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:

If the local bakery won’t come down from $2.99 for a loaf of bread and I’m only willing to pay $1.99, no biggie — the deal doesn’t happen.

If a writer won’t let his new novel go for an advance of less than $20k and the publisher won’t come up from $10k, same thing — that novel doesn’t get published (at least not by that publisher).

But when a bunch of bakers won’t take less than $X per hour for their labor, and the bakery owner won’t pay more than $Y, all of a sudden it’s “the labor unions have strangled Hostess” and “[w]orkers … have allowed union leaders to persuade them to destroy their jobs.”

Damn union workers! Who the hell do they think they are, having their agents bargain for a good deal and walking away if they don’t get it. Don’t they know that they should just gratefully accept whatever they are offered and consider themselves lucky?

Anti-union propagandists love to bellyache that “unions have been given special immunity by corrupt left wing politicians,” and they’re right (see Wagner Act, the). But they forget the “special immunity” given to employers by corrupt right-wing politicians (see Taft-Hartley Act, the). State intervention in labor markets cuts both ways, and damages those markets both ways too.

Absent such state intervention, unions are just market actors — no different in principle than any other such actors. You can be pro-market or you can be anti-union, but you can’t be both.

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

Like a scene from “Maximum Overdrive,” only with a Mitt Romney fan behind the wheel:

[Police allege that] Holly Solomon, 28, chased her 36-year-old husband Daniel Solomon with the family Jeep SUV on Saturday night over a political argument stemming from the fact he didn’t vote, CBS station KPHO in Phoenix, Ariz. reported. She pinned him between the underside of the SUV and the curb when he tried to run for help.

The husband told investigators that Solomon believed her family was going to face hardship from President Barack Obama’s re-election.

Witnesses told police that Solomon followed her husband in her car through a parking lot while screaming at him. He hid behind a light pole to protect himself while Solomon circled several times. She struck him as he tried to make a break for the main road.

Seems a little over the top, doesn’t it? Even if voting could change some things, Daniel Solomon’s vote wouldn’t have changed anything: Romney carried Arizona by close to 200,000 votes. And punishing all 4.6 million Arizona non-voters in this way might backfire and increase sentiment for a “crazed Republican driver” addendum to the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.

In this episode of Speaking On Liberty we have an interview with C4SS Senior Fellow Charles W. Johnson, co-editor of “Markets not Capitalism.”

http://youtu.be/rQiy4ICwnYA

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

Interview with C4SS at Libertopia!

While at Libertopia 2012, I got to chat with Gary Chartier, Roderick Long, Charles Johnson, and Sheldon Richman! All are affiliated with the Center for a Stateless Society. If you’re curious what “left libertarianism” means, this interview will fill you in.

PS: Download the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook if you want to hear more – Gary and Charles are its editors, and everyone in this interview contributed writing to the project.

Back in January of 2009, newly elected Barak Obama started a webpage titled Change.Gov The Office of the President-Elect. One of the purposes of this site, The Citizen’s Briefing Book, was to solicit ideas for how to fulfill the following sentiment:

“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our  children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.” — President Barack Obama

C4SS senior fellow and Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory,  Kevin Carson, offered Obama a sketch for how he might achieve this world – backed up with Carson’s Studies, particularly Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles.

President Obama has a new term and another chance to bring us at least a little closer to that world. So Obama, let’s try this again:

Easing the Transition to an Alternative Economy

If we want to replace the present centralized economy of waste production and planned obsolescence, it’s an inescapable fact that a great deal of excess manufacturing capacity cannot be saved.  In my opinion it’s a  mistake to try to prop it up through expedients like the Detroit bailout.

Corporate capitalism has been plagued from its late-19th century beginnings with chronic crises of over-accumulation and overproduction, which would probably have destroyed it in the Great Depression (despite the New Deal) had WWII not postponed the crisis for a generation by helpfully blowing up most of the plant and equipment in the world outside the U.S. and creating a permanent war economy for absorbing surplus output.  But Europe and Japan rebuilt their industrial capital by 1970, and since then the chronic crises have been back with a vengeance. Before the current downturn, America’s overbuilt industry couldn’t dispose of its full  output running at capacity, even with everybody tapping into home equity and maxing out their credit cards to replace everything they owned every five years. And we’ll never see those levels again. So there’s no  escaping the fact that much of our plant and equipment, in a few years, will be rust.

