This is the second part of my series on Al Carroll’s critique of libertarianism and small government conservatism. Let’s continue the critique.

He writes:

And yet, in a nation that prides itself on democracy and equality, one finds many defenders of elitism and inequality among some conservatives, most libertarians, and especially objectivists. In a capitalist nation, one that often worships economic success above morality, one can find religious defenses of amorality going back pretty far.

Not all libertarians defend elitism. There are indeed some who do so, but the notion of elites is not intrinsic to libertarianism. Those of us who are left-libertarian market anarchists certainly reject elitism. We’re also not amoral nor do we worship economic success. Our morality of non-aggression is adhered to pretty strongly.

The overturning or limiting of anti poverty, banking, public health, environmental, labor, and safety laws since the 1980s and the blocking of gun control, done for conservative ideological reasons or to benefit large corporations, resulted in huge losses of American lives. Those presidents partly responsible include not only Reagan, Bush Sr., and GW Bush, but also Clinton.

It’s doubtful whether libertarians had anything to do with that. The author also ignores all the deaths caused by government. R.J. Rummel estimates that governments have killed 262,000,000 people in major democides. It should be noted that his statistics have been questioned by a Facebook person I ran into, so the estimate should be viewed with caution. We do know that the Nazis killed millions and so did Stalin though.

The body count from anti government dogma far exceeds all wars in American history:

Up to 875,000 preventable deaths per year, or over one third of all deaths in the US.

At least 26,000 preventable deaths from poor healthcare or lack of healthcare each year.

The author is not clear on what causes these 875,000 preventable deaths per year, nor does he provide a source for his statistic. He also ignores the fact that we don’t have a freed market in healthcare. There is a statist system that has become even more so with the advent of the Affordable Care Act.

A heavily disputed number of preventable deaths from lack of effective gun control includes both murders and a far higher number of gun suicides. The number of deaths prevented by guns is much smaller, and exaggerated by industry lobbyists by as much as a hundredfold. Part of the reason for disputes about how many lives may be saved by gun control is the NRA successfully blocks government health research on firearms deaths.

He assumes these deaths would not have occurred with gun control. Something he doesn’t go on to prove. There is also no recognition of the cultural aspects of gun violence. It may be that a less violent culture would produce far fewer gun deaths. As for the blocking of government research, it’s possible that said research could be conducted by non-governmental organizations.

A further thought of his is:

An unknown number of earlier deaths from increased poverty because of financial deregulation, causing the Great Recession of 2007-2012, the dot.com collapse of the 1990s, the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, and the housing market collapse, the banking and mortgage crisis, the insurance industry crisis, and the Worldcom and Enron scandals in the 2000s.

For the third time; libertarians are not in charge. A truly freed market would drastically reduce poverty, because there would be no state intervention to prop up the wealth/power of the established rich. One wonders whether an established rich would exist at all. As for the allegation of financial deregulation causing crisis; I recommend Roderick Long’s piece titled Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the financial crisis.

The country’s turn to the right is often blamed, but this is too broad a claim. There are many cases of conservative support for government regulation of personal freedom. Some conservatives favor regulation of everything people do below the waist, except with the money in their wallet.

We agree on the lack of consistent anti-government sentiment among conservatives. This is implied in his statement about the regulation of personal freedom they desire.

Corporations pushing for deregulation for their own profit or from ideological blindness that imagine regulation costs profits is often blamed. But the US is almost unique in this mindset among business elites. Most nations have corporate elites that accept government roles, often working with them as partners. In every other nation except for Britain, modern industry was developed by the government. It’s worth noting, most of the more successful economies today are mixed.

He interestingly seems to embrace corporatism or the corporate state here. When business elites and government elites work together; the result is more concentrated wealth and inequality. This is due to the fact that they can obtain subsidies and regulatory protection. The fact that modern industry was developed by government doesn’t prove it can’t be created without the state. The resources would still exist and could be used for industrial purposes. The final point to be made is that no standard of success is offered. That’s all for now. I will write the rest of the series after taking a break.

This week’s blog topic is derived from a tweet posted by Dave Zirin earlier this week, following new media site and Ezra Klein vessel Vox posting a silly and weightless article about Solange Knowles beating up on Jay Z in an elevator titled, “Who Is Solange? And Why Is She Attacking Jay Z?”

The article doesn’t really answer the second question, as at the time, no one really knew why past rumor and speculation. But past that, the article is really just… uninformative. We’re apparently supposed to care (and/or not… care? What is happening) about the incident at the Met Gala because Solange is Beyonce’s sister, and Bey was recently listed as one of the most influential people by Time Magazine, and then there are memes and reposted photos from TMZ and…

Is this what new media is supposed to look like?

Vox debuted mere weeks ago, on March 30, to limited fanfare; it’s part of the same media group that hosts the fantastic tech site The Verge and video game site Polygon, and its launch was sponsored by General Electric. According to their “About” page, Vox is building their site in public, “listening to your feedback and learning as we grow.” Its mission? “Explain the news.”

So far, they’ve “voxsplained” Common Core (including an article listing all the ways in which Louis C.K. is wrong about it), net neutrality and Benghazi, among other subjects; they’ve also done hard hitting journalism on… otter necrophilia.

So far, color me unimpressed, and a little bit queasy.

