Amia Srinivasan has four questions for free-market moralists, specifically those who accept something like a Nozickian account of individual rights. My own take is more Rothbardian than Nozickian, but that still seems close enough to give her four answers, and to ask four questions in return about the assumptions that underlie her essay.

Amia begins by asking:

1. Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?

This largely depends on how we’re defining “free.” There certainly can be (and are) large discrepancies in social power that might not necessarily involve the direct use of force or fraud. Those discrepancies are  often very socially destructive, and it is legitimate to say that people on the wrong end of that kind of situation aren’t “free” in some broad (but important) sense of the word.

However, it’s not clear why acknowledging this would pose a threat to libertarianism. Libertarians can believe that people should always work to maximize “freedom” in its broad sense while also believing that it is always wrong to violate it in its strict sense. And, indeed, plenty of radical libertarians and free marketeers have explicitly tied their defense of freedom in the strict sense to the importance of freedom in the broad sense.

So here’s the first counter-question:

1. Do government interventions typically shrink or expand existing inequalities of social power?

Toward the beginning of her column, Srinivasan notes a couple examples of moral defenses of social inequality on free-market grounds. Yet despite the assumptions of both Srinivasan and the defenders of inequality she cites, a moral defense of voluntary exchange can’t be used to defend many of the inequalities we see in the world today.

As Srinivasan herself has noted elsewhere, the wealthy are considerably more dependent on government than the rest of us. This makes sense, given that they’re the ones most likely to have significant influence over public policy.

Even those laws and programs ostensibly designed to help the poor typically work to entrench the social position of the already wealthy. Sometimes this is through less obvious benefits, and sometimes this is by making the exploited complacent enough to not revolt.

If Srinivasan agrees with what seems like the logical conclusion of her earlier column about the rich and government dependency, it seems like the logical conclusion is that government usually works to strengthen existing inequalities. If that’s true, the drive toward freedom in that broader sense is an argument for free markets, not against them.

It’s hard to see how social inequality could be made worse by taking power away from an institution that’s engaged in massive land theft, killed serious attempts at labor organizing, regulated away alternatives to the life-draining workplace of the modern world, and just generally worked to keep the poor poor and the rich rich.

Considering the amount of violence it took to build existing relations of social power, rights-based libertarians (including Nozickians) are in an especially good place to tackle these problems. This is because they can remind us that property that’s been verifiably stolen is ripe for expropriation by anyone else willing to put it into productive use.

Next, Srinivasan asks:

2. Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?

No, definitely not. I don’t know who Srinivasan thinks disagrees with this, though. The idea that libertarians believe non-aggression is the only important moral principle is a common strawman, but it’s almost never something any libertarian actually advocates. So the only way this is a mark against libertarianism is if you assume a 1:1 correlation between what’s morally impermissible and what ought to be legally impermissible. So, to Srinivasan I ask:

2. Should everything morally impermissible also be legally impermissible?

Srinivasan and other anti-libertarians will probably agree that the answer is no. If that’s the case, there needs to be some standard for how we do determine what should or shouldn’t be illegal.

One natural inclination might be to fall back on a libertarian standard, that invasions against people’s rights are what ought to be illegal. An alternative might be to say that the law’s violence should be used or not used according to the seriousness of a moral wrong.

This alternative test would go sharply against common sense morality, though. For example, most of us would probably agree that under normal circumstances, adultery is worse than petty theft or minor vandalism. And yet most of us would also probably agree that adultery should stay completely legal, and that petty theft and minor vandalism should remain illegal.

3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?

No. Following what I said after the second question, that’s not a mark against libertarianism. Following what I said after the first question, allowing government intervention is more likely to allocate resources according to what keeps the rich rich and the poor poor, not according to who deserves what.

There’s another problem here, though:

3. Is there a good way of using government to dependably discover and enforce desert?

Governments are made up of human beings, no wiser, no more omniscient, and with no more well-tuned of a moral sense than their citizens. Given how removed they are from people living under their supervision, governments do a poor job of actually doling out the right kind of help at the right time.

One useful way of at least getting people what they want while also taking everyone else’s wants into consideration is letting them interact freely through markets. This is because prices carry much more information than any particular participant will (or can) ever actually know, and often important information about people’s needs that can only be discovered through actual market exchange.

If we want to talk about resolving people’s needs beyond just what they can get through commerce, libertarians also have a better answer to that than government activity.

I don’t think anyone has to be reminded how much better that private charities performed than governments after Hurricane Katrina. What they might be interested to know is that even more effective than top-down private charities were efforts based around grassroots mutual aid.

These came both from local churches and loose-knit organizations like the Common Ground Collective, who took the time to actually find out what people needed, rather than just assuming.

Similarly, we can remember the fraternal societies of the past, which knew their members closely enough to actually get them real help in an efficient way, without subjecting them to the dehumanizing paternalism that many recipients of government aid feel today. Any feasible social safety net will need to be genuinely social, by which I mean completely disconnected from government.

So if you prefer that people get more of what they need or deserve, the right response is to have government step away to let the people operate on the knowledge they actually have. If you prefer that people don’t get what they don’t deserve, you should make sure they can’t use government to get it.

4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?