The goal should be a shift from the present system of over-accumulated, centralized, oligopoly industry, and its business model of planned obsolescence and “push” distribution, to a decentralized economy of small-scale manufacturing for local markets.  This means, among other things, a switch from capital-intensive production methods based on product-specific machinery, to production with small-scale, general purpose machinery.  It means, in place of the old Sloanist production model, something like the present-day economy of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region:  networked small manufacturers producing for the local market, with a high degree of cooperative ownership.  Such an economy, based on a “pull” distribution model with production geared to demand on a just-in-time basis, will be insulated from the boom-bust cycles of the old national “push” economies. And we need a new model of user-friendly, modular product design aimed at cheap and easy repairability and recycling.

Your main focus, in my opinion, should be to ease the transition by eliminating present policies (market-distorting subsidies, privileges, and cartelizing regulations) that impede it and protect the old economy from the new one.

This means, for one thing, eliminating differential tax exemptions that favor firms engaged in centralized, large-scale, capital-intensive production:  e.g., the depreciation allowance, the R&D credit, the deductability of interest on corporate debt, and the exemption of stock transactions involved in mergers and acquisitions from capital gains tax).  Then lower the corporate income tax enough to be revenue-neutral.

It means, especially, eliminating the biggest subsidy to economic centralization, and to artificially large market area and firm size – i.e., subsidies to long-distance transportation.  The Interstate should be funded entirely by weight-based user fees on trucking, which causes virtually all of the roadbed damage.  All subsidies to new airports or to expanding old ones should be eliminated, including all federal guarantees of local bond issues.

Perhaps most important of all, it requires radically scaling back the present strong “intellectual property” regime.  IP (through patent pooling and exchange, monopolies on current production technologies, etc.) is probably the single most powerful cartelizing force, which enables each industry to be concentrated in the hands of a few players.  It impedes the transfer of skills and new technology from the old manufacturing dinosaurs  to the kinds of small, local producers we need.  It also serves as a powerful bulwark to planned obsolescence, imposing legal restrictions on the manufacture of cheap generic replacement parts.

Scaling back IP law (a good start would be repealing the DMCA, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and the Uruguay Round’s TRIPS accord) would eliminate the barriers to the diffusion of skill and technology that currently prop up the old corporate dinosaurs of the software and entertainment industries, and facilitate their replacement by networked production on an open source model.  Please cut loose the MPAA, RIAA, and Bill Gates, and do so yesterday!

Finally, we need to eliminate all subsidies to large-scale agribusiness.  The result will be a flourishing sector of community-supported agriculture, replacing the old agribusiness dinosaurs as fast as new ground can be cultivated.

That’s my tentative estimate (based on Google election result and population statistics) of the percentage of Americans who voted for nobody for President of the United States on Tuesday.

US President Barack Obama knocked down about 60.7 million votes.

GOP challenger Mitt Romney polled about 57.8 million.

Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, 1.14 million.

Green candidate Jill Stein, about 400,000.

A few others, a few thousands or tens of thousands.

About 38.8% of the population supported one of the candidates; about 19.5% of the population supported the alleged “winner.”

61.2% of the population did not consent to be ruled at all, and fewer than one in five Americans consented to be ruled by Barack Obama. The figures are likely similar for most or all of the 435 US Representatives and 33 US Senators “elected” on Tuesday.

If these politicians support the system of government they claim to support — one in which governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed” — then the only order of business they have to discuss is who will turn the lights off as they depart Washington.

Don’t bet the ranch on it.

Congratulations. Your preferred candidate won a second term as president. I’m sure y’all are too busy dancing in the streets and smilecrying and stuff to be on the Internet right now, but this will be here when all that is done.

Now that Obama has got himself a second term, you and I need to have a chat. I just have a couple questions I need to ask, and then you can be on your merry Democrat way.

1. Now that this is no longer an “election year,” will you now pay attention to the drone strikes, kill lists, allowance of indefinite detention and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants?
2. Now that Obama is safe in the White House until 2016, will you pay attention to the continued incarceration of Private Manning?
3. Now that your dude has won, will you look critically at his connections to the parasitic financial institutions that sent our economy spiraling out of control in 2008?
4. Now that there will never be another Obama campaign, will you protest with us against all of the above?

Or will you stay home, wring your hands and sit there looking worried that your friends won’t like you anymore if you speak out against all of these things, things that people in other countries are justifiably mad at? Will you still call people who protest these things impractical, “emotional progressives,” or worse?

Will you sit there, pensively waiting for Obama to become the man he promised he would be in 2008?

Here’s a hint: he won’t.

You don’t have to be an anarchist to see that the man you elected, while ostensibly “better” in a couple of arguably important ways than the man he was running against, is still no one to write home about. The “lesser evil” is still evil.

All we are asking is that you remove your head from your collective behind and, at the very least, help us make sure that his evil doesn’t grow.

