In March, I submitted a total of 40,457 C4SS op-eds to newspapers around the globe.

So far I have cataloged 46 “media pickups” of Center material in March.

These numbers are NOT the total of our submissions or pickups by any means — we now have media coordinators submitting original articles and translations in Spanish (Carlos Clemente) and Portuguese (Erick Vasconcelos), and attempting to track pickups in those languages. As Alan, Erick and other media coordinators get into the routines of their work, I’ll start coordinating with them to bring you more accurate numbers. Just keep in mind that the numbers I’m giving you are the LOW end of what we’re accomplishing!

A recent article by Deborah Small at Salon raises some genuinely valuable points about the likely pitfalls of prison reform and the broad scope of the problem of criminalization. Yet the headline, and the later paragraphs, package these important and interesting points into yet another one of the “progressives should fear and despise libertarians” pieces that have been endemic recently at center-left websites like Salon.

The article begins by discussing various ways criminalization and oppression can persist even as the state makes cosmetic changes to its legal system and uses the language of humanitarian reform. Given that a broad coalition of government officials, ranging from Eric Holder to Rick Perry, are suddenly showing enthusiasm for prison reform, these possible pitfalls of reform are vital to discuss. For example, she quotes a 1971 report titled “Struggle for Justice,” which notes the superficial and euphemistic nature of many previous reforms. As the authors of that report noted, “Call them ‘community treatment centers’ or what you will, if human beings are involuntarily confined in them, they are prisons.”

Small also quotes recent remarks by Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Michelle Alexander explained her concerns about upcoming prison reform as follows:

“We see politicians across the spectrum raising concerns for the first time in 40 years about the size of our prison state,” said Alexander, “and yet I worry that so much of the dialogue is driven by financial concerns rather than genuine concern for the communities that have been most impacted and the families that have been destroyed” by aggressive anti-drug policies.

Unless “we have a real conversation” about the magnitude of the damage caused by the drug war, “we’re going to find ourselves, years from now, either having a slightly downsized system of mass incarceration that continues to hum along pretty well,” she said, “or some new system of racial and social control will have emerged again, because we have not learned the core lesson that our history is trying to teach us.”

These are important concerns. It is vital to remember that the prison system as we know it emerged out of reform. For example, solitary confinement, a brutal method of control and psychological torture, was initially developed by Quakers and intended as a humanitarian reform. The criminalization of blacks in this country emerged from a loophole in the 13th Amendment, which said that slavery and involuntary servitude were unlawful “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The reformist abolition of slavery was piecemeal, allowing the reestablishment of slavery through the penal system.

To avoid these pitfalls, Deborah Small recommends a broader emphasis than simply ending mass incarceration. Instead, she proposes a framework that emphasizes ending mass criminalization. She explains the distinction as follows:

Mass incarceration is one outcome of the culture of criminalization. Criminalization includes the expansion of law enforcement and the surveillance state to a broad range of activities and settings: zero tolerance policies in schools that steer children into the criminal justice system; welfare policies that punish poor mothers and force them to work outside of the home; employment practices that require workers to compromise their basic civil liberties as a prerequisite for a job; immigration policies that stigmatize and humiliate people while making it difficult for them to access essential services like health care and housing. These and similar practices too numerous to list fall under the rubric of criminalization.

When people talk about mass incarceration they’re usually referring to the more than 2 million Americans behind bars in local jails or state and federal prisons. That number, as high as it is, obscures the fact that on any given day an additional 4 million people are under some form of correctional supervision — generally, probation or parole. According to the Wall Street Journal, studies reveal American men have a 52 percent likelihood of arrest over their lifetime — that’s basically a 50/50 chance. Either American men have an extraordinarily high rate of criminality or we’ve cast the police net way too wide and caught way too many in it.

I’m inclined to agree with this. While prisons are particularly repugnant institutions, people will not be free if they are released from prisons but then subjected to mass surveillance, police harassment, invasive searches, prison-like schools, incarceration within “halfway houses,” stultifying state-secured structural poverty, or other forms of systemic coercion and control. This why my abolitionism is holistic. Rather than merely looking at the institutions of prisons, I look at the entire state apparatus and social order.

After this stellar start, however, Deborah Small’s article begins to fall into a familiar mode for Salon and Alternet articles, expressing common fears about libertarians, particularly the libertarian right. To some extent, even though I am a left-libertarian and supporter of freed markets, I share her concerns about right-wingers like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Grover Nordquist. These right-wing advocates of limited government do not oppose prisons and policing per se. They largely want to see a smaller and more limited system of imprisonment and criminalization, but they certainly don’t wish to see it abolished altogether. Much of their concern with the drug war is also rooted in a decentralist skepticism of federal power. This opposition to federal power will not stop state and local level excesses of imprisonment and criminalization, such as municipal laws that criminalize the homeless or repressive local police practices like Stop and Frisk. Moreover, there are reasons to be concerned that a leaner system of criminalization would also be more efficient at its unjust ends. This is why I’m an anarchist rather than a minarchist. Minarchist libertarians wish to preserve some of the state functions I consider most destructive. They often function as efficiency experts for the state rather than as opponents of state power.

Where I definitely part ways with Deborah Small is her insistence that opposing criminalization requires the use of state power to implement a progressive economic agenda. She writes, “Libertarian politicians like Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Rick Perry oppose things most people want and need: increasing the minimum wage; expanding Medicaid eligibility; increasing food stamps and other income support; investing in early childhood education; protecting consumers from predatory financial institutions and expanding the vote.” It’s a bit bizarre to label Rick Perry a libertarian; he’s simply a conservative statist. But more importantly, I strongly disagree with the claim that the state programs Deborah Small mentions are necessary to ending criminalization and the structural poverty that characterizes it. Frankly, it’s bizarre to me that someone believes strengthening the state is necessary for challenging criminalization.

How does Deborah Small think these programs are secured? The taxation that funds government programs occurs through state force, with the threat of imprisonment for tax evasion playing a key role in obtaining the resources for programs like Medicaid and food stamps. In other words, Small proposes to use criminalization in order to end criminalization.

