A couple of days ago liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias described how zoning laws prohibit mixed-use neighborhoods.  Rather than having neighborhood groceries, bars, and small businesses within easy walking distances of residences, we have a monoculture pattern of development in which homogenous bedroom suburbs are separated by considerable distances from the places we work and shop, and the only way to get from one to the other is by negotiating a series of Checkpoint Charlies at one cloverleaf after another.  “I really and truly wish libertarians would spend more time working on this kind of issue,” Yglesias said.

Well, certainly there’s a highly vocal libertarian contingent (“You’ll take away my car when you pry my cold, dead foot off the gas pedal”) that defends sprawl as the result of free market forces, and equates opposition to sprawl and the car culture with statist paternalism.   John Stossel, for example, attacking the “myth” that “urban sprawl is ruining America,” strongly implied that the current pattern of suburban development reflected the average person’s preferences, and dismissed opposition to sprawl and suburban monocultures as a movement of elitist social engineers.  And he cited James Kunstler as an example of that breed.

Interestingly, though, a libertarian need go no further than Kunstler’s book “The Geography of Nowhere” to get a clear idea of the role of the state in promoting suburbanization and the car culture.  Kunstler devotes an entire chapter to the role of Robert Moses’s intergovernmental authorities in the first large-scale experiment with urban freeway systems on Long Island.

Since then, local governments have been almost universally dominated by an unholy alliance of real estate developers and other commercial interests whose agenda centers on building new freeways.  Where I live, the primary responsibility of the Arkansas Third District Congressman is to bring home highway pork.  U.S. Hwy 471, the “John Paul Hammerschmidt Expressway,” is named for our former Congressman (and its chief landmark, the Bobby Hopper tunnel, honors a former highway commissioner–and before that a Ford dealer–of that name).  In a typical election, all the candidates for city council give “building more roads” as their top priority–which means building new roads to “relieve congestion,” most of it generated by the housing additions and strip malls that sprang up along the last  new road they built to “relieve congestion.”

You’d have to be pretty obtuse to miss a central point of Kunstler’s book:  suburbanization and the car culture were central to urban planning in the decades after World War II, and were in fact mandated by the planners.

The typical urban design platte excluded all businesses from residential areas, and mandated large setbacks and enormous front lawns.  An amusing (if appalling) illustration of the latter is Georgetown.  The old prewar houses, with their front porches cozily situated fifteen feet or so from the tree-lined sidewalks, were grandfathered in to the post-WWII plattes.  But when a house burned down, a new house built on that lot had to follow the new mandates:  so one house on the block was a Brady Bunch-style split-level ranch, set far behind its neighbors, with a front lawn like a golf course.

We see the same pattern endlessly repeated.  Not only is the corner grocery or drug store prohibited in the suburbs, but affordable walkup apartments are also prohibited over downtown businesses.  (Incidentally, Amory Lovins and the other authors of “Natural Capitalism” cited a study’s estimate that reinstating the corner grocer woud by itself reduce gasoline consumption by 6%.)

An article in The Freeman several years back remarked on the way cities and regulated utilities subsidized outlying development at the expense of the older part of town.  Centrally located residents are charged above cost for electricity and water so that utilities can be extended below cost to new developments, and pay higher sales taxes to subsidize the building of roads to serve the new housing additions.

And libertarians are far from universally being cartoonish defenders of sprawl like Stossel.  For example Michael Lewyn, in “A Libertarian Smart Growth Agenda,” advocates an anti-sprawl coalition focused on eliminating government subsidies to the car culture and regulatory impediments to mixed use development.

Fighting sprawl isn’t a matter of imposing new government mandates.  It’s a matter of scaling back existing restrictions on mixed use development, and prying the mouths of the real estate industry and the automobile-highway complex off the taxpayer teat. It’s not clear that can be done without abolishing government completely.

Eyebrows went up when Chrysler announced that it would be shutting down 25% of its US dealers. Since the auto company doesn’t pay the operating costs of its franchise dealerships, it looked like a bad business idea. Why would an already troubled company go out of its way to reduce the availability of its product?

If you guessed “politics,” you guessed right: The closures appear to have been pushed on Chrysler by the Obama administration, which has considerable leverage with the company due to the “public investment in” (read: taxpayer bailout of) America’s auto manufacturers.

I’m shocked — shocked — to hear that there may be an additional political angle to the closures. It’s starting to look like Chrysler dealership owners who make campaign contributions to Republican candidates are taking it in the shorts, while Friends of Barack are seeing their competitors eliminated.

Surprised? I’m surprised that you’re surprised. When the state gets involved in the market, politics gets involved in the market. And when politics gets involved in the market, it should be no surprise that that politics proceeds to impart its distinctive taint to “market decisions.”

The auto industry may be the most glaring example of this truism. As a matter of fact, if I could pick only one market sector to demonstrate the perverse effects of the state, it would probably be transportation.

You’ve probably heard of “biodiesel.” If you’re the average American, odds are pretty good that you think of it as one of those new-fangled environmentalist ideas. In point of fact, Rudolf Diesel’s early engines ran on, well, “biodiesel” — vegetable oils in general, and hemp oil in particular. Petroleum-based “diesel” wasn’t synthesized to mimic “biodiesel” for a good ten years after the first Rudolf Diesel engine debuted.

