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?

According to Mitt Romney, 47% of Americans “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.”

So 47% of Americans are members of Congress and/or the armed forces?

A historical snippet of the left/right distinction that left-libertarians are sympathetic to from dictionary.com.

Sinister? I am sure “they” think so. “The better one”? I am sure “we” think so. Would sit on the left side of a King expressing our opposition to a monarch and monarchy, and favoring more democratic institutions? You got us, dead to rights.

During the election season the words left and right denote political affiliation more than spatial direction. But where do these associations come from?

The left hand has long been associated with deviance. The word “sinister” originally meant “to the left” in Latin. The word “left” comes from the Old English word lyft, which literally meant “weak, foolish.” To avoid the negative and superstitious associations of the left side, many languages used euphemisms for it. In Old English the left side was called winestra, which meant “friendlier.” In Greek it was called aristeros or “the better one.”

When did the political affiliation of these two common words arise? In fact, the association is not American at all. It originated during the French Revolution. In the 1790s, King Louis XVI  was fighting with the Legislative Assembly. Like our modern-day House of Representatives, seating in the French Legislative Assembly was arranged based on political affiliation. The King sat in front of the assembly. To his right sat the conservative Feuillants who backed the king and believed in a constitutional monarchy. To his left sat the liberal Girondists and radical Jacobins who wanted to install a completely democratic government. Oddly enough, in the U.S. House of Representatives the tables have turned: members of the Republican party sit to the left of the House Speaker and members of the Democratic party sit to his or her right.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that Left and Right denoted political affiliation in Britain and the US, and the more politically loaded terms “leftwing” and “rightwing” were not widely used until after 1960 according to Google’s NGram viewer.

I’m tired of Obama’s supporters boasting–falsely–that he kept his promise to end the war in Iraq. First, the war isn’t over. Sectarian violence is still commonplace. The millions of refugees created by the U.S invasion in 2003 still have not returned home.

Second, Obama withdrew the last U.S. troops only because George W. Bush was forced by the Iraqi government, which is allied with Iran, to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) dictating a full withdrawal at the end of 2011. Bush wanted dozens of permanent bases but Prime Minister Maliki said no.

As 2011 wore on, Obama sent War Secretary Panetta to beg Maliki to “ask” that U.S. troops remain in Iraq. Maliki refused, especially after Muqtada al Sadr, the influential Shi’ite leader, threatened to resume his Mahdi Army’s resistance to U.S. occupation. Maliki also told Panetta there would be no U.S. bases.

Obama withdrew the troops because–despite his best efforts–he was ordered to do so under terms reluctantly agreed to by his predecessor.

Obama’s supporters should stop lying about how the U.S. occupation in Iraq ended.

A recent column in Investors Business Daily took up the task of comparing a few of the different iterations of “capitalism” that we hear discussed these days, “real capitalism,” “crony capitalism,” and “state capitalism.” Real capitalism, the kind favored by the author, is placed in opposition to the bailouts of Chrysler and GM, phenomena which the author must then somehow fit into his worldview of adulation for America’s corporate giants.

Since there is of course no way that Big Biz could really be the villain of the tale, could really be the true beneficiary of Big Government, he says, “It wasn’t so much an auto company bailout as a bailout of a union whose workers were averaging $70 an hour in wages and lavish vacation, pension, and health insurance benefits — which played a big part I nearly destroying the companies. “No, no, it couldn’t have been corporate welfare for the rich! No way — we know that they earn their keep. It was those darn workers again, always ruining “real capitalism” by trying to get something for nothing, perquisites like a survivable retirement and some decent health insurance; they ought to be ashamed. IBD demonstrates the lengths that capitalism’s many apologists will go to in order to disregard the conclusions that actual political economy presents about the relationship between capital and the state. They couldn’t very well admit that even their “real capitalism” is a system of privilege in contradiction to the free market, so when the basest, most obvious instances of privilege crop up, they’re forced to chalk them up to those nasty unions. Then they can comfortably call it “state capitalism” and go right back to defending the rich as innovators, entrepreneurs and hard workers. But despite all of these eager hymns to capitalism, they almost always tend to ignore the most deeply rooted forms of state granted privilege, handicaps on competition that don’t benefit labor but systematically disadvantage it. The lesson? Whenever some talking head tells you that “[t]oo few people in the federal government favor capitalism,” think for a bit on the aggregate effect of the many subsidies, licenses, regulatory burdens and other barriers to full competition. All of that is helping wage laborers more than corporate execs? Could’ve fooled me.

Exciting news from the Cato Institute: It has just issued its first ebook: Anarchism and Justice by Roy A. Childs Jr., a collection of writings by the great libertarian author and editor. Childs (1949-1992) was the long-time editor of Libertarian Review and the Lassez Faire Books catalog. He persuaded many young libertarians of market anarchism in the 1970s (me included) with his open letter to Ayn Rand, included in the volume. Also included is Roy’s refutation of Robert Nozick’s “invisible hand” theory of the emergence of the minimal state. George H. Smith contributed an introduction.

“We must start out as anarchists,” Roy writes, “and have the advocates of the state make out their case.”

Here is the table of contents:

• Anarchism and Justice
• Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand
• The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism: An Open Letter to Objectivists and Libertarians
• The Invisible Hand Strikes Back
• Anarchist Illusions

The ongoing violent protests against American embassies throughout the Muslim world are almost entirely being attributed to anger over the anti-Islam YouTube video Innocence of Muslims.   But some news sources, including UK newspaper The Independent, are examining how the protests and attacks may be part of a planned response to U.S. foreign policy.  As many of the protests are happening in Yemen, I would strongly encourage C4SS readers to re-visit Jeremy Scahill’s excellent article Washington’s War in Yemen Backfires.  Scahill provides a detailed and compelling account of the US government’s ongoing aggression in Yemen, and how this violence motivates resentment of America and support for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).