C4SS trustee Gary Chartier will discuss “Libertarians for Redistribution” with participants in a Students for Liberty webinar on Tuesday, December 11. Chartier argues that, while statist redistribution is undesirable, stateless redistribution–effected by market exchange, solidarity, the rectification of past injustice, and the homesteading of assets acquired through state engrossment or by tax-supported firms–can be a valuable means of addressing inequities and reducing economic vulnerability and insecurity and can achieve some (albeit not all) the goals of statist redistribution.

Webinar Registration

Libertarians ordinarily look at the idea of income and wealth redistribution very skeptically. And they should—if redistribution by the state for the purpose of equalizing incomes, boosting productivity, or achieving other macro-level goals is in view. But a number of the goals of statist programs of redistribution can, perhaps surprisingly, be served by a distinctively libertarian approach to redistribution, focusing on the rectification of past injustices, the elimination of privilege, solidarity and mutual aid, and market exchange.

“Union Holds US Ports Hostage,” according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Russ Pohl. Hell, if he’s going to be so sensationalist about it, he should at least add some exclamation marks to the headline.

Interestingly, Pohl doesn’t play the trump card — the state’s looming presence in all labor negotiations — that right-“libertarians” are usually so eager to throw down on the table.

Maybe that’s because, per the piece, “[f]ederal mediators were called in to defuse the situation but ultimately admitted they themselves had little to do with the final outcome.” That final outcome, by the way, was that striking clerical workers returned to their jobs after successfully negotiating a contract with the operators of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Or maybe Pohl shied away from playing the “government power” card because it wasn’t the workers seeking state intervention, but rather the National Retail Federation urging US President Barack Obama to intervene and order an end the strike.

Some “hostage situation.” I wonder if that’s what Pohl would call it if the owner of one of those shipping containers, full of (for example) Christmas toys, declined to deliver said toys to a purchasing store without a signed contract in hand? Especially if the toy seller had been delivering toys for two years without such a contract, just relying on the store’s owners to pay him whatever they felt the toys were worth (the port workers reported for duty every day for two years sans contract before saying enough was enough)?

In a recent opinion piece, Antonio Morales Méndez, mayor of the municipality of Agüimes in the Canary Islands, gives us a good deal of figures that reflect the reality of welfare-state realpolitik in Spain (the translation is mine):

… the director of the internal revenue agency, Beatriz Viana, declared that as part of a plan to fight the submerged economy, the Treasury would send tributary agents to small business (like restaurants, coffee shops, stores, etc.) to seize their cash if they have fiscal debts. She also said that this would be done during commercial hours and even if there were customers in the premises. This announcement coincides with data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) that reveal that small firms as a whole have lost a third of their sales since 2006. Since the beginning of the crisis, one of every three of these companies has disappeared from the map. 500,000 businesses (200,000 small firms and 300,000 autonomous workers), with a total annual sales of more than 600,000 million Euros have closed their doors. While this happens, INE–who points out in the same working paper that disposable income for Spanish households dropped 3.2% during the second quarter of this year and that 21.8% of the population is under the threshold of poverty risk–tells us that Spanish millionaires keep engrossing their fortunes.

According to the union of tax inspectors (GESTHA), 72% of fiscal fraud in Spain corresponds to large firms and large patrimonies, 17% to small firms, 9% to autonomous workers and 2% to the rest of the population, but the exemplary and rigorous measures are applied to the weakest group. Furthermore, according to the same civil servants (who ask for more human and material resources), 80% of the inspectors (one for almost 2,000 citizens) is dedicated to prosecuting small frauds and irregularities of small firms, autonomous workers and employed workers who forget a detail in their tax declaration instead of going after the “the business groups, the multinational corporations and the big fortunes.” This is one more data point to consider when evaluating why the country’s largest companies and fortunes evaded more than 40,000 million Euros in taxes last year with total impunity.

