For many folks Autumn is a season for getting out into the wild, for viewing fall colors, building camp fires, breathing in the still sweet air and plainly enjoying the great outdoors — “our” public lands. With the government shutdown, however, it is rather difficult to access “our” national parks and wilderness areas. Public lands are suddenly not so public — access is denied.

This presents a conundrum: If our wilderness areas are really public lands why do we not have access to them? The answer is rather simple — we do not have public parks or wilderness areas; in their place we instead find state territory. We do not have freedom to roam, explore and enjoy uncultivated land because it is property claimed by the state.

The federal government has profound influence on who has access to land, how it is used and where and when such land use can take place. Over one third of the United States is “owned” and operated [PDF] by the federal government. Government institutions and policies have major implications for natural resources, wilderness habitat and the public’s freedom to roam. In the current system, the more power or capital one has, the more influence they have over policy. Because of this there is not only a government monopoly over uncultivated lands but also a pervasive corporate monopoly. We see this with the encroachment on wilderness with road and dam construction, concessions and lodging in “protected” areas as well as timber operations, mining and oil and gas exploration. If you can pay you can play and if the public dissents or wishes not to have wilderness exploited there is a system in place to protect your interests — one need not look further than the jailing of Tim DeChristopher or the government crack-down on environmental activism for an example.

If there were truly a public sector, however, individuals, as equals, could freely participate in decisions that involve our society — including land use. If we were liberated and set forth policy in a true public arena without invasive concentrations of power then there would be equality in access to resources, information and land. With as much as the citizens of this country find National Parks to be places of pride and adventure we should have no doubt that the true free market would develop mechanisms for stewardship of our natural places. In other words, there would still be park rangers enjoying their jobs today — possibly much more so.

Concentrated power, however, seeks to restrict the true market form and with it democratic consensus. This is why we cannot enjoy “public” lands during this government shut down. Democracy is restricted, it is part of the system, it has been removed from the public arena and placed into institutions.

If citizens wish for a public sector that will allow them to freely and responsibly enjoy their natural heritage then we should labor to reclaim the commons. We should labor to free ourselves from corporate institutional supremacy.  If our society was decentralized and democratic our children would always have access to rivers, meadows, forests and mountainous peaks — they would always be able to experience the liberation of wildness.

Alas, logic seems to have little weight in the argument, and lots of alleged libertarians have come up with lots of ways to get around the facts and arrive at the results they prefer.

Some of those ways are just silly, e.g. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s suggestion that we should — just this once! — pretend that the state is a legitimate property owner, whose preferred disposition of its property just happens to match Hoppe’s own ideas on who should and should not be allowed to pass over that property and under what conditions.

Lately, however, the arguments are getting beyond silly and into purely bizarre (“[The ruling class] wishes to avoid more than token identification with the English people at large. … State-sponsored mass immigration has been the most obvious evidence of this desire.” ) and superstitious (“[I]f there’s national will to address it as a problem that threatens the foundations of a society, then a Nation has every right to do so.”) territory.

What’s up with that? If the subject were anything but immigration, libertarians would recognize the forgoing as the combination of Hitlerian ethnic pseudo-science and aboriginal witch doctor bullshit (but I repeat myself) that it is.

Jeff Olson, a 40 year old Californian Occupy activist was just acquitted after facing 13 years in prison for scrawling anti-bank chalk messages outside of three San Diego branches of the criminal cartel called Bank of America. The judge in the case barred Olson’s attorney from “mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial.” Olson and his lawyer are bewildered by the judge’s mandate. Apparently so was the jury. Future victims may not be so lucky.

Meanwhile, the Canadian state is forbidding people from wearing masks during “unlawful assemblies,” targeting the iconic Guy Fawkes masks of the Occupy movement which primarily opposed financial oligarchy. The offense comes with a ten-year jail sentence.

Perhaps to help enforce this new law, the Canadian government has allowed the FBI to operate within its borders. Meanwhile, new Freedom of Information Act documents reveal that the FBI made plans to assassinate non-violent Occupy movement leaders in Houston, Texas “if deemed necessary.”

To wit, organizing against banks is grounds for state-sanctioned FBI murder, as was advocating for civil rights and opposing the Vietnam war, as the family of Martin Luther King Jr. discovered in a court ruling in 1999 (Coretta Scott King vs. Jowers). Black Panther Fred Hampton also met the same fate at the hands of the FBI. Is financial liberation the new civil rights or anti-war movement? The new big no-no?

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire

From whence does this animosity toward banks come? Does the institution perform a necessary and Pareto-improving service?

