Last week I had the great pleasure of attending the Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) annual conference. I saw many excellent presentations, including Ed Stringham’s talk on anarchism, Abigail Hall presenting a paper on how foreign wars bring repression home, David Skarbek discussing prison gangs as self-governing institutions that facilitate market exchange, Brian Meehan explaining regulatory capture in the private security industry, and presentations on the political economy of slavery by Jeffrey Rogers Hummell and Phil Magness. I also met Molinari Institute president Roderick Long and joined him in presenting on a panel on Lysander Spooner’s Legacy for the 21st Century. The following is based on what I presented there. 

Lysander Spooner is perhaps best known for his passionate abolitionism. In a letter to The Commonwealth, Spooner wrote, “I have no sympathy with the pusillanimous and criminal statement, If slavery will let us alone, we will let it alone … I hope then to see freedom and slavery meet face to face with no question between them, except which shall conquer, and which shall die.” He articulated this radical antislavery position in such pieces as The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845) and A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, a letter to the non-slaveholders of the South urging them to aid and abet slave revolts.

Long after the civil war and the passage of the 13th Amendment, some may question the relevance of abolitionism to the 21st Century. But slavery did not experience a clean and straightforward end. The 13th Amendment prohibited slavery “except as punishment for a crime.” In the South, this was followed by the passage of the Black Codes, which criminalized a litany of innocuous actions specifically for blacks. So rather than abolishing slavery, the 13th Amendment simply changed its form. This created forced labor that was arguably worse than chattel slavery. As Angela Davis explains:

Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.

Let’s look to today. The Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as “Angola,” was converted from a slave plantation to a prison, and is still used for forced agricultural labor. Sweatshop conditions exist in prisons across the country. Companies like Walmart, AT&T, and Starbucks all profit from this slave labor. So do war profiteers like BAE, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. The racism of slavery persists; according to the Sentencing Project, 60% of prisoners are people of color, with 1 in 3 black men experiencing imprisonment in their lifetime. America incarcerates on a mass scale, with more than 2.4 million people imprisoned. The abolitionist movement has some unfinished business here.

Beyond his abolitionism, Spooner’s broader libertarian radicalism provides us with a useful framework for opposing this brutally unjust prison system. Spooner’s natural law approach to anarchism, articulated in Vices Are Not Crimes, provides us with a strong ethical and legal argument against the majority of the criminal code. In particular, it provides a solid argument against the drug prohibitions and immigration restrictions that have fueled mass incarceration, as well as against the anti-prostitution laws that have enabled police harassment and assault against many women, particularly transgender women of color. Spooner actually used the argument that vices are not crimes to oppose the establishment of a professional police department in Boston in 1885.  Similar arguments can be used to support abolishing the police today. Where people wish to protect themselves from crimes and aggression, they have incentives to hire this sort of security on the market. A centralized state police force, however, socializes the costs of busybodies policing vices. Policing lends itself to violations of natural law in a Spoonerite sense.

Spooner further argued, in An Essay on the Trial By Jury, that it is a jury’s “right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.” He is articulating a case for what is often called jury nullification. Today, jury instructions exist to explicitly deny the right of a jury to judge the justice of laws. Organizations like the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA), seek to educate jurors on this right. Spooner argues, “if the government may dictate to the jury what laws they are to enforce, it is no longer a trial by the country, [*9] but a trial by the government; because the jury then try the accused, not by any standard of their own — by their own judgments of their rightful liberties — but by a standard dictated to them by the government. And the standard, thus dictated by the government, becomes the measure of the people’s liberties. If the government dictate the standard of trial, it of course dictates the results of the trial.” Reversing the trend from trial by jury to trial by government is one tactic available to us for thwarting the power of police, prosecutors, and prisons.

But perhaps the most interesting tactical insight prison abolitionists can glean from Spooner is derived from his American Letter Mail Company. The United States Postal Service monopoly behaved as we might expect a monopoly to: high costs and poor service. Rather than lobbying government to improve their services, Spooner directly competed with the Postal Service. This can point us towards a tactic for challenging any state monopoly: entrepreneurial direct action!

The state’s monopoly on law is riddled with perverse incentives. Police forces, employed by the state rather than by clients who seek protection for their persons and property, have no incentives to encourage them to prioritize violent crimes or property crimes over victimless crimes. To the contrary, there are various incentives that encourage them to redirect resources towards pursuing victimless crimes, such as sex work and drug offenses, rather than violent crimes. Asset forfeiture laws, for example, grant police the power to seize property that they believe was obtained or used in relation to a crime. In many jurisdictions, they can seize the property without convicting or even charging the property owner with any crime. The seized property is then auctioned off to financially benefit the police department. This introduces a profit motive to engage in more asset forfeiture. Violent crimes like rape and murder are rarely lucrative in this regard, but “crimes” of commerce and entrepreneurship such as drug dealing and sex work typically do implicate money and property. This means that police have a profit motive that encourages them to direct resources towards vice enforcement rather than thoroughly investigating violent crimes. Federal funding that is explicitly tied to militarization and vice enforcement exacerbates these perverse incentives.

Vice enforcement is often highly discriminatory and makes marginalized groups vulnerable to state violence. The criminalization of particular realms of commerce means that those engaged in such commerce are deterred from reporting violent crimes or property crimes, particularly any related to their work. Moreover, discriminatory enforcement deters marginalized communities from seeking police assistance. Many communities of color view police as an occupying army rather than an institution they can safely seek assistance from. As of 2011, 46% of transgender people were “uncomfortable seeking police assistance.” Under Secure Communities, local police forces share information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), thus making immigrants fear interaction with law enforcement. This is the reality of modern American policing.

The state’s system of justice encourages diversion of resources away from finding abusers and towards discriminatory enforcement of vice laws. The practical effect is to guarantee that many victims of violence, abuse, and plunder have good reasons not to seek police assistance. The state then crowds out alternative security and justice options; indeed, it overtly seeks to eliminate them to preserve its monopoly on force and law. So many people who are among the most vulnerable to violence are deprived of avenues for security and justice.