Regrettably, as it is typically the case, Méndez utterly fails to realize that this is THE fundamental problem of democracy, that the welfare state’s main function, is corporate welfare; and enthusiastically blames “total market freedom” for the whole mess.

In this episode of Speaking On Liberty Kyle Platt and Jason Lee Byas interview C4SS and the Independent Institute fellow Anthony Gregory. Gregory is also a contributor to the Huffington post and Lewrockwell.com.

http://youtu.be/k6wVPtdTjTM

Per CBC News:

The United Nations should take more action to fill the vacuum of governance that’s caused Congo to fall into “absolute anarchy” since April, Canadian Senator Roméo Dallaire says.

The fighting in Congo is between the Congolese state and rebels allegedly armed and backed by the Ugandan and Rwandan states. The problem isn’t not enough government, it’s three too many governments.

C4SS has teamed up with the Distro of the Libertarian Left. The Distro produces and distribute zines and booklets on anarchism, market anarchist theory, counter-economics, and other movements for liberation. For every copy of Murray Rothbard’s “All Power to the Soviets!” that you purchase through the Distro, C4SS will receive a percentage. Support C4SS with Murray Rothbard’s “All Power to the Soviets!”

$1.25 for the first copy. $0.75 for every additional copy.

Murray Rothbard is now remembered as the father of Anarcho-Capitalism, but in the 60s he argued for placing market anarchism on the revolutionary Left, and allied with SDS and the Black Panthers. Here he argues that principled libertarianism means defending freedom and genuine, labor-based property — not apologetics for politically-fabricated property titles or state-privileged corporate capitalism — that radical free-market principles support student occupations of universities and workers’ councils seizing factories and property from corporations embedded in the military-industrial complex.

The [homestead] principle applies to nominally ‘private’ property which really comes from the State …. Columbia University, for example, which receives nearly 2/3 of its income from government, is only a ‘private’ college in the most ironic sense. It deserves a similar fate of virtuous homesteading confiscation. But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to ‘private’ property? Surely less than zero. As … co-founders of the garrison state, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their ‘private’ property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murderer must be ‘respected’.

C4SS Senior Fellow and Trustee Gary Chartier speaks at the 2012 Southern California Students For Liberty Regional Conference.

One major event to watch for today is the release of the Leveson Inquiry Report, a 2,000 page document that is the result of over a year of research into “the culture, practice and ethics” of the British press and which could have major negative effects on it. One outcome of the report, the possible creation of statutory regulations for the British media, has already seen one newspaper, The Spectator, announce it will disregard any implemented rules:

Today, laws intended to stop the worst excesses of the tabloids could end by exerting a chilling effect on the rest of press. Once parliament has granted itself such powers, it can be counted on to expand them later. The language being used by the enemies of press freedom in Britain today is positively Orwellian: the state should merely ‘guarantee independence’ of the press regulator. The idea of benign ‘statutory regulation’ was advocated by MPs in 1952 and The Spectator vigorously opposed it then, too. ‘Everyone who really understands what freedom of the press means and cares about it,’ we argued, ‘must resist such a proposal to the uttermost.’

That is what The Spectator will now do. If the press agrees a new form of self-regulation, perhaps contractually binding this time, we will happily take part. But we would not sign up to anything enforced by government. If such a group is constituted we will not attend its meetings, pay its fines nor heed its menaces. We would still obey the (other) laws of the land. But to join any scheme which subordinates press to parliament would be a betrayal of what this paper has stood for since its inception in 1828.

The report is scheduled to be released at 1:30 p.m. GMT, or 7:30 a.m. US Central Standard Time. Follow the proceedings on Twitter by searching for #leveson.

“The cops aren’t protecting us so we have to figure out ways to protect ourselves.”

The BBC article “Apps that protect you from police brutality” highlights three smart phone applications designed to hold government officials accountable, or at least put the fear of public scrutiny and rebuke in their hearts.