When we talk about new media, and celebrity-journalist-centered media specifically, we tend to be optimistic that a given vehicle is going to highlight the good points of a particular writer’s work. With The Intercept, we focus on Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras’s writing on government surveillance. With FiveThirtyEight, we want good political statistics. With Vox, what are we getting? After the first month, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot. Mostly, it just reminds me of the overly-curious personality sphere you have to kill from Portal.

Ezra Klein has gathered together a pretty hefty team of writers to work for him at Vox, including Matthew Yglesias and Zach Beauchamp. But so far, the results have brought a less-interesting Buzzfeed to bear, not a new media franchise blazing new ground. Also, otter necrophilia.

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The first two weeks of May have been very good to us at C4SS Media. The podcast feed (also on iTunes and Stitcher Radio) has been downloaded from over 2000 times since the first recording was posted on May 1. We’ve got more in the works, including a podcast for this blog and some other discussion-oriented shows. In the meantime, you can like Missing Comma’s Facebook page and follow us on Twitter, and don’t forget to do the same for the Center here and here. Thanks for your support!

Al Carroll recently penned a piece titled The Moral and Practical Failures of Libertarianism and Small Government Conservatism. This will be a point by point refutation. Let’s begin.

Al writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He also writes:

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

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

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

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

4. Democratic control obviously is better than elite control.

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

Robert Johannes, a 73 year old man, is currently incarcerated in Michigan. His attorney, Daniel E. Manville, contends that inadequate access to dental care has left Johannes missing teeth for extended periods of time and unable to eat. As Michigan Live reported, “The lawsuit claims that Johannes has had several teeth removed, including three bicuspids and two molars, since entering prison and that he requires dentures or partials to be able to chew foods.”

Michael Levy, an inmate at Arizona State Prison, arguably faced even worse neglect from prison healthcare providers. After 15 days of headaches and chest pains, he was only given ibuprofen. Fourteen days later he complained that these symptoms persisted in excruciating ways, and requested an MRI. Officials ignored the request, and he continued to file requests over several months. Eventually, Levy experienced an aneurysm and a stroke. According to Tucson News 4, “Doctors recommended the inmate do aggressive physical therapy, but Levy’s health care provider Corizon stepped in. … Corizon denied his rehab with St. Joseph Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix ‘due to the cost of rehab.'”

These recent incidents of prison healthcare neglect are not unique. In her book Resistance Behind Bars, Victoria Law describes the case of Michelle Everett, a prisoner in Oregon who repeatedly requested medical care but was ignored. “She was given medical attention only after turning yellow,” Law writes. “After both hepatitis and cirrhosis of the liver were ruled out, she was told that a bile duct was obstructed, but that the prison could do nothing about it.”

For-profit companies often contract with prisons to provide healthcare. Yet their incentives differ substantially from what we would see from healthcare providers in a free market. While these companies are cost-sensitive due to the impact of costs on their profits, their clients are not prisoners, but the state. These contractors have a state-secured monopoly within the prison, so prisoners are not free to seek services from competing firms.  These incentives predictably produce abysmal care. Victoria Law describes two companies that engaged in particularly egregious forms of neglect. One is Prison Health Services (PHS). Writes Law:

A yearlong investigation by the New York Times found that the care provided by PHS was often deficient, flawed, and/or lethal. According to the Times, state investigators scrutinizing ten prisoner deaths came to the same conclusions after finding the same circumstances in each case: to cut expenses, PHS trimmed medical staffs, hired underqualified doctors, had nurses doing tasks beyond their training and withheld prescription drugs. The investigators also found that PHS allowed patient records remain unread and employee misconduct to go unpunished.

Similar neglect has been perpetrated by Correctional Medical Services (CMS). “An investigative article in Harper’s revealed that CMS stymies those seeking treatment for hepatitis C, requiring them to fulfill a long list of conditions, known as ‘the protocol pathway,’ before they can receive any care,” writes Law. This reprehensible behavior is predictable given the incentives prison medical contractors are given.

Problems in prison and jail healthcare are systemic. Prison healthcare services are often understaffed. Moreover, prison is characterized by cruel, austere, and punitive conditions, such as hard and uncomfortable beds and inadequate or unappetizing food rations. The only way to get more bedding or better food is typically a medical exemption, which means that understaffed medical services find themselves swamped with inmates who are simply seeking better accommodations. This makes it harder to detect serious medical issues and respond to them in time.

The mentally ill, the poor, drug users, and sex workers all face increased risks of health problems. Yet our society warehouses members of these groups in institutions where healthcare access is systematically denied. Problems with prison healthcare are not isolated incidents; they’re signs of a structural problem.

Steven Reisner discusses a letter to Obama about ending torture once and for all.

Ralph Nader discusses a potential left-right alliance.

Vincent Navarro discusses the Mondragon worker cooperatives in Spain.

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

Qatryk interviews Roderick Long in Poland.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the death penalty.

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

Kevin Carson discusses May Day.

Kevin Carson discusses the governmentalist educational establishment and equality.

Stefan Haus discusses the rise of the right in Europe.

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

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

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

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses racism in government programs.

Sheldon Richman discusses the thick and thin libertarian debate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Fantina discusses U.S. terrorism against Cuba.

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

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the ticking time bomb scenario and torture.

Cathy Reisenwitz discusses how government created the campus rape crisis.

Christopher Westley discusses e-cig manufacturers who support regulation.

David Stockman discusses why the warfare state must be dismantled.

Magnus Carlsen beats Anand before the World Chess Championship.

Magnus Carlsen beats Boris Gelfand.