Entrepreneurial direct action can help solve this problem. There are some examples of this being built, particularly by feminists and anti-racists. For example, the Gulabi Gang in India engages in direct action against domestic abusers and corrupt government officials, and sometimes also engages in legal arbitration. In New York City, the Audre Lorde Project trains local businesses and community spaces to defuse violent situations without calling the police. These forms of entrepreneurial direct action are community projects enacted without a profit motive, but we can also build for-profit attempts to provide alternatives to the state’s criminal injustice system.

In the age of mass incarceration, Spooner’s writings and actions provide us with many insights for building a prison abolitionist movement. From his uncompromising attacks on slavery, to his natural law critique of vice laws and policing, to his defense of jury nullification, to his entrepreneurial direct action, a Spoonerite approach provides us with tools to end America’s prison state.

Ahmad Barqawi discusses why the Arab League should be dissolved.

Binoy Kampmark discusses the military dictatorship in Egypt.

Roberta A. Modugno discusses the Levellers.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses how the War on Drugs is literal.

James Bovard discusses USDA’s regulation of raisin production and distribution.

Ryan McMaken discusses Ron Paul, Richard Cobden, and the risky nature of opposition to war.

Laurence M. Vance discusses questioning the U.S. military.

A. Barton Hinkle discusses how government power rests on violence and coercion.

Kevin Carson discusses the statist character of factory farming.

Michael Young reviews America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East by Hugh Wilford.

Bob Rijkers, Caroline Freund, and Antonio Nucifora discuss Tunisia’s crony capitalism.

Murray Polner discusses the prospect of WW3.

A. Barton Hinkle discusses the suppression of free speech across America.

John Stossel discusses the bullying character of the FDA.

Abby Wisse Schachter discusses the criminalization of fun.

Matt Welch, Ronald Bailey, Jeffrey A. Singer, and Sandy Reider discuss whether vaccines should be mandatory.

Winslow T. Wheeler discusses the false claim that the U.S. has an inadequate defense budget.

Ajamu Barkaka discusses the whitewashing of white terrorism.

W. James Antle III discusses crony capitalism.

John P. McCaskey discusses what he calls the new libertarians.

Kevin Carson discusses what taxes pay for.

Joseph S. Diedrich discusses whether intellectual property defies human nature.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses U.S. coups of past and present.

Lilany Obando discusses the criminalization of social movements in Colombia.

Kevin Carson discusses phony “free market” reform.

Alexander R. Cohen discusses taxation.

Daniel Robelo discusses the drug war’s fueling of mass deportations of migrants.

Wendy McElroy discusses regulators harming microbusinesses.

Max Euwe defeats Alexander Alekhine.

Max Euwe defeats Bobby Fischer.

What is the proper relation between legality and morality?

To friends I stated that what was morally required is not what is legally required. This post is an exploration of my evolving thought on this issue. In the process of thinking further about it, I discovered a revised train of thought. As Ayn Rand stated:

“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

Let me note that I only partially agree with Ayn Rand’s statement above. Legality can relate to morality, but it doesn’t, of necessity, have to. It’s possible for something to be immoral without being a violation of a libertarian law code. This is due to the fact that the only legal obligations one has are to respect the individual rights of others You may have non-consensual moral obligations that are only legitimately enforceable through non-violent means. This would still be eminently libertarian as long as people were being pressured for rational and individualistic pro-liberty reasons. The obligation to help customers without discriminating on grounds of irrational bigotry comes to mind. No one can be ethically forced to help another through legal force, but a person can be non-violently pressured to do so. Other examples include an obligation to engage in contextually justified mutual aid. You can’t rightfully have the product of your labor seized for this purpose, but you still have a moral obligation to do so.

A libertarian law code completely divorced from morality would be a nihilist one. How can you justify the defensive use of force that would be permitted by such a code without invoking a moral reason? You can’t. It would mean that libertarianism was nothing more than a subjective preference with no moral weight. That is no basis for building a substantive legal system. Libertarianism is a value laden ideology and this is preferably reflected in its laws. In the absence of this, it would simply be authorizing a coercion filled subjective brawl among competing wills. That kind of Hobbesian scenario is not conducive to liberty. It’s compatible with a chaotic tyranny. A world where different warlords or feudal lords compete for power and control over others would be created. Do I contradict myself by claiming that non-moral libertarian law is nihilistic and that morality is not of necessity related to legality? No, because I am not claiming that all of morality needs to be the basis of a legal system. I just argue that some moral rules need to inform the legal foundations of a libertarian society.

The final thing to discuss is when things are both moral and legal. This happily resolves the problem of whether to make something ethical mandated by law. The enshrinement of ethics into law allows one to discharge their moral obligations without fearing punishment. It’s precisely valuable for this reason. One example is murder. It’s both immoral and preferably illegal to commit an act of murder. Another example is rape. It’s once again both immoral and preferably illegal. We could multiply these examples further, but I wish to bring this post to a close. I encourage my readers to leave comments and think critically about what I’ve written. It’s always fun to receive feedback and constructive criticism. I only ask that my readers respectfully reply rather than insult me. I look forward to your responses!

Last year the Nevada GOP decided to remove opposition to gay marriage and abortion from its platform. It’s not clear whether this is about votes or reflects genuine sentiment. It’s certainly out of touch with other GOP platforms across the country. This is definitely a good thing though. It also doesn’t go far enough. It’s much more preferable that the Nevada GOP embrace legal stateless gay marriage or non-discrimination in the issuing of licenses as long as we have a government. This is also true of legalized abortion. The deletion of the issues from the platform could signal that they are indifferent rather than an active embrace of liberty.

Does this mean we left-libertarian market anarchists are better off embracing the Nevada GOP as a vehicle for libertarian reform? Not at all. The Nevada GOP is probably still, on balance, far from embracing radically limited government. We’re also anarchists and not interested in even very small government. I mention this, because an anarchist may still prefer an extremely tiny government to a larger one in relative terms. This would only hold true as long as government existed.

What about the option of infiltrating the Nevada GOP and striving to push it in a more radically libertarian direction? This is arguably a waste of resources that could be spent on building anarchy. We would have to hide our left-libertarian market anarchist identity. There would otherwise be a backlash against the “evil” anarchist entryists. It’s important to remember that statists at least sometimes deal with disagreement by initiating force via the government, so we left-libertarian market anarchists would be subject to said force by the Nevada GOP. As long as they continued to embrace the institution of government at least.

