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.

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

You can help support C4SS by purchasing a zine copy of Charles Johnson’s “Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin“.

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

A ready for print version.

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.

¡Salud y Libertad!

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.

The headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reads “Cellphones increasingly a problem for courts across St. Louis region.”

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?”

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

8

They had already been traveling for three days, but had not gone far from Moscow. The landscape along the way was wintry: the tracks, the fields, the forests, the roofs of the villages-everything lay under snow.

The Zhivago family had found themselves by luck on the left corner of the upper front bunk, by a dim, elongated window just under the ceiling, where they settled in a family circle, not breaking up their company.

Antonina Alexandrovna was traveling in a freight car for the first time. When they were getting on the train in Moscow, Yuri Andreevich had lifted the women up to the level of the car floor, along the edge of which rolled a heavy sliding door. Further on, the women got the knack of it and climbed into the car by themselves.

At first the cars had seemed to Antonina Alexandrovna like cattle sheds on wheels. These pens, in her opinion, were bound to fall apart at the first jolt or shake. But it was already the third day that they were being thrown forward or back or sideways on turns or as the momentum changed, and the third day that the axles went on knocking rapidly under the floor, like the sticks of a wind-up toy drum, and the trip went very well, and Antonina Alexandrovna’s apprehensions proved unjustified.

The long train, consisting of twenty-three cars (the Zhivagos were in the fourteenth), stretched only some one part of itself-the head, the tail, the middle-along the short platforms of the stations.

The front cars were for the military, in the middle rode the free public, at the end those mobilized by labor conscription.

There were about five hundred passengers of this category, people of all ages and the most diverse ranks and occupations.

The eight cars that this public occupied presented a motley spectacle. Alongside well-dressed rich people, Petersburg stockbrokers and lawyers, one could see-also recognized as belonging to the class of exploiters-cabdrivers, floor polishers, bathhouse attendants, Tartar junkmen, runaway madmen from disbanded asylums, small shopkeepers, and monks.

The first sat around the red-hot stoves without their jackets, on short, round blocks stood upright, telling each other something and laughing loudly. They were people with connections. They were not dejected. At home influential relations were interceding for them. In any case, they could buy themselves off further along the way.

The second, wearing boots and unbuttoned kaftans, or long, loose shirts over their pants and going barefoot, bearded or beardless, stood by the slid-open doors of the stuffy cars, holding on to the doorposts and the bars across the opening, looked sullenly at the area by the wayside and its inhabitants, and talked to no one. They did not have the necessary acquaintances. They had nothing to hope for.

Not all these people were placed in the cars authorized for them. A portion had been tucked into the middle of the train, mixed with the free public. There were people of that sort in the fourteenth car.

9

Usually, when the train approached some station, Antonina Alexandrovna, who was lying on the upper level, raised herself to the uncomfortable position she was forced into by the low ceiling, which prevented her from straightening up, hung her head over the side, and, through the chink of the slightly opened door, determined whether the place presented any interest from the point of view of barter and whether it was worthwhile getting down from the bunk and going outside.

And so it was now. The slowing pace of the train brought her out of her drowsiness. The multitude of switches over which the freight car jolted with increasingly loud bumps spoke for the importance of the station and the length of the forthcoming stop.

Antonina Alexandrovna sat bent over, rubbed her eyes, smoothed her hair, and, thrusting her hand into the knapsack, rummaged around and pulled out a towel embroidered with roosters, little figures, yokes, and wheels.

Just then the doctor woke up, jumped down from the berth first, and helped his wife climb down to the floor.

Meanwhile, past the open door of the car, following the switchmen’s boxes and lampposts, there already floated the trees of the station, weighed down by whole layers of snow, which looked like a welcome offering for the train, and the first to jump down from the still quickly moving train onto the pristine snow of the platform were the sailors, who, to get ahead of everyone, went running around the station building, where, in the shelter of the side wall, women selling forbidden food usually hid.