Of course not. However, as we’ve discussed, that doesn’t mean that there should be any legal obligations outside of respecting individual rights. Even if there were, government wouldn’t be an effective way to discover or enforce those obligations. Rather than enforcing those sorts of obligations, interventions would likely work to help already socially powerful people avoid their own obligations.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s ignore everything else I’ve said here. There’s still one more question worth asking:

4. Are people morally equal?

Srinivasan surely agrees that they are. If she does, though, her assumptions about the ability to violently enforce people’s moral obligations don’t get her where she wants.

If she’s right about everything else but agrees that people are morally equal, this just gives everyone a right to violently enforce everyone else’s moral duties. It doesn’t give one group of a people a right to hoard that privilege for themselves.

In order to even establish a government, she has to show us how the group of people who operate the government win their preferential moral status. Here I step away from her intended target, Robert Nozick, but at least he acknowledged the prima facie problem of political authority, and bent over backwards trying to solve it.

Srinivasan claims that someone can’t make a hardline moral defense of the free market (or of an absolutist position in favor of libertarian rights) without taking some very counter-intuitive positions on all four of her questions. But this is only true, I’ve tried to show, if you assume some other, even more counter-intuitive answers to the questions I’ve raised.

Welcome to the fourth review! Let’s get started.

First up are the usual pieces on foreign policy and militarism:

Daniel R. Mahanty discusses how realists can also champion human rights.

David Swanson discusses the visit to the White House of a Taliban victim and drone strikes.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the victims of war in Iraq.

Joy Gordon discusses the effects of sanctions on Iran.

Binoy Kampark discusses the death to peace efforts via drone strike.

Giuliano Battiston discusses demands for accountability by Afghans.

Juan Cole discusses U.S. genocide in Iraq.

Geoffrey Mcdonald on Egypt and U.S. policy.

Kelly Vlahos discusses the Washington silence on Iraq.

Walter B. Jones discusses the Afghan War.

Jonathan Carp discusses why the draft never stopped a war.

Revelations of NSA involvement in the targeted killing program by Greg Miller, Julie Tate, and Barton Gellman.

Bruce Fein discusses the U.S. master race theory.

William Astore tells us what war is good for.

Civil liberties is the next topic:

Andrew Smolski discusses the liberal legal framework and the NSA spying program.

Ivan Eland discusses the NSA snooping.

Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Cobain discuss reasons not to believe national security is being threatened by leaks.

Jesselyn Radack on NSA collection of email address books.

Amy Davidson discusses journalists being treated as traitors.

Onward to a brief detour into environmental politics!

Juan Cole discusses ten climate change threats being ignored by the mainstream media.

A second brief detour into the politics of nationalism:

Interview with Jonathan Cook by Joseph Cotto on Israel.

And some misc. pieces follow:

Interview with Tariq Ali.

Sheldon Richman discusses problems with the ACA.

David S. D ‘Amato discusses the War on Drugs.

Conor Friedersdorf discusses post 9-11 policy.

A piece on Stephen Kinzer’s new book on the Dulles brothers.

Obama sure is good at killing people!

Book review of a new text on Israel.

We end with the first two games from the ongoing World Chess Championship:

Magnus Carlsen vs Viswanathan Anand.

Viswanathan Anand vs Magnus Carlsen.

After watching a couple of people I know argue about whether “economic freedom” or “social freedom” was more important, I had the typical libertarian reaction: That’s a meaningless question, they’re the same thing. All transactions are “economic” in an important sense, and all relationships between people are “social.” To violently repress any non-invasive action is to limit someone’s economic opportunities, and doing that tends to put people in a socially subordinate position.

Then it struck me that there’s another problem with that dichotomy that left-libertarians in particular are in a good place to point out, and it has to do with popular ideological assumptions about whose “economic freedoms” are most often violated.

For most people, the archetypal examples of something that violates “economic freedoms” typically involve repressing a wealthier or otherwise more generally privileged person, and their archetypal examples of something that violates “social freedoms” typically involve repressing a poorer or otherwise more generally oppressed person. When you control for that, it becomes a lot harder to distinguish between what’s a restriction on “economic freedom” and what’s a restriction on “social freedom.”

For example, consider labor laws that harm serious, wildcat unionizing. Are those restrictions on “economic freedom” or “social freedom?” What about holding vast amounts of completely untouched land? Vagrancy laws? Zoning (especially regulations regarding non-related people sharing a house)? Eminent domain? Occupational licensing? Drug laws? Prohibitions on sex work? Immigration laws? The general regulatory web that prevents a resurgence of mutual aid societies?

It’s definitely not clear to me, and I think that shows the purpose this distinction really serves.

“Virtually everything about these people’s livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length. …

The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and the state-making cannot be understood apart from it.” —James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.

There are many projects that have been developed throughout the past several decades that, if not created by market anarchists, have been immediately recognized by market anarchists as expressions of our dissolution strategy against that personal-cultural-structural damage known as the state – our enemy.

Open-Source Insurgency [PDF] – making centralized or authoritarian governance impossible. Free Open-Source Software – Debian; PGP Encryption Systems and The Tor Project – Wikileaks, Silk Road and Anonymous; Peer-to-peer File Sharing – BitTorrent, The Pirate Bay, BitCoin.

Homebrew Industrial Revolutions – making centralized or authoritarian production irrelevant. Asynchronous Collaborative Editing – Wikipedia, MOOC; Networked Manufacturing – 100k Garages, Fab Labs; CNC Production and 3-D Printing – Open-Source Ecology, Hackerspaces; DIY science and food production – Wetlabs, Aquaponics; Crowd Sourced Fundraising and Support – The Common Ground Collective, Indiegogo, Occupy Sandy.

