Sheldon Richman, C4SS Senior Fellow, C4SS Trustee Chair, Free Association blogger and Vice President of the Future of Freedom Foundation, on “The Absurdity of Universal Background Checks,” gun control, the legal, rational and moral arguments for the right to self defense, the immorality of the income tax, practical anarchy and much more.
Traces of Reality Radio hosted by Guillermo Jimenez.
http://youtu.be/cm6-SZ_UHyw
J.D. Tuccille’s post “52 Percent Of Americans Want Government To ‘Redistribute’ Wealth,” on Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog was a glaring example of “vulgar libertarianism” in action.
According to C4SS Senior Fellow Kevin Carson, “This school of libertarianism has inscribed on its banner the reactionary watchword: ‘Them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get‘.” Carson adds, “In every case, the good guys, the sacrificial victims of the Progressive State, are the rich and powerful. The bad guys are the consumer and the worker, acting to enrich themselves from the public treasury.”
Tuccille was alarmed at a recent Gallup poll showing that just 33 percent of respondents considered wealth distribution in the US to be “fair,” while 59 percent considered it “unfair.” 52 percent of those responding favored taxing the rich to redistribute wealth. Tuccille responded to the poll results with condescension, a common tactic of vulgar libertarians:
“That’s not fair,” is the plaintive cry of every toddler ever born, though my own son quickly memorized my constant response: “Not getting your way isn’t the same as ‘unfair.'” I may need five minutes alone with the American public, however, since many of my countrymen apparently think it’s “unfair” that other people have more money than them — and they want the government to give them some of what the other guy has.
One would assume from Tuccille’s sneering tone that we live in a “free market” meritocracy (we don’t) where government doesn’t pick winners (they do) and everyone has a shot at their little slice of “The American Dream” (a myth invented by the privileged). Did Tuccille consider that increased calls for redistribution might be a sign that more people are becoming aware that the state capitalist system is rigged?
Tuccille concludes his sermon to us unruly wage slaves with a threat straight out of Atlas Shrugged: “Then again, if the United States becomes a country that punishes success, and so drives the ambitious elsewhere, or underground, perhaps the resulting leveling downward will be perceived as more … fair.”
Damn J.D., you’re going to take your ball and run off to Galt’s Gulch because of a Gallup Poll? Who’s pouting now?
Here is a “left libertarian” site.
Here is a “liberaltarian” site.
The two terms don’t mean the same thing.
There’s some ideological overlap, but it’s fuzzy. There are some people with one foot in each of the two camps (I used to be one of them; now I’m not), which can be confusing.
If there lines of separation that are even slightly bright, I’d say they are these:
All of the above is, of course, just my opinion.
That is all.
There have been plenty of noxious responses to the Boston Marathon bombing. The usual suspects blamed Muslims as quickly as possible. Conspiracy entrepreneurs huffed and puffed about “false flags” in their usual Pavlovian manner. So reading Glenn Greenwald’s April 16 column was a like taking in a breath of fresh air after escaping a HAZ-MAT scene.
Greenwald discussed five reactions that seem to be present after events like Boston. Among these were the knee-jerk blaming of Muslims, the fear among Arabs and Muslims that the suspect will indeed be a Muslim and the ritual proclamations by pundits that we must accept the enhanced security precautions that will surely follow this attack.
I don’t want to yammer on too much about these points, because I want you to read Greenwald’s piece. So I will just close by quoting him at length:
Regardless of your views of justification and intent: whatever rage you’re feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that’s the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday’s victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that’s the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It’s natural that it won’t be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.
Thanks Glenn, we needed that.
C4SS Senior Fellow and Karl Hess Scholar in Social Theory Kevin Carson was recently interviewed on the Liberty Minded podcast by Jason Lee Byas, Grayson English and Trevor Hultner. The interview focused mainly on Carson’s previous book, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto (free online version here), and his forthcoming book The Desktop Regulatory State.
http://youtu.be/TcrGh1ukfEY
Arun Gupta recently argued on Truthout that leftists should reconsider their opposition to gun control. Bear in mind, Gupta is referring to “self-described radicals and revolutionaries, not liberals.”
Gupta says that many leftists “agree with the right that the biggest threat to society is not mentally ill shooters like Adam Lanza. It’s the state.” But Gupta is “rethinking this position” and now believes “that a society awash in guns is more of a detriment to the left project of emancipation than a means to secure it.”
According to Gupta:
…the left should connect the dots by framing gun restrictions as part of the effort to limit police powers, abuses and surveillance. Unlike the right, the left does not believe the state of nature is a war of all against all. Central to the left project is demilitarizing society, and by using this as the umbrella, gun control can provide an opening to shackle the state instead of the people. But first, the left needs to rethink the role that violence plays in social change.