Moreover, welfare programs are all too often used as mechanisms to monitor and control the poor in this country. As Thaddeus Russell documents, The Other America, a book that played a key role in the ideology behind the American welfare state, displayed conservative and paternalistic contempt for the poor. This paternalistic ideology had a deep influence on American anti-poverty programs, which have been used as mechanisms to coerce poor Americans into complying with socially conservative norms. Russell explains:

In fact, Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” deployed legions of social workers, armed not only with the power to extort proper behavior from the poor with welfare payments but also with the prevailing idea that their subjects should be treated as children, with restrictions imposed on their sex lives, leisure time, diet, spending habits, clothing, and grooming styles. In 1996 the welfare regime tightened its grip with the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), signed into law by another Democrat, Bill Clinton. This “welfare reform,” as it was known, enforced the twin pillars of bourgeois culture: sexual repression and the Protestant work ethic. The act instituted “workfare,” making welfare payments available only to those who have jobs or participate in government make-work such as picking up leaves in public parks or removing trash from subway stations. Many who supported the bill argued not only that the poor needed to be weaned from their dependency on the state but also that they needed to learn what the Puritans brought with them to New England: the idea that work in itself, no matter how ill-paying or demeaning, is virtuous. The bill also appropriated $250 million for “mentoring, counseling, and adult supervision to promote abstinence from sexual activity.” Welfare recipients were to be taught “the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity,” that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity,” and that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

In other words, the welfare state has long been used as a means of coercively imposing the work ethic and socially conservative sexual values.

Similar observations about welfare and compulsory imposition of the work ethic were made by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in their book Regulating the Poor. They write:

As for relief programs themselves, the historical pattern is clearly not one of progressive liberalization; it is rather a record of periodically expanding and contracting relief rolls as the system performs its two main functions: maintaining civil order and enforcing work. … But much more should be understood of this mechanism than merely that it reinforces work norms. It also goes far toward defining and enforcing the terms on which different classes of people are made to do different kinds of work; relief arrangements, in other words, have a great deal to do with maintaining social and economic inequities. The indignities and cruelties of the dole are no deterrent to indolence among the rich; but for the poor person, the specter of ending up on the welfare or in the poorhouse makes any job at any wage a preferable alternative. And so the issue is not the relative merit of work itself; it is rather how some people are made to do the harshest work for the least reward.

Thus welfare plays a key role in upholding work discipline for capitalists.

Welfare by its very nature lends itself to serving as a mechanism for social control. Ultimately, being dependent upon others means being at their whim. Given who controls the levers of state power, this does not bear well for poor people who are made dependent on state power. As Iris Young explained in her classic essay Five Faces of Oppression, “Being a “dependent” in our society implies being legitimately subject to the often arbitrary and invasive authority of social service providers and other public and private administrators who enforce rules with which the marginal must comply, and otherwise exercise power over the conditions of their lives.” A universal basic income guarantee (UBI) could hopefully reduce these relationships of power and control by making payments unconditional, but as C4SS’s Ryan Calhoun points out, even UBI could be used as a tool to discipline and control the poor. In fairness, I should note that much of Deborah Small’s point seems to be that things like mandatory drug tests for welfare recipients are a form of criminalization, and she and I would probably join together to fight such conditions and forms of control.

However, all of this means that the welfare state serves not as an antidote to criminalization, but often as another weapon of criminalization. The money used to finance welfare schemes is obtained through taxation by threat of imprisonment and other criminal sanctions. Meanwhile, the recipients of welfare payments are subject to control and surveillance by dehumanizing bureaucracies. This is hardly the tool opponents of criminalization should want to use to end structural poverty. The minimum wage has its own problems, not the least of which is its history as a weapon to marginalize and exclude minorities, immigrants, and “undesirables” from the workforce. Minimum wage hikes should not be the preferred tool for ending structural poverty either, particularly for those of us who want to help liberate marginalized people from criminalization.

But if not welfare and minimum wage increases, how will we challenge the poverty and inequality that characterizes the prison state? Well, there’s a lot to do on that front. We should challenge the various ways that the state creates artificial scarcity and creates structural poverty. We should work to abolish the borders and immigration restrictions that keep too many trapped in poverty. We should build grassroots institutions of mutual aid, putting the power in the hands of the communities in need rather than in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians. We should support radical labor unions like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which organize outside of the state’s bureaucratic structure to secure better working conditions, protect human rights in the fields, and challenge the power of bosses and capitalists.

What we should not and must not do is strengthen the state that created the systems of criminalization and mass incarceration. While concerns about prison reforms proposed by conservatives and right-libertarians are very warranted, we must be equally skeptical of reforms proposed by liberals and progressives. We must not forget that Bill Clinton was the incarceration president. We must not forget that many progressive organizations have pushed hate crimes laws that strengthen the prison state and the warfare state alike. We must not forget that award winning liberal activist Jane Marquardt is an executive at the third largest for-profit prison company in America. In other words, we must extend Deborah Small’s justifiable criticism of libertarian and conservative prison reforms to also cover liberal and progressive prison reforms.

We also shouldn’t merely change how we have our conversations without changing how we think about institutions. No matter how deeply we care about criminalization, structural poverty, inequality, or racial injustice, intentions and consequences are different. If we try to solve these problems by putting more money and power into bureaucratic institutions governed by perverse political incentives, we will see clearly counterproductive results.

We must extend our skepticism and our rage to the state itself. The state is a system of organized violence and repression. It is a system of class rule, through which oligarchs extract wealth from the masses to enrich their cronies. Prisons, policing, and criminalization are among the most toxic features of this system of coercion. Rather than simply reforming this system, let’s abolish it, and replace it with a world built on voluntary association and grassroots community organizing.

Sheldon Richman discusses how Americans can help Ukrainians.

David Gordon discusses Gary Chartier’s new book on John Rawls.

Norman Solomon discusses the hypocrisy of senator Feinstein.

Christopher Brauchl discusses the hypocrisy of senator Feinstein.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the conflict between Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Cesar Chelala discusses the Syrian civil war’s impact on children.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the national security state and Latin America.

Joanne Knight discusses private prisons.

Jesse Walker discusses Reagan and foreign policy.

Sheldon Richman discusses the empire.

Julian Adorney discusses whether liberty is on the rise or not.

Gary M. Galles discusses the difference between the words liberty and freedom.

Silvia Borzutsky reviews a book on Operation Condor.

Uri Avnery discusses political coalitions in Israel.

Henry Clark discusses George H. Smith’s new book.

Bryan Cheang discusses Herbert Spencer and empire.

Gregory Bresiger discusses Robert Taft and isolationism.

Wendy McElroy discusses the prison population of the United States.

Laura Bachmann discusses civil liberties in China.

Maya Schenwar discusses harsh sentencing for gun law violations.