An interesting question is whether this will have an impact on the broader GOP. If the Nevada GOP is more successful at the polls, other state parties and even the national organization may decide to embrace its approach. This would be encouraging and have a positive impact on the politics of the U.S. It’s something to welcome, but it shouldn’t distract us from achieving anarchism. It would lighten the burden of statism on women and same-sex marriage, so there is merit in pursuing this kind of reform. As long as it doesn’t mean abandoning the goal of creating anarchy. That is our ultimate goal.

The final point to make is that this does represent progress, but it’s fairly limited. The next step is to actively embrace the pro-liberty position on both issues. Let’s encourage our GOP friends to go the distance and really embrace freedom. You can let them know that left-libertarian market anarchism is the true embodiment of the sometimes freedom friendly rhetoric of the GOP. It’s also a good idea to spread this message to your Democratic Party friends and anyone else who will listen. There is great disillusionment with the existing political system. The time is ripe for friends of freedom to convince others of the morality and practicality of our vision. It’s better to act before this despair disappears. We may never get a better time than now to act. Let’s work on creating a free society.

The Daily Beast’s Geoffrey Stone has drawn the line in the sand when it comes to the Free Flow of Information Act. He has made it clear which side he’s on. He believes that the only way journalism can continue to be free in the United States of got-dang America is if journalists have the same sort of client privilege afforded doctors and lawyers. If sources don’t feel safe to speak to the media, we are on a railcar headed to hell.

That’s why, he says, Congress should pass the Free Flow of Information Act, warts and all. As is. Right now.

Wait. What?

From Stone’s article (4/15/14):

[T]he law is full of hard choices, and what matters here is not that every tomdickandharry self-professed “journalist” gets to assert the privilege, but that sources can reasonably find journalists who can invoke the privilege when they want anonymity. It is no doubt true that, no matter how one draws the line, some folks will be unhappy. But as long as the statutory definition of “journalist” is reasonable, and is not couched in such a way to exclude journalists because of their particular ideological slant, this is not a serious obstacle. Indeed, if 49 states have managed to make this work, so can the federal government.

Sorry, no. The constitutionalist devil on my left shoulder can’t abide the first amendment-eviscerating clauses added by Dianne Feinstein in the current version of the act; the anarchist on my right shoulder obviously wants to see the act lit on fire, with all digital copies wiped as a precaution. As I wrote in my April 1 op-ed, more than just bloggers would be adversely affected by the shield law’s exclusions:

But what if the reporter in question doesn’t work for a newspaper, television station, radio station or wire service? What if they got a job at Wikileaks?

“The term ‘covered journalist’ does not include any person or entity whose principal function, as demonstrated by the totality of such person or entity’s work, is to publish primary source documents that have been disclosed to such person or entity without authorization.”

So that means that independent investigative journalists who run their own sites and leak sites like Wikileaks and Cryptome aren’t covered. See also: Targets of state-level “Ag-Gag” laws, which criminalize the filming of factory farm conditions and other agricultural atrocities, and people who film the police.

In fact, the Free Flow of Information Act spends more time detailing what it will not cover than describing who it will protect.

Now, granted, Stone was writing in response to arguments by an ex-Romney staffer, Gabriel Schoenfeld, whose article, “Time for a Shield Law?” was published in the spring 2014 issue of National Affairs. From the quotey bits in Stone’s piece (not to mention an admittedly merely-cursory glance at the source), I don’t know if I could defend the premises of Schoenfeld’s article either. Conservative statism is just as bad as, if not worse than, liberal statism.

But Stone’s piece is still statist apologetics, and needs to be called out as such. So let’s go through the article.

After defining what journalist-source privilege is, and comparing it to the confidentiality agreements afforded doctors or lawyers, he describes a scenario where a congressional aide overhears a bribe taking place. This aide turns to a journalist, who assures them that their identity will not get out: “Without the privilege, the story would never have seen the light of day, but with the privilege the story gets out and the source remains anonymous.”

However, if the congressperson caught taking the bribe is prosecuted in federal court, the journalist is compelled to reveal their source, who is then compelled to testify. “Knowing this, the source in many instances will tell no one about what she overheard, and there will therefore be no investigation or prosecution for the bribe,” Stone writes.

This is definitely not good, but so far, this is simply an argument for a shield law, not the current shield bill being debated. In fact, this scenario presents the main stumbling block: why in the world is Congress going to pass a law that makes it easier for someone to incriminate them and get away scot-free?

Through their definition of who gets to be a journalist, they’re not. They are making sure that the outlets that crave the most access – the major networks, public radio, major newspapers – are the only ones covered; everyone else can suck eggs – especially Wikileaks, or organizations like it.

Stone is fine with this, as the above-quoted section of his article indicates. He’s okay with “compromise.” I’m not.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

Welcome to C4SS’s newest regular blog, Wars and Rumors of Wars. Here, we will explore issues of war and peace, ranging from foreign and military affairs through the culture of militarism and the effects of war on soldiers and civilians to the details of anti-war activism. I will be your main writer, although others from within and without C4SS will contribute as well. As my byline says, I’m a veteran of the Iraq War and a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, having fought as a medic in Baghdad in 2007 and having been an IVAW member since 2010.

What we want is peace and freedom – no war but class war – but to get there we must understand our enemy. Developing that understanding is going to be a major concern of this blog. If we wish to cut off the state’s supply of soldiers, we must understand soldiers and know why they fight. If we wish to eradicate militarism, we must understand its appeal and recognize its appearance. If we want to help the victims of war heal, we must hear their voices – finding and sharing the stories of the survivors of war will be a major focus for this blog. And if we want to work for peace, we must examine what has worked and what hasn’t, make the best arguments we can and be always willing to back our words with action.

From time to time – as in my recent article on Ukraine – it may appear that I am granting some or even all of the premises of the warmongers. I do this not because I do in fact agree with them – for example, I do not believe that “democracy” in a meaningful sense is any great concern of the planners at Foggy Bottom – but because I think making the strongest argument means meeting the enemy on his own ground. If we can show that war and intervention will not achieve the good things the warmongers claim to want, then we weaken their position and spur interest in what their actual motivations may be.

