to surrounding populations and gives rise to further conflict and violence as people are left with depleted resources. Forest loss also reduces the amount of available habitat for a number of species, including avian communities, currently experiencing a precipitous population decline — a dangerous precedent in the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

The state organism is continually exalted by those in positions of power as the only legitimate mechanism of social organization. We are told only the state can ensure peace and sustainability in an increasingly complex and ever fragile world. But given the role of the nation-state in the world, as an economic and military power, it is time to acknowledge the organism is a global threat to peace, security, liberty and the environment.

States will not act on climate. Nation-states work as rational actors, advancing their own self interests. They seek the expansion their power, largely through the exploitation of natural resources. There is an inherent conflict of interest among states: The state with the most territory has the most resources for consumption. This is why war (be it military or economic) is the health of the state — it provides a monopoly over a territory and thus resources.

All of this, as 300 to 400 thousand people marched outside of the United Nations, and around the globe, to urge environmental protection. Progress starts in the streets, but true change requires everyday neighborhood environmentalism. Social power can render the state, and all of its illegitimate authority, useless. Don’t just step up to the plate. Stand on the ashes of power.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Azione sul Clima: Sulle Ceneri del Potere.

“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival … It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

Of course, Adams was correct. There are 4th of July celebrations all across the country — fully equipped with the activities mentioned in his letter plus tons of food and fireworks. Today, however, there is an urgent need for collective reflection on the all too important idea behind the holiday — liberty — and its unique history in the country.

A society rooted in liberty would be defined simply as (to borrow from Merriam Webster) one “free from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior or political views.” We in the United States enjoy degrees of freedom, but said freedom is not absolute. Furthermore, there currently exist aggressive barriers to achieving a free society (such as structural poverty and racism to name only a couple) and such barriers are institutionalized, protected and upheld by state power.

Social power, however, works in opposition to state power. Throughout our collective history, liberty has been achieved by people either working around power structures or directly engaging them, forcing change. Liberty is not the product of legislation, but the sum of human action. It is important to remember that patriotism is not allegiance to government or obedience to law, but rather defending and advocating moral positions in spite of the power structure.

There is something classically American about questioning authority and having distrust of large centralized governments. This tradition is experiencing a needed resurgence as of late, and along with it, so too are libertarian politics.

There are many libertarian “schools,” but in the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant American school, known as individualist anarchism, existed with other varieties. This tradition is gaining popularity again today in the form of market anarchism. Independent scholar Kevin Carson, in his landmark book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, describes this philosophy as free market anti-capitalism. Carson writes:

The classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner was both a socialist movement and a subcurrent of classical liberalism … Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to the increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a classical liberal movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic for the power of big business.

This tradition resists domination, violence and privilege because these societal attributes are violations of liberty and human dignity. The idea embraces markets that are crafted by the spontaneous order of inclined labor and holds that society can be organized around voluntary interactions. Anarchism is the belief that human beings are fundamentally good so as we pursue happiness in absolute liberty, our natural instincts for altruism and cooperation will produce a free and prosperous society. These ideas are self-evident and as American as apple pie. On this Independence Day light your bonfires, celebrate liberty and further embrace American anarchism.

When the British Go Association proposed to fund a strategy to promote the game and commissioned a study on its image, the result was surprising [PDF]: Go was described in the responses as too “difficult,” too “intellectual,” or simply “outside of reach” of the respondents. Part of this image problem could be due to the fact that its introduction in Europe and the US was led by mathematicians, physicists and engineers linked to the scientific vanguard and elite universities. Perhaps it also has something to do with how Go has been portrayed by North American cinema: A game which even geniuses like John Nash are incapable of mastering, overwhelmed by the “chaotic nature of the universe” that the game supposedly reflects.

What’s interesting is that there’s some truth to that. Ultimately, the main precursor of the game in England was none other than Alan Turing. While directing the famous team that would decipher the Enigma machine and create Colossus, the first computer in history, he was playing Go almost daily. The scene of Turing studying the goban [board], or inviting others to play, became so common that today, in Bletchley Park, his old office is decorated with a board and two baskets of stones. That was where he taught a young mathematician from Oxford to play – I. J. Good. Good would continue working — and playing — with Turing after the war in the famous studio in Manchester where The Baby and Mark 1, the first civilian computers, would be born.