One of Henry Ford’s prototype cars not only ran on biofuels (his company operated a biomass conversion facility in Michigan in the 1930s!), but its body was constructed of hemp resins.

How did petroleum get into the driver’s seat? Politics, of course. Politically connected businessmen (in particular newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, an investor in DuPont) who were heavily invested in non-hemp materials (wood pulp for paper and petroleum for fuel) ran a scare campaign against hemp and lobbied for legislation to outlaw its cultivation and use. They got what they wanted — and we got the war on drugs, the 1970s Arab embargo and, a few years back, gas costing $5 a gallon.

Of course, the automobile also had to overcome competition from mass transit. How did they manage it? Do you even have to guess?

At one time, many buses, trolleys, streetcars and train lines were privately owned. They represented an obstacle to the automakers’ eventual “two cars in every garage” revenue model. In order to sell that model, the automakers first had to sell politicians on using taxpayer money to build a far more robust road and street network that could carry the traffic they wanted to (profitably) put on it. So, they got with the lobbying. In 1956, the automakers hit the subsidy jackpot when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation creating the Interstate Highway System.

As a result, most remaining “mass transit” is now also subsidized by the taxpayer and those garages with two cars each in them are scattered over hell’s half acre of “suburban sprawl” (connected by those taxpayer-funded roads).

Have the consequences of state intervention in the transportation market been uniformly bad? Probably not. Might some of the same consequences have transpired in a a market environment? Probably so. But there’s every reason to believe that a market free of political influence would have delivered different, and overall better, results — and the ill effects of the political influence are too visible and onerous to ignore.

Given the incestuous relationship between the state and the business community, it should come as no surprise when Friends of [Insert Currently Successful Politician’s Name Here] get their competitors bulldozed or receive preferential “no-bid” government contractors — or when Enemies of [Insert Currently Successful Politician’s Name Here] look up and see a bulldozer or an IRS audit coming their way.

“Separation of market and state?” Great idea … but the only way it will work out in the end is if the state actually packs its bags and moves out of the house.

Translations for the article:

• Spanish, El caso de los concesionarios Chrysler: nada nuevo bajo el sol 

“Memorial Day,” according to Wikipedia, “is a United States federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May …. Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in the military service.”

I confess to mixed feelings. On the one hand, it’s easy for remembrance of those killed in history’s wars to metamorphose into something else — glorification of the wars they died in or of the states they died in service to, for example. On the other hand, Santayana’s words ring true: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If we want to remember — to really remember, rather than simply heaping our own ideas on top of soldiers’ graves like dying flowers — best to let the dead speak for themselves.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

For those whose Latin is as rusty as mine, that last phrase translates as “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”

The author of the poem above, Wilfred Owen, served as a British officer in the 2nd Battalion, Manchester Regiment. He fell at the Second Battle of the Sambre a week before the armistice that ended World War I. He was 25.

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air —
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath —
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

Alan Seeger, an American, moved to Paris and, in 1914, joined the French Foreign Legion. He was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre on July 4th, 1916. He was 28.

Yes, war is the health of the state — so let’s take care to not treat Memorial Day as a propaganda occasion in service to the health of war.

Mourning, not celebration, is the appropriate response to the state’s rituals of mass murder. Having heard the dead, let us carry flowers to their graves, and promise ourselves what they could not promise us: Never again.

In an earlier weekly commentary piece, I argued that the enormous sums of black market money created by the drug war led to the proliferation of gangs — and turned local police forces into just another kind of gang fighting to control the drug money.

Anyone suspecting me of hyperbole only need read the news. One needn’t go far for examples of thuggish, ganglike police behavior.

Police lie and plant evidence to cover up their lawlessness, to manufacture “probable cause” for fishing expeditions against those they “know” are guilty, or to justify civil forfeiture of goodies they covet. Witness police attempts to plant drugs in the home of Katherine Johnson, an elderly woman murdered by a SWAT raid gone bad, in order to cover their tracks. The LAPD Ramparts Division routinely engaged in unprovoked beatings and shootings, stole narotics and dealt them themselves, and planted evidence to conceal their crimes. The Philadelphia police engaged in similar evidence planting. A simple Google search finds allegations of systematic planting of evidence in Huntington Beach, Atlanta, New York, Omaha, and St. Louis–all on the first page of the search results.

Police, like other gangs, terrorize the populations under their jurisdiction in order to secure obedience and maintain unquestioned rule over their “turf.”

A Cato Institute study on police militarization quoted urban police on deliberate shows of force in inner cities to intimidate the local population: “We send out two, two-to-four-men cars, we look for minor violations and do jump-outs, either on people on the street or automobiles. After we jump-out the second car provides periphery cover with an ostentatious display of weaponry. We’re sending a clear message: if the shootings don’t stop, we’ll shoot someone.”

Recently Homer, La. Police Chief Russell Mills was quoted as saying: “If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names. I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.”

Police, like other gangs, use terror to intimidate “snitches.”

A Queens bar owner, Eduardo Espinosa, suffers police harassment because he implicated police for framing suspects in a fake sting operation: “Every two to three weeks, there’s cops in here, searching the bar. If there’s no violation, they’ll make it up. I lost all my clients — everybody’s scared to come in my place right now.”