This year marks the centennial of the outbreak of the Great War, one of the greatest tragedies in European history that had one salutary effect. The Great War made crystal clear the futility and horror of war, and instilled in a generation a healthy and natural skepticism towards power. This skepticism led these men and women to be termed the “Lost Generation,” although no generation since has found a clearer image of the meaning of war. For this first post, I will leave you with one of the most moving iterations of that image, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.

Britten was a conscientious objector in the United Kingdom during World War II, refusing service even in a noncombatant capacity due to his firm belief in pacifism. While his pacifism was unpopular, he remained an successful composer. In 1961, he was commissioned to write a piece for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, a replacement for the original destroyed in an air raid in 1940. Rather than turn out a triumphalist piece celebrating the Allied victory, Britten turned to perhaps the greatest poet of the Great War, Wilfred Owen.

Britten wove Owen’s agonized lyric together with the traditional Latin setting of the Requiem Mass, creating a shattering remembrance of the tragedy of war. He inscribed the score with a quote from Owen himself:

My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity …
All a poet can do today is warn.

While this blog concerns a harsh and terrible subject, our fundamental position is hope. We believe peace can come. “For all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.” I hope you’ll stay with us.

In one of my blog posts; I discussed property rights and the Civil Rights era sit-ins. This post is a further exploration of the subject. I said the following in the previous post:

These bills make an Orwellian use of terms like freedom. The ability to exclude people for irrational and arbitrary reasons is not an instance of liberty. Libertarians will earn the wrath of decent LGBT people everywhere without offering a solution other than state force to the problem of discrimination. We have a chance to show that our individualist principles apply to persecuted minorities as much as non-minorities. It’s not something to botch.

Thomas L. Knapp responded with:

Not sure what you mean by “exclude.”

If I don’t want to bake a cake for you, it doesn’t matter what my reasons are. You don’t own me. I own me. I get to decide whether or not I bake a cake for you — and that decision IS an instance of liberty.

Knapp and I don’t disagree about the importance of personal freedom. I tend not to couch it in terms of ownership, but I understand the gist of it. I do however disagree with him on this one. Power is still being exercised when you deny someone a service for irrational bigoted reasons. It’s not a form of power based on physical violence, but it still counts as such. It represents social ostracism and economic reward/punishment. The latter involves the control of economic resources and selective distribution of them to effect changes in the character or behavior of another. Does this mean we should combat it with physical force? Not at all. There is still the principle of proportionality to consider. Non-violent controlling behavior is ethically met with non-violent means. Of course, if people violently assault peaceful sit in protesters they are entitled to use violence in self-defense.

Another point I made worth revisiting was:

What about the issues of private property rights and trespass? One way to approach that question is through contextual or dialectical libertarian methodology. Private property rights are contextual and relate to occupancy or use. They are one value among others to consider in assessing the morality of an action. In the context of bigots irrationally excluding people from spaces otherwise open to the public, the value of private property rights is trumped by the need for social inclusion.

Why does one have to choose between these two particular values? The sit-iners are not engaged in any aggressively violent actions, so they aren’t violating libertarian principle. As far as private property rights go, there isn’t any violent destruction of property involved. Social inclusion can be fought for through non-violent social activism. The practicality of which was shown by the Civil Rights Movement. In other words: these values are not mutually exclusive. They both serve as supports for genuine freedom.

If someone did destroy property during the course of a sit-down protest, we could still show sympathy and forgive them. This is dictated by the context of their actions. We could even socially pressure the property owner to do the same. A court could refuse to hear a restitution claim. It would be cruel to target the racially oppressed for prosecution in this context.

One final thing is left to address. Does this mean that all uses of coercion to defend property are unjust? Not at all. If a criminal gang tries to take your food, it’s perfectly acceptable for you to use force to defend it. This is due to the rationality of the action. As Ayn Rand could tell you, ethics and rationality run together. Let us work to make ethical rationality a reality.

It’s been five months since we at C4SS launched the Entrepreneurial Anti-Capitalism project in a bid to provide some much needed support to people engaged in the construction of a new world. We sought projects that either lay the ground for, or skillfully employ, tools and techniques to uproot, undermine or obviate centralized and authoritarian systems of control, or that demonstrate through incontrovertible success the irrelevance and inefficiency of those systems in providing for human means, and realizing human dreams. And preferably ones whose enthusiasm far outstripped their current resources.

The project began with Unsystem‘s Dark Wallet, a browser application intended to safeguard the Bitcoin economy from the incipient movements toward regulation by providing users with additional layers of anonymity, packaged for easy application by users. Later, in the wake of Taiphoon Haiyan’s landfall in the Philippines, we were fortunate to come into contact with some truly amazing anarchists based out of Onsite Infoshop in Muntinlupa City and elsewhere, who were mobilizing to provide food, shelter, electricity and communications to people effected. Their future plans include the development of the mobile Solar Guerilla Autonomous Response Team to react to any sudden power collapse.

Mutual aid and counter-economics aside, we now have the opportunity to turn our attention to another project, small in size but global in scope; that of workplace resistance in China and Taiwan.

Workers in Taiwan have asked for organizer training from their allies abroad. IWW organizers Jm Wong and Erik Forman are heading there to meet them, to lend skills gleaned from their own workplace organizing experiences, and to collaborate with Taiwan IWW members on a Mandarin translation of the IWW Organizer Manual. They’ll also be traveling to Honk Kong to meet dock workers whose 2013 strike and blockade of port facilities in pursuit of higher wages and safer working conditions kicked off a mass occupation of downtown Hong Kong outside the offices of Li Ka-shing, the billionaire behind Hongkong International Terminals (HIT), which controls more than 70 percent of Hong Kong’s port container traffic.

The neoliberal shift of the 1970’s signaled the end of the “bigger slice” policy of Western nations cutting their work force larger and more satisfying slices of the wealth that post-war corporatist policies had helped centralize. With production facilities having been moved oversees, out of reach the original labor force whose obsolescence served to gut their social movements, the fight against state and capital is more obviously a global one (not that it ever wasn’t). Despite it’s global field, waging it must still be a distributed process; even when the actions taken involve thousands of people. Spotting exploits and leveraging that knowledge is not something that can be done by one group of people on behalf of another, but must necessarily be a bottom up endeavor by people on the ground, ones in possession of distributed knowledge, and who can move quickly.