The military and police are a massive subsidy to the wealthy, protecting monopolized assets (including vital commodities like food and water) at tax-cattle expense. But the depersonalized surplus value extraction of finance is how they got rich in the first place. Bankers are wily, and have developed many means to dupe the sorry folk who actually work for a living. Just a few are summarized below.

Inflation and the Cantillon Effect

Central banks target an annual inflation rate of 3%. This rate compounds, so that, since the secret establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the dollar has lost over 90% of its purchasing power. Major spates of devaluation occurred in the 1970s, beginning with the Nixon’s de facto default during the closure of the Gold Window and the end of Bretton Woods. Inflation robs the masses in at least two ways:

First, because the bourgeoisie hold their wealth in financial assets like equities and commodities that retain purchasing power in the face of currency devaluation. The poor keep cash on hand and their wages do not keep pace with inflation.

Second, via the Cantillon Effect, named after 18th century economist Richard Cantillon. Former Lehman and Deutsche Bank director John Butler summarizes it this way:

New money enters the economy by being spent [or invested]. But the first to spend it does so before it begins to lose purchasing power as it expands the existing money supply. The money then gradually permeates the entire economy, driving up the overall price level. Those last in line for the new money, primarily everyday savers and consumers, eventually find that, by being last in line for the new money, their accumulated savings are being de facto ‘diluted’ and the purchasing power of their wages diminished. [Federal Reserve member banks get that fresh money first].

Extropolated to the global level, this non-neutrality of money implies that an issuer of a reserve currency is the primary beneficiary of the ‘Cantillon effect’. First in line for the new international money you have the owners of capital in the reserve issuing countries, who use the new money to accumulate more global assets, and at the end you have workers the world over who receive the new money last, after it has placed general upward pressure on prices. Greater global wealth disparity is the inevitable result.

The Cantillon Effect is also a tax imposed by reserve-currency printers on the entire globe. As China very well knows, its bond holdings do not give it the “upper hand” on the US as so many fear, but as David Graeber puts it, bond holders pay a form of tribute to the global military hegemon in exchange for a decreasingly ravenous demand market for cheap plastic crap.

Usurious Interest Rates

High interest rates artificially increase return on capital and burden those multitudes who must borrow merely to live between evaporating paychecks. In a freed market, savings would not be devalued by inflation and would accumulate. People would loan it out as the available credit pool expanded, and interest rates would drop as lenders competed for borrowers. The price of money (or interest rate) would actually reflect the aggregate savings and borrower time-preference (averting bubbles, malinvestment and the hollowing of the capital base). A decentralized, antifragile banking system would be less prone to regular catastrophic collapse.

Bailouts and Moral Hazard Augmentation

Between 2008 and 2011, the Federal Reserve has lent, at very low interest rates (as low as zero) a lot of money to the very banks that nearly destroyed the financial system. How much, exactly? Somewhere in the realm of $29.6 trillion. (For scale, US GDP is $14 trillion). The Fed also bought worthless assets like mortgage backed securities for 100 pennies on the dollar. Every dollar printed devalues the dollars in people’s pockets. Furthermore, these free loans were mainly piled into US treasury bonds, which carry an interest yield funded by the taxpayer.

The expectation of a forthcoming state bailout leads to moral hazard. But the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission pioneered moral hazard. This backstop, along with the Discount Window, enables banks to take profitable risks that they otherwise could not, like High Frequency Trading algorithms, which steal pennies and manipulate asset prices (but also cause flash crashes and destroy firms in milliseconds).

Not to mention banks get away with screwing over their own clients — in a free banking system, reputation is vital. Not in the Financially Repressed ponzi world of the vampire squid Government Sachs, however, where former CEO Hank Paulson gets appointed Secretary of the Treasury, or when international banks collude with central banks to rig the most important interest rate in the world, the LIBOR scandal.

The entire cartelized, state-protected banking kleptocracy exists not to efficiently allocate savings for maximum productive output, but rather to ingeniously extract wealth from the distracted and demoralized populace (with varying degrees of surreptitiousness — today it is quite blatant).

Individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker ennumerated the Four Monopolies in 1888 (and Charles W. Johnson five more in 2011), the first of which being the money monopoly, a description that rings true today.

The Secret of Oz is a critically acclaimed documentary that provides an unafraid and comprehensive history of modern banking, recommended to all those who desire a firm theoretical basis on which to Chalk-ccupy the megabanks. Now that there is legal precedent for chalk not being considered vandalism, perhaps it should be done more. Activists reject the cartel by moving their money to credit unions and by becoming their own central banks via crypto-currencies, local currencies and precious metals.

