Uri Avnery discusses new right-wing bills up for passage in Israel.

Nicola Nasser discusses recent bombings in Palestine.

Jonathan Schell discusses Nick Turse’s book on Vietnam.

Annabelle Bamforth discusses a new report on drone deaths.

Ivan Eland discusses the Afghan war.

Lew Rockwell discusses how the presidents are our enemies.

George H. Smith discusses psychological egoism.

Sharon Presley discusses libertarian feminism.

Mikalya Novak discusses feminist and Austrian critiques of mainstream economics.

Binoy Kampmark discusses the Jewish nation-state bill in Israel.

Uri Avnery discusses the situation in Israel.

Brian M. Downing discusses Iran vs the Islamic State.

J.D. Tuccille discusses the core of government.

Jesse Walker discusses Eric Garner’s death.

Zaid Jilani discusses Democratic Party complicity in police militarization.

Chris Floyd discusses refugees and the paucity of money to support them.

Chris Floyd discusses the plight of a Gitmo prisoner.

Chris Floyd discusses drone strikes and state terrorism.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the new defense chief.

Patrick L. Smith discusses the Russia-Ukraine debacle.

James Carden discusses why grand strategy is bunk.

Rob Urie discusses police violence and the idea of race.

Michelle Renee Matisons discusses class, race, gender, and U.S. policing.

Mike Caccioppoli discusses Darren Wilson.

Kelly Vlahos discusses the loss of a champion of civil liberties in Congress.

Dan Fromkin discusses 12 things to keep in mind when reading the torture report.

Esam Al-Amin discusses how Egypt’s coup leaders are a criminal syndicate.

The famous Samuel Reshevsky loses to Rafael Vaganian.

Thomas Ernst defeats Ferdinand Hellers.

1. Tom Bethell, “How Private Property Saved the Pilgrims”, the Hoover Institution’s Hoover Digest
2. Jerry Bowyer, “Lessons From A Capitalist Thanksgiving”, Forbes
3. Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie, “The Pilgrims and Property Rights”, Reason
4. Jim Cox, “Celebrating Individualist Private Property—Based Production Day”, the Ludwig von Mises Insitute’s LewRockwell.com
5. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, “Giving Thanks for Private Property”, LewRockwell.com
6. Richard Ebeling, Thanksgiving: Celebrating the Birth of Free Enterprise in America”, Epic Times
7. Gary M. Galles, “Property and the First Thanksgiving”, the Ludwig von Mises Insitute’s Mises Daily
8. Anthony Gregory, “Giving Thanks to the Market”, the Independent Institute’s The Beacon
9. Daniel Griswold, “How Capitalism Saved the Pilgrims”, the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty
10. Henry Hazlitt, “Private Enterprise Regained” (PDF), the Foundation for Economic Education’s The Freeman (In his editorial comments to the 2004 issue, C4SS’s own Sheldon Richman concurred.)
11. Kathryn Hickok. “What Governor Bradford Learned at Plymouth’s First Thanksgiving”, Cascade Policy Institute
12. Aloysius Hogan , “Thanksgiving and Markets“, Competitive Enterprise Institute
13. Jacob G. Hornberger, “Thanksgiving, Socialism, and the Free Market”, LewRockwell.com
14. Richard J. Maybury, “The Great Thanksgiving Hoax”, Mises Daily
15. Benjamin W. Powell, “The Pilgrims’ Real Thanksgiving Lesson”, the Independent Institute
16. Sartell Prentice, Jr., “Our First Thanksgiving”, The Freeman (and summarized succinctly in an official tweet)
17. Howard Rich, “A Thanksgiving Lesson”, Americans for Limited Government’s NetRightDaily
18. Murray N. Rothbard, “What Really Happened at Plymouth”, Mises Daily, excerpted from Rothbard’s book Conceived In Liberty
19. Byron Schlomach, “Giving Thanks for Lessons Learned”, Goldwater Institute
20. Paul Schmidt, “The Real Story Behind Thanksgiving”, the Advocates for Self-Government’s The Liberator Online
21. John Stossel, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (2007), “Happy Starvation Day” (2010), “Thankful for Property” (2013) and “Thanks, Property Rights!” (2014), Creators Syndicate
22. Alex Tabarrok, “A Thanksgiving Lesson”, Marginal Revolution
23. Kim Weissman, “The Plymouth Experiment”, Congress Action
24. “The Real Thanksgiving Story”, webpage with unidentified author on the website of the Foundation for Economic Education (as well as a prominent section in founder Leonard Read’s famous speech “The Essence of Americanism”).

It should be noted that some of the pieces, unlike the one analyzed in the linked C4SS piece, do mention that Plymouth’s economics were imposed by it being a corporation, but none draw a parallel to the modern corporation’s not escaping the same problems. (Prentice’s remark that “Each time I produce less, in my work, than enough to earn a profit for my employer, I am stealing from someone else” gets it even more backward.)