The effects of success, the returns of solidarity, are also global. Extending support to those resisting economic regimentation isn’t just a moral imperative, it’s also an opportunity for disrupting a key node of the global supply chain, whose top down direction and centralized infrastructure leave it vulnerable to disruption at key points. This holds true for the factory and dock workers of Taiwan no less than anywhere else, and their success can open spaces for further resistance everywhere. With that in mind, we are happy to help the Jm Wong and Erik Forman on their way.

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Whenever someone asks me about the problems of the prison state and why I would like to abolish the entire prison system, I just say, “read Nathan Goodman’s blog ya muppets!” I’m delighted to be writing this guest blog post for my pal Nathan, who does a wonderful job highlighting the problems and moral atrocities that occur in the United States of Incarceration. In addition to the horrible consequences of prisons, I believe there are conceptual reasons we ought to be opposed to them. When determining the ethical response to violence, we must account for the principle of proportionality.

Think about it like this. Suppose you’re hungry for some delicious pizza, like I am right now. When I finish writing this, I’m going to pick up the phone and place an order for some pizza. But I have to decide what size I want. As is the case with pizza, my eyes (or ears since I’m ordering on the phone) are bigger than my stomach and I’m tempted to order a large. Problem is, I won’t actually be able to finish the whole thing. It’s just too much pizza (this concept is actually incoherent, but this is only an analogy). Of course, I don’t want to order a small either. It won’t fill me up and I will want more pizza. Considering all the variables – my body type, my appetite, the size of my wallet, etc – I have to get the pizza that is proportional.

Proportional pizza is not actually a philosophical concept, which is a travesty. But we do have something like it that was developed by some guys named Socrates, Plato, and Aristote, among others. In the ancient Greek tradition, this is called the Golden Mean. According to Socrates, “man must know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible.” In the Aristotelian tradition, a virtue such as courage is action that falls between acting too rash and too cowardly. Aristotle thought all the virtues depend upon a mean between two extremes. There is no doubt he would have ordered the medium pizza.

What can this tell us about non-aggression, proportionality, and justice? The Golden Mean shows us that acting just requires a sense of proportionality. It explains why when someone steals my television, killing them would be doing too much and doing nothing would be too little. Justice lies somewhere between the two. Responding to an act of aggression with a disproportionate amount of force misses the Golden Mean.

This idea means we are committed to a specific form of retaliation. We can act violent insofar as that violence is needed to defend ourselves or make ourselves whole. Taking my television back and breaking the thief’s arm is not needed to defend myself nor make myself whole – it’s not proportionate. Any action I take that goes beyond self-defense and restitution is, itself, aggression. In the case of the television, justice requires me taking back my television along with some compensation for what I had to go through (maybe I had to run after the thief and tore my shirt on a tree branch). Nothing more and nothing less.

Now, what kind of blog post would this be if I didn’t call for the abolition of prisons? One of the reasons I’m a prison abolitionist is because locking people in cages for months, years, or decades, is not needed for self-defense. Imprisoning the television thief goes beyond the proper form of retaliation because prison is all about punishment for punishment’s sake. Once I get my television back, the thief is no longer a threat and I have no claim to any of his property except the appropriate restitution.

Forcibly restraining someone for an extended period of time could only be justified if they are an on-going threat to society. Considering the few number of people who are actually a continual danger to others, this hardly justifies prisons. There are more effective and more moral alternatives for this small minority. Consider a system of house arrest. Or perhaps a rehabilitation clinic.

A proper concern for non-aggression and proportionality entails the absolute rejection of a system based on punishment for its own sake, which is what prisons are. It implies a system based on restitution, on making the victim whole. Let’s not forget Aristotle’s Golden Mean when we are ordering pizza or when we are discussing the proper treatment of criminals.

Ivan Eland discusses U.S. security agencies.

Uri Avnery discusses changing the Israeli flag.

Eric Sommer discusses why journalists have blood on their hands.

Patrick Cockburn discusses Saudi Arabia’s regret over supporting terrorism.

Robin Philpot discusses Rwanda.

Matt Peppe discusses terrorism directed against Cuba.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses treating people like garbage.

Sheldon Richman discusses the Ukraine.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the lessons of the Egyptian coup for Americans.

Andrew Cockburn discusses why sanctions don’t work.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Nicola Nasser discusses Saudi Arabia.

Kevin Carson discusses Matt Ygelesias.

Sheldon Richman discusses Michael Moore.

Kevin Carson discusses the welfare state.

Aaron Cantu discusses corporate welfare.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Al Qaeda involvement in the Syrian uprising.

Sheldon Richman discusses the American empire.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses domestic drones.

Richard Ebeling discusses individual self-determination vs nationalism.

Charles Pierson discusses the Wall Street Journal’s love of the Pakistani army.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the drug war.

Stanton Peele discusses the hijacking of sobriety by the recovery movement.

Kevin Carson discusses magical thinking and authority.

David Stockman discusses the war in Syria.

Renee Parsons discusses regime change.

James O. Gallagher reviews Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State.

George H. Smith discusses intellectuals and the French Revolution.

Anthony Gregory counsels against a libertarian cold war and discusses the Russian invasion of Crimera.

Justin Raimondo discusses libertarianism in one country.

Sheldon Richman discusses the Iraqi fairy tale.

Sheldon Richman discusses the absence of an Iranian threat.

Nick Turse discusses American militarism in Africa.

Steve Horowtiz discusses inequality.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses the difference between neoconservatives and small government conservatives.

Alexander Alekhine defeats Aron Nimzowitsch.

Alexander Alekhine defeats Jose Raul Capablanca.

The Society of Professional Journalists is one of those institutions within journalism that can be counted on to almost never change. That’s why the release of their latest draft of their new ethics code is such a big deal.