Are dangerous factories the price of progress? A passionate debate now rages over whether international safety standards should be enforced against manufacturers in the developing world and their Western retailers. Proponents of standards argue that the costs would be small and the benefits great. An Accord on Fire and Building Safety has been signed by major retailers in Europe and a few in North America, but the Huffington Post says that 14 other North American retailers have refused to endorse it.  “Some retailers, like Walmart, claim they are working on separate initiatives to improve conditions and workplace safety in Bangladesh,” the online publication states, but this claim has been met with skepticism.

Opponents of government regulation argue that artificially raising the costs of manufacturing in poor countries would harm intended beneficiaries by destroying jobs. If so, workers would face worse options, including life on the streets and prostitution.

Unfortunately, the debate is unnecessarily narrow. What needs discussing — and radical changing — is the country’s political-economic system, which benefits elites while keeping the mass of people down. The economists are correct that under the status quo, imposing safety standards would raise costs, cause unemployment, and aggravate poverty. But we can’t leave the matter there. We must go on to examine how the political-economic system constricts people’s employment opportunities, including self-employment, and otherwise stifles their efforts to improve their lives. Thus, a debate over whether garment factories should be subject to safety regulations, while the status quo goes largely undisturbed, misses the point.

According to a report (PDF) written for the Netherlands ministry of foreign affairs, most Bangladeshis, unsurprisingly, are victimized by a land system that has long benefited the rural and urban elites. “Land-grabbing of both rural and urban land by domestic actors is a problem in Bangladesh,” the report states.

Wealthy and influential people have encroached on public lands…, often with help of officials in land-administration and management departments. Among other examples, hundreds of housing companies in urban areas have started to demarcate their project area using pillars and signboard before receiving titles. They use local musclemen with guns and occupy local administrations, including the police. Most of the time, land owners feel obliged to sell their productive resources to the companies at a price inferior to market value. Civil servants within the government support these companies and receive some plot of land in exchange.

Women suffer most because of the patriarchy supported by the political system. “Women in Bangladesh rarely have equal property rights and rarely hold title to land,” the report notes. “Social and customary practices effectively exclude women from direct access to land.”

As a result,

Many of the rural poor in Bangladesh are landless, have only small plots of land, are depending on tenancy, or sharecropping. Moreover, tenure insecurity is high due to outdated and unfair laws and policies…. These growing rural inequalities and instability also generate migration to towns, increasing the rates of urban poverty.

Much as in Britain after the Enclosures, urban migration swells the ranks of workers, allowing employers to take advantage of them. Since Bangladesh does not have a free-market economy, starting a business is mired in regulatory red tape — and worse, such as “intellectual property” law — that benefit the elite while stifling the chance for poor individuals to find alternatives to factory work. (The owner of the Savar factory, Mohammed Sohel Rana, got rich in a system where, the Guardian writes, “politics and business are closely connected, corruption is rife, and the gap between rich and poor continues to grow.”) Moreover, until the factory collapse, garment workers could not organize without employer permission.

Crony capitalism deprives Bangladeshis of property rights, freedom of exchange, and therefore work options. The people need neither the corporatist status quo nor Western condescension. They need radical land reform and freed markets.

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

In this essay, the individualist Anarchist writer Charles Johnson offers an analysis of the concrete mechanisms of capitalism, and of how the revolutionary potential of free economic relationships is diverted and deformed when markets are constrained to labor under bosses, monopoly and government. Johnson revisits, and updates, Benjamin Tucker’s classic “Four Monopolies” analysis of state capitalism, arguing that the case for Tucker’s free-market anticapitalism is stronger than ever, as we take into account not only the growth and retrenchment of the Land Monopoly, Money Monopoly, Patent Monopoly, and Protectionist Monopoly, but also the metastatic spread of state-capitalist monopolies into Agribusiness, Infrastructure, Utilities, Health Care, and Regulatory Protectionism.

For most of the twentieth century, American libertarians saw themselves, and were seen as, defenders of “capitalism.” Until nearly the end of the 20th century, anticapitalist anarchism was sidelined in political debate, and most simply ceased to be treat it as a live option; mean­while, most American libertarians, and nearly all of their opponents, seemed to agree that opposing state control of the economy meant defending business against the attacks of “big government.” The purpose and effect of laissez faire was simply to unleash existing forms of commerce from political restraints, and to produce something which would look, more or less, like business as usual, only more so: bigger, faster, stronger, and no longer held back by government from pushing the corporate business model to the hilt.