Police in Pickerington, Ohio organized a public pressure campaign to intimidate a character witness, high school principal Scott Reeves, who vouched for the character of a man who shot at a SWAT team he mistook for armed robbers.

The “Rate-My-Cop” website was created as a national public database, compiling publicly available records to enable people to compare the performance of police forces and individual police officers across the country when it came to such issues as police brutality, corruption, etc. So naturally police unions across the country began screaming to have the site shut down.

During Police Week in 2007, a D.C. resident collected 48 hours of footage of police misconduct, including public drunkenness and disorder, public urination, throwing empty liquor bottles on church property, and driving segways with open containers of alcohol. Naturally, D.C. police stood by and watched it all happen, and refused to respond to complaints. And when the heroic citizen posted the footage to YouTube, naturally he received numerous anonymous death threats from people who identified themselves as police.

Police, like other gangs, prey upon those living on their “turf.” Consider, for example, the recent story of Philadelphia police cutting the lines to surveillance cameras in immigrant-owned shops, and then helping themselves to snacks, alcohol, and cigarettes — not to mention cash from the till.

Fellow C4SS commentator Thomas Knapp recently cited Aaron Russo’s litmus test for whether we live in a police state. Imagine yourself driving normally, under the speed limit, when a cop pulls in behind you and begins to tail you through several turns. Are you reassured that you’re being protected and served, and gratified to know that your city’s finest are on the job? Or do you get nervous and start wondering what you did wrong, overcome with dread that you’re about to get pulled over for some unknown offense? If your reaction is the latter, you’re living in a police state.

Daniel Hauser is 13 years old. Remember that. It’s important.

Daniel is also at present, along with his mother, a “fugitive” from “justice” — defined by a court as the state’s putative authority to choose his medical treatments for him in opposition to his own choices and the choices of his parents.

Not surprisingly, the state’s court, when exercising that authority, has chosen to exercise it in favor of state-sanctioned monopolies on both the practice of medicine (state-licensed physicians who have effectively lobbied to exclude alternative practitioners from the market) and the provision of medication (“FDA approved” medications from Big Pharma versus remedies which don’t have politically connected backers willing and able to spend millions “convincing” bureaucrats of their safety and efficacy).

Daniel and his mother, Colleen Hauser, reject the state’s claim of authority in the matter of his medical decisions. Until earlier this week, that rejection took a relatively non-confrontational form: They argued their case in court. At some point, however, it became obvious to them that the game was rigged in favor of the state and its pets. Their choices would not be honored. The medical licensure lobby and the drug bureaucrats were going to make those choices for Daniel Hauser, and if necessary the state’s guns would be drawn on the Hauser family to ensure their compliance.

So, Daniel and Colleen Hauser ran. “Authorities” believe they’re headed for Mexico, where Daniel can get the treatments he has chosen instead of the treatments the state chose for him.

Good on them. Run, Daniel, run!

I’m not a doctor. I don’t play a doctor on TV, or even on the Internet. I don’t claim to know what treatment is most likely to prove effective versus Daniel Hauser’s cancer (Hodgkin’s lymphoma).

What I do know is that Daniel is 13 years old. If he’s in any way a normal adolescent boy, he’s faced life-or-death situations for years, on his own (or sometimes with his parents’ guidance), without a judge or police officer or doctor holding his hand. He’s crossed streets full of moving traffic. He’s looked over the edges of high places and decided not to jump. He’s seen the household chemicals under the sink and decided not to drink them.

That Daniel is still alive is pretty good evidence that he’s not completely incapable of thinking his own situations through and making his own decisions about those situations.

To some extent, the state obviously agrees: If Daniel found himself accused of a brutal murder, he could, if the state’s courts concurred, be “tried as an adult” for the crime.

But when Daniel rejects the recommendations of a state-licensed doctor (after, by the way, initially accepting those recommendations and experiencing their effects), he’s suddenly an incompetent child. When his parents, who have known and loved him for 13 years, and have managed to help him get through that 13 years alive, concur with him in that rejection, they’re suddenly incompetent adults.

Daniel’s story is not a medical story; it’s a political story. It’s not about Hodgkin’s lymphoma or chemotherapy; it’s about who’s in charge.

Randolph Bourne famously observed that “war is the health of the state.” The state, on the other hand, is the health of elites with the money to lobby it for monopolies and enforcement of those monopolies.

From its founding in 1847, the American Medical Association waged a 50-plus-year campaign to require state licensure for the practice of medicine in the United States, finally succeeding at the dawn of the 20th century. The Food and Drug Administration and its conversion into a bureaucratic monopoly preservation body soon followed.

The net effect of both organizations’ work hasn’t been to enhance the public’s safety. It’s been to cartelize health care and exclude competition.

AMA member doctors make more money than they could on the free market, because they guard the gates to the profession and the state puts their competitors in jail.

Pharmaceutical corporations rake in billions of dollars because they can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on bureaucratic approvals, and because the state puts their competitors who can’t come up with that kind of baksheesh out of business.

The reason we’re hearing about Daniel Hauser isn’t that he suffers from Hodgkins’. The reason we’re hearing about Daniel Hauser is that he and his parents had the gall and temerity to question the authority of the state, and to threaten, even if only in a small way, the prerogatives of the state’s favored elites.

A friend and mentor of mine, the late Aaron Russo, used to open some of his talks with a question: How can you know whether or not you live in a police state?