Kevin Carson nicely sums up our approach:

“Our goal is not to assume leadership of existing institutions, but rather to render them irrelevant. We don’t want to take over the state or change its policies. We want to render its laws unenforceable. We don’t want to take over corporations and make them more ‘socially responsible.’ We want to build a counter-economy of open-source information, neighborhood garage manufacturing, Permaculture, encrypted currency and mutual banks, leaving the corporations to die on the vine along with the state.

We do not hope to reform the existing order. We intend to serve as its grave-diggers.”

Today we have Defense Distributed‘s Liberator. Tomorrow we will have UnSystem‘s Dark Wallet. Two projects that integrate the dissolutionary powers of impossibility and irrelevance.

Dark Wallet will be one of the many shovels available to us to ease and hasten our fossarian desires. It is A Line In The Sand – Just In Time For Our Disappearance.

The Center for a Stateless Society is excited to donate to and support the Dark Wallet project. We would also like to introduce our supporters to a new project of our own.

A couple of months ago C4SS received a 100 bitcoin donation back when bitcoin was trading around $124. Now bitcoin is trading around $200. The C4SS workgroup debated on what to do with all that bitcoin. The first suggestions were to donate the lion’s share to established projects that were in line with our interests and aspirations like the EFF, the IWW General Defense Fund and Work People’s College, the P2P Foundation and Chelsea Manning’s Canteen Fund.

Then it was decided that, even though these organizations and projects are near and dear to our hearts, there are still more projects out there – eager, waiting, dreaming. Projects where enthusiasm outstrips resources. Where a $200 donation is the difference between a nascent anarchist infoshop in Alabama or Egypt closing its doors or expanding its operations.

We want the resiliency and the information found in the stigmergic swarm of projects and people doing new things. We want to challenge established groups to up their game and break their preconceived limits by offering them competition. The state is digging in and doubling down on total surveillance and prison economies. We need preemption, dislocation and disruption – now! We want virtualization, repetition and coopetition – now! We are dedicated to finding the cracks in the state’s system, wedging them open, freeing all prisoners and pulverizing the foundations.

We are calling this project: Entrepreneurial Anti-Capitalism.

We will be blogging about the projects we support as they come to our attention. We are reaching out through a number of networks to try to get an idea of what is out there or who is getting ready to start a project. If you know of a project, let us know. If you want to donate to the Entrepreneurial Anti-Capitalism project, let us know.

In the meantime, please, support Dark Wallet today and grab a shovel.

The following note is a response to some objections to: Real Libertarians Don’t Shill For The Kochs.

This article, “No Reason, Just Hate: That’s A Modern Liberal,” denies that the Kochs are major players in Alberta tar sands extraction and claims they stand to lose money if the project opens their U.S. oil interests to competition.

Whether or not that is so, it does not alter the facts that the Kochs support the Keystone project, or that the project is feasible only with massive land theft via eminent domain and regulatory preemption of common law liability for polluters. Whether or not the Kochs tip their hat to condemning eminent domain in principle, the fact remains that a project like Keystone is as closely tied to the state and its land thefts as were, say, the land grant railroads. So the Kochs’ defense is a bit like Lincoln’s Jesuit who, accused of killing ten men and a dog, triumphantly produced the dog in court.

Suggestions that alleging Koch financial interests in the project entail making it “all about the Kochs,” or that opposition to the project comes only from “liberals,” are strawman attacks. There are plenty of principled REASONS for free market advocates to oppose a corporatist project like Keystone without “liberals” ever coming into the picture.

If you check out the C4SS “press room,” you’ll see that in October we came within one “pickup” of hitting the 900 mark.

Our goal was to hit 1,000 by the end of the year. That looks kind of unlikely, but with 28 pickups in October, we’re doing better than the “one pickup per weekday” goal we’ve been trying to meet as a matter of course, and we’re getting ready to raise that goal.

Among the October pickups, you’ll see some publications running C4SS material for the first time — Nguoi Viet Daily News (the largest Vietnamese newspaper in the United States), and two sister Georgia newspapers, the Marietta Daily Journal and the Cherokee Tribune.

As always, thanks to our supporters for making this continued progress possible!

On October 20th, Amia Srinivasan, proffered four questions for anyone dependent on a technical language of free(d) markets. C4SS Senior Fellow, Charles Johnson, has five answers for her:

The Nozickian outlook is often represented as moral common sense. But is it? Here I pose four questions for anyone inclined to accept Nozick’s argument that a just society is simply one in which the free market operates unfettered. Each question targets one of the premises or implications of Nozick’s argument. If you’re going to buy Nozick’s argument, you must say yes to all four. But doing so isn’t as easy as it might first appear.

A0. I think the interpretation of what “Nozickian” means is largely wrong, and the suggestion that mainstream political discourse involves much of anything at all which is either Rawlsian or Nozickian, either in method or in content, is frankly pretty loopy and a desperate grasp at far more intellectual significance than will ever actually be found in mainstream political discourse.

Q1. Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?

A1. In one sense sure, in another sense, no.

I’m not much interested in arguing over lexicography; but I will say that the sense of “free” in which all such transactions are “free” is a perfectly legitimate and coherent one; and it is ethically relevant to determining what kinds of individual or social means could possibly be appropriate in responding to a given transaction.