Gupta believes that mass shootings like Newton provide an excuse to strengthen the state. But will new gun laws reduce violence to the point that the role of the state in crime control will be diminished? I think this proposition is doubtful at best.
Gupta’s analysis is more thought-provoking than the statist drivel that usually passes for “Left” opinion on guns. Still, I cannot endorse new gun restrictions. Leftists should certainly not partake in the national infatuation with weaponry or make a fetish of violent revolution. But I suspect a new “war on guns” will primarily hurt the powerless, just as all of the state’s wars do.
Ultimately, I agree with C4SS Fellow Nathan Goodman who said, “the real point he (Gupta) should be making here isn’t that leftists should back gun control, but that leftists should organize against the school to prison pipeline and attacks on the ‘mentally ill’ that happen in response to mass shootings.”
For almost two years C4SS has maintained a Tor relay node with a freedom friendly data center in the Netherlands. The relay is part of a global network dedicated to the idea that a free society requires freedom of information. Since June 2011 C4SS has continuously added nearly 10 Mbps of bandwidth to the network (statistics).
Although we can’t know, by design, what passes through the relay, it’s entirely likely that it has facilitated communications by revolutionaries, agorists, whistleblowers, journalists working under censorious regimes and many more striving to advance the cause of liberty and the dissolution of authority.
Operating the node does come at a cost. Just under $200 will cover hosting and support for the relay for another quarter.
If you believe, as we do, that Tor is one of the technologies that makes both state and corporate oppression not only obsolete, but impossible, please click through and contribute today.
The State is damage, we will find a route around!
Since Chipin has closed its doors, we are testing out a fundraising provider. We will see how it goes. Go Get Funding offered the lowest percentage, 4%, for its services, so we will give them a try.
All the best,
-C4SS
P.S. The hardcore can send bitcoins to 1DnumwHUq1uGp1c4sRasbXipvkMNsy
C4SS Media presents Kevin Carson‘s “The Root is Power“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.
“The central identifying feature of a reformist effort is that it fails to strike at the root of oppression — power. All such efforts aim either at changing individual behavior without regard to the individual’s position in the overall system of power, or at creating an authoritarian institutional framework staffed by upper-middle class “helping professionals” to protect the individual from oppressive behavior.”
Even though this presentation by Dan Ariely slightly leans towards “best practices” for corporate “scientific” management, as in “if you want to maintain the current power structure and improve production, then think about applying these techniques that we have discovered,” it’s still worth watching. The experimental evidence that he discusses seems to support something we’ve been saying for a while.
In this episode of the Liberty Minded Radio Show C4SS Fellows Jason Lee Byas and Trevor Hultner team up with Grayson English to discuss S4SS, the University of Oklahoma’s Students for a Stateless Society and their successful “Ask an Anarchist Day”.
http://youtu.be/gKYQUJp1zRs
With S4SS, our goal is to develop a networked structure that will allow for maximum autonomy while fostering maximum inter/intra-chapter participation, communication, and coordination.
All power to the affinity groups!
Leaning on Elinor Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Action we have decided to try the following organizational orientation:
The Students for a Stateless Society (S4SS) agree to the following four design principles:
1. “Student” does not mean subservient, submissive, or subordinate. A student is anyone who desires knowledge. A student can be either a teacher or a learner.
2. A stateless society is anarchy. Students have a right to contribute to and have a voice in the institutions they participate or constitute. As anarchists we will actively pursue and support hierarchy dissolving and mutual aid projects. Our time as students is not a time of passivity or mindless discipline, but a time for activity and creativity.
3. S4SS spaces are safe and valued spaces. We are dedicated to not only identifying agents of aggression, but dissolving institutions of oppression.
4. All chapters of S4SS, to be considered active, must have at least one volunteer “point of contact” that can be reached by interested students or encouraging chapters. There is no limit to the number of S4SS chapters that can be on any one campus – swarm and take over!
If S4SS sounds like a project that you would like to support or set up in your area, then see if one of the active S4SS chapters is near your campus or register your own.
And again, swarm and take over!
Today in his “On Security and Liberty” column at The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald demonstrates once again that he is one of the Left’s most tenacious and fearless voices.
In “Three Key Lessons From The Obama Administration’s Drone Lies,” Greenwald acknowledges the fact that “establishment sources” have finally begun to call out the Obama Administration for not telling the truth about who is being targeted for death-by-drone. Indeed, the word “lies” is now being employed. Greenwald cites a recent report by McClatchy as well as an article by Micah Zenko in Foreign Policy as evidence of this trend.