1. ACLU-NJ Police Tape
2. Stop and Frisk Watch
3. FlyRights

My latest blog post here at C4SS dealt with violence against women. One commenter seemed puzzled. He argued that in some significant areas men face greater amounts of state violence than women, and then asked “Why the focus on women? If you’re not an evil sexist pig, you’re just against violence, no matter the victim.”

Many, perhaps most, victims of state violence are men, and that state violence is worth opposing. Why is raising the issue of state violence against women relevant, in that case?

Violence against women has a particular oppressive role in our society. First, let’s address the violence that is committed in a decentralized manner by non-state actors. In America, violence against women in the domestic sphere has largely been made invisible, been ignored by the state’s justice system, and has in some cases even been explicitly aided and abetted by the state. Meanwhile, decentralized violence against women in more public spaces has served to keep women as a group in a state of fear and to consequently limit their freedom of movement and their sexual autonomy. Ask a group of women and men what they do to protect themselves when they walk at night, and the vastly different responses along gender lines will show the type of gender biased fear of violence that exists in this society.

Furthermore, both in the past and in some other societies today, violence against women has been institutionalized to keep women in a state of subordination. This can be seen with things like witch hunts, violence against feminist protesters, and bans on adultery. This is overt state violence against women, and it is crucial to understanding both sexism and state violence.

However, because cultural norms surrounding violence against women primarily address violence in public spaces by strangers, and Western feminists have focused the bulk of our consciousness raising efforts on violence in the private sphere, state violence against women is largely invisible in our society. While it may be less prevalent than state violence against men (And considering under-reporting I don’t think we can know that it is), state violence against women remains a serious problem that ought to be addressed.

There are myriad examples of state violence against women. In the immigration detention system, women are sexually assaulted and guards use their power over detainees to cover it up. Sex workers and suspected sex workers, mostly women, face harassment, threats, and sexual violence from police officers. Often, their possession of condoms is treated as a sufficient basis for harassing and caging them, as a recent report from Human Rights Watch revealed. Sexual assaults by police officers have been documented in a variety of detailed reports, including Driving While Female. This piece from INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence documents and analyzes some particularly appalling cases of sexual violence by police officers. Women in prison often face sexual violence, with this violence made invisible by calling it a “strip search” rather than what it is: sexual assault. This is why Angela Davis argues that strip searches constitute the “routinization of sexual assault.”

I could continue to list off and document examples, but I don’t think I need to. The reality is that state violence against women happens and that gender and sex play a role in the structure of that violence. Pointing this out does not make you a “sexist pig.” But being outraged when people attempt to fight it does.

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

Today is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. While a great deal of violence against women is perpetuated in the most decentralized interpersonal relationships, the date was chosen to commemorate the victims of an act of state violence against women. On this day in 1960, the Mirabal sisters were executed by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Stand against both state and private violence against women, today and everyday.

What does working to eliminate violence against women look like?  It can look like  a lot of different things.   To learn how to work in your personal life to prevent gender violence, I would recommend this article from Scarleteen and Jackson Katz’s list “10 Things Men Can Do to Prevent Gender Violence.”  To learn how to organize against gender violence as it impacts women of color and as it intersects with state violence in the US, I would suggest this article from INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence.   To consider how we can counter interpersonal violence against women without the state’s justice system, I recommend this video.

C4SS Fellow Tennyson elaborates on our real human potential through transhumanism.

“Can humans live 1000 years? Can we print our own products, food, body organs? Transhumanism addresses these subjects and questions.”

“We don’t have the right to subordinate other people to our ends or treat them as objects for our uses,” says Roderick Long, professor of philosophy at Auburn University and President of the Molinari Institute. “And that is a fundamental kind of equality that I think is at the heart of libertarianism.”

We want to be free, we want to live, we want peace.