Ron Jacobs discusses islamophobia.

David Mizner discusses the drone strikes.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the implosion of Libya.

John Pilger discusses a U.S. carried out coup.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the War on Terror.

Jeffrey Tucker discusses the uproar over his brutalism article.

Kevin Carson reviews a book on power.

Peter Andreas discusses a book on illicit smuggling.

Bent Larsen beats Bobby Fischer.

Bent Larsen beats Boris Spassky.

I had my first experience with the Canadian state this week. The immigration authorities questioned me about my trip to Canada. One dicey moment was when the customs officer asked about whether I paid taxes or not. I replied that I only pay sales tax. I haven’t made enough money to pay income tax since 2006. Another obnoxious question was about whether I had ever been stopped by the police. Both of which were answered for the purpose of smoothly entering the country.

Few aspects of the modern state are more irritating than the control of borders. Our movements are circumscribed by the nationalistic regimentation of migration and travel. This makes it more difficult to vote with your feet. One polity may be particularly oppressive, but the entrance requirements of another can be rather repressive too. This renders it more difficult to escape unjust conditions and reside in a more just area.

I am only here on a visit, but I could very well be migrating to another country sometime in the future. It will be a nightmare to go through this again with different immigration authorities. One of my fears relates to how they will treat my computer and other valuable items. I could be stopped for my political activites too. It would be the restriction of my liberty based upon a political disagreement.

Nation-states have other major disadvantages, but the restriction of movement is definitely one of the worst. A basic human right includes the liberty to move about without arbitrary restrictions on said movement. What could be more arbitrary than imaginary lines drawn in the sand by military and police power? Not much! All such borders are political fictions that benefit ruling classes.

Border restrictions especially hurt lower class people who need to get to a better locality. Such individuals are out to create a better life for themselves and deserve our moral support. They are the ones with the least amount of resources to fight immigration laws. The laws are thus biased against lower income people. They are the most restricted and affected by them.

Strong border controls allow rulers to pick and choose who enters a given territory. It priliveges some people at the expense of others. The individuals who have political connections are at an advantage relative to those who don’t. A base of support can thus be created and cultivated amongst the immigrant populace. Let’s work to open the borders and end nation-states.

If you use “thick libertarian” and “thin libertarian” to refer to individuals, you’re misunderstanding the terms. All libertarians are thin libertarians, and all libertarians are thick libertarians. Thin libertarianism is just the thin core that all libertarians agree on in so far as they’re libertarians, thick libertarianism is the additional beliefs that we add onto those in order to have a more full understanding of libertarianism. The view that only the “thin” aspects matter is itself a “thick” view, since the “thin” aspects don’t directly entail that.

*Not really.

I was surprised to open up the Columbia Journalism Review’s website last week and see this article by Steven Brill peering up at me: “Stories I’d Like To See: A fair view of the Koch brothers, and explaining bitcoin.”

This section in particular cracked me up:

This article in the Washington Post last week tried to link the Koch brothers’ support for the Keystone energy pipeline to their company’s economic interests. But it was so lame — none of their products is due to go through the pipeline — that it made me want to read a complete article, full of unbiased reporting across the range of their business interests. I want to know just how self-interested the brothers’ political spending spree actually is.

Sure, any political activism by rich people to limit taxes and government regulation is bound to be in their interests generally. But do the Koch brothers have a more specific agenda, as the Post article tried to prove? Or could it be that Charles and David Koch just happen to believe a conservative government is good for their country?

The brothers and their foundation have also given hundreds of millions to multiple charities that have nothing to do with politics. As this article in the Indianapolis Star points out, the Charles Koch Foundation “underwrites research and teaching at Brown, Mount Holyoke, Sarah Lawrence, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Vassar and some 245 other colleges.” The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center has been renamed the David H. Koch Theater because he’s such a generous benefactor.

These are not beneficiaries associated with hard right causes.

Brill is right, of course; while it might be easy to paint the Kochs and their corporation with one evil, monolithic brush, you can’t do it with any real consistency. But this article, as interesting as it was, wasn’t the reason I was headed over to CJR.

Over on their #Realtalk blog, journalist Ann Friedman listed out some common worries she heard from new journalism school graduates about their job prospects. One I liked – about the awkwardness of networking – described a very stigmergic scenario:

I know, I know. I need a network, but networking is for douchebags.

Networking is for douchebags if you’re only doing it to get a job or a promotion. (Or “connecting” with random journalists on LinkedIn en masse.) Instead, think of your network as a community—a group of professional collaborators with whom you share skills and ideas, contacts and advice—that you invest in whether or not you’re looking for a new job. This is what Robert Krulwich calls horizontal loyalty.

For now, your network is going to be made up of a lot of other entry-level journalists—like your classmates and fellow interns—plus a few people who have been your internship supervisors. You need to get over the feeling that you’re competing for the same three jobs and see other entry-level journalists as allies. You personally may only know three higher-up editors, but if you share the wealth, together you know six or 10 or more. Ask your friends to make introductions, and do the same for them. This is how to slowly expand the number of people you know while also investing in the careers of those who are important to you. It takes time, but the payoff is real.

And just in terms of straight media news, there’s an interesting project coming out of the Online News Association, called “Build Your Own Ethics Code.” According to CJR reporter Edirin Oputu, Build Your Own Ethics Code is “a toolkit to help news outlets, bloggers, and journalists decide on ethical guidelines that match their own ideas about reporting and journalism”:

The project, which includes the collaboration of ONA’s news ethics committee with roughly two dozen journalists and academics, will give reporters a chance to look at the issues that arise in the course of reporting and to draw up an ethical code based on the kind of work they do and the ethical help they believe they need, said ONA’s executive director, Jane McDonnell.

‘I think that when you get journalists in a room together, you can see that there is a complete will to make sure that their reporting and distribution is as close to perfect as they can get it. But the speed at which they work often kind of negates that, or makes it more difficult,’ she said.

ONA will also open the project up for crowdsourcing at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, in early May.

That’s it for now! Check back in next week for more media news and anarchist tidbits.

Don’t be shy; say hi! Leave a comment telling me what you thought of this blog, or make a suggestion for future posts. Or, you can follow me on Twitter, where we can exchange profanities – or maybe even cause the next big libertarian schism!