In this post, I continue my brief introduction to left-wing laissez faire economic theory. Let’s get started.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Journalism Review reported last week that journalists’ wages were falling behind the national average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

While reporters’ wages increased from $40,000 to around $44,000 in the period between 2003 and 2013, the rest of the country rose from $36,000 to over $46,000 in the same time span.

Additionally, in the decade between 2003 and 2013, multitudes of newspapers, television stations and radio stations fired or laid off dozens of their employees at a time. Local newspaper publisher OPUBCO fired hundreds of employees over multiple layoffs before being acquired by energy industry billionaire Phillip Anschutz. Those that remained took pay cuts.

Newspaper ad revenue is down 60 percent over the past decade,” according to the AJR article by Jim Bach. “This has given employers at many news outlets extraordinary leverage over their workers.

It doesn’t help that the job market for journalists shrinks every year, while the job pool steadily grows. Journalism schools continue to churn out graduates, who go straight for coveted reporting jobs – naturally – and they do so for less and less pay every year. So, what does this mean for journalism?

Well, nothing really. It’s simply reflective of the current ecosystem the news industry finds itself in. Journalism is contracting as it tries to navigate new forms of media. Independent journalists are still a long way away from being able to supplant the old regime. So in the meantime, this is just the reality reporters are currently facing.

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Sorry for the short post this week, folks. I’m finishing up moving across town, and my mind has been elsewhere. But good news! C4SS Media, the new podcast network featuring audio recordings of op-eds and other stuff, is now on both iTunes and Stitcher Radio! Just search “C4SS Media” in each site’s respective search functions.

Also, I don’t know if I ever formally announced that Missing Comma has its own Facebook page and Twitter account. You can follow us on Twitter: @missingcomma and on Facebook at this link. Give us a like! I promise you’ll only be mildly disappointed.

In my last two blog posts, I responded to Lynn Stuart Parramore’s article titled How Piketty’s Bombshell Book Blew Up Libertarian Fantasies. At the end of the second one, I promised an explanation of the economic theory I used to critique her article. This post will be a brief introduction to said economic theory. Let’s get started.

This theory is called left-wing market anarchism or laissez faire socialism. Its basic contention is that a truly freed market has never existed, and that capitalism is a statist system. There is also the conviction that genuinely freed markets would result in greater relative equality and more worker friendly conditions. The first thing to cover are the four big monopolies identified by the late individualist anarchist, Benjamin Tucker. They are described in his famous essay, State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, And Wherein They Differ. They are the money monopoly, land monopoly, tariff monopoly, and the patent monopoly or intellectual property monopolies. Let us consider each in turn.

1) The money monopoly pertains to a government or state grant of privilege to select individuals or people possessing certain types of property. This privilege is the exclusive right to issue money. The effect of this is to keep interest rates artificially high or maintain them period. In a left-libertarian market anarchist society, anyone would be free to issue a currency. There would be a competitive whittling down of lending money to the labor cost of conducting banking business. Another positive effect identified by Tucker would be the absence of control mentioned below:

It is claimed that the holders of this privilege control the rate of interest, the rate of rent of houses and buildings, and the prices of goods,—the first directly, and the second and third indirectly.

Kevin Carson has quoted Alexander Cairncross to the effect that:

the American worker has at his disposal a larger stock of capital at home than in the factory where he is employed….

Said capital or property would serve as collateral or backing. This would increase the bargaining power of labor in relation to capital, because the laborers would be able to organize their own credit systems for conducting independent business apart from the capitalists. As Gary Elkin notes:

It’s important to note that because of Tucker’s proposal to increase the bargaining power of workers through access to mutual credit, his so-called Individualist anarchism is not only compatible with workers’ control but would in fact promote it. For if access to mutual credit were to increase the bargaining power of workers to the extent that Tucker claimed it would, they would then be able to (1) demand and get workplace democracy, and (2) pool their credit buy and own companies collectively.

2) The land monopoly consists of governments or states granting or protecting land titles not based on occupation and use. This is a critique of absentee landlordism and the rent following therefrom. This has the effect of shutting out land based work as a competitive factor with industry. It also destroyed the independence to be derived from occupying land or making use of a stateless commons.

3) The tariff monopoly pertains to the protection of the profits of domestic capitalist industry from foreign competition. This increases the price of goods and thus extracts more of the product of laborers from them. It also helps create oligopolies or monopolies, because there is no competitive whittling down of profit or size. It’s worth noting that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon thought the money monopoly had to be abolished before the tariff monopoly, because the people put out of work by foreign competition would need a market with a vast demand for labor to find different work.

4) The patent or intellectual property monopoly allows people to extract monopoly prices from things that could conceivably be competed over. A person is also denied the ability to use their property in a way they see fit through aggressive force. Two people can write the same book without stealing from each other. Patents are also pooled by corporations to prevent any competition and to control economic resources. This allows them to lock the third world into a dependence on them for technology. In addition to the above, Kevin Carson has noted:

A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%.

The one exception was drugs, in which 60% supposedly would not have been invented. I suspect disingenuousness on the part of the respondants, however. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices.

In my next post, I will continue this introduction.

Stay tuned!

Recently we heard from Ukraine of a flyer distributed by Russian separatists in Donetsk. The flyer ordered the Jews of the city to register and pay a fee as a penalty for the support of Jewish leaders for the new government in Kiev. The flyer was denounced by American secretary of state John Kerry and widely discussed in the Western press as evidence of just how alarming the Russian separatists in Ukraine are. Of course, it was also completely fake.