… We do not want to hate, we do not want to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore. ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want! …

[Emperor Nicholas I of Russia] heard the report of the embezzlement silently with compressed lips, his large white hand — with one ring on the fourth finger — stroking some sheets of paper, and his eyes steadily fixed on Chernyshov’s forehead and on the tuft of hair above it.

Nicholas was convinced that everybody stole. He knew he would have to punish the commissariat officials now, and decided to send them all to serve in the ranks, but he also knew that this would not prevent those who succeeded them from acting in the same way. It was a characteristic of officials to steal, but it was his duty to punish them for doing so, and tired as he was of that duty he conscientiously performed it.

“It seems there is only one honest man in Russia!” said he.

Chernyshov at once understood that this one honest man was Nicholas himself, and smiled approvingly.

“It looks like it, your Imperial Majesty,” said he.

“Leave it — I will give a decision,” said Nicholas, taking the document and putting it on the left side of the table.

Then Chernyshov reported the rewards to be given and about moving the army on the Prussian frontier.

Nicholas looked over the list and struck out some names, and then briefly and firmly gave orders to move two divisions to the Prussian frontier. He could not forgive the King of Prussia for granting a Constitution to his people after the events of 1848, and therefore while expressing most friendly feelings to his brother-in-law in letters and conversation, he considered it necessary to keep an army near the frontier in case of need. He might want to use these troops to defend his brother-in-law’s throne if the people of Prussia rebelled (Nicholas saw a readiness for rebellion everywhere) as he had used troops to suppress the rising in Hungary a few years previously. they were also of use to give more weight and influence to such advice as he gave to the King of Prussia.

“Yes — what would Russia be like now if it were not for me?” he again thought.

“Well, what else is there?” said he.

“A courier from the Caucasus,” said Chernyshov, and he reported what Vorontsov had written about Hadji Murad’s surrender.

“Well, well!” said Nicholas. “It’s a good beginning!”

“Evidently the plan devised by your Majesty begins to bear fruit,” said Chernyshov.

This approval of his strategic talents was particularly pleasant to Nicholas because, though he prided himself upon them, at the bottom of his heart he knew that they did not really exist, and he now desired to hear more detailed praise of himself.

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean that if your Majesty’s plans had been adopted before, and we had moved forward slowly and steadily, cutting down forests and destroying the supplies of food, the Caucasus would have been subjugated long ago. I attribute Hadji Murad’s surrender entirely to his having come to the conclusion that they can hold out no longer.”

“True,” said Nicholas.

Although the plan of a gradual advance into the enemy’s territory by means of felling forests and destroying the food supplies was Ermolov’s and Velyaminov’s plan, and was quite contrary to Nicholas’s own plan of seizing Shamil’s place of residence and destroying that nest of robbers — which was the plan on which the dargo expedition in 1845 (that cost so many lives) had been undertaken — Nicholas nevertheless attributed to himself also the plan of a slow advance and a systematic felling of forests and devastation of the country. It would seem that to believe the plan of a slow movement by felling forests and destroying food supplies to have been his own would have necessitated hiding the fact that he had insisted on quite contrary operations in 1845. But he did not hide it and was proud of the plan of the 1845 expedition as well as of the plan of a slow advance — though the two were obviously contrary to one another. Continual brazen flattery from everybody round him in the teeth of obvious facts had brought him to such a state that he no longer saw his own inconsistencies or measured his actions and words by reality, logic, or even simple common sense; but was quite convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and mutually contradictory they might be, became reasonable, just, and mutually accordant simply because he gave them. His decision in the case next reported to him — that of the student of the Academy of Medicine — was of the that senseless kind.

The case was as follows: A young man who had twice failed in his examinations was being examined a third time, and when the examiner again would not pass him, the young man whose nerves were deranged, considering this to be an injustice, seized a pen- knife from the table in a paroxysm of fury, and rushing at the professor inflicted on him several trifling wounds.

“What’s his name?” asked Nicholas.

“Bzhezovski.”