This was almost a complete reversal from the attitude of traditional libertarians like Benjamin Tucker, an attitude which we might call ‘free-market anti-capitalism.’ Tucker was one of the best-known defenders of free markets in nineteenth-century America. . . Yet he repeatedly described his views as a form of “Anarchistic Socialism.” . . . What could “social­ism” mean for a radical, free-market individualist like Tucker? Certainly not govern­ment control of industry. Rather, what Tucker was pointing out was his opposition to actually-existing capitalist business practices, and his support for workers’ control over the conditions of their own labor – the control denied by the Four Monopolies and the artificial inequalities of wealth and bargaining power they fostered. For Tucker, then, a libertarian politics meant an attack on economic privilege – by removing the political privileges that propped it up, and dismantling monopolies by exposing them to competition from below. . . .

$1.00 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

Market Anarchist Joseph R. Stromberg takes on the Land Monopoly, and examines how political expropriation, the tax economy, and political constraints on workers’ access to small-scale land ownership have combined to create an economy of dependence, employment and top-down capitalism.

“Where resources are ‘open,’ few will work for big enter­prises, and the latter will (if they can) institute some form of slavery. One never finds free land, free peasants, and non-working owners together. Why? Because where pol­it­ic­al leverage allows, aspir­ing lords and rent-seekers will eliminate the free land, the free peasants, or both. Enter­prisers in colonies have always want­ed regul­ar supplies of cheap labor for their projects. Aided by col­on­ial administrators with the same assumptions, they gradually over­came native economic in­dep­endence. Land was the key.  No matter how hard natives work­ed on their holdings, colonialists decried their ‘idleness’ — and their unciv­il­iz­ed fail­ure to work for wages. Colonial bureaucrats and em­ploy­ers saw a definite connection between small-scale land­own­er­ship and independence, and resolved to cut that independence short….

“I doubt we are necessarily better off merely because of em­ploy­ment. We need to know more, including why particular sets of choices exist in the first place. Back in the ’60s, Selective Serv­ice used to ‘channel’ us into the ‘right’ occupations by threaten­ing to draft us. What if proletarianization is not the ideal form of hum­an life? What if a complex division of labor is merely useful or con­ven­ient, but not a moral imper­at­ive? What if most of us are hirelings, well paid or otherwise, and then we learn what that status amounts to? Unfreedom arises both from direct, forcible coercion and from institutional arrangements that make people dependent. Freedom requires that we not be menaced by latent unknown powers. Freedom in this sense is liberty—a shared civic or public good. Like many real public goods it is not provided by the state, indeed the state may be its chief enemy….”

INTRODUÇÃO

I. Ascensão e Persistência da Comuna de Vila.

II. Destruição da Comuna Camponesa pelo Estado.

III. Destruição da Comuna Camponesa pelo Estado. Os Cercos na Inglaterra.

IV. Destruição da Comuna Camponesa pelo Estado. França: Guerra às Comuns por Monarquia, República e Império.

V. Destruição da Comuna Camponesa pelo Estado. O Acordo Permanente da Índia.

VI. Destruição da Comuna Camponesa pelo Estado. A Destruição da Mir na Rússia.

VII. Destruição da Comuna Camponesa pelo Estado. Política Fundiária Britânica na África.

VIII. A Questão da Eficiência

Conclusão

Apêndice: Os Debates Relativos ao Cerco

Apêndice: Os Debates Relativos ao Cerco. A Questão da Eficiência nos Cercos.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 28 de febrero 2012.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

The crises laid at the feet of laissez faire are the crises of markets that are nothing if not fettered. When critics confront us with corporate malfeasance, structural poverty, or socioeconomic marginalization, we should be clear that market principles do not require defending big business at all costs, and that much of what our critics condemn results from government regulation and legal privileges. As a model for analyzing the political edge of corporate power and defending markets from the bottom up, we twenty-first-century libertarians might look to our nineteenth-century roots—to the insights of the American individualists, especially their most talented exponent, Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939), editor of the free-market anarchist journal Liberty.

Conventional textbook treatments portray the American Gilded Age as one of relentless exploitation and economic laissez faire. But Tucker argued that the stereotypical features of capitalism in his day were products not of the market form, but of markets deformed by political privileges. Tucker did not use this terminology, but for the sake of analysis we might delineate four patterns of deformation that especially concerned him: captive markets, ratchet effects, concentration of ownership, and insulation of incumbents.

Types of Distortion

Captive Markets. Legal mandates and government monopolies produce captive markets in which customers are artificially locked in to particular services or sellers that they wouldn’t otherwise patronize because political requirements enforce the demand. For example, the car insurance market is shaped by laws requiring insurance and regulating the minimum service that must be purchased. Captive markets legally guarantee privileged companies access to a steady stock of customers, corralled by the threat of fines and arrest.

Ratchet Effects. Legal burdens, price distortions, and captive markets combine to ratchet up fixed costs of living far higher than would prevail in freed markets. To get by, people are constrained by the necessity of covering these persistent, inflexible costs—by selling labor, buying insurance, taking on debt—under artificially rigid circumstances. Ratchets keep many chasing the next paycheck, creating permanent states of financial crisis for the poor.