Deception is commonplace during war, but the vital role lies play in fomenting war is not as commonly understood. We would like to believe that our “leaders” approach decisions of war and peace with great seriousness, and so some of us are willing to see the lies that lead us to war as exceptions, or mistakes. However, the pattern is so prevalent that the exception becomes the rule.

The story is of course very familiar to us – a tyrannical regime committing a litany of atrocities against defenseless civilians, remorselessly grinding them into a bloody pulp and committing an ever-increasing array of horrors against the population. Men are killed, women raped, even infants are murdered. The story is so familiar in becomes a motif, a motif that is recurring now in Syria and has occurred and reoccurred many times before.

The most famous instance is perhaps the “rape of Belgium.” The German invasion of Belgium was Great Britain’s rationale for entering the Great War, but the simple violation of Belgian neutrality was not enough for the British public. So, they were instead fed a steady diet of atrocity stories, luridly embellishing the very real horrors that accompany any invading army, with particular focus on sexual violence. Many atrocities were invented outright, such as tales of Belgian nuns tied to the clappers of church bells and crushed, or of the Germans using the bodies of dead Belgians to produce lubricants for machinery. To be clear, the German Army in Belgium committed grievous sins, as indeed do all invading armies. The concerted propaganda effort, however, removed these sins from their context, added further horrors, and focused the attention of the press on endlessly telling and retelling these tales.

In a more modern context, many readers will remember the famous testimony of one Nayirah before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This young woman bore agonized witness to the terrible image of Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators and leaving them to die on cold hospital floors. Her testimony was corroborated by supposed testimony from evacuees and her story backed by none other than Amnesty International.

After the war, Nayirah was revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and her testimony coached by a public relations firm hired by the Kuwaiti government, Hill & Knowlton. No evidence was found to support her lurid tales; Kuwaiti patients had indeed died, but due to their abandonment by Kuwaiti doctors and nurses fleeing the Iraqi invasion. No babies were thrown to the floor. Nayirah’s testimony is remembered; the reality of her role as a public relations flack spinning tales to outrage Americans is not.

And so today we are greeted with horror stories from eastern Ukraine and from Syria. Are terrible things taking place in these countries? Of course. But anyone who claims to know exactly what is happening and exactly who is responsible is either a dupe, or is trying to dupe you.

Palestinian prisoners incarcerated in Israeli jails are not allowed conjugal visits. They have no physical contact with loved ones, and all visits have a glass barrier between visitors and inmates. But prisoners and their wives are finding a route around this social control by smuggling sperm out of prison and using in vitro fertilization to have children, the Washington Post reports.

Suad Abu Fayed, whose husband is imprisoned for involvement with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, recently had a child by this method. “I know it won’t be easy raising a baby with a husband in jail, but this is our way of breaking Israel’s siege on us,” she told the Post. “We are challenging [Israel’s] occupation and getting something beautiful in return.”

These restrictions on reproduction and human contact are unjustifiable forms of control that are cruelly dehumanizing, unnecessary for preventing or stopping violence, and fit into an overall system of occupation, coercion, apartheid, and control. Yet prisoners, their families, and others find ingenious and entrepreneurial ways around this.

Black markets have played a similar liberating role in Alabama with the recent Free Alabama Movement. Prisoners inside Alabama prisons have used cell phones, which are prohibited inside prisons, to produce videos exposing and protesting unjust conditions. The Free Alabama Movement made headlines in late April by calling for a strike by prison laborers to protest slave-like labor conditions. The strike was endorsed by the Industrial Workers of the World. The transparency, political speech, and action taken by the Free Alabama Movement would not be possible without the illicit smuggling of cell phones into prisons. Once again, black markets prove vital to political resistance.

In attempts to squelch such black markets, prison officials engage in pervasive surveillance and invasive searches. Among the worst of these are strip searches and cavity searches. These searches can traumatize rape survivors and provoke them to harm themselves or others. Moreover, they involve forced exposure and intimate contact to the point that they themselves often meet the state’s own definition of sexual assault. Angela Davis refers to strip searches as “routinization of sexual assault.” Yet in 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that anyone being booked into jail, even for something as trivial as a traffic stop, could constitutionally be strip searched in order to prevent them from bringing contraband into a jail or prison. Given the transparency and accountability illicit cell phones could facilitate, it could be argued that the state has created a feedback loop where routine sexual assault is justified in order to deprive inmates of access to tools that could counter illicit sexual assault. Yet in spite of these systems of control and surveillance, markets persist and flourish, and contraband remains common in prisons around the United States and around the world.

Ultimately, human beings want to engage in exchange and access goods and services. According to economist David Skarbek, prison gangs have largely formed as governance institutions to facilitate this sort of exchange. Skarbek’s forthcoming book, The Social Order of the Underworld, examines these issues in detail. Skarbek has also documented more open markets in San Pedro Prison in Bolivia, where prisoners engaged in self-governance and guards did not squelch market activity.

Prohibition does not work. Markets route around prohibitions and state violence, and the flourishing of black markets is a key part of prison resistance.

About 2,748,978 Americans are employees of the federal government.

The population of the US is somewhere around 317,940,000.

The federal government takes 17.3% of Gross Domestic Product in taxes.

So the average federal employee controls a little more than 20 times as much of each year’s produced wealth as the average American. And it’s not just production income:  As highlighted in the recent Bundy ranch standoff, that 0.86% of the population claims to “own” 28% of land in the United States.