“A Pole?”

“Of Polish descent and a roman Catholic,” answered Chernyshov.

Nicholas frowned. He had done much evil to the Poles. To justify that evil he had to feel certain that all Poles were rascals, and he considered them to be such and hated them in proportion to the evil he had done them.

“Wait a little,” he said, closing his eyes and bowing his head.

Chernyshov, having more than once heard Nicholas say so, knew that when the Emperor had to take a decision it was only necessary for him to concentrate his attention for a few moments and the spirit moved him, and the best possible decision presented itself as though an inner voice had told him what to do. He was now thinking how most fully to satisfy the feeling of hatred against the Poles which this incident had stirred up within him, and the inner voice suggested the following decision. He took the report and in his large handwriting wrote on its margin with three orthographical mistakes:

“Deserves deth, but, thank God, we have no capitle punishment, and it is not for me to introduce it. Make him fun the gauntlet of a thousand men twelve times. — Nicholas.”

He signed, adding his unnaturally huge flourish.

Nicholas knew that twelve thousand strokes with the regulation rods were not only certain death with torture, but were a superfluous cruelty, for five thousand strokes were sufficient to kill the strongest man. But it pleased him to be ruthlessly cruel and it also pleased him to think that we have abolished capital punishment in Russia.

Having written his decision about the student, he pushed it across to Chernyshov.

“There,” he said, “read it.”

Chernyshov read it, and bowed his head as a sign of respectful amazement at the wisdom of the decision.

“Yes, and let all the students be present on the drill- ground at the punishment,” added Nicholas.

“It will do them good! I will abolish this revolutionary spirit and will tear it up by the roots!” he thought.

“It shall be done,” replied Chernyshov; and after a short pause he straightened the tuft on his forehead and returned to the Caucasian report.

“What do you command me to write in reply to Prince Vorontsov’s dispatch?”

“To keep firmly to my system of destroying the dwellings and food supplies in Chechnya and to harass them by raids.” answered Nicholas.

“And what are your Majesty’s commands with reference to Hadji Murad?” asked Chernyshov.

“Well, Vorontsov writes that he wants to make use of him in the Caucasus.”

“Is it not dangerous?” said Chernyshov, avoiding Nicholas’s gaze. “Prince Vorontsov is too confiding, I am afraid.”

“And you — what do you think?” asked Nicholas sharply, detecting Chernyshov’s intention of presenting Vorontsov’s decision in an unfavorable light.

“Well, I should have thought it would be safer to deport him to Central Russia.”

“You would have thought!” said Nicholas ironically. “But I don’t think so, and agree with Vorontsov. Write to him accordingly.”

“It shall be done,” said Chernyshov, rising and bowing himself out.

Dolgoruky also bowed himself out, having during the whole audience only uttered a few words (in reply to a question from Nicholas) about the movement of the army.

After Chernyshov, Nicholas received Bibikov, General- Governor of the Western Provinces. Having expressed his approval of the measures taken by Bibikov against the mutinous peasants who did not wish to accept the orthodox Faith, he ordered him to have all those who did not submit tried by court-martial. That was equivalent to sentencing them to run the gauntlet. He also ordered the editor of a newspaper to be sent to serve in the ranks of the army for publishing information about the transfer of several thousand State peasants to the imperial estates.

“I do this because I consider it necessary,” said Nicholas, “and I will not allow it to be discussed.”

Bibikov saw the cruelty of the order concerning the Uniate peasants and the injustice of transferring State peasants (the only free peasants in Russia in those days) to the Crown, which meant making them serfs of the Imperial family. But it was impossible to express dissent. Not to agree with Nicholas’s decisions would have meant the loss of that brilliant position which it had cost Bibikov forty years to attain and which he now enjoyed; and he therefore submissively bowed his dark head (already touched with grey) to indicate his submission and his readiness to fulfil the cruel, insensate, and dishonest supreme will.