He is considered the successor to Turing’s work, and we owe Good things as important as the Fast Fourier transform, surely the most used algorithm in history. Beyond informatics and Baysian statistics, the truth is that he had an interesting life, including milestones like the first theorization of the “technological singularity” and having advised Kubrick on HAL and the information systems in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

But in reality, Good had already become popular among restless young students years before the movie, when, in his column in the New Scientist of January 21, 1965, he published an article called “The mystery of Go.” Today, the British Go Association recognizes that article as the true beginning of the spread of the game in the islands, and a whole generation of players remembers it as the starting point of their attraction to the game.

The curiosity awakened by the article materialized in dozens of clubs, almost all linked to university environments in which the student movements of ’68 were brewing. The famous Arabist Robert Irwin tells in his memoir how “the craze for the Japanese game of Go was at its height,” and his alter ego, Harvey, star of the moment in the “Oxford Anarchist Society” teaches him to play and use shi, the logic of encircling, as a way of approaching discussions of all kinds.

Go In May Of ’68

Go is jumping from the science faculties to the social faculties, and from the islands to the continent. In 1965, a mathematics professor, Chevalley, that began playing the game because of Good’s article, teaches Jacques Roubaud to play. Roubard is one of the founders of the Oulipo group, and, though he will go down in history as a writer, a mathematician by training. Soon two more members join the group: Pierre Lusson and the great Georges Perec. Perec is captivated by the game, and in the middle of 1968, writes “The Disparition,” which uses more than a few metaphors that begin in situations on the board, and in 1969, with Lusson and Roubaud, the famous “Petit traité invitant à la découverte of l’art subtil du go.”

Although manuals had already been published in French, the book unleashes the interest of the young French intellectuals of the times, who take Go as symbolic of otherness, of the opposite of thought of traditional power symbolized by chess.

Go becomes something alternative and cool. Even a young North American science fiction writer, Ursula K. Leguin, includes it in her latest novel, “The left hand of darkness,” winner of the Hugo award that year (and the Nebula the following year, 1970).

Years later, Deleuze and Guattari, who had seen a goban for the first time at Perec’s home, will pick up this Perecian and spirit-of-’68 idea of the otherness of Go, in one of the most important books of libertarian European thought at the end of the century, “A Thousand Plateaus” (1980):

Chess is a game of State, or court; the Emperor of China practiced it. Chess pieces are codified, they have an internal nature or intrinsic properties, from which their movements, their positions, their confrontations are derived. They are qualified, the horse is always a horse, the bishop a bishop, the pawn a pawn. Each one is like a subject of enunciation, gifted with a relative power; and those relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, the chess player, or the form of inner self of the game.

The pawns in Go, on the contrary, are balls, cards, simple arithmetic units, whose sole function is anonymous, collective or third-person: “It” advances — it could be man, a woman, a flea, or an elephant. The pawns in Go are the elements of a non-subjectivized mechanical agency, without intrinsic properties, but only situational. The relationships are also very different in the two cases. In their means of inwardness, the chess pieces maintain two-way relationships with each other, and with the adversary : their functions are structural. A pawn in Go, on the contrary, only has means of outwardness, or extrinsic relationships with cloudy consteallations, according to which it carries out functions of insertion or situation, like bordering, surrounding, breaking. A single pawn in Go can synchronously annihilate a whole constellation, while one chess piece cannot (or can only do it diachronically).

Chess is clearly a war, but an insitutionalized, regulated, codified war, with a front, a rearguard, and battles. What is unique about Go, on the other hand, is that it is a war without battlelines, without confrontation and rearguard, and in the ultimate extreme, without battle: pure strategy, while chess is semiotics. Finally, it is not about space itself: in the case of the chess, it is a game of distributing a closed space, hence, of going from one point to another, of occupying a maximum of squares with a minimum of pieces. Go is a game of being distributed in a open space, of occupying the space, of conserving the possibility of emerging at any point: movement no longer goes from one point to another, but rather becomes perpetual, without goal or destination, without departure or arrival.

Smooth space of Go versus striated space of chess. Nomos of Go versus State of chess, nomos versus polis. Because chess codifies and decodifies space, while Go proceeds in another way, territorializing and desterritorializing it (turning the exterior into a territory in space, consolidating that territory through the construction of a second adjacent territory, deterritorializing the enemy through the internal rupture of their territory, deterritorializing oneself by retreating, going somewhere else…). Another justice, another movement, another space-time.

The Internet Era

In the ’80s and ’90s, in Europe and the US, Go no longer depended on concrete people to develop. It was a minority cultural element within a minority. But that excentric and often erudite minority, almost always university-associated and technophile, was fermenting in something new: hacker culture, which, in turn, was going to shape a good part of the new world that would come with the Internet. When, in the second half of the ’90s, HTML and the newborn World Wide Web opened the tap of massive socialization of the new medium, Go gained a sudden visibility simply because the percentage of Internet users who are players is far above the average in the population.