If you remember back a ways, you’ll recall that I’ve brought up SPJ in the ethical context before – in the aftermath of Caleb Hannan’s “exposé” of Essay Vanderbilt, many turned to SPJ’s ethics code for guidance on what he should have done with the information he uncovered. It said, most notably:

Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.

This line has been edited to include members of the public.

The new version of the code is aimed at a media that is increasingly based online, but its infrastructure is the same. Under the section “Seek Truth And Report It,” for example, they added this paragraph:

Aggressively gather and update information as the story unfolds and work to avoid error. Deliberate distortion and reporting unconfirmed rumors are never permissible. Remember that neither speed nor brevity excuses inaccuracy or mitigates the damage of error. […] Work to put every story into context. In promoting, previewing or reporting a story live, take care not to misrepresent or oversimplify it. […] Seek sources whose views are seldom used. Official and unofficial sources can be equally valid.

Other points of awesome:

Avoid stereotyping. Examine your own cultural values and avoid imposing those on others. …

Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance, irreverence or invasive behavior.

And finally, my favorite:

Recognize that legal access to information differs from ethical justification to publish. Journalists should balance the importance of information and potential effects on subjects and the public before publication.

~*~

Bonus round: here’s Jeremy Scahill talking about objectivity in journalism on MediaBistro’s Media Beat:

What do you call a “withdrawal” that doesn’t end drone strikes? A faux one. The term withdrawal implies an exit from the area. If U.S. drones will continue to kill people in Afghanistan, the military presence is not truly over. We should be worried about the continued and apparently indefinite use of imperial violence by the U.S. government.

A full exit from the area is the only ethical and practical course of action. There is no moral justification for the further killing of Afghans to prop up a local state. This is especially true of a state as corrupt as the Afghan one, but it would apply to any state. On the practical side of the equation, it isn’t safe to keep making enemies via military occupation. The U.S. government endangers countless people by doing this.

Drone strikes are particularly noxious. They allow for easy remote control killing of suspected enemies of the state anywhere in the world. There are very few obstacles placed in the way of these death machines. Radicals are preferably the ones leading the charge against these killer devices. We left-libertarians can lead the way in opposing the death and destruction created by these monsters.

In the absence of ground troops and drones, the U.S. can still maintain control through a local client regime. This proxy force can wreak plenty of death and destruction too. It is preferable to be resolute in our opposition to both forms of control or occupation; both deserve condemnation for furthering coercive power exercised against Afghans and anyone else who happens to walk into territory claimed by the Afghan state. Power will not stand down without a determined opposition. We left-libertarians can take the lead in furthering that opposition.

What are the implications of continued U.S. drone strikes for the domestic front? At home, we can expect the importation of drones as a method of control. They can be used to surveil people anywhere on Earth. Such invasions of privacy are unacceptable and represent the growth of unaccountable concentrated power. This power will be exercised against all who displease the ruling class in some way or another. The time to fight back is now.

The state’s expansive military power is a threat not only to world peace, but the lives of those in the “homeland” too. The present superpower status of the U.S. does nothing but foment empire. We know that empires wreak death and destruction on a massive scale. Let’s put an end to the U.S. one.

There’s a lot of news and information related to prisons, policing, borders, and other facets of the prison state. In previous editions of the Weekly Abolitionist, I have tried to fit multiple stories into one theme or analytic frame. This week, however, I’ve encountered a diverse enough range of articles relating to these issues that I’ll be compiling them into a roundup.

• Over at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin has an excellent reply to the argument that undocumented immigrants have acted immorally by violating the law. As an anarchist I reject the idea that one has a moral obligation to obey the state’s laws. But Somin persuasively argues that even with a presumption in favor of obedience to laws, there are good reasons to believe that other factors make it moral to cross borders without legal permission.
• In other news related to the criminalization of migrants, protests continue across the nation to oppose the ongoing harms of mass deportations. April 5th marked a National Day of Action Against Deportations. Over at PanAm Post, Fergus Hodgson has a good article on the protests.
• Deportations continue to destroy lives and break up families in my home state of Utah. Ana Cañenguez, who I have mentioned previously at this blog, was just told by ICE that her application for humanitarian exemption was denied. This means she will be deported back to El Salvador and her family will be split apart by state coercion. As Ana told reporters,  “I don’t understand why this President can tear families apart.”  We must fight for a world where no presidents or other state actors have that horrible power. As Anthony Gregory puts it, “End deportations now. This is beyond cruel, and such horrors occur hundreds of times a day in the name of immigration control. Obama’s presidency has topped all others on deportations in absolute terms, at least in modern history.”
• Another horror inflicted by the prison state is rape by state actors like police and prison guards. These rapists act with virtual impunity thanks to the state’s institutional power, ideological euphemisms, and the state’s monopoly on law. One of these rapists, Kansas City police officer Jeffrey Holmes, was actually convicted of a crime on Friday. Holmes raped two women, both of whom he accused of prostitution. While prosecutors alleged that he used his position as an officer to coerce the women into sex, prosecutors charged him not with rape or assault but with “corruption.” He was convicted of these charges and sentenced to “15 days in jail and a fine.” This is incredibly lenient compared to typical sentences for rape and sexual assault, and it is yet another example of euphemism being used to shield a state actor from accountability for rape.
• To  understand more about how the prison state enables rape, I highly recommend The Shame of Our Prisons: New Evidence, an article by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow from last October’s New York Review of Books. The article summarizes lots of recent research on prison rape from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and I find it immensely useful for understanding the specifics of the problem.
• As I write this, I’m listening to a talk by Jonathan Nitzan titled No Way Out: Crime, Punishment & the Capitalization of Power. Nitzan is one of the authors of Capital as Power, and this talk analyzes mass incarceration and punishment through the lens of his analysis of capitalism. This provides an explanation for the seemingly unusual phenomenon of liberal capitalist states incarcerating on a mass scale.
• For another economic perspective on prisons, I also recommend Daniel D’Amico’s talk The American Prison State. D’Amico looks at incarceration and punishment through the lens of free market economics, specifically the Austrian school.

I hope you find these links interesting and informative. I’ll leave you with something you can do to help those imprisoned by the American state. Writing to prisoners can make their life inside the prison slightly less monotonous and more livable. For a good way to start writing letters to prisoners, I recommend writing to prisoners on their birthdays. You can find some information on political prisoner birthdays for April here.