Having dismissed Bibikov, Nicholas stretched himself, with a sense of duty well fulfilled, glanced at the clock, and went to get ready to go out. Having put on a uniform with epaulets, orders, and a ribbon, he went out into the reception hall where more than a hundred persons — men in uniforms and women in elegant low-necked dresses, all standing in the places assigned to them — awaited his arrival with agitation.

He came out to them with a lifeless look in his eyes, his chest expanded, his stomach bulging out above and below its bandages, and feeling everybody’s gaze tremulously and obsequiously fixed upon him he assumed an even more triumphant air. When his eyes met those of people he knew, remembering who was who, he stopped and addressed a few words to them sometimes in Russian and sometimes in French, and transfixing them with his cold glassy eye listened to what they said.

Having received all the New Year congratulations he passed on to church, where God, through His servants the priests, greeted and praised Nicholas just as worldly people did; and weary as he was of these greetings and praises Nicholas duly accepted them. All this was as it should be, because the welfare and happiness of the whole world depended on him, and wearied though he was he would still not refuse the universe his assistance.

When at the end of the service the magnificently arrayed deacon, his long hair crimped and carefully combed, began the chant “Many Years,” which was heartily caught up by the splendid choir, Nicholas looked round and noticed Nelidova, with her fine shoulders, standing by a window, and he decided the comparison with yesterday’s girl in her favor.

After Mass he went to the empress and spent a few minutes in the bosom of his family, joking with the children and his wife. Then passing through the Hermitage, he visited the Minister of the Court, Volkonski, and among other things ordered him to pay out of a special fund a yearly pension to the mother of yesterday’s girl. From there he went for his customary drive.

Dinner that day was served in the Pompeian Hall. Besides the younger sons of Nicholas and Michael there were also invited Baron Lieven, Count Rzhevski, Dolgoruky, the Prussian Ambassador, and the King of Prussia’s aide-de-camp.

While waiting for the appearance of the Emperor and Empress an interesting conversation took place between Baron Lieven and the Prussian Ambassador concerning the disquieting news from Poland.

“La Pologne et le Caucases, ce sont les deux cauteres de la Russie,” said Lieven. “Il nous faut dent mille hommes a peu pres, dans chcun de ces deux pays.”

The Ambassador expressed a fictitious surprise that it should be so.

“Vous dites, la Pologne —”  began the Ambassador.

“Oh, oui, c’etait un coup de maitre de Metternich de nous en avoir laisse l’embarras…”

At this point the Empress, with her trembling head and fixed smile, entered followed by Nicholas.

At dinner Nicholas spoke of Hadji Murad’s surrender and said that the war in the Caucasus must now soon come to an end in consequence of the measures he was taking to limit the scope of the mountaineers by felling their forests and by his system of erecting a series of small forts.

The Ambassador, having exchanged a rapid glance with the aide-de-camp — to whom he had only that morning spoken about Nicholas’s unfortunate weakness for considering himself a great strategist — warmly praised this plan which once more demonstrated Nicholas’s great strategic ability.

After dinner Nicholas drove to the ballet where hundreds of women marched round in tights and scanty clothing. One of the specially attracted him, and he had the German ballet-master sent for and gave orders that a diamond ring should be presented to her.

The next day when Chernyshov came with his report, Nicholas again confirmed his order to Vorontsov — that now that Hadji Murad had surrendered, the Chechens should be more actively harassed than ever and the cordon round them tightened.

Chernyshov wrote in that sense to Vorontsov; and another courier, overdriving more horses and bruising the faces of more drivers, galloped to Tiflis.

– Leo Tolstoy, Chapter 15 of Hadji Murad, 1917.

See also Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Definitions and Distinctions.