Q2. Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?

A2. No, of course not.

Hardly anyone believes this; certainly not Nozick. But of course calling something “morally impermissible” means that it’s immoral to do it. It doesn’t mean that it’s moral for a third party to prohibit it, and I fear that there may be a really crude equivocation between the notion of moral “permissibility” and the notion of legal *permission* lurking in the wings.

Q3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?

A3. No.

But so what? Ownership is not, in my view, mainly a matter of desert. People deserve all kinds of things that they aren’t morally entitled to take, and people often deserve less than what they own. Maybe the best case for individual property rights derives from some kind of connection between labor and exchange, on the one hand, and desert, on the other; I’m not convinced of this, but if it’s true, it still wouldn’t follow that there’s a simple equivalence between what you deserve and what you’re entitled to own.

Q4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?

A4. “Obligation” is ambiguous. People have lots of non-consensual moral obligations above and beyond respect for individual rights. I don’t think they have any enforceable legal obligations above and beyond respect for individual rights. Certainly if the idea is supposed to be that there are no moral obligations above and beyond respect for individual rights, then this is a travesty against Nozick’s view — the point is specifically that individual rights are supposed to be side constraints on morally permissible action; not that they determine the whole content of morality. If on the other hand the claim is that *since* saving the drowning man may be morally obligatory, it may also (therefore) be made legally obligatory, then of course that would be trying to sneak in a pretty big argumentative move through the back door.

“I know enough about human nature to know that it’s [anarchism] a naively flawed concept.”

“Anarchy’s a lovely idea, but it conflicts with human nature.”

Anarchists are used to hearing objections like these incessantly. It seems everyone is certain that stateless society built around left-libertarian principles is incompatible with human nature. But is this true?

It seems to me that if human nature exists, we would discern it through research in psychology, anthropology, history, and economics.  So, what does research in those fields tell us about states and stateless societies?

Research in anthropology and history confirm the existence of stable societies without anything we would call “states.” James C Scott documents some of these in Southeast Asia in his book The Art of Not Being Governed.  There’s also evidence of an effectively stateless society having existed with functional polycentric law for an extended period in Iceland.

How about research from psychology? Well, experiments in social psychology like the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments show that hierarchy and authority (which are essentially intrinsic to states) create strong incentives for abuse. Psychologist Sharon Presley summarizes some of the research on obedience and authority here.

What about research in economics? Well, Elinor Ostrom used both game theoretic models and extensive empirical research to show that decentralized and grassroots participatory social institutions can effectively manage and govern common pool resources without state regulation. While Ostrom herself was not an anarchist, her research demonstrates the vibrant possibilities of self-governance and illuminates how decentralized and voluntary organization can build collective action without the information problems that beset states.  Economic research that bolsters the case for anarchism is not limited to Ostrom’s work. For example, on the matter of states, public choice theory starts from fairly reasonable premises about human nature used for mainstream economics and shows that states often come with innately perverse incentives that will lead them to behave destructively and irresponsibly.

So if we’re looking at “human nature” through a lens of social science, it’s not obvious from the evidence that “human nature” is a strong point against anarchism. Indeed, it may provide a strong argument for it.

C4SS Trustee and Senior Fellow, Gary Chartier, discusses war, peace and the permanent danger of a standing state on C4SS Media’s youtube channel.

C4SS Senior Fellow and Molinari Institute Director and President, Roderick T. Long, presenting before the 2013 Students for Liberty Dallas Regional Conference at the University of North Texas.

Roderick T. Long particpated in a brief interview regarding his talk, Objections to Libertarianism, Transitioning to Free(d) Markets, and More.

Welcome to the third edition of my weekly review! Let’s get started on a fantastic series of articles.

First off are the usual pieces on foreign policy and military affairs:

1. Barry Lando discusses how presidential intervention almost squashed a damning 60 minutes segment on American involvement in Iran.

2. Andre Vltcheck discusses the recent massacre in Kenya.

3. Binoy Kampark discusses international politics vis a vis Iran.

4. David Swanson identifies 45 lies in Obama’s recent U.N. speech.

5. Anthony Gregory reviews Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.

6. Norman Pollack writes about Obama and Rouhani at the U.N..

7. William C. Lewis discusses why Washington will continue its crimes.

8. Scott Horton discusses how U.S. policy contributed to the disaster in Somalia.

9. Sheldon Richman offers commentary on the same matter.

10. Jason Mueller discusses the context of Somali piracy.

11. John Glaser discusses the potential for a military quagmire in Africa.

12. Jeremy Scahill discusses Obama’s U.N. speech.

13. David Sirota discusses Obama’s paeans to empire.

14. Janis Teruggi Page asks whether U.S. intelligence helped Pincohet kill her brother.

15. Kasturi Sen discusses how sanctions on Syria are hurting the people rather than Assad.

Onward to civil liberties issues!

1. Nozomi Hayase writes about the heroic role played by Sarah Harrison in the Wikileaks saga.

2. Jacob Sullum on NSA politics.

3. Matthew Harwood and Christopher Calabrese discuss how government is eroding privacy.

4. Noam Chomsky speaks about the shredding of liberty in America.

5. Chris Hedges discusses the origins of the police state.

Libertarian politics are discussed below:

1. Steve Horowitz discusses libertarianism and individualism.

2. Sheldon Richman discusses why the national debt is illegitimate. He invokes the words of the individualist anarchist, Lysander Spooner.