Oh, they say they control it “for all of us” and “on everyone’s behalf,” but that just doesn’t wash even if it’s true (and we all know it isn’t). After all, many — maybe even most — “private sector” rich people contribute to charity and so forth, but the “wealth inequality” complainers hold that it’s the fact that they have/control the wealth, not what they do with it, that’s important.

What got me thinking about this? Well, a lot of people are talking about Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century. I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve been following the talk, and one blurb stood out to me:

“A landmark book … which brings a ton of data to bear in reaching the commonsensical conclusion that inequality has to do with more than just blind market forces at work.” Paul Krugman, New York Times

That quote caught my attention because I find such a … libertarian … statement rather odd coming out of Krugman’s mouth. I believe it to be true that it is indeed not “blind market forces” which create drastic wealth inequalities. I suspect that in a free market, wealth would distribute itself quite a bit more evenly than it does in a state-managed economy. I’m not saying that there would be no rich people or no poor people, just that most people would be wealthier than they are now and that “the super-rich” would control a smaller percentage of wealth than they do at present.

But is that what Krugman meant? I tried Googling the specific quote and wasn’t able to find the piece it came from. What I did find was his upcoming piece on Piketty in The New York Review of Books, “Why We’re in a New Gilded Age.” In which he holds that:

So progressive taxation — in particular taxation of wealth and inheritance — can be a powerful force limiting inequality.

And he’s just. Flat. Wrong. When wealth is “progressively taxed,” it doesn’t get redistributed equally among those poorer than the people who had it before. It gets redistributed to a tiny bureaucratic minority who are just as interested in acquiring, using and keeping that wealth as anyone else, even if they formally disclaim personal interest and pretend to be acting as agents of “the public.” As history demonstrates, this tiny bureaucratic minority tends to align itself with those “progressively taxed” wealthy rather than with the poor, however deserving or undeserving you might think the poor are (if for no other reason than that even under very “progressive” taxation, the wealthy retain enough wealth to pay bribes, hire lobbyists, elect candidates, etc.).

The state is, as Karl Marx put it, “the executive committee of the ruling class.” And it pays itself a hell of a salary.

[cross-posted from KN@PPSTER — this piece is in the public domain]

In April, I made 38,078 English-language op-ed submissions (our media coordinators working in other languages also made submissions and had pickups by publications which run in those languages), and I have detected 47 “media pickups” of our content (this is content that was published in April or late March).

Just a quick note on submissions, as I sometimes get questions along the lines of “wait … you guys wrote 38,000 op-eds in one month?” The answer to that is “no.”

When I say that I’ve submitted 38,078 op-eds in a month, what I mean is that the op-eds we wrote in that month have been submitted a total of 38,078 times. So one op-ed may have been submitted in the US only (to around 1,700 newspapers), while another may have been submitted worldwide (to about 2,600 newspapers). I keep a running tally of how many newspapers each op-ed is submitted to and that’s the 38,078. So any one op-ed may have been sent to as many as 2,700 papers, and any one paper may have received some or all of the op-eds we published that month. Hope that clarifies things.

Michael Uhl discusses the murder of a Brazilian torturer who confessed to his crime.

John Grant discusses Losing Tim: A Memoir.

Troy Camplin reviews Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture.

Michael S. Rozeff discusses why libertarians should still embrace the non-aggression principle

William L. Anderson discusses Republican governors who are against the Bill of Rights.

Joe Scarry discusses U.S. military advisers in Southeast Asia.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Tony Blair’s ignoring of Saudi Arabia as prime source of terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism.

Paul Rosenberg discusses the truth about war heroes.

Justin Raimondo discusses Obama’s pivot to Asia.

W. James Antle III discusses the libertarian right’s issue with plagiarism and conspiracy theories.

Cathy Reisenwitz discusses why Republicans should get to know their enemy on income inequality.

Steve Chapman discusses the hawkishness of Hilary Clinton.

Brian Doherty reviews The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses U.S. intervention in Venezuela and Egypt.

John Glaser discusses how the U.S. supports regimes that support terrorism.

Justin Raimondo discusses the lamentation of a neocon.

David R. Henderson discusses an economist’s case for a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Kevin Gosztola discusses transparency on drone strikes.

Bill discusses how a slave society is a polite society for the government.

Thomas L. Knapp discusses Israel and apartheid.

Laurence M. Vance discusses he phony conservative war.

Gene Healy dicusses why Obama is right on pardoning non-violent drug offenders.

Jason Brennan discusses the three types of democratic citizens.

Ed Krayewski discusses why it’s not World War 3.

John R. Graham discusses whether the Canadian middle class is doing better than the American one.

Jacob Sullum discusses Obama’s plan to grant clemency to non-violent drug offenders.

Daniel J. D’Amico discusses four things you should know about mass imprisonment.

George C. Leef reviews Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything.

Judit Polgar wins against Anatoly Karpov.

Judit Polgar defeats Garry Kasparov.

My name is Nick Ford and I would like to welcome you to this blog of mine, Hardly Working.

The goal of this blog is to promote a future where none of us will have to work. And by “work” I don’t mean just giving effort, but labor that we give to others under systematic duress. A good example is the workers who work in retail or low-paying jobs because they have no other good options.