Aaron had a theory on the subject, or rather a method for answering the question:

Imagine yourself, he said, driving down the road. Not fast, not recklessly, just driving down the road as any normal person would drive to get from Point A to Point B.

Now, Russo said, imagine that as you pass an intersection, you look in the rearview mirror and see that a police car has turned onto the street behind you. The police officer isn’t running his siren and passing you on the way to the scene of some crime. He’s just settling in behind you, driving at the same speed as you … tailing you.

Are you comforted by the knowledge that the police are out on patrol, fighting crime? Or do you start to worry — do you get that tight feeling down in your gut, expecting to be pulled over at any moment for some offense that you don’t — probably can’t — know you’ve committed?

The latter reaction, Russo said, is a sign that you’re living in a police state: A society in which you and everyone around you are subject to the arbitrary whims, and expected to obey the every command, of “law enforcement personnel.”

If one follows the news at all, one can hardly be blamed for believing that the line separating relatively free society from police state has long since passed out of view in the rear-facing mirror of Russo’s question. It’s not infrequent these days to hear of individuals being arrested and charged with “failing to obey an order of a police officer” — or for “resisting arrest,” often with no charge cited to justify the arrest itself.

Calls for “reform in law enforcement” — review commissions, new regulations to restrain police and hold them accountable — may sound good, but they don’t get to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is political power itself, and more specifically its centralization and monopolization in the modern state.

You might be surprised to learn that in western civilization, “police” as we know them are a relatively recent historical phenomenon. The first tax-funded police force in England wasn’t created until the 18th century. Major American cities didn’t form government-sanctioned, tax-funded police forces until the mid-19th century, and in smaller towns and cities, “law enforcement” was often handled by local volunteers well into the 1900s.

As the state assumed more and more power over “law enforcement,” the focus naturally shifted. Volunteer watchmen — serving their communities and answerable to their neighbors — became “professional police,” serving the state and answerable only to their appointed bureaucratic superiors. As their professional structure formalized, they established their own powerful political lobbies to influence those superiors.

The result is what we see today: A symbiotic organism of state in which “law enforcement” serves the political class when called upon to do so, and in turn receives protection for its members. Tax-funded salaries and benefits, of course, but also considerable power to bully the public at will, with their badges serving as de facto shields from accountability for their actions.

The names change weekly, but the stories don’t: Police officers shoot innocent civilians, are placed on “administrative leave,” and are subsequently cleared by their fellow police officers in an “internal investigation” and returned to duty without ever facing a jury. Videos emerge of police officers clearly and without provocation abusing citizens, and if the incidents can’t be handled with the “internal affairs” dodge, we’re told that “a few bad apples” are to blame.

The corruption and abusive nature of “law enforcement” can’t be handled through minor reform; it’s a symptom, not the cause, and it is so intertwined with the nature of the state itself that the two cannot be separated. The political class’s attack dogs have gained a taste for power, and so long as we allow that class to rule us, those dogs will be fed.

In a 2005 interview, Bill Gates dismissed the free culture/open source movement as “some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises.”

Never mind Gates’ own hypocrisy on the subject. Never mind that he developed Microsoft’s BASIC compiler by a classic open source method: “The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.” Never mind that this enthusiastic dumpster diver had the nerve to write a letter to the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter in 1976, whining that the widespread infringment of BASIC was taking food out of his mouth (“most of you steal your software”) — despite being a multi-million dollar trust fund baby from birth.

Never mind what Gates practiced. Many a fortune founded in robbery has been sanctified by time.

What matters, rather, is what he preaches: if you don’t believe a return on effort should be guaranteed by the state, you’re a communist.

But as the American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker observed more than a century ago, removing privilege and monopoly means that free market competition will cause the benefits of innovation to be “socialized.”

The normal process, in a free market without entry barriers, is for an innovator to derive short-term economic rents from being the first on the market, and for those rents then to decline to nothing as competitors adopt the innovation and drive price down to production cost.

So anyone who believes in genuinely free markets is a “communist.”

As many critics of “intellectual property” have pointed out, the term is inherently self-contradictory. “Intellectual property” is fundamentally at war with the principles of genuine private property. “Intellectual property” can only exist by infringing the rights of genuine, tangible property. Copyrights and patents give the holder a de facto ownership right in other people’s physical property, and prevents prohibits them from using their own property in ways that the copyright or patent holder has been granted a monopoly on.

And the reason for this, if you examine the assumptions behind IP law, is that the “artist” or “innovator” has a right to state-guaranteed returns on his investment or effort.

So if we’re Copyright Communists, then Bill Gates and his good buddies at the RIAA and MPAA are Copyright Nazis.

Fascism is a system in which government guarantees a profit to favored business interests by protecting them — at gunpoint — from market competition.

The Copyright Nazis believe the creator’s right to a profit trumps the right of people to enter the market freely and use their own property as they see fit.

We Copyright Communists believe everyone has the right to do what he wants with his own property, and that nobody is entitled to a profit from the state.

Copyright Nazism, on the other hand, is “socialism” of the perverse kind described by Noam Chomsky: socialized cost and privatized profit. The real and genuine property of the many — their property in the fruits of their own labor, and their right to do with it as they will — is “socialized” for the benefit of the privileged. Bill Gates’ watchword, in short is Adam Smith’s “vile maxim of the masters of mankind,” frequently quoted by Chomsky: “all for ourselves .. and nothing for other people.”