Discussion of George H. Smith’s, The System of Liberty.

Lew Rockwell discusses the appeal of libertarianism for the common man.

Drug war politics make another appearance in this edition:

1. Sadhbh Walse discusses Michael Douglas’s blasting of the U.S. penal system in a drug war context.

2. Kevin Carson chimes in on the Drug War too.

3. Ernest Drucker and Mike Trace discuss a general amnesty for drug war prisoners.

Two chess pieces to finish off:

1. John Watson reviews Najdorf’s Zurich 1953.

2. A link presenting a movie about chess hustlers.

Welcome to the second edition of my libertarian leftist weekly review! There are many exciting new pieces to share. I will be sending 30 a week. Let’s get started.

A hot topic of late has been the potential war with Syria. Here are some articles addressing it from an anti-war/anti-imperialist perspective:

1. Rob Urie talks about U.S. imperialism and potential war with Syria.

2. Sheldon Richman talks about how the people fought off a potential war with Syria.

3. Ernesto J. Sanchez discusses the history of U.S. intervention in Syria.

4. Rob Urie discusses Obama’s attitude towards Syria.

More anti-militarist pieces below:

1. A poem written by Mitchel Cohen, Sandy Ure Griffin, and Joel Landy about not fighting Obama’s war anymore.

2. Bob Dreyfuss and Nick Turse discuss Afghan victims of the war.

3. Thaddeus Russell discusses the history of militarist liberalism.

4. John Pilger has a great piece below on Chile.

As a libertarian leftist; the rights and struggles of labor are of concern to me. I present you with several pieces pertaining to labor politics:

1. Corey Robin discusses the ACLU’s authoritarian policies towards its employees.

2. Corey Robin also has a great piece on academic and employee freedom in Oregon.

3. Much of the Egyptian economy is controlled by the military elite. It’s no surprise that labor played a role in the Egyptian revolution. This article discusses how labor may be targeted by the new military regime.

One thing that distinguishes left-wing market anarchists from right-wing libertarians is our distinction between the market economy and capitalism.

Ex-libertarian, Gus DiZerega, offers his own unique take on the distinction in a two part series of blog posts:

1. Capitalism vs. The Market.

2. Capitalism vs. The Market II: Reintegrating Markets Into Civil Society.

One aspect of arguing against the War on Drugs is humanizing its victims. This article discusses the mythology surrounding crack addicts.

Anthony Gregory discusses why the Black Panthers were right on gun control.

David S. D’Amato discusses why the draft is un-libertarian.

Kevin Carson on IP.

Book review on a book about empire’s aftermath.

Nicola Nasser discusses the bad turn the Arab Spring has taken.

Graham Peebles discusses repression in Ethiopia.

Franklin Lamb remembers the massacres at Sabra and Shatila.

Asawin Suebsaeng discusses a great new movie on torture.

Matt Welch interviews Jeremy Scahill.

John Stossel discusses why trade is superior to war.

Justin Raimondo on Obama’s Contras.

Shane Harris on drones.

Scott Martelle discusses how big banks are manipulating legislation to target credit unions.

Tom Englehardt pens an open letter to the next Snowden.

Sheldon Richman reviews Living Economics.

A few chess pieces from the site Chesscafe.com:

1. Michael McGuerty reviews Magnus Force.

2. Steve Goldberg reviews The King in Jeopardy.

Libertarianism has nothing to do with national interests. Libertarianism is about individual liberty. The liberty to live your own life, to pursue your own livelihood, and to come and go as you please to anywhere that’s open to you or anywhere you’re invited to go. The implications for immigration policy are obvious: Everyone – not just Americans, not just “citizens,” not just people with government permission slips, but everyone – has rights. They have the right to own or lease property, to take jobs, to make their own living, wherever they want, and to peacefully come and go wherever, wherever and however they please as long as they don’t infringe on any other individual’s equal liberty. That means nothing short of free immigration, open borders, and immediate and unconditional amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants.

If a landlord rents an apartment to an immigrant, they have every right to live there, regardless of where they came from. If an immigrant buys land of their own, they have every right to live there, regardless of where they came from. If a friend invites them to come sleep on their couch or in their spare bedroom, they have every right to stay there as long as the friend wants them. Of course they do. Nations have nothing to do with it; state governments have nothing to do with it; local governments have nothing to do with it; neighborhood busybodies and border-control freaks who want to inflict their prejudices on other people’s property have nothing to do with it. If you don’t want immigrants in your house then you are welcome not to invite them in. If you don’t want immigrants in your neighbor’s house, that’s tough for you, bro; you’ll need to keep your prejudices on your own property.

A recent post at the “Libertarian Realist” blog (actually, they are neither) claims to take issue with Sheldon Richman’s defense of free immigration. The post is an example of astonishing sophistry, beginning with a long attack on Sheldon’s comments about “the right to travel and settle anywhere.” They complain that in a free society, landowners should be able to throw out uninvited trespassers, so there cannot be any such right. Apparently they neglected Sheldon’s direct statement that the right of free immigration is “the right to travel and settle anywhere so long as no one else’s rights are violated.” Or they chose to ignore this, and hoped nobody would notice the bait-and-switch. Of course, everybody has a right to shut their own door. But their own, not their neighbors’.

