“…the worst is yet to come. What begins with a military escalation of France’s own, today, will eventually end with the region in the hands of private military businesses and warlords, following the US model. Decomposition is characterized by fragile alliances, and if the Tuareg, who were recently allies of AQMI, offer their help to the French army, tomorrow, some of them might break away into local feifdoms that happen to be tempting to those occupying them.”
A supporter and friend of C4SS, has put together a “small batch” screen print of the C4SS “box” logo with a DIY finish.
If you decide on purchasing one of Ian’s shirts, let him know that you also want to support C4SS with your purchase and C4SS will get a 10% of purchase price donation.
If you think this kind of partnership or something similar would be helpful to your Homebrew (ad)venture, then let C4SS know. We are happy to work out details and provide graphics. Email C4SS with the title “Support-Donations” to faq@c4ss.org
“Pursuant to FRCP 48(a), the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, hereby dismisses the case presently pending against Defendant Aaron Swartz,” Ortiz wrote in a submission to the court on Monday. “In support of this dismissal, the government states that Mr. Swartz died on January 11, 2013.”
Despite Swartz’s family literally placing the blame for his death on the state, and both MIT and JSTOR releasing public statements that were largely positive in how they portrayed him, a spokesperson for Ortiz told the Los Angeles Times, “We want to respect the privacy of the family and do not feel it is appropriate to comment on the case at this time.”
After a year and a half of state harassment, the threat of over 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine hanging over Swartz’s head, after both JSTOR and MIT dropped their criminal charges (though MIT still wanted to go ahead with their civil suit), the government went after Swartz like a rabid dog – and got a kill.
I highly recommend this new video from Dan D’Amico and Learn Liberty on how America’s criminal justice system promotes racial inequality. D’Amico does an excellent job explaining the enormous racial inequalities in who the state cages. But, perhaps even more importantly, he makes it clear that this isn’t just an issue about individual racist cops, judges, or jurors. Rather, perverse incentives and laws that appear colorblind have created a structural problem of racism.
C4SS Media would like to present one of our signature political position pieces, from C4SS Senior Fellow Gary Chartier:
The C4SS Media team is working on generating weekly content for the C4SS YouTube channel. If you are interested in helping this project or staying up to date, email us — under the subject line: C4SS Media Support — at faq@c4ss.org or subscribe today.
Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan has died at the age of 93.
Buchanan thought of himself as a classical liberal and an Austrian economist — but neither a leftist nor an anarchist. But that doesn’t mean left-wing market anarchists don’t have important lessons to learn from him, particularly with regard to two of his most important contributions to social theory.
First, Buchanan pioneered public choice analysis — looking at the behavior of institutional actors, and especially state actors, as ordinary people with ordinary motivations who don’t acquire new fundamental values and attitudes and goals simply because they occupy particular positions. Public choice analysis emphasizes the fact that there’s no reason to expect politicians and other state functionaries to be more “public-spirited” than their counterparts in the corporate sector (and perhaps even less so, given the difficulty of measuring their performance and holding them accountable).
Embracing public choice analysis is, in particular, quite compatible with seeing politicians and bureaucrats as acting in light of motives as shaped by their cronyish relationships with business elites or, indeed, their ability to maximize their own wealth using political power. Public choice analysis isn’t identical with class analysis, not least because the latter assumes not merely that politicians’ motives aren’t any better than ordinary people’s, but, in fact, that they’re worse, for predictable reasons. But the two are naturally complementary. Public choice analysis points to one way in which the state functions as a tool of economic redistribution — not from the rich to the poor, but from everyone, including the poor, to the privileged. Buchanan’s notion that politics should be viewed “without romance” helps to make clear why the hope that the state will save ordinary people from the predatory corporate elite is naïve at best. A one-time self-described socialist, who remembered the arbitrary preference given to people with wealth during his time in the military during World War II, Buchanan could hardly be displeased by this result.