Another Adam Smith quote that’s relevant to the Copyright Nazis: “‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

I declare myself the enemy of Gates, the MPAA and RIAA, and a friend of Adam Smith.

If this be communism, then make the most of it.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, ¿Comunismo del Copyright?

Over the course of the last 25 years or so, “privatization” has gone from innovative idea to over-used buzzword to standard government operating procedure (often described as “public-private partnerships”).

Last week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced its own privatization initiative: NASA intends to pay private firms to provide interim rockets and crew capsules while it develops a government replacement for the shuttle program. Other recent privatization trial balloons cover everything from Internet governance at the international level to foster care at the state level.

The idea behind privatization is that the private sector — the market sector — operates more “efficiently” than government, providing cost savings to the taxpayer. Company X, we’re told (probably truthfully) can produce the widget for a buck, where a state-owned and operated factory would require two bucks to produce the same widget.

That, of course, raises the question of what we need government for. Why not just buy the things we want on the free market in the first place, rather than passing our money to market providers through the hands of inefficient government bureaucracy, driving the total cost back upward toward that “inefficient government” price?

Convinced anarchists need no more justification than that question to reject privatization outright. The unconvinced, however, may require more evidence for the unacceptability of privatization. That evidence is abundant.

Privatization, as it is currently practiced, strengthens the state and weakens the private sector. While it was originally sold as bringing “market values” to “public sector” operations, in practice exactly the opposite has happened.

First of all, “privatization” is a misnomer. When a government project is “privatized,” the state generally retains substantial authority over that project — and takes a substantial financial rakeoff for “administration” and “oversight.” The retained authority keeps the whole project soaking wet in the smelly liquid of politics, and the rakeoff, as previously mentioned, pushes the real price back upward from “market prices” toward “political prices.”

Secondly, the enterprises attracted to, and most likely to garner contracts for, privatization schemes aren’t necessarily the most efficient market enterprises. Rather, they’re the enterprises which hire the best lobbyists and wield the most political influence. In this respect, “privatization,” rather than being a cure for government failures, is a vector for infecting the private sector with the same diseases.

Finally, there’s a flip side to the “public-private partnership.” While the state retains substantial authority over the projects, the contractors get tagged with substantial responsibility for the outcomes.

When a privatized project goes south — when it comes to light that inmates have been abused in “private” prisons, or prospectively when one of NASA’s “private” crew capsules loses atmosphere in orbit — our bureaucrats will point their fingers straight at the “private” contractors and hope we forget the piles of government standards those contractors were required to operate under.

The market entities, if there are any involved, take it in the shorts; more likely, these “market entities” are actually politically connected enterprises who’ll be back for another dip from the well after things blow over and fade into memory, but they at least get a public spanking to keep up appearances.

The government entities, on the other hand, move forward with their reputations unstained and their budgets untouched.

Privatization, as currently practiced, is a “heads the state wins, tails the state’s subjects lose” proposition. If a privatized project founders on scandal or capsizes on cost, it’s all the market’s fault and the state should get more directly involved. If a privatized project “succeeds,” the state takes the credit and throws more “privatization” bait into the water, bringing more of the “private sector” into its happy, spendthrift “public sector” family.

The alternative to privatization as currently practiced — let’s call it “sham privatization” — is real privatization: Taking the provision of traditionally “public” services away from government altogether. The nugget of truth at the core of sham privatization schemes is that yet, the market really is more cost-efficient than government. At everything.

In this study, Kevin Carson reviews libertarian perspectives on “intellectual property”; the ethics of the practice itself and the harms resulting from it. He finds that IP is an artificial, rather than natural, property right; creating scarcity rather than managing it. In that capacity, it has acted as an unjust and irrational state subsidy to corporate capitalism — distorting markets, doing violence to the concept of real property rights, forcibly transferring wealth to parasitic cartels and generally having a pernicious impact on the US domestic and global economies that is difficult to overstate. He concludes by debunking the myth of IP as supposedly necessary for incentive reasons.

Download: “Intellectual Property”: A Libertarian Critique

I. The Ethics of “Intellectual Property”
II. Privilege as Economic Irrationality
III. “Intellectual Property” and the Structure of the American Domestic Economy
IV. “Intellectual Property” and the Global Economy
V. “Intellectual Property,” Business Models and Product Design
VI. Is “Intellectual Property” a Necessary Incentive?

An old saw among opponents of ever more powerful government is the tale of the boiling frog. As the story goes, a frog can be placed in a pot of cool water and, if the heat is turned up slowly enough, find itself boiled alive without ever thinking to jump out.

Having never myself attempted the experiment, I can’t say with any confidence whether or not the tale is literally true. As metaphor, however, it goes right to the heart of the nature of the state.

We, the frogs of 2009, permit ourselves to be subjected to horrors at the hands of government which our forebears of 1976 would have rejected out of hand, which our ancestors of 1876 would have treated as revolutionary casus belli, and which the generation of 1776 would have simply found itself unable to envision.

Thirty years ago, we’d have laughed at the suggestion that government-issued ID and entry in a government database might one day be required to purchase “over-the-counter medicines” like pseudoephedrine.

Only a little more than a hundred years ago, morphine was an “over-the-counter” medicine.