The sailors’ black uniforms, the flying ribbons of their peakless caps, and their bell-bottomed trousers lent a dash and impetuosity to their steps and made everyone give way before them, as before downhill skiers or skaters racing at top speed.

Around the corner of the station, hiding behind one another and as nervous as if they were telling fortunes, peasant women from the nearby villages lined up with cucumbers, cottage cheese, boiled beef, and rye cheesecakes, which, under the quilted covers they were brought in, kept their aroma and warmth even in the cold. The women and girls, in kerchiefs tucked under their winter jackets, blushed like poppies at some of the sailors’ jokes, and at the same time feared them worse than fire, because it was mostly of sailors that all sorts of detachments were formed for combating speculation and forbidden free trade.

The peasant women’s confusion did not last long. The train was coming to a stop. Other passengers were arriving. The public intermingled. Trade became brisk.

Antonina Alexandrovna was making the rounds of the women, the towel thrown over her shoulder, looking as if she were going behind the station to wash with snow. She had already been called to from the lines several times:

“Hey, you, city girl, what are you asking for the towel?”

But Antonina Alexandrovna, without stopping, walked on further with her husband.

At the end of the line stood a woman in a black kerchief with free crimson designs. She noticed the embroidered towel. Her bold eyes lit up. She glanced sideways, made sure that danger did not threaten from anywhere, quickly went up close to Antonina Alexandrovna, and, throwing back the cover of her goods, whispered in a heated patter:

“Looky here. Ever seen the like? Aren’t you tempted? Well, don’t think too long-it’ll be snapped up. Give me the towel for the halfy.”

Antonina Alexandrovna did not catch the last word. She thought the woman had said something about a calf.

“What’s that, my dear?”

By a halfy the peasant woman meant half a hare, split in two and roasted from head to tail, which she was holding in her hands. She repeated:

“I said give me the towel for a halfy. Why are you looking at me? It’s not dog meat. My husband’s a hunter. It’s a hare, a hare.”

The exchange was made. Each side thought she had made a great gain and the opposite side was as great a loser. Antonina Alexandrovna was ashamed to have fleeced the poor woman so dishonestly. But the woman, pleased with the deal, hastened to put sin behind her and, calling the woman next to her, who was all traded out, strode home with her down a narrow path trampled in the snow, which led to somewhere far away.

Just then there was a commotion in the crowd. Somewhere an old woman shouted:

“Where are you off to, young sir? And the money? When did you give it to me, you shameless liar? Ah, you greedy gut, I shout at him, and he walks off and doesn’t look back. Stop, I said, stop, mister comrade! Help! Thief! Robbery! There he is, there, hold him!”

“Which one?”

“Him walking there, with the shaved mug, laughing.”

“The one with a hole on his elbow?”

“Yes, yes. Hold him, the heathen!”

“The one with the patched sleeve?”

“Yes, yes. Ah, dear God, I’ve been robbed!”

“What’s the story here?”

“He was buying pies and milk from this old woman, stuffed himself full, and pffft! She’s here, howling her head off.”

“It can’t be left like that. He’s got to be caught.”

“Go on, catch him. He’s all belts and cartridges. He’ll do the catching.”

– Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, 182-184.

NRA leader Wayne LaPierre blamed a lot of different people for violence in American culture – but not the military or the extreme deference to military personnel and values prevalent in American society (and among his supporters). In fact, he couldn’t help but praise millions of active and retired police officers, military veterans, and private security guards as “an extraordinary corps of patriotic, trained, qualified citizens” who should be in charge of school security.

How about instead of more lockdowns, crackdowns, and clampdowns, we go for schools that are less like prisons and allow people who are willing and able to responsibly defend themselves to do so? Too bad that won’t fit into the dominant narrative that says the federal government must decide for us and enforce their decision.