C4SS Media presents David S. D’Amato‘s “The New Economy and the Cost Principle” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“As free marketers, decentralists and individualists, we occupy a corner of the libertarian movement. At the same time, as critics of wealth inequality and champions of the poor and working classes, we find ourselves within today’s anti-capitalist movements for economic justice. Given the most commonly repeated terms of debate, the false dichotomies bleated on cable news and opinion pages day after day, these commitments may seem to present a contradiction. Free marketers are regarded as defenders of a plutocratic economic status quo, with the state cast as bulwark against cutthroat competition and protector of the little guy.”

Alternet just can’t stop publishing attacks on libertarianism. The article is titled “10 Reasons Americans Should be Wary of Rand Paul’s Libertarianism, Especially Young People“. It mistakenly labels Rand Paul a libertarian. He has stated he isn’t one:

They thought all along that they could call me a libertarian and hang that label around my neck like an albatross, but I’m not a libertarian.

He has also displayed a less than libertarian attitude on the War on Drugs:

“He made it very clear that he does not support legalization of drugs like marijuana and that he supports traditional marriage,” [said Brad Sherman of the Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville, Iowa].

Let us address several of the most important points in this piece. The author writes:

Rand Paul’s brand of libertarian believes that “liberty” is freedom from an oppressive government. But in a democracy the government is us. The real oppressors in today’s economic and political system are the corporations which increasingly dominate all aspects of our public and private lives

One need not choose between opposing government power or corporate power, both deserve our condemnation. They also tend to work together as the author acknowledges in her mention of the corporate state. The author also repeats the tired old fallacy of the government being us. If this were true, when the government kills us it would be suicide rather than murder. It also ignores that there is never total agreement about government policies. Elections always contain a minority that doesn’t get its way. In what meaningful sense are they part of the government? It also supposes a singular social super organism.

The author also contends:

Said Paul, “I would introduce and support legislation to send Roe v. Wade back to the states.”

Why? So that decisions about what a woman does with her body can be made by politicians like that guy in Virginia wanted mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds for any woman who wanted to terminate a pregnancy?

The author is wrong to implicitly ascribe this position to libertarianism. Libertarianism is about individual rights and not states rights, No government has rights; only individuals do. On this issue, I agree with the criticism, but it has nothing to do with libertarian principle.

The final contention we address goes as follows:

Those of us who are fighting for jobs programs and infrastructure investment—two things that would help the millennial generation significantly—have a fierce opponent in Rand Paul. Paul believes government spending is inherently bad, and tax cuts are inherently good. There are jobs proposals that target millennials for assistance. Rand Paul is against them.

The author apparently thinks jobs are something that should be handed down by a governing class. We left-libertarians seek to create our own workplace. As far as infrastructure goes, state funded infrastructure is a way to externalize costs of business onto the general taxpayer. An example is roads used predominantly by corporations engaged in long distance shipping. We bear the costs of their business model. Let us work to put an end to this.

C4SS Media presents Jonathan Carp‘s “Eleven Years of War” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“The Iraq War was, as wars go, not an especially harsh or brutal one, and was largely conducted according to all the latest precepts of “humanitarian intervention.” The free-fire zones of Vietnam were largely absent, as were the brutalities of massed, prolonged aerial and artillery bombardment. And yet, the results are unimaginably horrific to us in our First World comfort. Sandy Hook and Columbine reverberate to this day in America; in the hell into which we plunged Iraq, neither would even make the front page. There is no war without horrific violence and nightmarish suffering. Never forget.”

Justin Raimondo discusses the pattern of disaster in U.S. foreign policy.

Charles R. Pierce discusses the torture scandal and the Obama admin.

Brian Cloughley discusses the warmongering of NATO.

Alexander Reid Ross discusses Hollande’s trip to Nigeria.

Brian Doherty discusses five gun rights cases to watch.

Raphael Cohen and Gabriel Scheinmann discuss the Libyan war.

Chase Madar discusses Micah Zenko.

David S. D’Amato discusses the new economy and the cost principle.

Alex Miller defends Jeffrey Tucker.

Thomas L. Knapp discusses Jeffrey Tucker’s use of the term brutalism.

Kent McManigal discusses road signs.

Timothy J. Taylor discusses statists in libertarian clothing.

Paul Detrick discusses the killing of Kelly Thomas.

Jim Davies discusses Murray Rothbard vs Robert LeFevre.

Paul Bonneua discusses reasons for not rejecting the non-aggression principle.

Jim Davies discusses Murray’s missing plan for change.

Alex R. Knight the third reviews the book Everything Voluntary.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the disbanding of NATO.

Jacob Sullum discusses the GOP abuse of executive power.

David Cole discusses the CIA’s abuse.

Robert A. Levy discusses libertarianism 101.

Christian Elderhorst discusses taxation.

Mark Thornton discusses how the drug war failed Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Hugh Gusterson discusses the forgotten Iraq War.

Gareth Porter discusses the crisis with Iran.

Scott Horton discusses John Rizzo’s new book on the CIA.

Nathan Smith discusses zoning laws.

Jeffrey Tucker discusses wages.

Levon Aronian plays a great game against Anand.

Levon Aronian plays Alexey Shirov.

It was a cool, blustery, October morning in 2007 when I realized the difference between work and labor. I was standing on the side of a country road in Tumwater, Washington waiting for my work crew to come pick me up. I had moved from Tennessee to the area just days before – a recent graduate with a service year ahead of me. I had accepted a contract position with the Washington Conservation Corps, a program dedicated to salmon habitat conservation and restoration ecology. I was soon picked up by my fellow corps members and taken to our lock-up. Here, we loaded our rig with numerous tools for trail construction – Pulaski’s, Macleod’s, chain saws and more. By that evening we had bagged Eagle’s Peak in Mount Rainier National Park, completing the fall drainage on the trail. It was my first day of “spike,” eight days in the back country digging re-routes and building trail – my first vivid memory of inclined labor.