Two hundred years ago, the idea of requiring doctors to be licensed by the state was unheard of and would have been rejected as alien to basic American principles of government.

It’s not the nature of the state which has changed over the centuries. Rather, what has changed are the technologies available to the state’s factotums for the purpose of turning up the heat beneath us frogs — and, apparently, our willingness to tolerate the slow but steady increase in temperature. If you don’t believe me, ask Pierre-Joseph Prodhoun:

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Proudhon wrote that in 1851, only a year after Allan Pinkerton formed the detective agency which would pioneer the science of state surveillance, at a time when the computer power the state uses for “data-mining” today was little more than a fanciful idea — the “analytical engine” — in the mind of Charles Babbage, and at a time when new forces, labor and capital, were at the beginning of their organized struggles to seize control of the state in their own interests as the old feudal interests drew their last crackling breaths.

Even so early in the arc of Leviathan’s rise, Proudhon understood that those who rely on the state to secure and protect their interests won’t — can’t — tolerate any true limits on their power, either theoretically or in practice.

As the bodies pile up — millions, nay, hundreds of millions or even billions of frogs cooked on the state’s battlefields, boiled in the state’s prisons, fried by the state’s regulations, poached by the state’s taxes — most of our fellow frogs wallow insensate in an ever hotter hot tub, while some few vie incessantly through politics for access to the knob which controls the burner.

If past history is any indication of future trends, it seems likely that that knob turns in only one direction — “up.” And if that’s the case, politics can never save us. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to screw up the courage to jump.

Have you ever noticed that the more politicians “cut” government spending, the more government spends?

Last month, President Obama put on a dog and pony show featuring his demand for $100 million in “spending cut” proposals from executive branch leaders. Earlier this week, the numbers on the “cuts” went up dramatically to $17 billion … and yet somehow Obama’s budget proposal, if passed, will represent the largest government budget in US history, so big that that $17 billion amounts to barely a drop from its bucket.

Hint: When a budget gets bigger, it isn’t being “cut.” It’s being “grown.”

One deception politicians use to turn increases into “cuts” is “baseline growth.” Once a government program is established, it is assumed that the amount of money required to sustain its operations will increase every year by some established percentage rate. If the program’s initial budget is $100, and its “baseline growth” projection is 5%, its projected budget for the second year will be $105, for its third year $110.25, and so on.

If, in the second year, the politicians set this program’s budget at $103 instead of $105, they then duly inform the citizenry that they’ve “cut” its funding by $2, when in fact they’ve raised that funding by $3.

This kind of legerdemain enables politicians to take any rhetorical tack they like, and to take different tacks for different constituencies.

Back in the 1990s, when the Republican Congress attempted to reduce the projected growth of Medicare spending (resulting in wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Clinton White House), I personally caught “my” congressman — a “small-government conservative” Republican — telling two different stories to his constituents:

To his “smaller government” constituents, he bragged about the cut in Medicare spending that he was backing.

To his “I’m older and rely on Medicare” constituents, he bragged about his proposal for an increase in the Medicare budget.

Whether he was lying or telling the truth to either or both constituencies depends on whether or not you buy the whole “baseline growth” dodge.

“Baseline spending” isn’t the only deceptive tactic for creating “cuts” while increasing spending. Cutting particular line items within a budget category while increasing overall spending on that category works too.

For example, President Obama’s budget calls for an overall increase in “defense” spending — yet his Republican opponents are raising the roof over defense cuts, because specific projects within the broader “defense” category are marked for reduced funding (or maybe just for a reduction relative to “baseline growth” … who knows?).

Opportunities for budget skulduggery are compounded, of course, by the fact that there are no limits.

When you or I budget for a project, we have to take into account the amount of money at our disposal: What we have on hand and perhaps how much we can borrow on the basis of our creditworthiness. When politicians budget for their projects, they arrogate to themselves the prerogative of borrowing any amount that they don’t think they can get away with milking directly from the taxpayer’s teat (and assigning responsibility for repaying the loan to the taxpayer anyway).

Government budget tricks are built into the way government does things. They’re part and parcel of any system based on a theoretically limited ability of A to coerce B into paying for whatever A wants. Once the element of coercion is introduced, attempts to get around the limitations come with it.

Above, I’ve used the term “government” as a substitute for a particular form of government: The state. I’ve done that because over the course of several centuries, we’ve all been conditioned to think of the state as the only, or at least standard, form of “government.” Now, I’d like to take a moment and ask you to re-think that association.

“Government” is all around us. “Governing” is something we do every day, all day long. Four people ordering a pizza, deciding on the toppings, and splitting the bill are “governing” themselves as a temporary group with a known goal. Every household is a “government.” Every club, every church, every golf foursome governs itself, and most of them do so quite well and without any need or desire to pull guns on each other.

The problems we associate with “government” arise when we allow ourselves to be talked into vesting designated “governors” with a monopoly on provision of this or that product or service, then tolerate coercive maintenance of that monopoly. In other words, they arise when we allow the creation of, or tolerate the continued existence of, the state.

The cure for the state is government — self-government.