Greenwald believes that three lessons can be gleaned from these reports:
(1) The Obama administration often has no idea who they are killing.
(2) Whistleblowers are vital for transparency and accountability, which is precisely why the Obama administration is waging a war on them.
(3) Secrecy ensures both government lies and abuses of power.
With these lessons in mind, Greenwald closes with some strong words for the media:
In light of this evidence, any journalists that continue to rely on US government statements about its killing program are revealing themselves to be eager propagandists, willing to be lied to and help amplify those lies (the same was true of journalists who continued to rely on government statements about “militants” being killed even after they knew how Obama officials had broadened that term to the point of meaninglessness). How many times do we have to learn these same lessons before recognizing their universality?
Yesterday on his blog The Agitator, investigative journalist Radley Balko discussed the “war on cops” hysteria that has surfaced again after the recent murders of two prosecutors and a sheriff. Balko has examined this claim before and has demonstrated that it is baseless.
Aside from being fraudulent, the theory that there is a “war on cops” in the US encourages further militarization of the police and makes it harder to hold officers accountable, according to Balko. Perhaps most dangerous, is the effect the idea has on police mindset. Balko explains:
But there’s a more pernicious effect of exaggerating the threat to police officers. In researching my forthcoming book, I interviewed lots of police officers, police administrators, criminologists and others connected to the field of law enforcement. There was a consensus among these people that constantly telling cops how dangerous their jobs are is affecting their mindset. It reinforces the soldier mentality already relentlessly drummed into cops’ heads by politicians’ habit of declaring “war” on things. Browse the online bulletin boards at sites like PoliceOne (where users must be credentialed law enforcement to comment), and you’ll see a lot of hostility toward everyone who isn’t in law enforcement, as well as various versions of the sentiment “I’ll do whatever I need to get home safe at night.” That’s a mantra that speaks more to self-preservation than public service.
Radley Balko is doing more than his share to enlighten people on this issue. He is also one of the foremost experts on police militarization in the US. His book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, is due out in July.
I highly recommend this post by Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute. Higgs challenges one of the most pervasive myths among libertarians, the idea that liberty’s triumph is impending due to the rise of libertarian ideology. As Higgs explains:
Here [in the contemporary West] nearly everybody is held tightly in the system by countless seemly beneficial ties that few people can imagine doing without: Who’ll send grandma a monthly check to keep her in groceries? Who’ll provide medical care for the scores of millions of lower-income people whose care now comes via Medicaid? Who’ll cover the huge medical bills the elderly now expect Medicare to pay? Who’ll subsidize the college loans on which millions of students rely? And so on and on. One has only to wade through the Code of Federal Regulations and ask on each page: if this particular regulation were scrapped today, how would its corporate and union beneficiaries react? Can one really imagine that these powerful institutions would simply shrug their shoulders if liberty should break out, after having fought for more than a century to forge the fetters that now bind the populace in the service of almost innumerable special interests.
This is an incredibly important point. All too often, libertarians think that simply by spreading libertarian ideology, we will achieve a libertarian world. But in light of the incentives that structure our lives, this is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense. It’s particularly frustrating in that it contributes to many libertarians focusing just on developing propaganda and scholarly works rather than participating in concrete action. I think it’s one of the main reasons for the stereotype that “anarcho-capitalists only exist on the internet” and one of the main reasons that so many libertarians have such weak theories of strategy. If we are going to undermine the state, we need to understand its structure and act in a way that challenges this structure. My understanding of the state’s structure leads me to embrace dual power tactics. By building grassroots community organizations, radical unions, worker cooperatives, boycotts and divestment campaigns, and other alternative institutions that meet human needs outside the state or take business away from institutions that have a symbiotic relationship with statism, we do far more to undermine the state than making speeches, films, or blog posts ever will.
That said, I do disagree with some of what Higgs writes. He asserts, “the time for liberty lovers to make a stand that had a fighting chance of success was a century ago.” I disagree. The time is now. We have a real chance to strike a blow against the state and the empire. Higgs is right that libertarian optimists are naive and misguided. However, that’s because they believe we can win with ideas alone. We need to build the new society in the shell of the old, not just talk about it.
In a recent post on Linkedin, author and business consultant Tim Williams explains the “Complexity Tax,” contending that in many cases “growth actually produces diseconomies of scale.” The idea, as Williams describes it, is that growing a firm, adding more services and personnel, also necessarily adds layers of hierarchy and “significantly more overhead,” giving rise to all sorts of internal inefficiencies. These arguments are likely to sound very familiar to followers of Kevin Carson’s work, particularly as it is contained in his book Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective.