Like most border-nationalists, the “Libertarian Realist” is not particularly interested in what libertarian principles imply; they’re interested mainly in finding rationalizations to pass off a foreordained anti-immigration conclusion as if it had something to do with principles individual liberty (it doesn’t). Apparently, they think the following is a crushing put down:

What we’re dealing with in the open-borders camp are . . . moral purists whose creed is altruistic egalitarian humanism.

To be fair, that is pretty much my creed, yes. But then, if the alternative is moral corruptionism, or anti-humanism, or an ethic of domination and subordination, then I am pretty much comfortable with where I stand.

They also find it odd that libertarians believe things like this:

“. . . They believe that it’s morally wrong for the people of any nation to pursue a self-interested immigration program.”

Well good God, of course it is morally wrong for nations to pursue their “self-interest” in anything, and especially in border control policies. People have self interests that matter, morally; nations do not. Nations are toxic hellholes of false identity and purveyors of monstrous political violence.  Nations are not rational people; they are not free associations or contractual agreements; they are unchosen, coercively assembled collectives, whose interests are typically an abortion of, if not an outright war against, the moral interests of individual people which actually deserve to be cultivated, practiced and respected. For anyone committed to individual liberty, a nations’ “interests” deserve no notice at all except to trample them underfoot.

National borders are a bloody stain on the face of the earth. Burn all nations to the ground.

C4SS Senior Fellow and Trustee Chair, Sheldon Richman, speaks at the University of Oklahoma on Constitution Day. He posits that perhaps the Articles of Confederation were the altogether superior document.

http://youtu.be/k9dM0l1ZxO8

Q and A with $5 worth of prognostication:

http://youtu.be/XHruM7Vnsao

C4SS Senior Fellow and The Karl Hess Scholar in Social Theory, Kevin Carson, join The Annoying Peasants Radio Show.

On this episode, The Annoying Peasants discuss mutualism, individualist anarchism and Carson’s books – Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.

Charles Johnson, aka Rad Geek (left) and I (right) are running an ALL Distro table at the Students for Liberty regional conference today. If you’re in the area, drop by (Smathers Library 1A, University of Florida)!

Welcome!

This is my first weekly review. In the tradition of the individualist anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, it will be edited to fit the editor. The political-cultural-economic angle will be anti-state, anti-authoritarian, left-wing market anarchist, anti-imperialist, libertarian, and pro-sex feminist.

Let us begin with a rundown of some fantastic foreign policy related pieces:

1. Sean Scallon discusses the rise of a nationalist militarist “left”.

2. Sheldon Richman reminds us of the dubious moral standing of the U.S. government in condemning the Assad regime.

3. Diana Johnstone discusses the use of the bombing of Serbia to justify the potential war in Syria.

4. Kate Epstein discusses Chelsea Manning.

5. Freddie deBoer talks about the tendency of liberal hawks to try to find a good war.

6. Ramah Kudami has a list of do’s and don’ts for Progressives on Syria.

7. Norman Pollack on Obama’s march to war in Syria.

8. Norman Pollack speaks on militarism again!

9. Jacob Hornberger discusses U.S. hypocrisy towards the Syrian government.

10. A news article by Cora Currier details how Obama has failed to investigate an infamous massacre by Afghan allies.

11. Michael Arria discusses how the allegedly Liberal news network, MSNBC, aligns with state war objectives.

12. Sheldon Richman discusses lies surrounding the Afghan War.

13. Jordan Michael Smith writes a review of George Kennan’s American Diplomacy.

A storm erupted over Michael Lind’s critique of libertarians for not having a single country to point to. Several good responses were penned. Roderick Long and Kevin Carson wrote my favorite ones. I include them below along with general pieces on libertarianism.

1. Thomas E. Woods Jr. discusses the silliness of a recent Salon piece on libertarianism.

2. Rachel Burger explains why “Libertarian” arguments against gay marriage fail.

3. Anthony Gregory discusses what’s wrong with both the governmentalist left and right.

4. Ronald Bailey responds to a Salon.com critique of Libertarianism.

5. Left-libertarian market anarchist, Roderick Long, responds to Michael Lind and E.J. Dionne.

6. Sheldon Richman responds to Michael Lind’s contention that libertarians love dictatorship.

7. Kevin Carson rips Michael Lind a new one too!

8. Kevin Carson answers Michael Lind’s query about the lack of a libertarian country too.

Next up are a series of articles on civil liberties violations. Keep Big Brother away!

1. Justin Raimondo discusses the recent NSA spying revelations.

2. Norman Solomon writes an open letter to Dianne Feinstein.

3. A Guardian editorial discusses the recent NSA revelations.

And two articles on the evil of the War on Drugs!

1. Darryl W Perry talks about how drug policy made him an anarchist.

2. Carmen Yarrusso discusses the legalization of marijuana.

A few chess pieces from the site Chesscafe.com:

1. Book review of a Mikhail Tal text.

2. Steve Goldberg reviews Pawn Structure Chess.

3. Chess problem solving portrayed as an art below. It’s taken from T.B. Rowland and F.F. Rowland’s, The Problem Art.

4. Review of ebook on the Ruy Lopez by Chris Wainscott.

C4SS Senior Fellow and The Karl Hess Scholar in Social Theory, Kevin Carson, will join The Annoying Peasants Radio Show tomorrow, Tuesday, October 8th at 9:30 pm eastern time.