Concentration. Confiscation, regressive redistribution, and legal monopolies deprive workers of resources while concentrating wealth and economic control within a politically favored business class. Struggling to cover ratcheted fixed costs, workers are dispossessed of the means to make an independent living and enter markets where ownership of land, capital, and key resources are legally concentrated in the hands of a few. Workers therefore depend on relationships with bosses and corporations far more than in freed markets, deforming economic activity into hierarchical relationships and confining rental economies.

Insulation. Captive markets and bailouts protect big players, while legal monopolies, regulatory barriers, and anticompetitive subsidies inhibit substitutes and competition from below. Government support props up big businesses, stifling the market and social pressures that might otherwise be brought to bear. Insulated businesses can treat employees and consumers with far less consideration or restraint; meanwhile, intervention shuts out alternative solutions by blocking smaller, grassroots, or informal competitors.

Tucker’s Big Four

We can, then, turn to Tucker’s central idea: In “State Socialism and Anarchism” (1888), Tucker argued that “Four Monopolies” fundamentally shaped the Gilded Age economy—four central areas of economic activity where government ratchets, concentration, and insulation came together to deform markets into “class monopolies,” regressively reshaping all markets as the effects rippled outward.

The Land Monopoly. Land titles in nineteenth-century America had nothing to do with free markets. All unoccupied land was claimed by government, whose military seized land from Indians, Mexicans, and independent “squatters.” Government ownership and preferential grants monopolized access, excluding free homesteading. (The “Homestead Act,” which supposedly opened Western lands to homesteading, really imposed rigid legal limits on homesteaders that only certain medium-sized commercial farmers could effectively meet. Smaller farms and nonfarmers were excluded.) Tucker identified this concentration of land titles in elite hands as a “land monopoly,” creating a class of privileged landlords by depriving workers of market opportunities to gain freeholds and escape rent.

Since 1888 the land monopoly has dramatically expanded. Governments worldwide have nationalized oil, natural gas, and water resources; in the United States mining rights and fossil fuel exploration are largely accessed through government licenses, due to government’s ownership of 50 percent of the American West. The cost of land is ratcheted and ownership concentrated through zoning codes, eminent domain, municipal “development” rackets, and local policies to keep real estate prices permanently rising. Freed land markets would feature more individual and widely dispersed ownership; land would be less expensive and more often held free and clear; vacant land would be more readily open to homesteading; and titles would be based as easily on sweat equity as on leveraged cash exchanges. Many people would no longer need to rent; those who chose to rent would find that competition had dramatically improved the prices and conditions available on the market.

The Money Monopoly. For Tucker the most damaging of the Big Four was the Money Monopoly, “the privilege given by the government to certain individuals . . . holding certain kinds of property, of issuing the circulating medium,” politically manipulating the money supply, prohibiting alternative currencies, and cartelizing banking, money, and credit. Tucker saw that monetary control not only secured monopoly profits for insulated banks, but also concentrated economic ownership throughout the economy, favoring the large, established businesses that large, established banks preferred to deal with.

Tucker identified the Money Monopoly as an economic force in 1888—before the Fed and fiat currency, the FDIC, Fannie, Freddie, the IMF, or trillion-dollar bailouts to banks “too big to fail.” Today regulatory cartels and political mandates have also captured insurance, alongside credit, savings, and investment, as a Money Monopoly stronghold, forcing workers into rigged markets while shutting out noncorporate, grassroots forms of mutual aid.

Ideas and Extortion

The Patent Monopoly. Tucker condemned monopolies protected by patents and copyrights—“protecting inventors and authors against competition for a period long enough to enable them to extort . . . a reward enormously in excess of . . . their services.” Since copying an idea does not deprive the inventor of the idea, or any tangible property she had before, “intellectual property” meant only a legal monopoly against competitors who could imitate or duplicate the monopolists’ products at lower cost.

“Intellectual property” (IP) has grown vigorously since 1888, as media, technology, and scientific innovation made control over the information economy a linchpin of corporate power. Monopoly profits on IP are the effective business model of Fortune 500 companies like GE, Monsanto, Microsoft, and Disney, which demand virtually unlimited legal power to insulate themselves from competition. Copyright terms quadrupled in length, while massive, synchronized expansions of intellectual protectionism became standard features of neoliberal “free trade” “agreements” like NAFTA and KORUS FTA (United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement). In a freed market such business models would fall—and with them, the ratcheted costs consumers pay for access to culture, medicine, and technology.