Robert Bozulich, author of some of the best-known books on the game in the West, is a good example of that environment and that evolution. He studied at UCLA and graduated in mathematics from Berkeley in ’66. In ’68, he went to Japan, where he created his first publishing house — in English — specializing in Go, Ishi Press, which will be succeeded, in the ’90s, by Kiseido. In 2000, when the first game servers appeared, he created, through Kiseido, KGS the exchange and gaming space for Go most used by Western players. A resident of Japan, he became a go-to person in the world of online libertarian activism, in which he became involved to the point of standing as a candidate for several testimonial formations, the latest being the Personal Freedom Party. He is not the only one. By 2003, it was already relatively common to find voices that called for a “Go strategy at the libertarian fringes of Republicanism. One discussion permeated those surroundings to the point of normalizing references to the game among electoral strategists.

The Go’ing Insurrection

In the insurrectionist and collectivist side of anarchism, a similar phenomenon was taking place, though with constant references to the idea of Go given by Deleuze and Guattari. In the second half of the nineties, the first groups that begin to think about Go as a metaphor to theorize libertarian alternatives that incorporate the Internet and free software into their design were already appearing. But it will be with the crisis, starting in 2010, that the strategic metaphors based on Go begin to multiply.

And thus, in November 2013, The Go’ing Insurrection [PDF] appears, the little book that is fashionable among afficionados right now. Anonymously written, its title is an homage to The Arriving Insurrection [PDF] (or The Coming Insurrection, depending on the translation), the famous and polemic post-Tiqqun text attributed to Joulien Coupat, to whom, however, it owes little beyond a few quotes: the idea that in politics, as in Go, territory is a relational concept, not spatial or scenic, does not begin with Coupat, but is, rather, commonplace in non-nationalist European thought since Walter Benjamin. In any case, the result is forty very suggestive pages, and recommended for anyone regardless of their ideology.

Go and the interesting life

The idea of Go as a school, or at least as a strategic language to think in terms of liberties and conflict resolution, surely has won more people over to Go than to libertarian ideas.

What’s true is that the game of Go is a terrain on which new situations and problems are constantly presented in an intellectually elegant manner. To solve them, to learn, to create knowledge for the pleasure of knowing, is doubtlessly more than enough motivation in itself. According to Desmond Morris, to learn, to discover, is the pleasure that evolution taught us to enjoy so that we would be able to adapt to the medium without having to wait millions of years to see if mutations responded better or not.

The libertarian ethos of all times has intuited that it is in that pleasure where the meaning of existence resides. So have totalitarian and paternalistic regimes of all times, of course, but they reject the frivolity of that “empty knowledge” that disperses society from the dream – their dream – of a one and only objective.

Surely that is the truth underneath the old Chinese saying that “no Go player is a bad person.” A game so abstract generates a kind of knowledge that is so hard to instrumentalize, that it necessarily raises a contradiction between the political will to impose on others, and the personal pleasure of an interesting life. You have to be a bit of an anarchist to be able to incorporate Go into your life. And if you like it because you’ve turned the desire to learn into the engine of your actions, it’s more than likely that you also have a minimalist in you, and you’re not very interested in fighting over resources or wealth with anyone.

Certainly, that pleasure in serial learning and discovery is what Desmond Morris called happiness.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

Since then, I have given some thought to the plausible origin of the trend and was surprised to find myself in agreement with what William Neuman’s recent piece for the New York Times has to say about it.

The reason I was surprised is that unlike most analyses of this sort, which tend to assume a false dichotomy between social and economic problems, Neuman’s piece addresses the structure of Venezuela’s economy as a key causal factor:

“… the same resource that the government relies on — the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves — has long fed a culture of easy money and consumerism here, along with a penchant for the quick fix and instant gratification.”

Still, what the piece doesn’t do is apply Occam’s Razor thoroughly enough to clarify the role of oil as the fundamental cause of Venezuelan women’s particularly aggressive fixation with plastic surgery.

For instance, Neuman quotes Lauren Gulbas, a feminist scholar and anthropologist at Dartmouth College, who has studied attitudes toward plastic surgery in Venezuela, saying that,

“There’s this notion in Venezuela of ‘buena presencia,’ ‘good presence’… that communicates that you have certain aspects that say you are a hard worker, a good worker, an honest person …. there’s a virtue associated with looking a certain way.”