You don’t need Adbusters to tell you to take to the streets. Just do it.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Queridos partidarios de Obama: carta de un anarquista.
• Dutch, Beste Obama supporters: een brief van een anarchist.
• Swedish, Kära Obama-Supporters: Ett brev från en anarkist.
• Portuguese, Caros Partidários de Obama: carta de um anarquista.
• Russian, Уважаемым сторонникам Обамы: послание от анархиста.

“Hitherto there has been no alternative for those who lived by their labour, but that of labouring either each for himself alone, or for a master. But the civilizing and improving influences of association, and the efficiency and economy of production on a large scale, may be obtained without dividing the producers into two parties with hostile interests and feelings, the many who do the work being mere servants under the command of the one who supplies the funds, and having no interest of their own in the enterprise except to earn their wages with as little labour as possible. The speculations and discussions of the last fifty years, and the events of the last thirty, are abundantly conclusive on this point. If the improvement which even triumphant military despotism has only retarded, not stopped, shall continue its course, there can be little doubt that the status of hired labourers will gradually tend to confine itself to the description of workpeople whose low moral qualities render them unfit for anything more independent: and that the relation of masters and work-people will be gradually superseded by partnership, in one of two forms: in some cases, association of the labourers with the capitalist; in others, and perhaps finally in all, association of labourers among themselves.”

– John Stuart Mill in Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy

The Center for a Stateless Society has been give permission to (re)publish the BHL Left-Libertarian Symposium articles on our site, on the condition that comments be directed back to the originals.

The following article was written by Matt Zwolinski and published on Bleeding Heart Libertarians,  October 21, 2012.

C4SS Zazzle

What is “left-libertarianism”? Is it really libertarian? Is it really leftist?

Starting next Monday, November 5th, you’ll find out – because that’s when the BHL / C4SS Symposium on Left-Libertarianism begins!

Drawing inspiration from the likes of Benjamin Tucker, Thomas Hodgskin, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, left-liberarianism purports to combine a (libertarian) support for free(d) markets with a trenchant (leftist) critique of contemporary corporate capitalism. The current wave of left-libertarian scholarship is led by the likes of Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson, Sheldon Richman, and our own Roderick Long and Gary Chartier. You can find their writings on the web at the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and at the Center for a Stateless Society. And now, thanks to the hard work of Charles and Gary, you can find a great sampling of classic and contemporary left-libertarian writings in their anthology, Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty, available as a free PDF or in paperback [and free audiobook].

Starting next Monday and continuing through Friday, November 16th, BHL and C4SS will run a series of six lead essays on various aspects of left-libertarian thought. Those lead essays will run on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with shorter response essays and discussion in the comments thread taking place in between. As always, we welcome participation from our readers, both in the comments thread here and at your own blogs.

Here’s the lineup:

Week 1 – The Left Libertarians

• Monday, November 5 – Gary Chartier, BHL-blogger and Professor of Law and Business Ethics at La Sierra University
• Wednesday, November 7 – Roderick Long, BHL-blogger, senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, and president of both the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society
• Friday, November 9 – Charles Johnson, blogger at Radgeek and occasional guest-blogger at BHL

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

A number of articles have been floating around the interwebs offering a powerful argument against centralized education or instruction. The following quote from Dvice.com’s article “Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction” contains a particularly striking quote:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

Once the “utilitarian” arguments for state sponsored social capitalization are stripped away, through mountains of practical experiments and demonstrative case studies, the only remaining argument for the continued existence of these structures and institutions is “power”. The political class needs “power” to maintain its position and livelihood and the other, industrious class, doesn’t – and would flourish beyond imagine in its absence.

For millennia, human populations have clustered near navigable waterways — oceans and rivers — for obvious reasons. They were important food sources, they constituted the main highways of commerce, and travel and communication over land were slow affairs.

Things are different now, due to everything from the locomotive and the automobile to the telegraph, telephone, radio and Internet. And yet I read somewhere awhile back that 90% of Americans (to pick a nationality) still live within 30 miles of a coast (including the Great Lakes) or major river.

I’m not trying to open up an argument on climate change here. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that things like Hurricane Sandy are just the way it is and always has been.

Still, it seems kind of silly to put so much major economic infrastructure right up against the capricious seaboard when most of the population that infrastructure supports (virtually the entire population not directly engaged in sailing or servicing ships and the things coming on and off those ships) doesn’t really need to live or work there.

Arnold Kling is pessimistic about the cost and time involved in fixing New York. The repair bills for Sandy are already being guesstimated in the $50 billion range.

At what point do the operators of (for example) the New York Stock Exchange say “you know, we could do this just as easily from Indianapolis and hardly ever have to wade to work?”

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