1. State-enforced artificial scarcity

Scarcity created or exacerbated by the state. Scarcity raises prices. Natural scarcity results from genuine material costs of production (affecting both effort and raw materials) and from natural, material limits on the replicability of goods. Natural scarcity is unavoidable. Artificial scarcity obtains when access is constrained even when a good is naturally abundant. It can only be created by actual or threatened aggression—the state’s métier. When the state engrosses land and thus keeps it from being homesteaded, when it limits access to health care by enforcing licensing requirements, when it limits access to land by enforcing zoning rules, or when it enforces “intellectual property” rights, it makes things more scarce than they would otherwise be, and thus more expensive.

2. (Artificial) property rights

Putative property rights created by fiat. There are good reasons, on multiple theories of property, for people to control their own bodies and the physical objects they acquire through voluntary transfer from others or which they homestead. The rights they exercise in these cases can be regarded as “natural” (even if there’s an important sense in which someone might see them as rooted to some extent in convention). Natural property rights result from natural scarcity: they flow directly from the actual, material possession of finite, rival goods. Defense of these rights is entailed in the very act of possession. By contrast, artificial property rights are rights established, not by homesteading or transfer, but by actual or threatened violence—by theft (as in the case of the enclosures) or engrossment, for instance, or through the creation of “intellectual property” claims which give one person or group claims on the justly acquired property of others. Artificial property rights require the creation of artificial scarcity, and require the invasion of others’ natural property to enforce.

3. Entry barrier

An institutional factor that limits access to a given market by imposes capital outlay requirements or raising overhead costs over and above the material requirements inherent in the production process, thereby artificially lowering the number of competitors, rendering the production process artificially less efficient, and raising the returns to those allowed to participate in it. An occupational licensing rule, for instance, is a barrier to entry into a given occupational market. Entry barriers not only lower the intensity of competition within an industry and enable oligopoly pricing, but also artificially increase the ratio of factor inputs to output, and thereby inhibit the natural deflationary effects of technical progress.

4. Cartel

A group of firms seeking to cooperate to boost profits by minimizing price competition among themselves and excluding potentially competitive new entrants from the market or markets in which they function. Realistically speaking, it will consistently be tempting for a firm participating in a cartel to defect from the cartel by underselling other cartel members, thus boosting its profits and reducing theirs; it will also be tempting for outsiders to challenge cartel arrangements—as, for instance, in virtue of the opportunities competing with cartelists with high profit margins might present. Thus, in the absence of a monopoly maintained by force or substantial social pressure, a cartel arrangement is likely to be unstable.

5. Monopoly price

A price charged in virtue of monopoly status. A monopoly occurs when a firm or a group of firms operating in a given market forcibly exclude other entrants from the market. While forcible exclusion is itself unjust to those excluded, a monopoly is also problematic for at least one other reason (there are doubtless more): a monopoly enables the seller to target price to the buyer’s ability to pay, and thereby distribute just enough of the benefit of technological progress to the buyer to make it worth her while to buy a new good or improved variant of an old good. The seller is able to appropriate the rest of the advantages of progress—as opposed to the natural state of affairs in which equilibrium price reflects the cost of production rather than the buyer’s ability to pay, and market competition quickly distributes all the fruits of progress to society at large. The maintenance of a monopoly is thus persistently disadvantageous to consumers.

6. State-enforced monopoly price

A price resulting from a monopoly maintained by the state. A private firm can, in principle, maintain a monopoly by forcibly excluding competition itself. But the maintenance of a monopoly by the state is advantageous for a monopolistic firm for several reasons. Most importantly, while a firm forcibly excluding competitors from a given market is easy to identify as a nakedly self-interested aggressor likely to be resisted by force and publicly shamed, the perceived legitimacy of state action makes it possible for the state’s maintenance of a monopoly to seem like a way of serving the public welfare, whether the maintenance of the monopoly is driven primarily by ignorance on the part of state actors or by their active collusion with firms in search of monopoly profits. In addition, because the state’s activities are funded by taxes, a firm can externalize the cost of maintaining its monopoly status on to taxpayers.