But while Neuman points out oil as as the plausible main cause of the phenomenon, the culture of easy money, consumerism and instant gratification that he claims it creates is not sufficient to explain the fixation of women with cosmetic surgery rather than with any other status good. And I frankly don’t understand how Gulbas concludes that the reason women choose to enlarge their breasts, inflate their buttocks and thicken their lips is to signal they are honest, hard workers — clearly, the main reason they want to perform this sort of changes to their bodies is to enhance their sexual attractiveness.

The clearest consequence of the enormous power that the state has historically accumulated through the oil monopoly in Venezuela is, unsurprisingly, a particularly strong capacity to control and distort every aspect of the economy and, increasingly, foreclose avenues for people to pursue genuinely economic means to wealth.

Now, the foremost non-economic means to wealth in such conditions are political. But because these are necessarily few in comparison to the economic opportunities that would prevail in a free market, people will also increasingly seek to affiliate as close as possible with those who have a more direct access to political power. One effective way to create such affiliations is through marriage.

Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that people engage in all-out, zero-sum, arms-race style competition to increase a perceived attractiveness to the opposite sex. In the case that they don’t succeed in the high-stakes, risky game of the political means to a comfortable standard of living, the second-best alternative is to marry one who does.

(As a side note, that such highly stereotyped standard of physical attractiveness prevails in Venezuela starkly contradicts the mainstream progressive notion that such stereotypes are created by free markets.)

And there would be no reason to expect women to be more prone than men to fall into this social dynamic if it weren’t for the inescapable grip of patriarchy, which slants economic opportunities in favor of men to the detriment of women even in the absence of the rocambolesque obstacles created by economic policies like those currently in place in Venezuela.

There’s a prejudiced notion both in and out of academic circles that might lead some to argue that the whole thing boils down to machismo, a term frequently used to denote the supposedly stronger patriarchal nature of Latin American cultures when compared to other Western societies.

But patriarchy is as pervasive as it is a perverse, universal social legacy. And while many other social factors might strengthen its pathological consequences, statist economies put them on steroids. In Venezuela, or elsewhere.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Patrarquía con Esteroides: La Fiebre de la Cirugía Plástica en Venezuela.

But mainly there’s an endless supply of resentment against “welfare queens,” and friend-of-a-friend stories about the luxurious tastes of those using food stamps at the checkout line, whose cumulative effect is to reassure the middle class that their real enemies are to be found by looking down, and not up.

If your resentment is directed downward against the “underclass” and recipients of welfare-for-the-poor, it’s most definitely misdirected.

First, let’s look at the little picture, and consider the net effects of state policy on the actual recipients of welfare. Consider how state policies on behalf of land owners and real estate investors, like the enforcement of absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, drives up rents and closes off access to cheap living space. Consider how licensing schemes and “anti-jitney” laws, zoning laws against operating businesses out of one’s home or out of pushcarts, and regulations that impose needless capital outlays and entry barriers or overhead costs, close off opportunities for self-employment. And consider how zoning restrictions on mixed-use development and other government promotions of sprawl and the car culture increase the basic cost of subsistence. You think the money spent on welfare for the poor equals that drain on the resources of the underclass?

Next, look at the big picture. Consider the total rents extracted from society as a whole by the dominant economic classes: The inflation of land rent and mortgages by the above-mentioned absentee titles to unimproved land; the usurious interest rates resulting from legal tender laws and restraints on competition in the supply of credit; the enormous markups over actual production cost that result from copyrights, patents and trademarks; the oligopoly markup (once estimated by the Nader Group at around 20% of retail price in industries dominated by a handful of firms) in industries cartelized by government regulations and entry barriers …

Now consider, out of this vast ocean of rents extracted by state-connected parasites, the miniscule fraction that trickles back to the most destitute of the destitute, in the form of welfare and food stamps, in just barely large enough quantities to prevent homelessness and starvation from reaching high enough levels to destabilize the political system and threaten the ruling classes’ ability to extract rents from all of us. The state-allied landlords, capitalists and rentiers rob us all with a front-end loader, and then the state — THEIR state — uses a teaspoon to relieve those hardest hit.

Every time in history the state has provided a dole to the poorest of the poor — the distribution of free grain and oil to the proletariat of Rome, the Poor Laws in England, AFDC and TANF since the 1960s — it has occurred against a background of large-scale robbery of the poor by the rich. The Roman proletariat received a dole to prevent bloody revolt after the common lands of the Republic had been engrossed by the nobility and turned into slave-farms. The Poor Laws of England were passed after the landed classes enclosed much of the Open Fields for sheep pasture. The urban American blacks who received AFDC in the 1960s were southern sharecroppers, or their children, who had been tractored off their land (or land that should have been theirs, if they had received the land that was rightfully theirs after Emancipation) after WWII.

As Frances Fox Piven and Andrew Cloward argued in “Regulating the Poor,” the state — which is largely controlled by and mainly serves the interest of the propertied classes — only steps in to provide welfare to the poor when it’s necessary to prevent social destabilization. When it does so, it usually provides the bare minimum necessary. And in the process, it uses the power conferred by distributing the public assistance to enforce a maximum in social discipline on the recipients (as anyone who’s dealt with the humiliation of a human services office, or a visit from a case-worker, can testify).

So don’t resent the folks who get welfare and food stamps. Your real enemies — the ones the state really serves — are above, not below.

My friend Alex Marshall, in his newest post up on Governing magazine, asks “What’s up with groups that argue for less government but see publicly built highways as an expression of the free market?” Alex is highly critical of right-wing libertarians whose policy preferences are a simple Rorschach test of their own personal biases – people who label their preferences with the language of freedom, individualism and happiness, whereas any policy they dislike is labeled “socialism” or “tyranny”. Thus, if these people like to drive big cars, then any government action that supports their ability to drive big cars is a bold stroke for glorious emancipation, whereas any policy that interferes with their ability to drive big cars is a form of Stalinism so black that even Stalin himself would have thought it excessive. I encourage you to read the whole post. This is how it starts:

Building a road is a manifestation of power, particularly state power. Carving a road across multiple jurisdictions and property lines — not to mention varying terrain — can be done only by an institution that can override the wishes of any one individual.

This was true in the days of the Roman Empire, when mighty roads were built so well that many of them still exist. And it’s true today. In the exercise of that authority, local, state and federal governments spent more than $150 billion on roads in 2005, according to the most recent federal Highway Statistics report. That’s comparable to what we spend annually on waging war in Iraq.

Given all this, I find it exceedingly strange that a group of conservative and libertarian-oriented think tanks — groups that argue for less government — have embraced highways and roads as a solution to traffic congestion and a general boon to living. In the same breath, they usually attack mass-transit spending, particularly on trains. They seem to see a highway as an expression of the free market and of American individualism, and a rail line as an example of government meddling and creeping socialism.

I should add, Alex is the author of “How Cities Work : Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken“. Chapter Six of this book will have especial interest for anyone who reads Art Of The Possible. This chapter, titled “The Master Hand“, focuses on the role that government plays in shaping cities:

Americans tend to think of government as something outside themselves, a kind of regulatory body that interferes with the working of both an economy and the development of places. According to this view, the shapers of cities and the creators of wealth are the individual actors: the developer, the house builder, the company owner.

But government–that is, us–almost always lays down the concrete slab that economies and places are built upon. Government not only creates the laws, and operates the courts and the police, it then lays down the roads and builds the schools. In a modern economy, it then proceeds to set up a Federal Reserve System, a Securities and Exchange Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and other more elaborate financial infrastructure.

I sense that most people do not understand this, and the reason can be laid at the feet of an insidious idea called “the free market.” We tend to think that places and economies just happen, built by the invisible hand of Adam Smith if by anyone. In our mind’s eye, we tend to see supermarkets and subdivisions proliferating across the countryside, driven by consumer choice and the decisions of banks to finance them. We tend not to see the government’s prior decision to build an Interstate through the area that made the whole thing possible.

The intersection of place and economics is often in transportation. The decision of what transportation system to build, something almost always done by government, tends to create both an economy for an area or metropolis, and a particular physical framework organized around that infrastructure. So when Denver builds a big airport, it also creates the loose physical structure of warehouses, offices, and shopping centers that proliferates around airports. When New York City built its subway system (which was nominally private but steered and aided by government), it also created the possibility of the dense networks of skyscrapers that would follow. The Interstate Highway System created both a new economics of transportation and a new lifestyle organized around suburban living.

I should add, before I read this book I already had a keen understanding of the extent to which cities were shaped by their economies, and I appreciated the irony of the saying that all cities are similar yet each is historically unique and a product of circumstance. However, this book brought home to me the extent to which every era has its dominant modes of transportation, and how cities are very much shaped by the constraints and possibilities of those modes. Alex puts the issue well in the concluding chapter:

Of all the public decisions that go into place-making, the most important is what type of transportation systems to use. They will determine the character of the city and much of its economy. Do we pave roads or lay down tracks? Do we fund buses or subsidize cars? Do we lay down bike paths or more highway lanes? Do we build airports or high-speed train lines?

What is transportation for? That’s the essential question Lewis Mumford asked forty years ago.

In the first place, it’s for building the economy of a city. A city’s external links to the outside world, its freeways, train lines, airports, ports, and others, will determine the potential of its industry and people. The big links a city has to the outside world determine its economic potential, something most people do not grasp. Thus, people should think hard about, and usually be ready to fund, the new airport, the new train lines, the new port, and even the new Interstate if it actually travels somewhere new, though this is not likely these days.

As these external links are established, attention can be paid to the internal transportation network. We should recognize that the internal transportation serves a different purpose than the external transportation systems of a city. The layout of a region’s internal transportation will determine how people get to work, how they shop, how they recreate, how they live. The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment. Simply getting rid of the freeways–forget mass transit–would establish a more neighborhood-centered economy and dynamic. But we don’t have to forget mass transit. Laying out train lines, streetcar tracks, bus lanes, bike paths, and sidewalks–and forgoing freeways and big roads–will mean a more place-oriented form of living. Both the drawbacks and the benefits of such a style dwell in its more communal, group-oriented form of living. You will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult.

Transportation is not the only public decision. Policies on growth and development can help implement a transportation policy. Such policies are far less important than usually thought, however. The major transportation systems dictate the pattern and style of developments. Once those are established, ways will be found over and around zoning and land-use laws to build the type of development that fits with a big highway or train line.

In his post over at Governing magazine, Alex is critical of the Reason Foundation’s love affair with the automobile:

Some typical highway-oriented papers on Reason’s Web site include “How to Build Our Way Out of Congestion” and “Private Tollways: How States Can Leverage Federal Highway Funds.” Rail transit is taken on in papers with titles such as “Myths of Light Rail Transit,” and “Rethinking Transit ‘Dollars & Sense’: Unearthing the True Cost of Public Transit.” I didn’t see any papers about unearthing the true cost of our public highway network.

These are the “the autonomists”, that is, “libertarians who have embraced highway spending”. Of course, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with a group that calls itself “libertarian” trying to decipher the best of two competing policies. It is common, nowadays, to use the word “libertarian” to mean “someone loyal to the classical liberal tradition”, and there is a strain of thought in classical liberalism, going back to Jeremy Bentham’s work on social utility, that laws should do the greatest good for the greatest number. Put another way, government exists to serve the people. The construction of infrastructure, or the provision of a public service, is one of the ways in which government can be useful to the general public. But why would the Reason Foundation suggest that a system of transportation which revolves around cars involves less government support than a system of transportation that revolves around trains?

Alex, in his current post on Governing magazine, is critical of those libertarians who have a blind spot regarding their own dependence on government (or rather, those libertarians who have a blind spot about how much government is involved in the particular solution that they favor). They (those particular libertarians) sometimes sound as if their favored solution is individualistic, whereas everyone else’s solution is socialism. Isn’t there something juvenile about depending on someone (or some institution) yet denigrating their (its) value?

We might ask if there is even any truth to the basic premises from which the Reason Foundation seems to proceed when addressig transportation issues. Is it correct to suggest that mass transit forecludes private-sector competition, whereas solutions that favor automobiles foster competition? Is regional transportation systems even a type of activity in which private-sector competition will be more effective than government action? There are, of course, many instances where government action creates disutility (the War On Drugs destroys people’s lives), but there are also cases where government action offers clear benefits to the vast majority of a population. The point can be made more clear with a quote from Friedrich Hayek’s book, “The Road To Serfdom“. This is from pages 41-44:

It is important not to confuse opposition against this kind of [socialist] planning with a dogmatic laissez faire attitude. The liberal argument is in favor of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of co-ordinating human efforts, not an argument for leaving things just as they are. It is based on the conviction that, where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other. It does not deny, but even emphasizes, that, in order that competition should work beneficially, a carefully thought-out legal framework is required and that neither the existing nor the past legal rules are free from grave defects. Nor does it deny that, where it is impossible to create the conditions necessary to make competition effective, we must resort to other methods of guiding economic activity. Economic liberalism is opposed, however, to competition’s being supplanted by inferior methods of co-ordinating individual efforts. And it regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. Indeed, one of the main arguments in favor of competition is that it dispenses with the need for “conscious social control” and that it gives the individuals a chance to decide whether the prospects of a particular occupation are sufficient to compensate for the disadvantages and risks connected with it.

The successful use of competition as the principle of social organization precludes certain types of coercive interference with economic life, but it admits of others which sometimes may very considerably assist its work and even requires certain kinds of government action. But there is good reason why the negative requirements, the points where coercion must not be used, have been particularly stressed. It is necessary in the first instance that the parties in the market should be free to sell and buy at any prices at which they can find a partner to the transaction and that that anybody should be free to produce, sell and buy anything that may be produced at all. And it is essential that the entry into the different trades should be open to all on equal terms and the law should not tolerate any attempts by individuals or groups to restrict this entry by open or concealed force. Any attempt to control prices or quantities of particular commodities deprives competition of its power of bring about an effective co-ordination of individual efforts, because price changes then cease to register all the relevant changes in circumstances and no longer provide a reliable guide for the individual’s actions.

This is not necessarily true, however, of measures merely restricting the allowed methods of production, so long as these restrictions effect all potential producers equally and are not used as an indirect way of controlling prices and quantities. Though all such controls of the methods of production impose extra costs (i.e., make it necessary to use more resources to produce a given output), they may well be worthwhile. To prohibit the use of certain poisonous substances or to require special precautions in their use, to limit working hours or to require certain sanitary arrangements, is fully compatible with the preservation of competition. The only question here is whether in the particular instance the advantages gained are greater than social costs which they impose. Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services – so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.

…There are, finally, undoubted fields where no legal arrangements can create the main condition on which the usefulness of the system of competition and private property depends: namely, that the owner benefits from all the useful services rendered by his property and suffers for all the damages caused to others by its use. Where, for example, it is impracticable to make the enjoyment of certain services dependent on the payment of a price, competition will not produce the services; and the price system becomes similarly ineffective when the damage caused to others by certain uses of property cannot be effectively charged to the owner of that property. In all these instances there is a divergence between the items which enter into private calculation and those which affect social welfare; and, whenever this divergence becomes important, some method other than competition may have to be found to supply the services in question. Thus, neither the provision of signposts on the roads nor, in most circumstances, that of the roads themselves, can be paid for by every individual user. Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism. But the fact that we have to resort to the substitution of direct regulation by authority where the conditions for the proper working of competition cannot be created does not prove that we should suppress competition where it can be made to function.

To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to supplement it where it cannot be made effective, to provide the services which, in the words of Adam Smith, “though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals” – these tasks provide, indeed, a wide and unquestioned field for state activity. In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing. An effective competitive system needs an intelligently designed and continuously adjust legal framework as much as any other. Even the most essential prerequisite of its proper functioning, the prevention of fraud and deception (including exploitation of ignorance), provides a great and by no means yet fully accomplished object of legislative activity.

Do systems of regional transportation meet the requirements that Hayek sets out here for “conditions in which competition will be effective”?

I have to admit, I am puzzled by the intensity with which the crew at the Reason Foundation seems to want to see private-sector roads come into existence in the US. Hayek wrote that where “it is impracticable to make the enjoyment of certain services dependent on the payment of a price, competition will not produce the services”. The folks at the Reason Foundation seem to want to jump through a great many hoops so that America can have private sector roads. In my opinion, this is an area of policy where government action is clearly more practical than any attempt to arrange circumstances so as to allow private-sector actors to take control of the provisioning of services. For that matter, I can more easily imagine competing train services offering mass transit than I can imagine competing roads offering some benefit to those in a region who need to use that region’s system of transportation. The only purpose that I can see for allowing private-sector actors to gain control over the roads is to allow a few businesses to enrich themselves, in near monopoly conditions, at the general expense.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008.

Libertarians often spend a lot of time defending the rich who have supposedly earned their wealth in the marketplace purely through productivity, and then they denounce the crooked labor unions and “socialists”who seek to steal the justly acquired property of the rich. This is a dangerous oversimplification of how the economy is structured, and it unfortunately pushes libertarians away from their true allies on the progressive left.

Working class activism is generally perceived in libertarian circles as collectivist, riddled with economic fallacies, and as yet another coercive state intrusion into the voluntary and peaceful exchange of goods. This very well might be true, but mainstream labor activism is in reality a well-justified but misled reaction to the horrors of state power and capitalism. After all, the elite have been using the state to rig the scales in their favor for virtually all of history. It should come as no surprise when people fight fire with fire by trying to steer the state into advancing their interests instead of that of their oppressors. Unfortunately, libertarians leave out the first part of this cycle and focus exclusively on the statism of the unionizers, ignoring the original anti-market behavior committed by the capitalists.

These positions are chosen as a result of the system of false choices which confront us politically.