The Protectionist Monopoly. Tucker identified the protectionist tariff as a monopoly in the sense that it insulated politically favored domestic producers from foreign competition, and thus ratcheted up daily costs for consumers.

With the rise of multinational corporations and neoliberal trade agreements, tariffs have declined over the years. But the specific legal mechanism was less important to Tucker than the purpose of controlling trade to insulate domestic incumbents. In 1888 that meant the tariff. In 2011, it means a vast network of political controls used to manage the “balance of trade”: export subsidies, manipulation of exchange rates, and multigovernment agencies like the World Bank and IMF.

Metastatic Monopolization

Tucker’s Big Four have only grown more pervasive since the 1880s. But the past century has also seen the metastatic proliferation of government regulatory bodies intended to restructure new transactions and capture new markets. Among today’s Many Monopolies, five are especially pervasive:

The Agribusiness Monopoly encompasses the New Deal system of U.S. Department of Agriculture cartels, surplus buy-ups, subsidized irrigation, export subsidies, and similar measures ratcheting up prices, distorting production toward subsidized crops, and concentrating agricultural activity in large-scale, capital-intensive monoculture. These, inevitably enacted in the name of “small farmers,” invariably benefit large factory farms and agribusiness conglomerates like ADM and Tyson.

The Infrastructure Monopoly includes physical and communications infrastructure. Governments build roads, railways, and airports through eminent domain and tax subsidies, and impose cartelizing regulations on most mass transit. Restricted entry secures monopoly profits for insulated carriers; confiscating money and property to subsidize long-distance transportation and shipping creates tax-supported business opportunities for agribusiness, big-box chain retailers, and other businesses dependent on long-haul trucking. Incumbent telecommunications and media companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon accumulate empires by cartelizing bandwidth; control of broadcast frequencies is concentrated through the FCC’s political allocation; and ownership of telephone, cable, and fiber-optic bandwidth is concentrated through local monopoly concessions for each medium.

The Utility Monopoly grants control over electricity, water, and natural gas to massive, centralized producers through comprehensive planning, subsidies, and regional monopolies. Household generation, polycentric neighborhood systems, or off-the-grid alternatives are crowded out or regulated to death.

Regulatory Protectionism

Regulatory Protectionism may be the most widely dispersed of the Many Monopolies. Like Tucker’s Protectionist Monopoly, it concentrates and insulates incumbent providers by creating hurdles for would-be competitors. Established businesses stifle competition from below by lobbying for regulatory red tape, extortionist fees, and complex licensing for everything from taxi-driving to hairdressing. Industry standards, which would otherwise be set by social convention and market experimentation, are removed from competition and determined by political pull. High compliance costs insulate incumbents who can afford them from competitors who cannot, shutting the poor out of entrepreneurial opportunities and independent livelihoods.

The Health Care Monopoly is a ripple effect of other monopolies but merits special notice because of the all-consuming growth of the medical sector and because health care and insurance so profoundly shape decisions about jobs, money, and financial planning. The central economic fact of health care is a crippling ratchet effect. Patent monopolies ratchet up drug costs and insulate profits for Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. The FDA and medical licensing provide a form of regulatory protectionism, constraining the supply of doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceuticals, concentrating profits and further ratcheting costs. A medical need can become a catastrophic cost, effectively requiring comprehensive insurance. Workers once got insurance through fraternal mutual-aid societies, but money monopolies have now thoroughly corporatized the insurance market through subsidies, mandates, and regulatory control. Workers now are tethered to their employers by the cost of insurance “benefits,” while facing the persistent danger of lost coverage, denied claims, and crippling debt.

Tucker’s analysis of the Four Monopolies controlling the Gilded Age economy, supplemented with the new Big Five that our own era has introduced, goes a long way toward showing why existing markets work the way they work and fail for the people they fail for. It may also inspire some objections from today’s libertarians.

The Many Monopolies deform markets toward stereotypically “capitalistic” business, but government intervenes in more than one direction. What about regulations or welfare programs to benefit poor people, or constraints on large, consolidated firms? These exist, but do not necessarily achieve their supposed aims. As shown in Gabriel Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism, the Progressive regulatory structure and antitrust law, far from curbing big business, form the core of regulatory protectionism, cartelizing and insulating big business. There are also issues of priority and scale. While I object to SBA loans or TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) as much as any free-marketeer, in this age of trillion-dollar bank bailouts, even when government puts fingers on both sides of the scale, one finger is pushing harder than the other.

What about the explanations market economists offer for corporate firms’ greater efficiency, based on division of labor, economies of scale, or gains from trade? Wouldn’t large corporations outcompete smaller rivals, even without subsidies and monopolies?