On this episode the Annoying Peasants will be discussing mutualism, individualist anarchism and Carson’s books – Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution.

In my summary of the C4SS vs IP episode, I made it clear that,

We would even be happy to encourage and facilitate a conversation with members of the Muslim community for him, if he so desires. It would be a good learning experience for all of us.

To take steps toward honoring this declaration I have reached out to Davi Barker of The Muslim Agorist and Muslims for Liberty. Barker is an a writer, an artist and an activist of significant skill and purchase in libertarian and agorist circles. I even had the privilege of meeting and talking with Barker at the 2013 New Hampshire Liberty Forum.

Before our site was taken down I emailed Barker some of the cruel comments coming out of the S4SS UGent group to get his perspective and experience dealing with this kind of hyperbole and bigotry. I also tapped the Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS) contributors and coordinators group for questions that they think individuals might want to ask regarding Islam and its intersection, if any, with anarchism or libertarianism. I want to thank Barker for his time and participating in this discussion.

When we initially approached the S4SS UGent group’s point of contact to explain what was going on and why a number of their discussions had begun to take on an Islamophobic focus complete with racist epithets.

They responded simply with, “Discussion on the NAP [Non-aggression principle] and how to deal with people ‘from certain cultures’ … the general conclusion was: seek and destroy.”

Barker would like to inform them that,

The answer [to how to deal with people] is, exactly the way you deal with people from your culture who engage in aggressive, rights violating behavior. The culture of origin has no bearing on the NAP, in fact the NAP precludes conceptualizing people as their culture. People are individuals. To regard cultures for their crimes instead of individuals for their crimes is collectivist thinking, what Ben Stone calls right-wing socialism. If an individual commits aggression his culture of origin is irrelevant, and his guilt in no way transfers to others in his culture who have not committed such an act.

Our interlocutor, “No culture wholly cohesive enough [to warrant categorical violence?] Have you ever heard of Afghanistan and Saudi-Arabia?”

Barker, from experience, explains, “

Yes, in fact, I have traveled there. I just recently returned from a month long trip to Saudi-Arabia, and I did not find a cohesive culture. I found the proliferation of western modes of dress and music common among the young, and displeased elders who preferred traditional modes. I found those who defended the prevailing order, and others who felt the monarchy was a tool of western powers they’d rather see cast off. I found some proselytizing the extremist Wahhabi doctrine, passing out free books about their movement’s founder, and I found others completely rejecting this doctrine and blaming it for most of the woes of their country. I found a whole host of cultural customs, some pleasant and others shocking, and also many frustrated and embarrassed by those customs. Anyone, especially an anarchist, who believes that there is a cohesive culture within the arbitrary boundaries defined by a state, has obviously never traveled there.

And, finally, charming as always, “When it comes to nazis, communists, and islamofascists, it is us or them, there is no margin of negotiation.”

Barker concludes,

As much as I hate to go to bat for nazis and communists, this is still not true, even for them. I have had neo-nazi and communist friends in my life, and even they were individuals, capable of reason, capable of moral agency, and capable of negotiation. They were in short, individuals first, and ideological labels second. And regardless of what your state subsidized text books told you about history, the same was true for every citizen and soldier in Nazi Germany. They were individually accountable for their crimes, not collectively.

The S4SS contributors were very interested to talk to Barker. I pulled together some of their questions for him:

1. How does your religion and your politics relate, if at all?”

Before I converted to Islam I was a socialist. A Marxist by osmosis, being from California. When I converted I mistakenly believed that Islam was a monolithic religion. One of the aspects of it that appealed to me was that the scripture, the Quran, has been preserved in it’s original language, and there are not sectarian divides over different translations. I quickly learned that having all Muslims agree on one book did not mean all Muslims agreed on one interpretation, and being new to the religion it became important to me to consider all available interpretations and to have a method of discerning between them. This process of investigation, searching for the interpretation which seemed most consistent to me, forced me to also question my political beliefs. To discern a political philosophy which was not only consistent with my new creed, but also internally consistent. This criterion lead me to reject socialism, and embrace property rights, and ultimately reject statism, and embrace voluntaryism. The Quranic verse, “There shall be no coercion in this way of life” is one that many Muslims try to mitigate through various interpretations, but I take it as a radical and inviolable axiom by which all interpretations must be measured.

2. Since 9/11, anti-Muslim bigotry has fueled both state violence and individual violence. How can libertarians ally with Muslims against this violence and hatred?

Many Muslim organizations focus on social outreach, sensitivity workshops, and interfaith work in an effort to combat anti-Muslim bigotry by demystifying Islam for non-Muslims. In the mainstream culture this has proven highly effective, and studies have shown that the majority of Americans have never actually met a Muslim, and having met just one Muslim face to face correlates dramatically with a rejection of stereotypes, propaganda and bigotry against Muslims. However, in my experience libertarians reject these things whether they’ve ever met a Muslim or not, because libertarianism, as an individualist philosophy, automatically rejects collectivist claims made about anyone. Libertarians, at least those who have fully internalized individualist thinking, are already inoculated against bigotry. So, partnering with Muslims to organize social events is an effective method, but even just spreading the message the liberty itself is an effective strategy against violence and hatred.