Perfect freedom is often dismissed as a fantasy. This post is aimed at refuting that notion. A good starting point is the late Ellen Willis’s distinction between personal and sovereign freedom. The former pertains to the ability to do whatever you want as long as you obey the law of equal freedom. This law stipulates that you can’t impinge upon another’s autonomy through force, coercion, violence, and compulsion. Sovereign freedom is essentially the negation of true liberty, because it grants license to do so. True liberty is synonymous with personal freedom.

The reason that many people don’t understand perfect freedom is due to the conflation of personal and sovereign freedom. Instead of recognizing that so called sovereign freedom involves the ability to exercise power over others, they use the two interchangeably. Some might say that one’s man freedom is another man’s oppression. This confuses the subjective with the objective. What may be experienced by an individual as oppressive may not really be so. A racist might see the court mandated end of Jim Crow as restricting his or her freedom to avoid African-Americans in public places. This is hardly an instance of oppression. Perfect freedom depends upon seeing how this is not truly repressive.

As long as we delineate the boundaries protecting each individual’s autonomy, we will be in a position to understand the difference between personal and sovereign freedom. The encroachment upon the legitimate space of another is not about liberty. It isn’t in keeping with the law of equal freedom. You act as if you possess more liberty than the other person by not respecting his equal rights. What you really claim is license to violate the rights of another. This creates an inequality of power and status.

Another good example of this is a person claiming that liberty requires he or she be allowed to control the actions of employees. In this instance; the person is claiming sovereign dominion over people based on business ties. Left-libertarian, Kevin Carson, has described this as contract feudalism. A concept about the preservation of feudal relations between lord and serf in the modern workplace. You may contract into it, but you have little choice about working for somebody else. Independent employment is harder to make successful.

A final instance of so called sovereign freedom pretending to be about liberty involves claims by nation-states pertaining to independence from external forces. This is really about the uncontested control of territory and prerogative to order others in that physical space around. Let’s work to put an end to sovereignty and increase personal freedom.

This piece by Lorenzo Morales at La Silla Vacía shows, with concise and beautiful prose, the process through which the FARC impose themselves on local peoples in Colombia, becoming the de facto rulers of an incipient state.

Morales tells us about life in Araracuara, a small, isolated town within the Caquetá Department, deep within the Amazon. During the last couple of years, the town has been going through an illegal gold-mining boom.

The town is so hard to reach that it used to house a penal colony in 1939, and today “…remains a confined place: there’s no road, a ticket to board the weekly 19-seat plane that arrives from Bogotá costs more than minimum wage. A beer costs 5000 pesos, a gallon of gas 16,000, twice as much as in Bogotá.”

Furthermore,

There, reality is inmune to the announcements of the Ministry of Environment, to the statements of the Defense Ministry, the plans of the one in charge of housing, to the governmental promises of infrastructure or healthcare. There, life governs itself, with its own laws.

That is… until recently:

Two months ago the FARC came back down from their strongholds in the upper Caquetá, from Florencia, San Vicente, Puerto Rico, El Doncello. They didn’t come with guns and swamp boots, but in small groups of militias, camouflaged among the strangers who come to this land looking to suck some of the new bonanza: the gold. New, because poverty here is an interlude between bonanzas: that of rubber 100 years ago, tiger or jaguar skins 50 years ago, coca 25 years back…

They arrived to restore order, they say. Order, in guerrilla logic, is to send boys to remove their piercings and get haircuts, forbid miners from getting drunk in brothels in Puerto Santander (across the river), lower the volume of music in the bars, sweep the town’s roads. Everyone knows that is the recurrent costume that precedes their next suit, that of armed “chepitos” [popular term denoting pintoresque, harrassing debt collectors that used to be common in Bogotá] asking for compulsory contributions. Said and done.

The Center, C4SS, had a rather interesting 2013, that ended with us having a large sum of money to play with.

But our fun will not continue without your help, your continued support and donations.

In order to make the case for why you should forgo a cup of coffee every month and donate to C4SS, the current Coordinating Director for C4SS will put together a report on what the donors received for the month and what future donors can expect. C4SS pays all of the writers that contribute and we prefer micro-donation swarms. We will certainly (re)publish free content as well as spend a big donation, but, as market anarchists, we are covetous of the resiliency and information embedded in trade and micro-donations.

So, what did you get instead of a cup of coffee?

C4SS published:

18 Commentaries,
12 Features,
4 Weekly Abolitionists,
8 Life, Love and Liberty blog posts,
4 Weekly Libertarian Leftist Reviews,
3 Missing Commas and
8 C4SS Media uploads to the C4SS youtube channel.

And thanks to our wonderful and devoted Media Coordinators our Commentaries have been submitted to media outlets around the globe as well as regularly translated into a growing number of languages:

7 Spanish translations,
1 Swedish translation,
17 Portuguese translations and
5 Dutch translations

Thanks to our talented and aggressive Portuguese translator and Media Coordinator, Erick Vasconcelos, Brazil has surpassed both Canada and the United Kingdom in the list of countries that most visit the site, making it second to the US. If you ever thought that market anarchism was or needs to be a global conversation, then C4SS is the place to donate. If we are missing a language (and we are missing a lot) and want to help, let us know.

Speaking of translations and global conversations, C4SS has been able to secure enough funding to pay for high quality translations of Kevin Carson‘s The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Fist. So far we have translators signed on for Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. We have already received an Italian version. And we are currently looking for a Greek translator. If you can help us or know some one that might be able and interested in translating roughly 18,000 words of medium density mutualist-speak into Greek, let us know – we can compensate for their labor!

C4SS has a number of projects in the works that have already been paid for, we are just waiting for the work to be completed. To pique your interests I will name a few:

• Jonathan Carp has been working on reviews for two books: Emma Griffin’s “Liberty’s Dawn” and AK Press’ “Ready for Revolution“.
• Nathan Goodman is working on reviews for two of Victoria Law’s books from PM Press: “Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women” and “Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities“.
• Christiaan Elderhorst is working on a review of Michel Bauwen’s new book “De Wereld Redden“.
• Natasha Petrova is finishing a review of Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s second edition of “Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical“.
• Grant Mincy is reviewing Arun Agrawal’s “Environmentality: Technologies Of Government And The Making Of Subjects“.
• And Anna Morgenstern is working on three more articles to develop and round out her “anarcho-[x] is impossible” series.

We have put together a symposium of sorts on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. At the moment we have articles ready from Kevin Carson, Wolfi Landstreicher and William Gillis. It is only Charles Johnson that is still finishing his review.