But Tucker didn’t reject the division of labor, gains from trade, or large-scale production. Rather he suggested labor, trade, and scale organized along different lines. Independent contracting, co-ops, and worker-managed shops are forms of specialization and trade no less than centralized firms. Scale can be internalized through central management, or externalized through polycentric trade. A corporate economy is only one among many possibilities for dividing labor and exchanging values. The question is whether it predominates because of economic forces that would persist in markets free of structural privilege, or because of predicaments that would dissipate when competitors are free to offer alternatives with less centralization, less management, and more trade and entrepreneurial independence for ordinary workers.

If Tucker’s analysis proves anything, it proves there are many places in economic life where ordinary people are given a hard shove toward spending money they’d rather not spend with trading partners they wouldn’t otherwise keep. The most pervasive, far-reaching government interventions foster economic concentration, commercialization, hyperthyroidal scale, and the consolidated hierarchy needed to manage it—not because they grow naturally in market economies but because they grow out of control in the hothouse of socialized costs and inhibited competition.

The Belt and the Bones

For most of the twentieth century American libertarians were seen as defenders of “capitalism” (though see Clarence Carson’s doubts about that word in the 1985 Freeman article “Capitalism: Yes and No”). Most libertarians, and nearly all their opponents, seemed to agree that libertarianism meant defending business against the attacks of “big government,” and the purpose of laissez faire was to unleash existing forms of commerce from political restraints.

This was almost a complete reversal from the attitude of traditional libertarians like Tucker, which we might call “free-market anti-capitalism.” He was one of the best-known defenders of free markets in nineteenth-century America, happily summarizing his economic principles as “Absolute Free Trade . . . laissez-faire the universal rule.” For Tucker, then, libertarianism meant an attack on economic privilege by removing the political privileges that propped it up, dismantling monopolies by exposing them to competition from below.

The Many Monopolies are pervasive and fundamentally shape the everyday reality of the corporatist economy. So why then have not only the opponents but also the advocates of free markets so often missed Tucker’s analysis, with Progressives constantly laying the blame for inequality, exploitation, and corporate power on “unregulated markets,” while “pro-capitalist” libertarians respond by making excuses for the economic status quo? Paradoxically, it may be that Tucker’s approach is forgotten partly because of the very depth and pervasiveness of the problems it identifies.

The interventions twentieth-century libertarians were most likely to identify and oppose—progressive taxes, welfare, environmental regulations—are surface interventions, economically speaking. While aiming to reform or restrain the corporate state-capitalist economy, they take its basic features—concentration, insulation, ratcheted costs, and corporate power—for granted, attempting only to contain their most unsightly downstream effects. Countervailing “Progressive” regulations are like a belt put on capitalism. A man may need a belt or he may look better without, but his body remains the same with or without the restraint.

The political means that consolidate the Many Monopolies do more than interfere in the outcomes of preexisting market structures. State-capitalist privileges shape basic patterns of ownership, access, and cost for essential goods and factors of production. They fundamentally restructure markets, inventing the class structures of ownership, ratcheted costs, and inhibited competition that produce wage labor, rent, and the corporate economy we face. These primary interventions are no belt for state capitalism to wear or take off; they are its very bones. Without them, what’s left is not a different look for the same body—it’s a totally different organism.

Because you wear a belt on the surface, it’s easy to see and easy to imagine how you might look without it. Twentieth-century libertarians rightly condemned how the belt was hitched by government coercion—but rarely noticed that however much the anti-business belt constrains the state capitalist economy’s natural shape, without the belt it is still a political product shaped by intervention to its pro-business bones. The Monopolies that create capitalists, landlords, and financiers and uphold corporate power are so deeply embedded in the existing economy, so entrenched in consensus politics, it is easy to mistake them for business as usual in a market society.

We might say—with apologies to Shulamith Firestone—that the political economy of state capitalism is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear to be a superficial set of interventions, a problem that can be solved by a few legal reforms, perhaps the elimination of the occasional bailout or export subsidy, while preserving intact the basic recognizable patterns of the corporate economy. But there is something deeper, and more pervasive, at stake. A fully freed market means liberating essential command posts in the economy from State control, to be reclaimed for market and social entrepreneurship. The market that would emerge would look profoundly different from anything we have now. That so profound a change cannot easily fit into traditional categories of thought—for example “libertarian” or “left-wing,” “laissez-faire” or “socialist,” “entrepreneurial” or “anti-capitalist”—is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: Radically free markets burst through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolutionary, we would use it.

To the superficial, and the one who is awed into admiration by vastness, the tangle of telephone wires over the city streets, the lines of trucks and drays crowding each other in their hurrying from depot to warehouse or from warehouse to retail store, the heavy trains speeding across the continent, all these have an effect that is irresistible.

