“[A]t what point,” asks Zen Anarchist at Everything Voluntary, “is somebody libertarian enough for your vote?”

I think Zen is asking the wrong question, at least to the extent that he’s addressing most non-voting libertarians.

We aren’t not voting for Gary Johnson because he’s “not libertarian enough.”

Even if he dropped his support for “humanitarian war,” stopped promoting the “Fair” Tax, and retracted/apologized for his call to conscript every business owner in the United States as an unpaid ICE agent, etc., voting for him (or for any other candidate) would not — in the opinion of non-voting libertarians — advance liberty.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and that’s fine — I understand the various arguments in favor of voting, and unlike some non-voting libertarians I don’t consider voting to be a moral failure as such — but my own position is that if we want to get rid of the state, one easy first step to take is to join the non-voting, non-consenting majority and get on with more important things than voting.

When “privatization” just means transferring the state’s coercion and use of taxes to private companies, it’s not a reduction in statism. Instead, it builds up perverse incentives and makes the state less transparent.  This can be seen quite clearly in the case of the for-profit prison industry.   It turns out that while for-profit prisons still receive our tax dollars and still lock peaceful people in cages, they’re not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

And while we’re on the subject, profiting from caging humans isn’t just for the prison operators.   An excellent report released this week documents how Wells Fargo is getting in on the authoritarian action.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the US Military has classified WikiLeaks an “enemy of the state”. This is the same legal category reserved for the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency. This classification carries some potential penalties for personnel:

Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with “communicating with the enemy”, a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.

Just so we’re clear, C4SS supports WikiLeaks and all “WikiLeaks” like projects. We not only host a WikiLeaks mirror site, but are currently raising funds to maintain a Tor relay node. Tor relay nodes help whistleblowers and journalists get their stories regarding corporate and government corruption into the right hands or into the open, safely and anonymously.

More than 281 million views, and recognized by The Guiness Book of World Records as the most liked YouTube video in history.

Top of the iTunes charts in 31 countries, and all over the Billboard Top 100 categories.

Nominated for best video in the upcoming MTV Europe Music Awards.

How could Psy possibly have accomplished all that without a state-enforced intellectual “property” monopoly? The answer, of course, is that there’s just no way he could have.

Oh, wait:

Psy has produced a video that is born to spawn and has further facilitated this by waiving his copyright.

Enjoy:

Legal scholars at NYU and Stanford have just released a new study titled Living Under Drones.   The study contains a wealth of useful information.  It debunks pro-war myths that the strikes only have minimal civilian casualties.  It illustrates how the strikes are illegal and potentially destructive to US security interests.  But most importantly, the study interviewed over a hundred Pakistanis directly impacted by the strikes, and detailed the horrible cost the bombings exact on individuals and communities.

I would urge you to read some personal stories  from victims of the drone war.

The Industrial Radical, the long-awaited periodical from the Molinari Institute (C4SS’s parent organization), is finally available! Details on the first issue here.

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

Apple turns down an app to track u.s. drone strikes in Afghanistan.

If only the drones were slim and rectangular with rounded corners! Then Apple would move heaven and earth to shut them down.

It occurs to me that Mitt Romney, Barack Obama and I do, in fact, have one extremely significant thing in common: All three of us want to run my life.

In a particularly myopic example of confusing America’s monopoly capitalism with a free market, Philip Caper (published at Truthout) argues that “full-blown market-based competition doesn’t work” when it comes to health care. One wonders how he might know that, given that what we’re seeing now (and have been seeing for decades) is just about as plainly constrained and engrossed by the rich and powerful as a system of delivering health care products and services could be. Now, as a criticism of corporate capitalism and the collusion between the state and capital, Caper’s would be close to the target. “The pricing of health care services,” Caper says, “is so complicated and irrational that it is impossible to determine in advance what the costs of treatment will be.” True enough, and that’s the predictable result of annulling the real free market’s price mechanism, which functions only when buyers and sellers are allowed to move freely with their resources.

Out of control costs and the low quality that Caper complains of are features of monopolism, of a capitalist package of policies that includes patents on drugs and supplies, lofty legal/regulatory barriers to market entry, and outright prohibitions against many organizational models for offering health care. Caper writes, “The next time somebody tells you we need more competition in health care, just remember that what you’re hearing is the sound of smoke being blown in order to create a smokescreen.” Right, the Big Business lobbies that tailor U.S. health policy only want you to think they believe in competition. And Caper ate it up. Writing in 1893, market anarchist William Bailie had already answered Caper’s shallow understanding of genuine competition:

We are told that competition among the capitalists leads also to low wages, to lying, adulteration, and all manner of deception; . . . Also it is said that competition is the parent of monopoly, that it drives the capitalists to combine, and gives us the trusts by means of which they rob the people with impunity. But this kind of reasoning is superficial. . . . where [competition] is assailed today, a close analysis reveals, not the evil effect of competition, but the need of more liberty.

The reigning king of intellectual “property” litigiousness looks to be on the receiving end for a little of what it’s been dishing out. Per Tom’s Guide:

Switzerland’s Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, or Swiss Federal Railway service, has accused Apple of copying the design of the Swiss Federal Railway service clock. Apple’s version of this clock appears in the iPad’s Clock app, which debuted as part of iOS 6, the latest version of Appe’s mobile operating system. According to MacRumors, the trademark and copyright for the clock, designed by Hans Hilfiker, is owned by the Swiss Federal Railways service.