C4SS is preparing two books. Kevin Carson has written an introduction to a Colin Ward annotated edition of Pyotr Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow”. This edition will also include a copy of Murray Bookchin’s “Towards a Liberatory Technology”. The other book is a collection of C4SS articles and studies concerning libertarian notions of and defenses for public property, with an introduction written by Roderick T. Long.

In the greater C4SS world, the “Markets Not Capitalism” Into the Libraries project can report two successes and one bonus point. The Albany New York Public Library and the Stockholm University Library are both sporting new copies of “Markets Not Capitalism”. The Stockholm Library already had one so David Grobgeld put in a request to have Kevin Carson’s “Studies in Mutualist Political Economy” added to their catalog.

C4SS’s affiliated student network, The Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS), has added two new chapters, Texas State and Appalachian State University. The University of Oklahoma S4SS is hosting, along with other student groups, two speaking events with C4SS Senior Fellow and Molinari Institute President Roderick T. Long; Thursday the 27th, Eudaimonistic Approaches to Libertarianism and, Friday the 28th, Robert Nozick, Class Struggle, and Free-Market Socialism. OU S4SS is also gearing up to produce a new periodical they are calling The New Leveller. And the Appalachian State University S4SS is currently raising funds to ship C4SS Senior Fellow Charles Johnson out to speak during their university’s Social Justice week – please consider helping them out in their fundraising drive.

There are many more projects that C4SS is developing that I can’t go into because the details are still being worked out, but look forward to an update on our Entrepreneurial Anti-Capitalism project, details on a beta-test for a paid internship program and getting our political quiz, finally, working again.

Needless to say, all of this work is only sustainable through your support. If you think the various political and economic debates around the world are enhanced by the addition of left libertarian market anarchist, freed market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist solutions, challenges, provocations or participation, please donate $5, today, to keep C4SS going and growing.

ALL the best!

If you oppose mass incarceration, you should oppose empire. If you oppose imperialism and militarism, you should oppose the prison state. Empire and incarceration are two related institutions of brutal state violence, and they are mutually reinforcing.

A new article by my friend Henia Belalia argues that immigrants’ rights should be understood in a context where migration is often forced by America’s destructive policies of imperialist intervention. At one point, the article examines the case of the Cañenguez family, which I also briefly discussed in last week’s blog. Ana Cañenguez and her family fled violence in El Salvador, and ICE is demanding they self-deport back to that nation. In her article, Henia examines how the violence in El Salvador is largely rooted in U.S. imperialism. She writes:

Today, nearly one quarter of El Salvador’s population lives and works in the United States. The economy, which once relied on its coffee exports, now depends on the remittances of its workers abroad who send money back to their family. This exchange is expedited by the fact that since 2001, their official currency is the dollar. In other words, every deportation of a Salvadorean worker in the United States has a direct negative impact on the economy of this small Central American nation.

To understand this situation, it’s helpful to start with El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, which was to become the most costly U.S. intervention in Latin America.

The United States spent $1 million a day funding death squads and a far-right military government in efforts to ward off the spread of communism and “another Nicaragua.” As a result, the country was traumatized by massive human rights violations and the death of 75,000 people. But perhaps what really tipped the scales was the formation of U.S.-funded private development organizations like FUSADES, which furthered neoliberal programs inside the country. The United States has also meddled in elections and set preconditions for U.S. aid that incentivizes — one might say bribes — politicians to open up the country to foreign multinationals. The recent enactment of the public-private partnership law, for example, grants “the government the right to sell off natural resources, infrastructure and services to foreign multinationals.”

El Salvador has been torn apart, impoverished, and destabilized by violent intervention from the American state. Now, when people like Ana Cañenguez peacefully travel from El Salvador to America to support their families, the United States government seeks to use force to deport them and destroy their livelihoods. In other words, America’s policies of mass deportation are policies that re-victimize those who already face poverty and violence because of the American empire.

These policies of mass deportation are part of the larger prison industrial complex. As Henia explains, “The deportation quota is set at 400,000 a year, and the private-prison industry has a powerful vested interest in keeping detention centers filled. DHS has even conceded “detention bed mandates” to the for-profit industry, ensuring a certain number of migrants will be detained in order to maximize profits.” The same concentrated interest groups that profit off of mass incarceration and drug prohibition also profit from this border imperialism.

The prison-industrial complex and America’s military empire are mutually reinforcing pieces of a larger system of coercion. Let’s do all we can to understand this system, to build alternatives to it, and to resist it.

Joel Schlosberg discusses how privacy and sausages are unlike laws.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the road from hell in Syria.

JP Sottile discusses drones.

Ryan McMaken discusses crony capitalism and the transcontinental railroads.

Justin Raimondo discusses Israel and the conservative movement.

Stephen Kinzer discusses the end of American hubris.

Ted Snider discusses 21st century coups.

Kenan Malik discusses dieudonne.

George Leef reviews a book on boom-bust and Austrian economics.

Nilantha ilangamuwa discusses the politics of Henry Kissinger.

Zoltan Grossman discusses Ukranian fascists

Gary Younge discusses the dark side of the CIA involvement in the War on Terror.

David S. D’ Amato discusses Ayn Rand and Max Stirner’s egoism.

Kelley B. Vlahos discusses the Afghan elections.

Gene Healy discusses why it’s good to steal from the state.

Jacob Sullum discusses U.N. drug warriors.

Nick Gillespie discusses how the FDA can kill you.

John Vaught LaBeaume discusses why he won’t attend CPAC.

A. Barton Hinkle discusses government telling us what we can and can’t eat.

Richard Ebeling discusses the continued relevance of Hayek’s road to serfdom.

Philip Smith discusses Asha Bandele’s interview with Michelle Alexander.

Anthony Gregory discusses the use of the war metaphor.

Philip Giraldi discusses the complicity of doctors in torture.

Nick Turse discusses U.S. military expansion into Africa.

Jeffrey Tucker contrasts brutalist with humane libertarianism.

Melvin A. Goodman discusses why the current CIA director needs to resign.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the blurring of the line between cops and soldiers.

Patrick Cockburn discusses conflict between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Emanuel Lasker does a fantastic double bishop sacrifice.

Emanuel Lasker plays a great game against Capablanca.

C4SS Media presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “The Problem Isn’t ‘Patent Trolls.’ The Problem Is Patents.,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“Apple’s complaint, in its essentials, is that patent “trolls” just buy up patent “rights,” then search for infringement to cash in on, rather than going to the trouble of making real products. But why shouldn’t they do that? If, as Apple would have us believe, patents are a legitimate market instrument, then the “trolls” are just exploiting that instrument more efficiently than Apple cares to, right?