Rupert Murdoch predicted this week that “the current days of the internet will soon be over.” As dead tree newspapers’ readership dwindles and Craigslist destroys the traditional advertising market, newspapers will increasingly try to capture value by charging for online content. The Murdoch papers, he said, were “already looking at that.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, John Kerry yesterday chaired hearings on the future of the newspaper industry. Representatives of several major newspapers and media chains called for an “exception” to antitrust laws that would allow the newspaper industry to agree on a common policy on establishing subscriber walls and charging for content, and form a united front against online content aggregators.

The sole voices of reason, Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost and Marissa Mayer of Google, warned that the industry would be shooting itself in the foot.

Kerry lamented the growing inability of newspapers to realize value from their “intellectual property” [sic] and expressed his desire to somehow enable them to prevent free access to their content without at the same time destroying the “openness” of the Internet. That’s a bit like wishing to eat meat without killing any animals. The proprietary content industry is barely able to make money even with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, so to make their business model viable would require an intrusive surveillance state on the scale portrayed in Richard Stallman’s “The Right to Read.”

Now, I recognize that there’s a problem. As traditional journalists never tire of pointing out, most of the content linked by bloggers and news aggregator sites was originally generated by old-fashioned shoe leather reporters. And those people have to eat.

But if what reporters do is essential, the same doesn’t necessarily go for traditional newspapers. News websites and bloggers, arguably, do a better job than traditional newspapers at aggregating the content generated by reporters. They do what journalists should do, and did do before the Lippmann model of “professional objectivity” turned journalism into a form of stenography: they have independent recourse to the realm of verifiable fact, and evaluate all the “he said, she said” statements of politicians and PR flacks in light of it.

In any case, regardless of whether the reporters are working for old-line newspapers or directly for online news aggregators, developing a business model by which they can be reimbursed for their work in an open-source world will be a real challenge. Crowdsourcing and reader-supported gift economies are one possibility. Sharing online advertising revenue to pay reporters for the “first sale” of their content is another. Supporting the reporters would probably cost a lot less if they were paid directly by the end-users at the aggregation sites without having to support the useless eaters in the corporate offices as well.

As Huffington said, “The discussion needs to move from ‘How do we save newspapers?’ to ‘How do we strengthen journalism? — via whatever platform it is delivered.’”

But the problem didn’t start with the Internet. Despite all the bathos about the poor content generators having to eat and all, dead tree newspapers have been downsizing traditional investigative reporters for decades now. It costs a lot more money to dig around and investigate the powerful than it does to run stories about JonBenet Ramsey, Shaundra Levy or Lacy Peterson. It’s more costly in terms of potential lawsuits and lost advertising revenue as well, compared to simply sending someone to the White House press pool to write down talking points from the guy behind the podium. Close to half of newspaper content is generated by press conferences and news releases from government and corporate PR departments–and that’s been true since long before the Internet.

So one way to support genuine investigative journalism might be to stop paying people to write down talking points in person, when the same thing can be achieved almost as effectively by cutting and pasting the talking points directly from the White House website.

And the Copyright Nazis’ proposed solution, of putting online content under lockdown behind a paid subscription wall, most definitely will not work.

All that’s necessary to circumvent such walls is one subscriber who knows how to cut and paste text into a blog post or an email to a discussion group, and the content is available for free online by a simple Google search. What’s more, the authoritarianism of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a paper tiger, in an age of strong encryption and bittorrent.

In the offensive-defensive technological arms race between the corporate state’s attempts to keep proprietary content under lockdown, and free people who want to freely distribute information, the latter will always be a step ahead.

Business models that depend on proprietary content are simply becoming untenable for technological reasons, and all the horses and men of the RIAA and MPAA together can’t put them together again.

Dear Friends,

As part of the Center’s mission to build awareness of market anarchist alternatives, we are launching a program to translate the Center’s publications into as many languages as possible. This effort will be 100% volunteer-driven, and I will serve as the initial coordinator for it.

As a volunteer translator or proofreader, you are invited to contribute translations into your native language(s) and/or to review those performed by others. Though any translation contribution is welcome, I am calling specifically for the support and contributions of native speakers of the world’s most widely-spoken languages:

• Chinese
• Hindi/Urdu
• French
• Arabic
• Spanish
• Russian
• Portuguese
• Bengali
• Indonesian/Malay
• German
• Japanese
• Italian

To become a c4ss translator: Choose any article on the site, translate it into your native language(s), and email it to translation@c4ss.org.

To become a c4ss translation proofreader: Email translation@c4ss.org indicating your interest and your native language(s).

Your participation level in this effort is entirely up to you. If you choose to dedicate yourself to putting all the Center’s content into your mother tongue, we — and perhaps the spare billion non-English speakers — will be delighted by your contribution. Likewise, if you find yourself with only occasional interest, time and energy to translate an item you find particularly important, those contributions will be accepted gladly, too.

Question: When does a libertarian call for bigger government?

Answer: Never.

Libertarianism persists as a phenomenon despite more schisms than you can shake a stick at: Anarchist versus minarchist, deontological versus consequentialist, purist versus pragmatist, radical versus reformer, political versus anti-political … you name it, there’s a schism for it.

What gives the libertarian movement such coherence as it possesses is that libertarians support “less state power.” Some libertarians support a little less state power, some libertarians support a lot less state power, and some libertarians support no state power — no state — at all.

What libertarians don’t support is more state power. Ever. Even in the biggest libertarian tent, that’s the dividing line: Less is libertarian, more isn’t.