Compare with the take on Plymouth of single-taxers like Fred Foldvary. The elision of the otherwise eagerly-cited account by William Bradford’s noting that his assigning colonists private land was “only for present use (but made no devission for inheritance)” has long been one of their points of contention with the mainstream libertarian movement.

Na versão com que somos aquinhoados, os Puritanos, impelidos por idealismo equivocado, inicialmente tratam de restaurar o primitivo comunismo cristão do Livro dos Atos, “tendo todas as coisas em comum.” Stossel caracteriza o arranjo como soando “como algo proveniente de Karl Marx.” Quando os óbvios problemas de incentivo implícitos naquela prática levaram a inanição, os colonos tiveram de aceitar a realidade e dividiram a terra, passando a trabalhá-la individualmente. A produção disparou, a inanição foi revertida, e todo mundo ficou feliz.

Não foi assim, porém, que as coisas realmente se passaram.

A história, escrita por Richard Curl, acerca das cooperativas nos Estados Unidos, Para Todas as Pessoas, preenche alguns detalhes faltantes que modificam inteiramente o significado da narrativa. Curl suplementa a história de Bradford com material deColônias Inglesas, de J. A. Doyle. De acordo com Doyle, o acordo entre os Peregrinos Separatistas e a corporação dos Comerciantes Mercadores estipulava que

“[t]odos os colonos … receberiam suprimento para suas necessidades oriundo de estoque comum. Durante sete anos não haveria propriedade ou comércio individual, mas o trabalho da colônia seria organizado de acordo com as diferentes capacidades dos colonos. Ao final dos sete anos, a companhia seria dissolvida e o estoque todo dividido.

Foram incluídas duas ressalvas, uma dando direito aos colonos de separar glebas ao redor de suas casas, e a outra permitindo-lhes dois dias na semana para cultivo delas. Os parceiros de Londres, contudo, recusaram-se a fazer essas concessões, e os agentes dos emigrantes retiraram-nas, para não abrirem mão do esquema.”

Na história convencional o zelo apostólico dos Peregrinos, que desejam recriar o comunismo da Igreja primitiva, é confrontado pela dura realidade. De acordo com Curl, porém, as relações entre os colonos Puritanos e os Comerciantes Mercadores fazem mais sentido à luz de significado implícito inteiramente diferente — as relações do campesinato inglês com as classes proprietárias de terras do País Velho: “Os colonos, a maioria dos quais formada de arrendatários rurais nos campos abertos de um velho parque de caça senhorial em Nottinghamshire, consideravam que a exigência dos investidores essencialmente reduzia-os à condição de servos. Os colonos não estavam pedindo mais do que o normal no sistema senhorial da Inglaterra em vigor desde a Idade Média. Os camponeses trabalhavam nos campos do senhor mas também tinham tempo para trabalhar glebas individuais para suas necessidades familiares.”

A história de Plymouth é por vezes comparada à da agricultura nos últimos dias da União Soviética, onde a maior parte do alimento consumido vinha de glebas familiares privadas — essencialmente hortas domésticas com algum gado de pequeno porte ali inserido. Se a população soviética inteira tivesse sido forçada a subsistir só com a produção das fazendas estatais e coletivas, o resultado teria sido inanição em massa — exatamente como em Plymouth. Esse paralelismo é inteiramente correto. O que a versão com que somos aquinhoados da história de Plymouth deixa de fora, entretanto, é que o papel da “fazenda coletiva” no pequeno drama é obra não de ingênuos Puritanos extremados procurando “ter todas as coisas em comum,” e sim de corporação privada credenciada pela coroa inglesa.

E, do modo que descreve Curl, o sistema de glebas privadas adotado depois da rebelião contra os Comerciantes Mercadores tampouco assemelhava-se às ideias modernas de domínio pleno da “propriedade privada.” Soa mais como o sistema de campo aberto de que os colonos tinham tido experiência em Nottinghamshire: As glebas familiares eram ad hoc, a serem periodicamente redivididas, e não passíveis de herança.