3. What are some common misconceptions about the Muslim religion that libertarians should know?

One of the biggest misconceptions we face in America is that Islam is somehow foreign to American society. In reality, Islam has been in America since its inception, mostly through the slave trade. Some historical sources suggest that Andalusian Muslims arrived in North America long before Columbus, and that many who traveled to the new world hired Muslim navigators from Spain. Most African slaves were brought to North America from West Africa, which is mostly Muslim. The statistics are impossible to guess, but there is evidence that many slaves were running clandestine schools to teach their children Arabic and preserve some of their Islamic heritage. The first recorded conversion to Islam in America was in 1888 by Alexander Russell Webb while he was operating as a Consul to the Muslim world.

4. Do you use your faith to explain the morality of anarchism or libertarianism? If so, how?

Yes. There are a number of ways to do this. First, it’s important to point out that Muhammad was born in a tribal anarchy, and never established a State as we would define it. It’s perhaps easier to make this argument as a Christian because Jesus was in direct conflict with Rome, and never came to power. Muhammad had conflicts with the Byzantine and Persian empires, but Arabia was a polycentric clan structure, so his primary conflict was with the dominant clan. Once he came to power Muhammad served as an arbiter, but he never claimed the authority to legislate those who did not explicitly consent to his leadership. Those who did not convert, and that sense did not consent, formed their own legal systems. And even when he was asked to serve as arbiter in disputes between non-Muslims he judged according to their laws, not Islamic law. So, he never established a monopoly on violence, but lived among competing judiciaries. Second, there are a number of good quotes from him, as in “The greatest jihad is to speak the truth in the face of a tyrant.” And finally, it’s pretty easy to call upon various periods of Islamic history where the State was weak or non existent and science and philosophy thrived in the Muslim world. Early libertarian writer Rose Wilder Lane has a book titled “Islam and the Discover of Freedom” which catalogs much of this history and describes how many of the philosophical underpinnings of libertarianism, such as the separation of faith and reason, the primacy of freedom of conscience, and many aspects of natural law theory came to Europe through interaction is Muslims in Turkey and Spain.

If you are interested in finding out more about Davi Barker’s work and faith, please check out his articles, interviews and art on his site – The Muslim Agorist.

Today on MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” co-host Krystal Ball showcased a rather embarrassing misunderstanding of libertarianism, citing Somalia as a “libertarian paradise” and suggesting that society would descend into dirty, violent chaos in the absence of government.

Ball apparently believes (with the superstition of the devout) that, for instance, healthcare services can only be furnished by and through the coercive mechanisms of the state. Such confused ideas emanate from the mistake of seeing the state as a socially progressive quasi-charity, as the result of some social contract by the terms of which we give up certain freedoms as participants in civil society, and in return receive services like police protection, roads, clean water and even health insurance. If Ball took a more careful, historical look, however, she would see that the state is not such an institution, not the result of a legitimate agreement, not genuinely interested in the plight of the poor or those workers she’s so worried about.

American radicals like Benjamin Tucker, Ezra Heywood and Joshua King Ingalls probed more deeply and understood the state in its historical and theoretical context; they worried about many of the same concerns as Ball. Their lives were intimately bound up in the defense of labor against capital, in social and economic justice and advancing the causes of society’s marginalized groups. It is interesting, then, to observe someone like Ball — obviously unfamiliar with radical history and movements — so sweepingly identify all of libertarianism as right-wing. One tradition of libertarian thought, anarchism, has always regarded the economic and political ruling classes as fundamentally inseparable, and has accordingly looked for the connections between coercive political authority and wealth inequality and exploitation. The state is the consortium of a rich, predatory elite; it guards their interests and creates the structural preconditions for widespread poverty and misery. Ball might ruminate on the words of Joshua King Ingalls, discussing the true origins of the state:

As the boundaries of tribes extended they came into contact with other tribes, upon whom they made war or who made war upon them. Mutual destruction and the possession of the domain and goods was doubtless the purpose of these conflicts. The more warlike destroyed the weaker or less warlike, and appropriated their wealth, as formerly our farmers destroyed the bees to obtain their accumulated honey; but, like them, the warlike tribes soon learned a better way. We have seen, now, what we may class as the primitive form, both of “production and division by usurpation.” Under this most discouraging state of affairs, however, production still went on, evincing the aptitude of mankind even in a savage or semi-savage, for productive industry, notwithstanding the word of our teachers of economics and apologists for existing usurpations; that unless the capitalist and landlord be assured of the lion’s share in the distribution they would not co-operate, and industry must cease.

This form was superseded by another form, in which the lives of the conquered were saved, upon the condition that they would become the bond-slaves of the victors—they, and their children, and their children’s children. This form may be termed chattelism. Under it production and division were quite simplistic problems. Its effect upon the increase of wealth was, no doubt, considerable in comparison with the barbarity which it superseded, and which killed the worker to obtain possession of his product. It was in some respects more considerate to the vanquished, and much more convenient for the predatory class; but it was less favorable to production than might have been expected, for the worker before had the normal incentive to industry, the prospective possession of its fruit, and till the last the hope that he might escape the threatened doom. But as a productive worker, the slave soon sank to the lowest level known to industrial activity—so low that the lash became the resort to stimulate his flagging purpose. To this enslavement and usurpation there was this justification, and this only. The victor could plead that he had saved the life of the vanquished, which was forfeited by the laws of barbaric war, and in consideration of which the victim gave his long-life service and also that of his posterity.