I had of course labored before this day, but this experience sticks out because I was fortunate enough during my time on the mountain to wake up every day and enjoy my labor. I enjoyed the manual exercise, crafting trail, working lightly on the land and exploring the forest. These activities were required of the job, but they did not feel like work. I viewed these tasks favorably, I was disposed towards these activities – to labor with the rock and soil of Earth. The job felt different from anything I had done before, it fit with my belief system and attitude towards life. I was practicing conservation and further developing a sense of wildness.

During this service year I befriended a fellow corps member by the name of Nicholas Wooten. We would talk science and philosophy, argue politics, talk about how things could/should be and would sometimes just get wild and drunk. Most of the time, however, Nick and I talked philosophy (and still do). During one of our conversations, Nick shared with me a quote that is rather important to him – it is now rather important to me. It is from the work of Marcus Aurelius in his piece The Meditations:

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present- I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?- But this is more pleasant.- Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?- But it is necessary to take rest also.- It is necessary: however nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds both to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will. But those who love their several arts exhaust themselves in working at them unwashed and without food; but thou valuest thy own own nature less than the turner values the turning art, or the dancer the dancing art, or the lover of money values his money, or the vainglorious man his little glory. And such men, when they have a violent affection to a thing, choose neither to eat nor to sleep rather than to perfect the things which they care for. But are the acts which concern society more vile in thy eyes and less worthy of thy labour?

How easy it is to repel and to wipe away every impression which is troublesome or unsuitable, and immediately to be in all tranquility

There is much to say about this quote. Personally, it has helped me mold together an idea that I call inclined labor. I write about inclined labor often but I have never defined the concept. It is my wish to do so in this blog post.

To be inclined is to feel a willing to accomplish, or a drawing toward, a particular action belief or attitude. Labor is physical or mental exertion – but it is very different from work. Work is a series of tasks that must be completed to achieve a certain goal – be it to gain a wage or to see that something functions properly. Labor is categorically different. Individual labor happens on its own terms, willed by the desire to complete a task. Work must be done, it is an intended activity. Inclined labor, however, is the physical and mental exertion that human beings are drawn to.

Inclined labor, then, is directly tied to the opening of Marcus Aurelius’s passage:

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present- I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?

Inclined labor is the true work of a human being – and it can only be actualized in liberty.

Today we work plenty but struggle to find time and energy to award ourselves the opportunity to truly labor. Work for economical means is a relatively new activity of human beings. Every civilization has had to work – chores need to be carried out for society to function. For the vast majority of our 200,000 year history as a modern species, however, our societies were much more egalitarian. In our early history there was much more labor – individuals knew their interests and carried out their functions and roles within their communities. It was not until the rise of power structures in the age of the ancients that human labor was viewed as something to command and control. Such authority has only exacerbated under the rise and fall of nation-states. Work as we know it today has only been dominant across the whole of society since the advent of industrial capitalism. Work is no longer something that is shared cooperatively for the functioning of society – work now defines a controlled economic system.

But we are a vigilant species. Over the millenia, and ever persistent today, human beings have continued to labor. How could we not when labor is inclined?

Imagine an economic system crafted by liberated human beings. What are the possibilities of humanity? How would the products of self directed labor progress and build society? What can we craft together during our time in the sun? What will liberated labor gift to future generations as we progress for millenia to come? How wondrous our civilizations and progress will be!

Inclined labor, whether a physical or mental exercise, is the creative expression of our interests and ingenuity – it is what we are driven to do. Our labor deserves to be liberated for it is ours and solely ours. Inclined labor is the true calling of human beings.

C4SS Media presents Christiaan Elderhorst‘s “Bitcoin Must Self-Regulate — The State Can Only Destroy” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“Currently there is no system by which Bitcoin marketplaces can be held accountable. Resorting to government legal systems might indeed be the only way by which Mt.Gox customers can receive the restitution they deserve. What does have to be kept in mind is that this option is far from optimal. Further talk of government regulation of crytocurrencies will not be a surprising result. In fact it seems inevitable. In the future the digital counter-economy will have to find ways to regulate itself. The ingenious online methods that are bound to come up might lead to insights by which we can regulate our own “analog” communities as well. One day government regulation of the marketplace will be a thing of the past as the self-regulating counter-economy replaces it entirely.”

I continue to be confused by “libertarian” support for the Keystone XL pipeline.

As I noted last month, my objection to Keystone is simple: It can’t be built without having the government steal land to build it on, from people who don’t care to sell.

For anyone operating under the label “libertarian,” that should be the end of the matter.

But I keep seeing “libertarian” calls for Keystone to be built.

Two things strike me as odd about these “libertarian” calls for Keystone:

1. They usually don’t address the libertarian objection — eminent domain — at all; and
2. The arguments they make are not only not libertarian arguments, but are in some cases just completely nonsensical.

The U. S. lacks pawns to be a leader in the foreign policy chess game — insufficient oil and natural gas production. Years of neglect in pushing fossil fuel production left the country unable to assist allies in times of emergency.

Russia provides substantial natural gas, oil, and coal to Europe that gives it leverage in the Ukraine Crises due to Europe’s fear of energy supply cutoff. The European Union has assisted in its servitude by resisting natural gas production by fracking and shutting down and curtailing future use of nuclear power plants.

The Ukraine Crises is an example of future events until the United States develops fossil fuel energy production superiority.

So the argument for Keystone is that it’s necessary to have it so the US government can dictate the affairs and relationships of other nations. That’s not a “libertarian” argument — libertarians are non-interventionists.

But even setting that aside, which we most manifestly should not, there are two major problems with the argument:

1. The US already has “fossil fuel energy production superiority.” In 2013, the US produced 12.5 million barrels of oil per day versus Russia’s 10.5 million barrels per day. In fact, the US is now the world’s leading energy producer and a net energy exporter (it achieved both those distinctions during the “anti-energy” Obama administration, by the way).
2. Keystone has nothing whatsoever to do with US energy production. It is a pipeline to trans-ship CANADIAN oil across the US to Gulf Coast refineries for CANADIAN export. It will increase neither US oil production nor US energy export by so much as a single calorie.

Over the years, I’ve been skeptical of lefty claims that prominent “libertarian” think tanks just shill for whatever corporations are willing to write checks for favorable “analysis.” But this kind of thing makes me wonder.

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