So if it is indeed true that, as Williams argues, many U.S. firms are too large, their organization models too complicated, how is it that smaller, leaner, more efficient competitors don’t overcome them from below? Put simply, to the extent that we actually had a free market in the United States (and in the world generally), smaller firms would do just that. The giants of American capitalism are less a result of competition and innovation than they are of a convoluted system of what the nineteenth century free market anarchists used to call “class laws” — consisting of subsidies and of barriers to entry that are virtually impenetrable. Today’s defenders of the free market must follow Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker, to name a couple, in rejecting today’s corporate capitalism on free market grounds.
The “Cat Signal” has gone out, visible to all members of the Internet Defense League. The latest threat to internet freedom is an expanded and strengthened CFAA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
This is the same piece of legislation that the government has been using to target innovators and activists since 1984. One of those innovators, Aaron Swartz, faced 13 counts under CFAA, up to 35 years in prison, for copying too many files from the online academic resource JSTOR. This threat of overwhelming state sponsored persecution has been regarded as the reason for Swartz tragic suicide January 11th, 2013.
The collective outrage generated from Swartz’s story has brought activists together in an effort to gain support for legislation that would reform and clarify CFAA, referred to as Aaron’s Law.
It appears that the House Judiciary Committee is not interested in Aaron’s Law’s spirit of reform and clarity, instead they prefer to see CFAA expanded and strengthened. The vote on this issue is April 10th, 2013.
Participants of the Internet Defense League have been asked to asked to call attention to this issue and direct traffic to the Fix the CFAA website. C4SS, as a participant, will oblige, but not without a caveat.
We do not want to see the CFAA fixed. It was never broken. It is a success. It was used how all laws are used. It did its job. It cannot be reformed. It is damage that we must identify and route around.
We want to see the CFAA destroyed by rendering it irrelevant. An irrelevance that is the result of its unenforceability and our ungovernability.
If Aaron’s Law buys us the time we need to “route around” or makes the yoke of law rest lighter upon our backs, then we will call attention to it. But we will never regard it as anything more than a temporary paper-thin restraint against psychopaths.
Kevin Carson, Senior C4SS Fellow and Karl Hess Chair of Social Theory, was interviewed today on The Corbett Report: Open Source Intelligence News. You can listen to the podcast here.
C4SS Media presents Charles Johnson‘s “Anticopyright“, read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford.
This web project is, in spirit and in letter, at war with every aspect of Intellectual Protectionism, in its principles — of monopolizing power, entitlement, social control and economic privilege — and in its operation — through increasingly invasive government policing and legal coercion — and in the disastrous global effects of patent and copyright restrictions.
This machine kills intellectual monopolists.
There’s an interesting series of posts at Quartz about the capital-for-labor replacing effects of technology during the last three decades, but regrettably, it doesn’t even hint on the political-institutional barriers that are making the short-run impact of tech more painful for labor than it need be, or the possiblity that technical progress will empower labor only because it will destroy the enforceability of the institutional mechanisms that enclose its benefits for the elite.
It’s the kind of piece that leaves an uneasy feeling after reading it. In a way it’s like having a meal prepared with high quality fresh produce, by a great chef… who somehow forgot to add a key spice that would have enhanced the overall flavor of the dish to a whole new level.
Anyhow, rumors are that the C4SS kitchen is working already to spice the whole thing up and serve it for dinner at the op-ed section. Stay tuned!
The Mercatus Center recently released its Freedom in the 50 States report, and their analysis reaches some pretty ludicrous conclusions. North Dakota, which just banned abortion, was named the “most free” state. Reproductive liberty did not factor into the Mercatus Center’s analysis at all. Arizona also received a high ranking in spite of their abysmal civil liberties record, partially because immigration freedom was not a category in the Mercatus analysis.
But to see the true vulgar libertarianism in the Mercatus report, one should look at how they evaluate economic freedom. One significant portion of their evaluation of states was based on their “lawsuit climate.” But litigation is an important way to hold companies accountable for damage in a free society, and has in fact been unjustly limited by the rise of the regulatory state. They also treat “right to work laws” as a boon to freedom, even though the laws are a violation of free contract.
This ranking system is an embarrassment to libertarians. As an anarchist, I am skeptical about whether we can even rank governments on how compatible they are with freedom. However, if I were to develop rankings, I would not use the criteria employed by Mercatus. Their attitude seems to be that the rights of marginalized individuals are trivial and that “them pore ol’ bosses need all the help they can get.”
Gun owners terrified of nonexistent plans to restrict ammo are buying it all up. The victim: Police departments
Sure, most local police departments don’t regularly rack up body counts on the scale of an Anders Behring Breivik or even an Adam Lanza. But it seems to me that reducing their available firepower might somewhat enhance their discretion in its use.