The problem isn’t “patent trolls.” The problem is patents.”

C4SS Media presents Grant Mincy‘s “Common Property, Common Power,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“What we are seeing is social power at work. The courts, legislature and special interests are powerless in the new public arena. The liberated market is not interested in the ownership of ideas, but rather progress, innovation and co-operative labor. The days of corporate colonialism are numbered.”

This is the final part of a trinity of posts on Lynn Stuart Parramore’s recent Atlernet article called “3 Things That Make Libertarian Heads Explode“. The first two posts in the series dealt with selective contentions about her thoughts regarding the libertarian attitude towards inequality and public goods. This one is about her thoughts on libertarianism and regulation. It will similarly quote a selected contention as the basis for a discussion. Let’s present the quotation:

Reality check: Markets are not invariably naturally competitive. In fact, many have a tendency to move toward harmful conditions like oligopoly, which turns them into anti-competitive entities.

The libertarian will try to say that oligopolies are the fault of government intervention. But there are plenty of examples to refute this. If you look at history, even at periods when governments have been quite limited and have served as little more than a night watchmen, you’ll find big, nasty oligopolies, like the 19th-century railroads, or steel. Today, we find computer operating systems (think Netscape and Microsoft) as examples of oligopolistic conditions.

Lynn Stuart Parramore is unaware of the previously cited revisionist history of Gabriel Kolko. Let’s quote his description of the anti-oligopolistic effects of even far from perfectly free market forces again. As Roy Childs prefaces his quotation of Gabriel Kolko in his essay “Big Business and the Rise of American Statism“:

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,

He goes on to quote Gabriel Kolko:

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

Her specific examples are also flawed. The transcontinental railroads of the 19th century involved massive land grants by the government. Microsoft benefits from IP protectionism. Neither of these are great examples of a natural oligopoly, unaided or supported by government. Both are actually prime examples of state capitalism.

She also ignores how regulation privileges established firms at the expense of newcomers who can’t meet the costs of regulation. They represent the forcible cartelization of industry and compulsory standardization. No more competitive pressure exists. This means that oligopolies are actually easier to establish, because there is no way to upset the market dominance of existing firms by out competing them. The status quo is forcibly maintained by the corporate influenced regulatory state Let’s embrace left-wing market anarchism and destroy concentrations of wealth!

C4SS Media presents Grant Mincy‘s “Which Side Are You On?” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“The challenges that face Appalachia are indeed great. To solve them, one must question why our “national interest” still lies in an “above all” energy policy. One must question how so much wealth has been extracted from the Appalachian coalfields while the communities there remain so poor. One must question why the largest consumers of fossil fuels are great militarized nation-states. One must question why such an ecological crisis is occurring. One must question the pervasive influence of the corporate monopoly on the people’s democracy. One must stand up for themselves, their community, their consensus and yes, even their biodiversity.

Today, these questions are being asked. Appalachia is rising.”

In 2013, I noted a rise in stories about so-called “Republican Anarchists.” Articles appearing in every publication and website from the Huffington Post to the New York Times decried the emergence of these Harry Reid-coined “anti-statists.” At the time it seemed like just another annoying turn of phrase that was popular in the moment but wouldn’t really amount to much in terms of cultural staying power. Other anarchists, like Wayne Price, noticed the same phenomenon.

Price wrote at Infoshop:

Historically this is very unusual. Far-rightists have usually been called “conservatives.” (They are rarely called the more accurate term, “reactionaries” — those who want to go backward.) Those in the center or the left may call them other names, such as “nuts” or “fascists.” (They are mostly not “fascists” in the sense of wanting to overthrow bourgeois democracy and replace it with a rightwing dictatorship — but they shade into such people.) But they were rarely, if ever, called “anarchists.” Why now?

There may be three reasons. One is that the real anarchist movement has grown and impacted on popular consciousness. Anarchists were part of the Occupy movement. Calling rightists “anarchists” manages to smear them with the conventional opprobrium of the left-wing, masked, bomb-throwing, window-smashing, anarchists (as widely pictured). Simultaneously it smears real anarchists with the opprobrium of the far-right politicians. For once, the Democrats have turned the tables on the Republicans. After all, the latter regularly denounce Obama and the Democrats as “socialists,” or even “communists” or “Marxists” (leaving aside “Muslims”). If only.

A second reason is that the far-right is loudly “anti-statist,” due to its supposed love of “liberty” and “freedom” (but not “democracy” and certainly not “equality”). The newspapers refer to them as “libertarians,” meaning pro-capitalist anti-statists (almost no one knows that “libertarian” once meant socialist-anarchist, and still does in much of the world). They declare, in the famous words of President Ronald Reagan, “The government is not the solution; the government is the problem.” They claim they oppose Obama’s Affordable Care Act because they want “to keep government out of health care.”

A third reason, I suspect, was that the far-rightists were generally acting in a destructive, uncompromising, and chaotic fashion. For the Democratic politicians and editorialists, this brought to mind the behavior of the “anarchic” anarchists, who are supposedly committed to chaos, destruction, and ruin.

While I suspect Price and I disagree on certain things, I came to the same conclusion:

It is disingenuous to call Republicans anarchists, as articles in New York Magazine, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, New York Times and OpenDemocracy have all done within the last year. Why? The answer is simple: despite their flirtation with (often the most basic or vulgar) libertarianism, Republicans love the State. Specifically, they love the aspects of the State that anarchists loathe most. Anarchists wouldn’t clamor for war on public radio, as John McCain did yesterday; they wouldn’t call for closed borders and the expulsion of undocumented immigrants, as people like Joe Arpaio and Jan Brewer do on a near-constant basis. Perhaps vitally, they wouldn’t be running for Congress in the first place.

But there is a larger undercurrent here that hasn’t really become visible until recently.

Natasha Petrova wrote the first part of her response to Lynn Stuart Parramore’s recent Alternet piece, “Three Things That Make Libertarians’ Heads Explode,” this week. She’s dissecting the article in her blog over the course of the next few weeks, but I wanted to bring up a larger metanarrative that she hinted to:

[Parramore] evidences no awareness of the existence of left-wing market anarchists or any other type of libertarian leftist. In her world, the only libertarians that exist are the Reason Magazine or right-wing variety.