This July, I wrote an op-ed for C4SS about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would strengthen the patent monopoly’s power to restrict access to medicines. But medical access is not the only area where the Trans-Pacific Partnership would threaten liberty. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s leaked sections on “intellectual property” suggest that the treaty would restrict freedom of speech online. Earlier this month, EFF presented their concerns at an event hosted by the Office of the US Trade Representative. Their report on this event should be very interesting to C4SS readers. It shows the lack of transparency involved in the TPP negotiations, as well as the propaganda campaign that the entertainment industry is mounting to protect themselves from the competition and free expression the internet has enabled.

If you wish to understand how corporate capitalism operates as a state-guaranteed system of privilege, the TPP provides a perfect illustration. In a truly Orwellian fashion, basic liberties are being restricted for the explicit purpose of restricting competition, and yet it’s being passed off as “free trade.”

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. . . . These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. . . . And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

This quote is from the infamous surreptitious video made of Mitt Romney’s speech at a fundraiser last spring. What are we to make of it?

The first thing to note is that Romney is typical of the right wing of the ruling elite, which often portrays lower income beneficiaries of the welfare state as a threat to the established order. In this view, they are dependent on government; they wish to remain that way; and they see themselves as victims.

(more…)

It looks like Americans for Prosperity is planning to hold an anti-Occupy rally in New York. The Guardian quotes Steve Lonegan, who achieved fame for trying to force Spanish-language billboards out of Bogota, NJ while he was mayor and was later supported by Ron Paul when he ran for governor:

The Occupy Wall Street crowd is nothing but a fringe element of malcontents bent on mayhem and destruction… These are people who despise free enterprise.

Free enterprise, like advertising to people who don’t read English well?

A more perceptive quote is found in a comment on the article responding to Lonegan’s charge.

Americans have this myth that capitalism is free enterprise. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, capitalism is the enemy of free enterprise…Capitalists are the 1%, free enterprise is the 99%.

In 2003, activist Rachel Corrie was run over and killed by an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozer.  Last month, an Israeli court dismissed a lawsuit by her family.   Rather than holding the Israeli government responsible for killing this woman, the court’s ruling blamed the victim.

Such victim blaming is appalling, but not surprising.  The Israeli government was the arbitrator in a dispute about itself.  Institutions cannot be held accountable for their abusive actions when they hold a monopoly on arbitration and legal accountability.  We have seen this repeatedly in cases of police brutality, prosecutorial misconduct, and war crimes.  The state holds a monopoly on law.  When it commits crimes, it won’t hold itself accountable.  Instead, it will blame the victim.

According to Google Analyics, 10.2% of the Center’s web visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The German government recommends otherwise.

I agree.

Fox News bewails the fall of the United States in the 2012 Economic Freedom of the World report, a study co-authored by Florida State University economist James Gwartney. Perusing the report, which finds Hong Kong and Singapore in first and second places, I was reminded of a passage from Marx Edgeworth Lazarus’ review (in an 1885 issue of Liberty) of the work of individualist and land reform champion Joshua King Ingalls. Praising Ingalls, Lazarus describes how he “exposes the hypocrisy of defending the actual business world by laws of tendency, as it were, in a vacuum; while ignoring the continual intervention of circumstances, and especially of government,–i.e., of arbitrary wills,–to frustrate [those laws of tendency].”

Throughout his life and work, Ingalls always contended that genuine laissez-faire could cure most of the ills associated with the labor question. The problem was that many economists and mainstream commentators had mistaken a system of state privilege for a condition of economic freedom. We’ve never gotten away from that, of course, with outlets like Fox News keen to brandish the guidon of a most unfree capitalist domination of the earth under the pretense of “Freedom of the World” reports. Coercive state protection of capital’s prerogative of demanding tribute, it must be said, has nothing to do with free markets or laissez-faire. But those are used equivalently by the great and seemingly growing list of these reports–themselves fairly interchangeable. We might do well to remember that, just as Ingalls and Lazarus had a conception of freedom quite different from those of many laissez-faire advocates of their day, so do many contemporary libertarians recognize the distinct difference between the now strictly potential freedom of the world and the “Freedom of the World” we apparently have.

Reminding us that states are merely marauding bands, violently appropriating land (and other) resources that they have no labor title to, long-held antagonisms between the Chinese and Japanese reignited this week. Sure enough, the land question remains, its importance brought to the forefront whenever we’re shown the utter chaos that the “order” of the state actually produces. It’s a matter of course that the dueling, turf-warring gangs holding us captive should demand our loyalty, and no less surprising that most have come to genuinely identify with their respective captors. Nationalism, as a central piece of the liturgical framework of statism, operates to shift attention away from the flaws underlying each and every instance of political rulership in favor of more immediate and concrete enemies. The islands that China and Japan both claim dominion over are but a small instance of a historical pattern of political titles placed in opposition to those that would be created and/or recognized by libertarian principles. If the Chinese are sore about these islands (Senkaku to the Japanese, Diaoyu to the Chinese), how sore indeed should all of us be at the history of political conquest that gave us the distribution of land (and other resources) we have today?

This article at Fast Company does a good job summarizing the philosophy behind the project.

Is their use of China’s special economic zones as their best example of how to lift millions out of poverty the most blatant vulgar-libertarian fallacy?

Or am I missing something?