7. Corporate welfare

Direct or indirect supports for businesses’ incomes offered by the state. Direct subsidies are the most obvious example, but anti-competitive measures like tariffs and other import restrictions, licensing and accreditation requirements, and “intellectual property” privileges might also be thought to qualify as instances of corporate welfare in a more extended sense.

8. (Genuine) free market

A market freed—liberated—from systematic forcible interference with just acquisition and free exchange. The most obvious such interference is the network of taxes, regulations, and privileges maintained by the state; widespread interference by non-state actors—organized crime families, for instance—could also render a market unfree.

9. Absentee landlordism

A set of social arrangements featuring continued ownership of land by someone who does not personally occupy and use it for the purpose of renting it to others; regarded as illegitimate in at least some cases by proponents of personal-occupancy-and-use standards for determining when justly acquired land has been abandoned. Even in a society in which occupancy-and-use standards weren’t enforced, there might well be significantly less absentee landlordism absent various impediments to becoming an owner are removed as state-secured privilege is eliminated.

10. Full product (of labor)

The full amount to which a worker is entitled for her work—likely to be denied to her if forcibly secured privileges require her, in effect, to pay tribute to the holders of monopoly privileges.

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day when people around the world gather to remember those who have been murdered because of transphobia.  This is an opportunity for all people concerned with liberty and justice to come together around an extremely serious problem.  Violence against transgender, or trans, people, particularly transgender women, is pervasive.  According to a 2011 study by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 50% of LGBT individuals murdered in 2009 were trans women and 44% of LGBT individuals murdered in 2010 were trans women.

When people fear for their lives and safety because of who they are, this is a tremendous assault on liberty.  It limits freedom of movement, with some being afraid to go to school, use public restrooms, or walk at night.  It limits freedom of expression by encouraging some people to remain in the closet and suppress their gender expression.  And this climate of fear is enforced through brutal acts of violence that clearly violate basic individual rights.

I would strongly recommend that all anarchists, libertarians, feminists, transgender rights advocates, and decent people read this article on anti-trans violence and hate crimes laws.  It illuminates the problem in a powerful way, and explains how the state’s top down solutions have failed to address it.  Furthermore, it discusses grassroots approaches to liberating the trans community from violence.  Fundamentally, I consider that type of activism to be at the heart of what anarchist political action is about.

More immediately, I would strongly urge you to find out if there is a Transgender Day of Remembrance event happening in your area.   Why?  As C4SS senior fellow Charles Johnson has written:

Because it’s important, and because it’s the decent thing to do, it’s one of the things you have to do in this life. But I hate remembering our dead. I am sick of there being more people every year that we have nothing left of but a memory. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.

But they deserve at least that.

Robert Poole is one of the founders of the Reason Foundation (which publishes Reason magazine), and served as its president and CEO from 1978 to 2000. He is currently director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation and frequently writes about issues related to privatization.

Samuel Konkin authored and published several periodicals during his lifetime, including the New Libertarian Weekly (1975-1978) and the New Libertarian (1978-1990). He was a proponent of left-libertarianism and a political philosophy he developed called agorism. He passed away in 2004.

In this video, Poole and Konkin engage in a spirited debate over what constitutes libertarian beliefs, how broadly libertarianism should be defined, and how best to apply the principles of libertarianism to make the world a freer, more prosperous place.

So the political right is mad that the government didn’t share everything they knew about Benghazi, eh? Tell me again why Bradley Manning is in prison? Why does the US want to “talk to” Julian Assange? What is wrong with Wikileaks?

If Lindsey Graham and John McCain want to get to the bottom of the Benghazi scandal, they should stop the crackdown on whistleblowers and instead listen to what they are saying. Of course this isn’t the case. Graham and McCain aren’t interested in exposing the truth about Benghazi or anything else the government is involved in. Rather, they are using this situation for political gain.

Don’t believe me? Check this out: