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.

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.”