This type of article has become extremely popular in recent months. Following the recent potentially-botched Newsweek article on the founder of Bitcoin, Salon published an article by Andrew Leonard sneering at anyone who viewed the cryptocurrency with a libertarian lens: “Sorry, libertarians: Your dream of a Bitcoin paradise are officially dead and gone.”

Other examples – just at Salon alone – include:

• ““Sharing economy” shams: Deception at the core of the Internet’s hottest businesses,” which asserts that “Companies like Airbnb use the language of ‘sharing’ and ‘gifts’ to conceal ambitions far more libertarian;”
• “Confessions of a former Libertarian: My personal, psychological and intellectual epiphany” – “I was a Buddhist concerned with world suffering — and I could no longer reconcile my humanity with my ideology;”
• My favorite: “Don’t ally with libertarians: Ideologues co-opt an anti-NSA rally;”
• And lots of articles about Rand Paul, Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand.

Additionally, Pando Daily writers Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, formerly of NSFWCorp, have used their platforms to go after various columnists and journalists for the grievous crime of being a so-called libertarian; from 2010 to now, Ames and Levine wrote several articles about Washington Post writer Radley Balko, including a recent article about how Balko was a member of the Cato Institute and therefore his journalistic work on the police state is invalid. Their nascent feud with Glenn Greenwald and First Look Media is also worth noting for the same reason.

What is this phenomenon? Why, all of a sudden, are some progressives – who don’t usually even disavow capitalism in the first place – so interested in whether someone identifies as a libertarian or not? It seems like the surest way to get paid in progressive media is to write about the inanity and/or evils of libertarianism – to manufacture a “gold scare” that obfuscates the complex web of issues and ideologies that comprise “libertarianism” and combines them into one gelatinous monolith. It’s great for page views.

While the implications of any term ending in “scare” sound serious, recalling imagery of a time where anarchists and other radicals were run out of the country on threat of death, this gold scare is, at best, amusing and at worst, slightly irritating.

Even socialist publication Jacobin has commented on this odd obsession with libertarianism:

One should not have any illusions that critics of the national security state all share socialist politics. But we should judge these critics by what they say and do and what their political impact is. An endless inquisition into hidden beliefs and motives, and the attempt to unmask a devious libertarian hidden agenda, makes for a satisfying purity politics for those who want to justify their own inaction. But it does nothing to contest the predatory fusion of state and capital that confronts us today, which must be confronted in the government, the workplace, and many other places besides.

Let’s be clear: Libertarianism is no monolith. Jeffrey Tucker’s recent article on “brutalism vs. humanitarianism” proves that there’s a lot we disagree on, just in terms of how far we think libertarianism should go. Past the “do we need liberty” question, there isn’t much we do actually, unequivocally agree on. So when a progressive writes an article saying, “GASP! All libertarians believe X!” the only appropriate response is laughter.

This is part two of a three part series on an article by Lynn Stuart Parramore of Alternet. The first part focused on a contention she made about libertarians and inequality. This post discusses her take on libertarians and public goods. Our focus is on her thoughts about national defense. As she puts it:

Another public good that flummoxes libertarians is national defense. If you mention to them that the market can’t possibly supply the defense of a country, they will cross their arms and answer: “How do you know?” They will insist that if there is enough demand, supply will magically follow.

Well, history tells us that countries that don’t get their act together on national defense have big problems. It’s almost demented to think that private markets would have supplied defense against the growing threat from Germany in the ’30s, not least because as is now well documented, many private business interests in the US, Britain and France favored accommodating the Nazis.

To counter the argument about supply and demand concerning national defense, you can simply point out that the draft has been necessary in every major war. You can sometimes find enough people to volunteer during peacetime, but people have a funny habit of not wanting to get themselves blown away during wartimes. That’s why in the U.S. Civil War, recruitment was total chaos, with rich people paying poor people to go fight in their place. In 1863, New York City exploded in a four-day long murderous riot because people opposed the Civil War draft law which allowed rich people like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie to pay off a substitute. That riot was one of the bloodiest in U.S. history.

The most glaring aspect of this passage is her apparent support for the military draft. As every left-libertarian market anarchist knows: the draft is involuntary servitude. If you can’t have a war without it, you don’t get to conduct one. It’s never ok to employ forced labor to achieve your aims. This is a moral truth that even non-libertarians tend to adhere to.

She also ignores the fact that there was no truly free market during the time period of World War 2. You can’t use an unfree market as an example of how free markets allegedly lead to a lack of defense. The business interests that supported the Nazis weren’t representative of freed market commerce. This is also due to their working with a state. No business that works with a nation-state is an example of a libertarian entity.

In addition to the above, this article displays an ignorance of the libertarian writing on defense without the state. It’s not practical or easy to conquer an anarchist society. There is no head to simply depose and declare victory over. No nation-states would exist in an anarchist society either. The issue of national defense simply wouldn’t arise.

What about the defense of non-state societies that come under attack by aggressors? Federated anarchist militias could repel invaders, but the likelihood of an invasion is slim. This is due to the internationalist character of an anarchist world. A global community would exist. Let’s work to make it a reality.

Lynn Stuart Parramore recently wrote an Alternet article titled “3 Things That Make Libertarian Heads Explode“. She identifies three areas where our heads will supposedly explode. They are inequality, public goods, and regulation. She evidences no awareness of the existence of left-wing market anarchists or any other type of libertarian leftist. In her world, the only libertarians that exist are the Reason Magazine or right-wing variety. In the first part of my series, I will discuss her contention about cronyism:

 When forced to deal with inequality, libertarians often talk about cronyism, something they insist would not happen in their free-market utopia. Cronyism, they insist, is all about government favors, forgetting that cronyism is rampant between various market players. What do you call it when corporate CEOs collude with their boards to award themselves outrageous salaries? If you are an English speaker, you call it “cronyism.” When the owner of a bank colludes with other bank owners to do things like interfere with prices or squash competition, that’s also a form of cronyism. For some strange reason, libertarians seem to think cronyism is just something businesses do with governments.

Non-governmentally enforced cartelization has a tendency to be more unstable due to the fact that it’s in the interest of competitors to break agreements. Gabriel Kolko has documented how regulatory measures were backed by big business for the purposes of cartelizing industries. Cronyism can occur without government, but the presence of government allows the use of coercive force to maintain it. The competitive pressure from markets far from a “freed” ideal were decentralizing economic power and wealth. This was occurring before the Progressive Era regulations were introduced. As Gabriel Kolko writes, the trend of the last decades of the 19th century and the first two of the 20th was:

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.