These lack of options come from state-granted monopoly privileges like intellectual property to big corporations and licensing restrictions (the taxi medallions being a good example) that make independent work harder to obtain. Through these privileges, corporations have been able to take up far more space in the marketplace than they would be able to normally. Without these privileges we’d see much wider array of economic experimentation: from worker cooperatives, to self-employment and independently contracting individuals. All sorts of possibilities could open up once we abolish the state and actually-existing capitalism and bring our labor more under our individual control and out of the hands of big business or government.

The goal of anarchism and the anti-work position I support is to give tools to all of us that will free us from such systems and relations. I don’t mean that they would be evenly distributed or exist in some perfect equilibrium, but the means of production would certainly be more socialized than it is now – as well as much more accessible by your average individual. This in turn makes work a lot less necessary.

Any labor that exists through either artificial economic or political conditions (i.e. a situation wherein your agency or power is overridden by another involuntarily) must be abolished. That means revoking the monopoly privileges granted by the state and putting businesses on a much more equal footing. Abolishing the state and making tools and wealth more accessible by getting it out of capitalist hands and giving it to the individual are some of the key components of abolishing work.

Getting tools or wealth doesn’t necessitate a workers revolution, some sort of vanguard or any violence on our part. The exception being, if the state decides to attack us on either their own behest or the behest of the capitalist class. No, what it requires is the old Wobbly slogan of “building the new society within the shell of the old” and, then, these institutions would work to, as Proudhon said, “…dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system, by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State.”

Of course, abolishing work is not just concerned with the economic sphere, but also the personal sphere (especially because these two things are intimately connected). I don’t want people free from the abuse of a system of work that is in place, but also from the cultural norms that reinforce the work environment. Cultural norms and attitudes, the Puritan Work Ethic for example, that reduce slackers and people who prefer leisure as “losers” or “deserving” their poverty.

The anti-work perspective, then, tries to criticize economics, culture and both the extra-personal parts of our lives (i.e. our relations to work, our bosses, our co-workers, our wages, the government, etc.) and our deeper personal levels (i.e. our own views about labor, how we view other people, our ethical and meta-ethical beliefs about work or the lack thereof, etc.).

To give an example of the deeper personal realm, a friend of mine recently sent me this link that explains the lives of a few different people. They are extreme cases and there is a ton of possible wiggle room, but let’s have a look at two:

He got up at four and set out on foot to hunt black grouse, wood grouse, woodcock, and snipe. At eleven he met his friends, who had also been out hunting alone all morning. They converged “at one of these babbling brooks,” he wrote. He outlined the rest of his schedule. “Take a quick dip, relax with a schnapps and a sandwich, stretch out, have a smoke, take a nap or just rest, and then sit around and chat until three. Then I hunt some more until sundown, bathe again, put on white tie and tails to keep up appearances, eat a huge dinner, smoke a cigar and sleep like a log until the sun comes up again to redden the eastern sky. This is living…. Could it be more perfect?”

And:

Wallace Stevens in his forties, living in Hartford, Connecticut, hewed to a productive routine. He rose at six, read for two hours, and walked another hour—three miles—to work. He dictated poems to his secretary. He ate no lunch; at noon he walked for another hour, often to an art gallery. He walked home from work—another hour. After dinner he retired to his study; he went to bed at nine. On Sundays, he walked in the park. I don’t know what he did on Saturdays. Perhaps he exchanged a few words with his wife, who posed for the Liberty dime.

I cannot say that either of these lives strike me as “perfect” because of my own individual capacities and skills, but, even so, I’d prefer the first example of a Dutch aristocrat – where naps are available, sleep is as long as I need, I can relax and write when I want to and so on. Sure, the aristocrat has this all in a routine too, but it’s clear that he probably wouldn’t hold to it too tightly. Notice that the aristocrat says he would “outline” and not just simply write his given routine. He naps or rests as he pleases and sees friends as a pastime.

Stevens, on the other hand, has a grueling routine. There’s certainly nothing unethical about what’s going on here, but would it be desirable? Perhaps for some. I know I am not one of those people and I think most people would prefer the first scenario over the second. Discipline is something many of us strive for within many contexts, yet we, often, give ourselves breaks, cut ourselves deals or give ourselves rewards. The second example of living doesn’t seem to ever stop, or reward the toil or give ourselves a few seconds to take in the outside breeze and just breathe.

So while I am, by no means, calling for the universality of the former or the total rejection of the latter (I don’t think having discipline or a routine is de facto bad), I do hope for a time when more of us can claim that we live like the first example.

Except it won’t be the aristocratic class that can claim such a pleasure, but any and all who want it.

No class, but the leisure class!

This is the second part of my two part series on Lynn Stuart Parramore’s recent article titled How Piketty’s Bombshell Book Blew Up Libertarian Fantasies. Let’s get started.

She writes:

By 1987, Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan had taken over as head of the Federal Reserve, and free market fever was unleashed upon America.

Alan Greenspan was indeed one of the original acolytes of Ayn Rand, but he deviated from pure laissez faire by becoming head of the central bank called the Federal Reserve. The notion that a “free market fervor” emanated from a statist institution like the Federal Reserve is absurd. It may have been in the direction of relatively more freed market freedom, but a fervor implies a massive revolutionary shift. Something I highly doubt occurred, but I am open to evidence otherwise.

The next thing worthy of discussion she wrote was:

People in U.S. business schools started reading Ayn Rand’s kooky novels as if they were serious economic treatises and hailing the free market as the only path to progress

Ayn Rand’s novels do touch on economic themes like corporatism and government management or regulation of the economy. It may not be a full blown economic treatise, but it doesn’t deserve to be dismissed. This left-libertarian market anarchist doesn’t believe the free market or freed market is the only path to progress. A healthy dose of civil society is essential to my theory of political economy and positive change.