We are currently born into a cruel dialectic where one can only reasonably support “markets” or support state power, and virtually all American politickin’ falls within this analytical framework. However, both options further entrench our corporate rulers.

Free market rhetoric in the United States is almost universally a euphemism for fascism. Being for “free markets” in cable news-speak means one wishes to keep the loot corporations have acquired through lobbying, removing none of their numerous subsidies, helpful regulations, competing good prohibitions, tariffs, land use policies, favorable tax codes, inflationary central banking practices & legal tender laws, licensing requirements, zoning mandates, intellectual property restrictions, etc. which bolster the position of the rich at the expense of the working poor, while at the same time removing all protection for the impoverished in the way of welfare programs and labor laws.

This is clearly an insane and disastrous course of action, and definitely an anti-libertarian one. Progressives are correct to oppose “free markets” if this is what they mean.

Consistent libertarians also reject virtually all of the policies I listed, but fail to recognize and frame what this position means for the impoverished of America. The liberty movement is absolutely a fight which can include those who traditionally agitate with labor movements. Libertarian aversion to sounding like a leftist is, in this author’s humble opinion, primarily a result of their long-standing alliance with the right. It is time to end this pattern permanently, but we must also confront the established progressive strategy.

The alternative culturally-approved political avenue of supporting state power to oppose the criminal manipulation of the economy perpetuated by capitalists is well-intentioned, but should be opposed for practical considerations. As it currently stands, very few progressives or libertarians would deny that the state works for the benefit of corporations and not for the average person. As public choice economics sadly elucidates, average people are not incentivized to pay close attention to politics because their vote is statistically unlikely to make a difference, and the costs which they accrue from the political machinations of corporations are spread thinly amongst themselves and all citizens, whereas the benefits are horrifically concentrated for special interests groups like Monsanto who lobby for unjust economic advantages in the marketplace.

Politicians and bureaucrats are primarily motivated by self interest, like everyone else, and thus have far more to gain from supporting those who receive concentrated benefits rather than the rationally oblivious (and often poor) John Q. Public. Mr. Public is being slyly stolen from and subverted but simply does not have the time or resources to become educated about the countless threats to his social and economic well-being. The threats are too numerous, costly, and diverse, and thus political action to combat special interests is extremely difficult. Contrasted with those who have massive opportunities for extreme profit as a result of state power, the amount of regulatory capture and special interest rulership which dominates the American state is no real surprise .

As long as those justly seeking to limit the power of corporations follow the regulatory route, they will face an incredibly well-financed group with money to burn in order to keep their unjust anti-market privileges.

There is, however, a way out of this incredibly destructive and marginalizing false dichotomy now while reflecting upon Jimmy Johns and the IWW.

Eliminating the state’s power to grant special favors to in-groups would genuinely please both libertarians and progressives. We need to acknowledge this immediately and work together to end corporate tyranny.

The state’s intrusion into the economy has purposefully limited competition to the corporations and has dramatically narrowed the range of opportunities for working people to become entrepreneurs through self-employment or collectives/co-ops. Thus they are forced to accept less benefits, worse working conditions, and “wages so low they freaked” as a result of the deck being stacked against freedom of competition in conscious favor of the corporations, the highest bidders for state power.

If Americans removed the state’s ability to play favoritism to the economic elite, which forces labor to be the pawns of the holders of capital, rather than workers jockeying for an artificially low number of jobs, businesses would be forced to compete in order to attract and keep laborers. Why would anyone work for a capitalist when one could reasonably be one’s own boss in a syndicalist or otherwise horizontally-organized workplace? The Jimmy Johns’ workers might very well have been able to start their own sandwichery! And if they ever did choose to work for a capitalist, it’d be because they were getting one heck of a deal.

This freed market approach wouldn’t face the huge public choice problems of avoiding regulatory capture, nor would it unnecessarily limit human creativity and productivity, and it would lead to the progressive end of a more egalitarian society. Libertarians and progressives would be able to make incredible progress by breaking through the false dichotomy and by creating our envisioned world through this strategy.

So next time you see a libertarian being a sourpuss about workers unionizing at Jimmy Johns or celebrating Labor Day, remind them gently that all of us are reacting against corporatism in our own way. For whilst libertarians oppose the use of the state to artificially raise the status of one group at the expense of other peaceful individuals, they have little to fear from laborers rightfully seeking whatever solace they can glean from the corporatist state. They are merely victims of the current system of false choices. The enemies of libertarianism are absolutely not laborers who desperately need economic freedom, nor progressives, but the corporate overlords who criminally wield state power and “free markets” against the impoverished.