Second, Buchanan called attention to the importance of constitutional constraints on the exercise of state power. His work in constitutional economics focused on, among other things, the logic of institutional design—on the formulation of rules for political decision-making that could be expected to yield desirable economic outcomes. His own work employed a broadly contractarian approach to the justification of a state with limited powers. But it could certainly be taken in a more radical direction. When he rehearsed his Nobel acceptance speech at George Mason University, he observed, in the course of responding to criticism from his audience, “If this argument fails, I’m an anarchist.” And, precisely in light of his own concerns about the potential abuse of state power, there’s a plausible case to be made for the view that the right sort of constitutional order, the sort capable of fostering prosperity and protecting autonomy, is a polycentric one: market anarchism is the best sort of constitutionalism. It is perfectly possible to argue, building on Buchanan’s own analyses of the behavior of state officials and of the logic of constitutionalism, that the best way to constrain state rapacity is, as a number of Buchanan’s students have argued, by doing without the state altogether.
Buchanan’s elegant and careful analyses were not the last word on public choice or constitutional economics. From a left-wing market anarchist perspective, they were insufficiently critical of the status quo. But they paved the way for more radical analyses of the political and legal order, analyses which will doubtless continue to be enriched by Buchanan’s own.
C4SS Media would like to present one of our signature political position pieces, from C4SS Senior Fellow Gary Chartier:
“Defenders of freed markets have good reason to identify their position as a species of ‘anti-capitalism.’ To explain why, I distinguish three potential meanings of ‘capitalism’ before suggesting that people committed to freed markets should oppose capitalism in my second and third senses. Then, I offer some reasons for using ‘capitalism’ as a label for some of the social arrangements to which freed-market advocates should object.” —Gary Chartier
For more than a year and a half, C4SS has been maintaining 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’s passed 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.
Operating the node does come at a cost. Just under $150 of hosting will cover the relay for the next six months.
If you believe, as we do, that Tor is one of the technologies that’s serving to make both state and corporate oppression not only obsolete, but impossible, please click through and contribute today.
The State is damage, liberty will route around!
All the best,
-C4SS
P.S. The hardcore can send bitcoins to 1DnumwHUq1uGp1c4sRasbXipvkMNsy7ixg.
This week I spotted a couple C4SS articles reproduced at a few blogs again:
Kevin’s “If progressives…” was reproduced at the blog of the Spanish arm of the Independent Institute and at Desde el Exilio, a Spanish libertarian blog. Quite a few right-wingish folks at Desde el Exilio expressed their being annoyed at Mr. Carson for daring to call himself a socialist. Lots of fun.
Kevin’s piece on the arms control debate got picked up by an interesting independent online newspaper in Spain, El Librepensador.
I also got an email from the editor of the Spanish version of Mises.org telling me that they will start publishing our stuff soon.
I get lots of email from lots of outfits of all ideologies. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of email from “progressive” groups, and pretty much every message takes the same line as this one from The Center for American Progress:
We saw many progressive victories in 2012. But we’re still facing down a radical, conservative ideology …
Yeah, conservatism as “radical” is a howler, but what I find more interesting is the degree to which “progressives” have given up a term they once proudly applied to themselves, turning it into a pejorative.
Rhetorically — and in my opinion more than rhetorically — that positions progressivism itself as a form of conservatism dedicated not to “progress” of any sort, but merely to preservation and extension of the New Deal/Great Society status quo and limitless state power at all costs.
Which, of course, is exactly what progressivism has been all about for a good half-century. But it’s startling to see progressives themselves so openly and readily admit that.
Argentine libertarian activist and C4SS contributor Nicolás Morás wrote a blog post at Orden Voluntario describing his first-hand experience of a recent wave of riots and looting at his hometown, San Carlos de Bariloche, and reflects about the fundamental political causes of this tragic episode:
It was 11:00 am and I was directing the shooting of Two Villages, an ambitious documentary project in which we cover a series of tabu social problems in the tourist city of San Carlos de Bariloche, where the center and bourgeois neighborhoods are separated in a quasi apartheid from the marginal zones. More on this later (by the way, we are producing the documentary under the auspices of C4SS).