Since the ‘80s, the top salaries and pay packages awarded to executives of the largest companies and financial firms in the U.S. have reached spectacular heights. This, coupled with low growth and stagnation of wages for the vast majority of workers, has meant growing inequality. As income from labor gets more and more unequal, income from capital starts to play a bigger role. By the time you get to the .01 percent, virtually all your income comes from capital—stuff like dividends and capital gains. That’s when wealth (what you have) starts to matter more than income (what you earn).

Wealth and income are related. You can also be said to earn wealth too. It doesn’t simply refer to what you already have. I agree that more wealth being acquired through capital rather than labor is a problem, but I don’t see government or the state as the solution. Freed markets will ensure that the only way of getting an income or obtaining wealth is through labor. They will also ensure that the wage of labor is its full product.

Another thing she writes is:

Wealth gathering at the top creates all sorts of problems. Some of these elites will hoard their wealth and fail to do anything productive with it. Others channel it into harmful activities like speculation, which can throw the economy out of whack. Some increase their wealth by preying on the less well-off. As inequality grows, regular people lose their purchasing power. They go into debt. The economy gets destabilized. (Piketty, and many other economists, count the increase in inequality as one of the reasons the economy blew up in 2007-’08.

There are ways to address the above problems without using government or state power. In a left-wing market anarchist society, the productive would be able to keep the product of their own labor. The disconnect between labor and results would not exist, so it would be more difficult to make a ton of cash to hoard. One would have to be continually innovate or rely on the cooperation of newly empowered fellow workers to make staggeringly high levels of money to put away. Speculation can also refer to forecasting the future direction of things, but I see the author as talking about speculation in the context of finances.

Which brings us back to Friedman’s view that people naturally get what they deserve, that reward is based on talent. Well, clearly in the case of inherited property, reward is not based on talent, but membership in the Lucky Sperm Club (or marriage into it). That made Uncle Milty a little bit uncomfortable, but he just huffed that life is not fair, and we shouldn’t think it any more unjust that one person is born with mathematical genius as the other is born with a fortune. What’s the difference?

Actually, there is a very big difference. It is the particular rules governing society that determine who amasses a fortune and what part of that fortune is passed on to heirs. The wrong-headed policies promoted by libertarians and their ilk, who hate any form of tax on the rich, such as inheritance taxes, have ensured that big fortunes in America are getting bigger, and they will play a much more prominent role in the direction of our society and economy if we continue on the present path.

She is partially right that inherited property or wealth has nothing to do with talent. I’d only add that it might represent talent in the form of manipulating the person who gives the wealth away. The rules of society do indeed determine who gets a fortune, and those rules deserve to be changed in the direction of left-wing market anarchism.

What we are headed for, after several decades of free market mania, is superinequality, possibly such as the world has never seen. In this world, more and more wealth will be gained off the backs of the 99 percent, and less and less will be earned through hard work.

Which essentially means freedom for the rich, and no one else.

We don’t live in any society with free market mania. I otherwise agree with her assessment. Look to my next blog post for an explanation and justification of the economic perspective underlying this assessment of Lynn Stuart Parramore’s article.

So, this is pretty exciting. As of today, C4SS podcasts is a thing! You can grab the RSS feed here, and very soon we will have confirmation from iTunes and Stitcher Radio that we’ve been added to their sites as well.

So why podcasts? Don’t y’all have YouTube?

The Center does indeed have a YouTube channel, but as we’ve been increasing our output of audio recordings, the demand for an audio-only podcast version of these recordings has risen as well. Also, YouTube is a great medium, but it’s designed with a captive audience in mind. Podcasts are easily downloadable and can be taken anywhere. Plus, you don’t have to sit there and wait for your video to buffer.

Will all previous recordings be posted to the podcast feed?

Unfortunately, no. We’re starting the podcast stream with Gary Chartier’s “We Should Abandon The Term ‘Capitalism,'” and going forward we’ll be posting recordings simultaneously, but we don’t have the audio files for previous recordings.

Will the podcasts only be available on iTunes or Stitcher Radio?

No! If you use a podcatcher that isn’t iTunes or Stitcher, you can always ask us to submit the RSS feed to it! Also, in most cases you can copy-paste the RSS feed into whatever you use, and download new episodes as they arrive.

What’s going to be on the C4SS Podcast Network, or C4SS Media?

Well, that’s a great question. Right now, the only thing we know for sure is that we’ll be posting the article recordings, and I know that I’ll be doing a podcast version of Missing Comma, but that’s all for the moment.

C4SS Media is still in its infancy, and as time goes by, more stuff will be added to it. We’re always willing to take suggestions!

Lynn Stuart Parramore just can’t stop attacking libertarianism. In a recent article titled How Piketty’s Bombshell Book Blows Up Libertarian Fantasies, she targets libertarians on equality and wealth. She also continues to evidence no awareness of the existence of left-wing forms of libertarianism like left-libertarian market anarchism. This is the ideology both I and the site I write for adhere to. This will thus be a critique of her from a left-libertarian market anarchist perspective. Let’s get started.

She opens with:

Libertarians have always been flummoxed by inequality, tending either to deny that it’s a problem or pretend that the invisible hand of the market will wave a magic wand to cure it. Then everybody gets properly rewarded for what he or she does with brains and effort, and things are peachy keen.