Regulations contribute to inequality by creating barriers to marketplace entry. The larger corporations can easily afford to meet the costs of regulations while the less capital intensive businesses cannot. This leads to the further concentration of wealth and an economy dominated by corporatist business enterprise. Inequality is also inherent in the relationship between regulator and regulated. All may be formally equal before the law, but there is clearly a relationship of command and control. This kind of inequality is often overlooked by left-wing statists.

C4SS Media presents Natasha Petrova‘s “Good Piece In The Jacobin,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.

“The key word here is ‘most’. A left-libertarian market anarchist transformation would involve a free market anti-capitalist or laissez faire socialist democratization of the market through freed market means. This could conceivably involve expropriation of state corporatist or state capitalist property. It’s thus clearly possible to accept the libertarian critique of the state as valid and still advocate revolutionary economic transformation. Our ideal is freed markets and not the existing ‘marketplace’.”

These days, some policy makers are discussing rolling back America’s system of mass incarceration. Figures from Eric Holder to Rand Paul are proposing eliminating many mandatory minimum sentences. States like Colorado are legalizing marijuana. But while some policy makers talk about shrinking the prison state, prison expansion continues to be pushed and passed by legislators.

On the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons recently allocated $54 million to open the Thomson Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Illinois. Democrats like Senator Dick Durbin and Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos have praised the funding, which redirects resources away from production for human needs and towards punishment and state violence. They praise it essentially as a stimulus package. Durbin said, “This is the news we’ve been waiting for. The funding that the Bureau of Prisons reported to Congress today is a significant investment in the economic future of Northern Illinois.” Similarly, Bustos said “This investment by the Bureau of Prisons in Thomson prison means that construction can soon begin, workers can soon compete for good-paying jobs and Northern Illinois will no longer be home to an empty prison.” According to Bustos’ press release, the prison is “expected to provide a major boost to the local economy and create more than 1,100 jobs. Annual operation of the facility is expected to generate more than $122 million in operating expenditures (including salaries), $19 million in labor income, and $61 million in local business sales.”

This tells us a lot about the economics of mass incarceration, but not in the way Bustos and Durbin might want us to think. These Democrats are entranced by Bastiat’s famous “broken window fallacy.” They ignore the opportunity costs of incarceration, from the redirection of resources away from peaceful production of goods and services to the caging of people who could make valuable contributions to communities if they were free. Moreover, this use of public prisons as make-work programs reveals that the perverse incentives at work in prisons operated by profiteers like the Corrections Corporation of America or the Management and Training Corporation also play out in the operation of public prisons. While the opportunity costs and tax costs are dispersed across the general population, and the human costs are concentrated upon people who are systematically disenfranchised, the benefits of prisons are given to concentrated interest groups like prison guards. Thus, public choice theory suggests that those who benefit have more incentive and ability to influence policy than those who bear the costs, so we see a rise in incarceration, regardless of whether it’s good policy for the general public. The perverse incentives are easy to illustrate when ruthless corporate profiteers are the beneficiaries and rent seekers, but local populations that want jobs as prison guards have the same types of incentive problems. This is why we need to push not just against for-profit prisons, but against all prisons. The economic logic of state financed prisons encourages a growing prison state.

In my home state of Utah, we’re seeing similar growth dynamics play out. The legislature recently passed bills to build a new prison and expand the Central Utah Correctional Facility in Gunnison. Bids by private contractors will be taken by the Prison Relocation and Development Authority (PRADA) for the construction of the new prison. This may also provide an opportunity for the prison to be operated by a for-profit contractor like the Corrections Corporation of America or the Management and Training Corporation. But even if only the construction of the prison occurs for profit, this is a clear example of prisons as cronyism, with obscene profits being made to service the exercise of state power. The expansion of the prison in Gunnison is largely being justified based on extrapolations from current prison growth rates. In other words, the state is spending money on the assumption that drug prohibition and other policies that facilitate mass incarceration will and should continue for the foreseeable future.

So far I’ve discussed the economics of prisons as make work programs and crony capitalist rent seeking. But the prison state also thrives and grows based on an ideological commitment to punishment. Center for a Stateless Society senior fellow Roderick Long has argued that libertarians should reject punishment on philosophical grounds, and embrace restitution and defense in its stead. Recent speculation by philosopher Rebecca Roache postulates that in the future, punishment could be exacerbated, with advanced drugs being used to make prisoners feel as though they are suffering for a thousand years over the course of a mere eight hours. This is horrific on multiple levels. The type of trauma that could be caused to whomever the state wants to harm is terrifying to contemplate. Moreover, the basic idea seems to be rooted in a purely punitive mentality. Roache asks, “Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free? When we ask that question, the goal isn’t simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments – the goal is to look at today’s punishments through the lens of the future.” This implies that justice is served by making “criminals” suffer. This method would do nothing to protect people from violence by likely reoffenders, nor would it assist in securing restitution for victims of harms. It would symbolize raw punishment and sadism, providing neither protection nor restitution. It is punishment distilled to its sadistic essence, and it’s sick indeed.

The punitive mentality is running rampant in the operation of America’s immigration system, but immigrants and their allies across the country are resisting the state’s violence and racism. My most recent column discusses the hunger strikes going on in Tacoma, Washington. Eunice Lee of the ACLU has a good blog post about the hunger strikes as well. Meanwhile, in my home state of Utah, immigrants are facing the full brunt of these punitive policies. The Cañenguez family is nearing their deadline to “voluntarily” (as if) self-deport, after which they face direct violence from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These migrants have not been charged with any crimes, and they are at risk of gang violence if the US government forcibly sends them back to El Salvador. Of course, the violence of the American state is its own form of gang violence. A gang with legal power is plotting to send them back into harms’ way at the hands of gangs that lack state authority. This is what immigration enforcement looks like. Please sign their petition to help this family be left alone by the state’s thugs.

In addition to immigrant resistance, opposition to the prison state continues to build from the radical wing of the transgender liberation movement. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a collective and law center led by transgender people of color, continues promoting prison abolitionist politics. The latest issue of In Solidarity, a magazine by their Prisoner Advisory Committee, was just released and was introduced and celebrated by former trans political prisoner CeCe McDonald. I highly recommend the issue, as well as everything else the Sylvia Rivera Law Project puts out.

The punitive state is continuing its growth and violent depredations, but resistance continues to build. Until all are free, let’s fight every day to stop the prison state.