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

PAMPHLET: Anarchism Without Hyphens & The Left/Right Spectrum (by Karl Hess)

The common response of many is to assume that an increase in welfare payments to low-income people will relieve their sense of frustration by providing them with an increase in their means for value satisfaction. This line of reasoning is reminiscent of the response of automobile manufacturers to employee demands during contract negotiations: offer them more money. There is a sizable body of opinion which holds that the strong demands – enforced by periodic strikes – of the auto workers are not so much a product of wage dissatisfaction (auto workers are quite highly paid) as they are a response to the employees’ felt sense of frustration at being locked into a highly structure work environment, characterized by the orderly, impersonal, and predictable assembly line.

While these employees, like anyone else, are always interested in more money, the real needs that they are seeking to satisfy are those related to attaining a sense of identity, having greater control and influence over their work environment, and realizing a greater sense of fulfillment from their work.  Unable to realize these needs, they revert, as Maslow points out, to the expression of the lower order needs as a substitute.

– Butler D. Shaffer in Violence as a Product of Imposed Order, 34-35.

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

Check out this article as a ready-to-print zine.

My TGIF column this week at The Future of Freedom Foundation, “Right-To-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition,” points out that an earlier generation of 20th-century libertarian economists opposed right-to-work laws. These include Milton Friedman and Percy L. Greaves Jr., a close associate of both Ludwig von Mises and Leonard E. Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education.

Friedman compared RTW to antidiscrimination laws, regarding them both as unjustified interference with the rights of employers to hire whomever they choose. Greaves saw RTW as inconsistent with markets and freedom because it forbids employers and unions from reaching a particular kind of voluntary agreement, namely, one that requires workers to compensate a union for representational services, as a condition of employment. Greaves correctly argued that RTW was only an issue because of earlier government intervention in the form of the Wagner Act, which requires an employer to deal with a union, and all workers to financially support it, if a majority of workers designate it as their bargaining agent. Greaves said that the free-market response to the compulsion in Wagner is repeal of Wagner, not further government intervention through an outlawing of employer-union exclusive contracts.

The irony is that Wagner plus the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments constitute a vast pro-business program to tame the labor movement. Instead of (threats of) sudden wildcat strikes, sympathy boycotts, and secondary strikes, the federal labor-law regime substituted cooling-off periods, compulsory arbitration, and many other restrictions. “Responsible” labor leaders were brought to the table as junior partners in the corporate state and were deputized to police their members’ compliance with the negotiated contracts. No wonder the Wobblies hated Wagner-Taft-Hartley. RTW was a way to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I seriously doubt that big employers would want to get rid of Wagner-Taft-Hartley if they had the chance.

Read the article here.

C4SS Senior fellow and chair of C4SS trustees, Sheldon Richman, discusses the historical trend and transformation of the use of the term “capitalism”. Richman also discusses left and right conflationism and misplaced faith in the benevolence or adiaphorous nature of the state to solve or mitigate social problems.

C4SS trustee and senior fellow, Gary Chartier, helps place libertarianism in its proper context and dispel some understandable, unfortunate misconceptions.

My friend and comrade Jesse Fruhwirth discussed the prison industrial complex with libertarian radio host Jake Shannon this Monday on Mental Self Defense Radio. Jesse is a heroic organizer and activist, and he offers incredible insight on the operation of the prison system in this country.  In this interview, he calls out the specific individuals and institutions profiting from mass incarceration, including Jane Marquardt. I wrote about Jane Marquardt’s role in the prison industrial complex yesterday at C4SS, and have written about the prison industrial complex previously here, here, here, and here.

Karl Hess discussing his views on appropriate/community technology from the Oscar winning documentary “Toward Liberty”.

C4SS senior fellow of the and holder of the Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory, Kevin Carson, conducted a fun and interesting interview with activist and podcaster Adam Kokesh of Adam Vs. The Man.

Subjects covered in the interview #155 (starts, minute 54): Vulgar libertarianism, labor theory of value, FMAC mutualism, economies of scale, human scale production, the end of economic growth, competitive currencies, hierarchies versus networks, 3-D printed homebrew industrial revolution, artificial property rights and scarcity, the (hopefully passive) dissolution of the state and much much more.