Those of us who advocate anarchistic freed markets do indeed contend that unimpeded market forces will lead to drastically reduced inequality, but we do not regard it as magic. It’s the product of applying the insights of economic science to the problem of wealth inequality. Science is by definition not magic and doesn’t rely on magical processes to achieve its aims. Lynn constructs a strawman in accusing libertarians of regarding the market as magical. I know of no libertarian on either the left or the right who regards it as such.

As for everyone getting appropriately rewarded for what they do with brains and efforts, I am not an advocate of meritocracy. Freed markets are useful as a way to conduct economic activity without central command and control or non-coercively. In a certain sense, they do indeed reward brains and effort due to the fact that economic goods or services require both to be produced. That being said, there is also the element of the subjectivity of the buyer and seller. That has an impact on price.

Her article also states:

Basically, the lessons boiled down to this: Some degree of inequality is both unavoidable and desirable in a free market, and income inequality in the U.S. isn’t very pronounced, anyway. Libertarians starting with these ideas tend to reject any government intervention meant to decrease inequality, claiming that such plans make people lazy and that they don’t work, anyway. Things like progressive income taxes, minimum wage laws and social safety nets make most libertarians very unhappy.

Some degree of relative inequality is probably unavoidable in a freed market, but we don’t know how much will exist until we’ve tried it out. We can only predict it will be generally lower than in a society without freed markets. Income inequality in the U.S. is indeed very pronounced. I certainly don’t deny its existence. Lynn doesn’t provide us with any understanding of why libertarians reject the government interventions she mentions. The reason is that they rest on the initiation of force or the threat thereof. She also ignores the fact that some of us are anarchist welfare liberals who support non-governmental or non-state social safety nets.

After the Great Depression, inequality decreased in America, as New Deal investment and education programs, government intervention in wages, the rise of unions, and other factors worked to give many more people a chance for success. Inequality reached its lowest ebb between 1950 and 1980. If you were looking at the U.S. during that time, it seemed like a pretty egalitarian place to be (though blacks, Hispanics, and many women would disagree).

Government intervention may have reduced relative inequality, but it was also state intervention like regulatory protectionism, corporate welfare, tariff walls, IP monopolies, banking monopolies, land monopolies, and strike breaking by agents of the state that helped create that vast inequality in the first place. The rise of unions was indeed a factor, but the original unions were not government or state sanctioned. Kevin Carson has also shown that unionism is more successful or would be without government support/regulation. That’s all for now. I will write a second part to be released on Friday.

The first double execution in Oklahoma since 1937 was botched badly tonight when the cocktail of chemicals that was supposed to kill 38-year-old Clayton Lockett failed to actually kill him.

Various news reports and tweets from the McAlester prison where Lockett was held reported that the new cocktail included the sedative midazolam, which is normally used as a seizure medication. The drug has seen an increase of inclusion in the lethal injection process after the manufacturers of phenobarbital, the process’ previous sedative, forbade its use.

Over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Fernando Teson is once again pounding the drums for … something. Presumably after being so hilariously, catastrophically, historically, possibly even supernaturally wrong on Iraq, Teson has decided not to overtly pound the drums of war. He’s just vaguely calling for “moral clarity” now, which is progress for Teson. After all, the last time he took a big stand on foreign affairs, it was to help urge the United States into one of its biggest strategic blunders, a blunder which became an enormous humanitarian catastrophe.

And Teson’s reaction to being so outstandingly wrong? He is simply shocked that the Iraqis are not more grateful for the privilege of enduring a decade plus of chaos, civil war, and mass death. The last time Teson urged action, the United States suffered a tremendous strategic blow and the people of Iraq suffered a tremendous catastrophe. And now Teson urges us to “side with Ukraine against Russia,” because Russia has done a bunch of bad things. Curiously this moral logic only applies to foreign countries; Teson does not urge us to stand with Iraqis against American aggression or Yemenis against American bombing. No, we are simply to stand with Ukraine.

Fernando Teson, you were wrong on Iraq. Very wrong. And a great many people without your credentials and platform were right, and said at the time that you were wrong, and predicted accurately what would follow an American invasion. No one should pay you the least mind when it comes to foreign affairs. And if you want to stand with Ukraine, by all means, book a plane ticket to Kiev and see if they’ll have you. A fight with Russia is sure to be a desperate one, and I am sure they would be grateful to have you manning a machine gun or running an artillery crew. Good luck.

And what should we do on Ukraine? If you, dear reader, feel standing up for the Ukrainian government against the Russian government is important, by all means- join future Private Teson at the front. In all sincerity, as a former soldier, I will have the highest respect for your courageous, principled stand. But if you think the American government can do anything but make things worse, you haven’t been paying attention.

Of course, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine do not have the option of staying uninvolved. The wolf is at their door, it seems. While we of course wish them well, a sober analysis of the military situation does not hold out a great deal of hope for the Ukrainian government. However, not all is lost for the Ukrainian people; indeed, as recent events in Iraq have shown (paying attention, Comrade Teson?), a popular insurgency can achieve results a traditional military cannot. A complete after-action review on the successful insurgency in Iraq would run to hundreds of pages, but the bottom line is simple, classic guerilla warfare. Ukrainians today would do better to trust their liberty to themselves, rather than to a brittle, easily destroyed institution like the government in Kiev – or the one in Washington, D.C.