Portanto o análogo adequado ao que quase exterminou os Peregrinos não é, ao contrário do que diz Stossel, “Karl Marx” ou “políticos e formadores de opinião [presumivelmente de esquerda].” É o senhor da herdade inglesa — ou corporação das 500 da Fortune. A história, porém, como de fato aconteceu, é ainda assim evidência dos males do estatismo e dos benefícios da cooperação voluntária. Os Comerciantes Mercadores, como as 500 empresas da Fortune de hoje, formavam uma corporação credenciada que dependia inteiramente dos benefícios e dos privilégios legais concedidos pelo estado. As fórmulas de convivência que essa corporação tentou impor aos colonos de Plymouth eram as mesmas das estipulações extrativas prevalecentes na herdade inglesa, feitas cumprir pelos privilégios legais que o estado conferia à nobreza fundiária. E o novo sistema pelo qual os Peregrinos as substituíram foi o vetusto sistema de campo aberto que vilas de camponeses haviam espontaneamente criado para si próprias, com ausência de interferência coercitiva, desde épocas neolíticas.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 27 de novembro de 2013.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

In the received version the Puritans, motivated by a misguided idealism, initially set out to restore the primitive Christian communism of the Book of Acts, “holding all things in common.” Stossel characterizes the arrangement as sounding “like something out of Karl Marx.” When the obvious incentive problems entailed in this practice led to starvation, the settlers accommodated themselves to reality and divided up the land and worked it individually. Output skyrocketed, starvation was averted, and everybody was happy.

But that’s not the way things actually happened.

Richard Curl’s history of cooperatives in America, For All the People, fills in some missing details that change the meaning of the story entirely. Curl supplements Bradford’s history with material from J. A. Doyle’s English Colonies. According to Doyle, the agreement between the Pilgrim Separatists and the Merchant Adventurers corporation provided that

“[a]ll settlers … were to receive their necessaries out of the common stock. For seven years there was to be no individual property or trade, but the labor of the colony was to be organized according to the different capacities of the settlers. At the end of the seven years the company was to be dissolved and the whole stock divided.

Two reservations were inserted, one entitling the settlers to separate plots of land about their houses, and the other allowing them two days in the week for cultivation of such holdings. The London partners, however, refused to grant these concessions, and the agents of the emigrants withdrew them rather than give up the scheme.”

In the conventional narrative the apostolic zeal of the Pilgrims, who desire to recreate the communism of the early Church, is confronted by hard reality. But according to Curl, relations between the Puritan settlers and the Merchant Adventurers make more sense in light of an entirely different subtext — the English peasantry’s relations with the landed classes in the Old Country: “The colonists, most of them tenant farmers in the open fields of an old manorial hunting park in Nottinghamshire, considered that the investors’ demand essentially reduced them to serfdom. The settlers were asking for no more than was normal under England’s manorial system in effect since the Middle Ages. Peasants worked in the lord’s fields but also had time to work with individual plots for their household needs.”

The Plymouth story is sometimes compared to that of agriculture in the last days of the Soviet Union, where most of the food consumed came from private family plots — essentially kitchen gardens with some small livestock thrown in. Had the entire Soviet population been forced to subsist on the output of State and collective farms alone, the result would have been mass starvation — exactly like in Plymouth. This parallel is entirely accurate. What the received version of the Plymouth story leaves out, however, is that the role of the “collective farm” in the little drama is played not by the naive Puritan zealots seeking to “hold all things in common” but by a private corporation chartered by the English crown.

And as Curl describes it, the system of private plots adopted after the rebellion against the Merchant Adventurers wasn’t much like modern fee simple ideas of “private property,” either. It sounds more like the open-field system the settlers had experienced in Nottinghamshire: The family plots were ad hoc, to be periodically redivided, and not subject to inheritance.

So the proper analog to what almost killed off the Pilgrims is not, as Stossel says, “Karl Marx” or “today’s [presumably left-wing] politicians and opinion-makers.” It’s the lord of an English manor — or a Fortune 500 corporation. But the story as it actually happened is still a testament to the evils of statism and the benefits of voluntary cooperation. The Merchant Adventurers, like the Fortune 500 companies of today, was a chartered corporation that depended entirely on benefits and legal privileges conferred by the state. The living arrangements it attempted to impose on the Plymouth settlers were the same as the extractive arrangements that prevailed on an English manor, enforced by the legal privileges the state conferred on the landed nobility. And the new system the Pilgrims replaced them with were the age-old open field system that peasant villages had spontaneously created for themselves, in the absence of coercive interference, since neolithic times.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Não, Stossel. Os Peregrinos Foram Levados à Inanição por uma Corporação, Não pelo Comunismo.

But don’t mistake “Black Friday” for a celebration of the free market. That comes the day after, on “Small Business Saturday.”

Libertarians and conservatives tend to champion the frenzied consumerism of “Black Friday” as a glorious affirmation of capitalism and markets, but really it’s just a Big Business bacchanal — the high holiday of anti-market privilege, a form of communion in which cheap DVD players and surprise deals are served up as the symbolic body and blood of massive government subsidies to big-box retailers.

The consumers aren’t to blame. Aside from the occasional deadly Xbox stampede, they’re generally well behaved. However, they’re reacting uncritically to the existing conditions of the market, seeking only to maximize their short-term personal utility.