But if we look below the surface and behold the picture there presented; see the ships that are wrecked, or railroad trains that have collided; hear the sobs of the sailor’s widow or the groans of the mangled brakeman, all because in the fierce rush of commerce the ship went to sea in a storm, or care was not taken to avoid an accident on the railroad; see the worn and aged men who have grown old while they might yet be young; see the gray-haired men who have grown so because their cargoes happened to reach port a few days late; see the wretched hovels and miserable lives of many who have given all their energy to carry on this mad chase; see the producer of wheat hungry, and the producer of wool cold; and his query rises, and, like the ghost in Hamlet will not “down:” is all this the perfection of human association or is it madness? It is far from the perfection of human association, and is, to a certain extent, madness.

Let us look into the workings of modern commerce, trace its effects back to their causes and see if it is either a blessing or a necessity. Without commerce the large cities as we know them, cities with their long streets of sky-high buildings, their splendor on one side and their squalor on the other, would not exist. These cities are the hot-beds of disease, crime and vice; the breeding places of all manner of disorders and infamies. But they are the legitimate and inevitable product of modern commerce.

Modem commerce is the companion of modern industry, and, like it, is the child of monopoly. Look at the internal commerce of America. Immense quantities of white lead are produced at Eureka, Nevada. All the requisites for making white lead are to be had, and altogether it is an ideal spot for the manufacture of white lead. But the Southern Pacific Railway Co. has interests in San Francisco, so it will not haul white lead from Eureka except at such rates as preclude its sale in competition with other white lead. They will haul the bar lead to San Francisco, then back past Eureka to Ogden or Salt Lake City or Denver for less than they will haul white lead from Eureka to these points. They have a monopoly of the hauling business in this region.

Take wool as another example. Large quantities of wool are grown in Southern and Eastern Oregon. This wool is shipped to Portland. From Portland it is shipped to New York. From there it goes to Lowell or Fall River where it is span and woven. From there the cloth is shipped to Boston, New York or Philadelphia where it is made up into clothing. This clothing goes to Chicago and St. Louis, and finally some of it reaches Portland from whence it is shipped to the towns in Southern and Eastern Oregon. The sheep-grower has raised much good wool, but after it has been hauled across the continent and back, the wool-grower only gets a few shoddy clothes, for the remainder has been absorbed by commerce — commission, storage, brokerage, transportation, insurance, profits.

I have eaten beef that was born in Southern Texas, fattened on the Staked Plains, butchered in Kansas City and cooked in Pan Handle City, Texas.

But what has monopoly to do with wool or beef being hauled so far and handled so much, yon may ask. I reply: Everything. In the country where the Wool is grown, all along the foot of the mountains, are splendid sites for woolen-goods factories. Mountain streams come tumbling down from the upper regions where the melting snows and ever-lasting springs start clear and pure, down for the lower altitudes. They could furnish power enough to run all spindles and looms needed to manufacture all the wool grown in this region. But monopoly of land puts the control of these sites into the hands of those who do not wish to use them for manufacturing purposes. Monopoly of machinery by means of patent laws, and monopoly of money compelling those who wish to purchase machinery to pay ruinous interest, preclude the possibility of putting in the necessary machinery, except by those who don’t want the factories there. Then, transportation companies make such discrimination against all such concerns when an attempt at their establishment is made, that they are killed thereby. The destruction of home butchering in Northern Texas was brought about by adverse legislation and transportation discrimination. As a result Armour & Co. would sell Kansas City beef cheaper than the local butcher could sell his product, and so he had to go out of business. Then the price of beef rose, but commerce flourished — the cattle were shipped to Kansas City, and then shipped back as dressed beef.

When we look at this question in the light of these facts, it becomes evident that less than three-fourths of our internal commerce — hauling, handling, transferring, interest paying, brokerage, etc. — is wasted, or worse than wasted. If the wool was manufactured near where it was grown, the wheat ground into flour at the nearest waterfall, and all industry organized on like considerations, the enormous amount of energy now wasted in these useless commercial transactions would be turned to producing necessities, comforts and luxuries. This would give far greater abundance and security, thus allowing greater leisure and opportunity for the cultivation of the artistic tastes and the literary and musical faculties.

Such an organization of industry can be accomplished only in a condition of freedom.

While government lasts commerce will continue to pillage and rob; to cause the young to look old; to furrow with care the brows of those who should be careless; and, while it fills the halls of some with splendor, it fills the cots of others with woe.

Away with the parent of monopoly — government — and all other monopolies will vanish like fog before the morning sun, and the re-organization of industries upon a sane and rational basis will proceed apace, and gaunt destitution be known no more in all the land.