My team was dispersed in different zones and I was walking towards 36th School, a conflictive secondary school, to interview its director. When I arrived, the school had just closed down and I sensed irritation and even desperation among the few people walking on the streets.
We all went back home, and at approximately 1:00 pm Todo Noticias, the news channel of Clarín group announced “collective looting in Bariloche.” Hundreds of people advanced towards Changomás, a hipermarket subsidiary of Walmart. Eluding the police controls, and a few of them confronting them, they threw themselves over the cameras and tried to lynch the journalists, setting their a car owned by Todo Noticias on fire.
As an inhabitant of this city I realized that the looters were moving towards Onelli street, which is full of small businesses that cater to the marginal neighborhoods and ends in the center of the city.
I decided to take the risk to cover whatever would happen. When I arrived all the businesses were closed, I talked to artisans at a street fair that were afraid and entrenched behind iron fences, fearing that they would suffer the consequences of the blind rage of people without class consciousness and unable to differentiate between small business and corporations, people morally confused to the point that they would attack the livelihood of honest working people and the property of neighbors who are in the same economic conditions as they are.
I reached the maximum point of tension: two whole blocks dominated by looters, and the local police, who first tried dispersing them with tear gas, was guarding a chain supermarket without the faintest intention of stopping the attacks towards small businesses. The attackers easily defeated the police throwing stones at them and making them run away without even stopping the traffic.
In the video below I show graffitis and other signs of para-political pro-Kirchner groups that seem to claim the organization of the looting squads. Later on, a contact at the municipal government told me that the promoters of the riots were well known pro-Kirchner propagandists that organized shock groups with the objective of settling accounts with(also pro-Kirchner) mayor Omar Goye.
While the federal police clumsily approached the conflictive areas, several people wearing hoods broke inside the storage facilities of the supermarket, and immediately afterwards stones started raining everyone filming the events, so we had no other option than leaving.
We had been forewarned.
During the whole day (December 21) similar riots were carried out around the country, resulting in great property losses and the use of military forces to intervene during the riots.
As usual, the state seized the opportunity to justify using disproportionate force, restriction of civil liberties, and by failing to recognize any political influence of the rioters, a virulent wave of hatred towards inhabitants of the poorest neighborhoods got hold of those who saw the dramatic scenes on TV.
Once again, statist interests resulted in the people devouring the people: Corrupt and politicized labor union leaders manipulated the rioters to gain their adherence, social hatred makes people blame other people instead of the political players behind the scenes, and while corporate retail outlets will be compensated by insurance companies, most small shopkeepers will probably find themselves without any means of subsistence after dust settles.
Once again we have witnessed that the current system is chaotic, and I’m more convinced now than ever that a free-market anarchy based on legitimate private property and private or community-organized security services would achieve a much higher level of social peace and prosperity.
Seeing these events first-hand is very instructive. As libertarians, we must learn to channel proletarian disenchantment so that it can be a real liberating force against statist and corporate structures, instead of a mad hurricane of all-against-all aggression.
Courts generally ban picture taking, except to allow some limited news media photography on a case-by-case basis. St. Louis courts also once banned cellphones with cameras, when those were uncommon, but relented when it became almost impossible to find a phone without a camera.
Recent incidents in St. Louis and elsewhere have some judges rethinking whether to ban cellphones from courtrooms and even courthouses.
“It’s a national problem,” said St. Louis Circuit Judge David Mason in a recent interview. “Judges across the country are coming down on this.”
…
“It’s hard for me to understand how people would think there was no problem,” the judge said. He emphasized that in any event, courthouse rules and culture will not yield.
Whatever happened to “speedy public trial” and “if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear?”