The same can’t be said of corporate apologists who know better but who check the details of institutional privilege at the door for propagandistic purposes. State policy intentionally skews the economic balance in favor of wealthy, geographically diverse corporations at the expense of more locally oriented and responsible firms. Conservatives claim fidelity to free market ideology while actually promoting a neoliberal mixed economy, which hopelessly muddles the political discourse, tricking people into thinking legitimate free markets are responsible for corporate centralism.

Without analyzing the first orders of production and later American homegrown privileges, let’s skip to the transportation processes. The primary cost of port construction and maintenance is subsidized by the taxpayer rather than paid for through user fees from those who actively use the infrastructure.

Loaded onto trucks, products make their way to shelves via the interstate highway system, where the average traveler subsidizes the high-tonnage haulers. This subsidy is reflected in retail prices: You pay extra at the gas pump for that discount on Aisle Three, in the process privileging distant producers at the expense of local actors. Not only does this divert resources and deplete the environment, it incentivizes massive economic centralization. Thanks, “free market!”

Conservatives defend the existing economic order as “free” in an effort to maintain the moral high ground, and understandably so. If they admit that the American economy is taxpayer-subsidized to the benefit of the elite they court (gasp) “class warfare.” This is a scary euphemism for when people question the legitimacy of existing property “rights” claims. As well they should. Becoming rich through the power of the state rather than through unsubsidized productivity is a veiled form of unjust wealth redistribution. Read: Theft.

Without free banking, you might have to use statist banks. With subsidized crops, intellectual property and tariffed alternatives, you may have to eat Monsanto’s frankenfood. You may not even be aware of what is happening or that alternatives exist.

Even the big box retailers I’ve named might not be explicitly evil or actively seek to subvert markets; they react to the political economy in the most self-advantageous manner, and who can blame them? But that doesn’t mean you have to affirm their choices by patronizing them

Showing up at the big boxes on “Black Friday” is no affirmation of “free markets” or capitalism. If that’s your goal, support the underdogs on Small Business Saturday, striking a blow with your dollar against anti-market forces which attempt to direct that dollar to distant, privileged producers on “Black Friday.” Environmentalists, consistent free market thinkers, and community producers of the world, unite!

I am a professional writer. I produce political commentary for somewhat meager remuneration. Sycophantic partisan establishment propagandizing probably pays better, but I spend most of my time criticizing the dialectical manipulation of the American citizenry through a system of false political choices: Reagan-style fake “free markets,” which aim to remove second-order regulation and welfare programs aimed at augmenting the ability of the poor to cope with first-order privileged, exploitative, and anti-market state institutions, versus trust in embellishing the power of the state which caused the first-order problems.

But enough of that yellowed madness. I swing the battle ax of libertarian nuance all year ’round. There are many things that I am thankful for beyond the standard recognition of well being that I’m not in active danger of starvation, being eaten by bears, or otherwise facing a primitive demise. There is one gem I’m especially grateful for and I would like to share with you.

This week I give thanks to the nearly universal drive for goodness amongst all people. As I interpreted it, this was also a central motif of the Rally to Restore Sanity. Rather than demonize, we are supposed to understand each other and the goodness we are all trying to express politically to varying degrees of accuracy and consistency.

Those who seek to expand state power even in the most dramatic of ways seldom seek to do so for some maligned desire to conquer and rule humanity. Most progressives, social democrats, and even communists I know aren’t what I would describe as evil. They have reacted to our political landscape in a way which I believe is incorrect and second-order, but in their hearts, I know their concern over inequality, exploitation and the quality of life of the worst off amongst us is sincere, not a mere justification for power-seeking. As the old saying goes, most people are for good things and against bad things. I recognize this and it gives me hope.

Chastising conservatives is practically the national sport amongst my demographic, and it’s often easy pickins’! But even the most vociferous and vicious neocons, who seek to marginalize sexual or ethnic communities and froth for indiscriminate war and revenge against the mostly innocent victims of the policies of the ruling class, are manipulated into thinking their interests or their safety actually requires such brutality. Few of them, confronted with the awful truth of this unnecessary course of action, and seeing the humanized burnt bodies, nay, smelling them from a few feet away, would still feel that such policies were acceptable.

Like Darth Vader, they will rise up and hurl the emperor into the core of the Death Star when confronted with visible insanity, when they see their sons tortured at the hands of the policies and rulers and institutions which they support. Few people are like Emperor Palpatine, beyond their own humanity. Most people I know are like Darth Vader; victims of an expertly manipulated political order and the corrupt incentive structures produced through illegitimate power.

On Turkey Day I’ll be giving thanks for the goodness in humankind which is misdirected but bursting with life and joy whenever I open my eyes to see it. In time, may it be refocused toward the appropriate goal of statelessness, but until then my friends, I am thankful that even when we disagree, the odds are overwhelming that you are probably still a decent and lovely human being.