So, when the Libertarian Party issues a press release calling on the US government to exercise more power than it does at present — more power than even Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano thinks is called for — something is obviously rotten in the state of Denmark. Or, rather, something’s rotten in Suite 200 of the Watergate, where the LP keeps its national headquarters.

Disclaimer: The Center for a Stateless Society is an anarchist, anti-political organization. The Libertarian Party is a political organization with members from across the nominally libertarian portion of the philosophical spectrum. There’s no formal cross-affiliation between the two, and in fact some members of each organization would argue that the other organization’s existence damages the movement. I’m in the often (especially so at this particular moment) uncomfortable position of being affiliated with both organizations.

In this case, it’s difficult to dispute the argument that the LP has crossed the line from libertarian advocacy to anti-libertarian advocacy. Its publicly stated position on “securing the borders” to combat, of all things, the swine flu “pandemic” (a phenomenon most associated with hysteria, not epidemiology) fails even the most broad-spectrum litmus test of libertarianism.

The unfortunate reality is that when one institution associated with the libertarian movement goes rogue in this manner, other such institutions are expected to respond. Silence is presumed to constitute assent, and that presumed assent can quickly taint public understanding of what our movement is all about.

Moreover, there are lessons to be learned from this incident. The press release is a symptom. The Libertarian Party’s systemic failure to uphold its own most basic principles is the disease … and it’s a contagious disease for which understanding is the vaccine.

Last year, the Libertarian Party held its biennial national convention in Denver, Colorado. At that convention, it adopted a new platform, including the following plank on Free Trade and Migration:

We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders. However, we support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a threat to security, health or property.

The portion of the plank following the word “however” is the portion used to justify the LP’s call for more state power on the border. It comes at the end of the plank. It constitutes only one of the plank’s four sentences. And it constitutes a minor exception to the positions outlined in the plank.

Since that plank was adopted, the LP has issued two press releases on immigration. One of those releases took a libertarian position (against the construction of a “border fence”), but prominently mentioned the “exceptions clause.” The other — this one — centered entirely around the “exceptions clause.”

That clause, like a few others in the platform, was included and adopted for the purpose of obtaining buy-in from “centrist” members of the LP — those who want “a little less government than we have now” and labor under a constant compulsion to “mainstream” the party by moving it closer to the existing political center.

That’s a dangerous compulsion. The libertarian movement — in both its political and anti-political manifestations — isn’t here to move to the center, it’s here to move the center. This incident graphically illustrates what happens when we confuse the two: Lean toward the center, and you’re likely to find yourself pulled right over the center line into enemy territory before you know what’s happening.

The jury is still out on whether political means can serve libertarian ends. This week’s evidence isn’t promising. If the Libertarian Party continues to promote anti-libertarianism, one hopes its members will act honestly — and change its name.

“When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.” –Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, 2002.

“You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.”
–Amazon Kindle, Terms of Service, 2007

Don’t buy the Kindle—at least until The Pirate Bay figures out how to crack its DRM and you can share ebooks files online. Until then, stick to buying your books on paper (or just check them out from the library and scan them). You can lend them or sell them at your own discretion, carry them around with you and read them wherever you want, without permission. In other words, when you pay for them they’re really yours.

I say that, by the way, as someone who markets a book via Amazon. I refuse to put out a Kindle edition of anything I’ve written. If you’ve got a Kindle reader and want Amazon to convert a pdf file of my books, have at it. I make it clear that everything I write is freely available under the Woody Guthrie public license: “Anyone found using our content without our permission will be considered mighty good friends of ours.” I refuse to enable the distributors of my work to behave abusively toward my readers, by stealing content they’ve previously paid for, or in any other way.

And as it turns out, if Amazon suspends your Kindle account (say, because you returned stuff too often), your reader becomes an inert chunk of plastic suitable for use as a doorstop or paperweight. All the e-books you’ve already bought and paid for can no longer be read. If you fall afoul of Amazon’s good graces, they’ll destroy your reader by remote and make the e-books you already “own” utterly worthless.

This is just another example of the general rule that, when it comes to digital content, you don’t ever own anything. As Cory Doctorow put it:

“in the name of protecting ‘intellectual property,’ big media companies are willing to do… violence to the idea of real property—arguing that everything we own, from our t-shirts to our cars to our ebooks, embody someone’s copyright, patent and trademark, that we’re basically just tenant farmers, living on the land of our gracious masters who’ve seen fit to give us a lease on our homes.”

If only somebody would figure out how to hack the Kindle’s DRM so you can duplicate e-book files and distribute them online.

The good news is that DRM is the biggest motivating force behind piracy. The DRM’ed stuff you buy “legally” seems deliberately calculated to be an affront to your convenience. You can’t switch from one platform to another, despite the fact that you supposedly “bought” it, because that would make it easy to lend to other people who might not pay for it. And it’s illegal to circumvent DRM so you can use the content you published in a way that’s easy for you. The traditional copyright doctrines of “fair use” and “first sale” that apply to printed material go out the window when it comes to digital content. But if you download a DRM-free version via a file-sharing network, you can do with it whatever you damn well please, without paying for the privilege of being kicked in the teeth.

The totalitarian lockdown society that the DRM mentality leads to, if pursued to its logical conclusion, was brilliantly illustrated by Richard Stallman in “The Right to Read” (just Google it—it’s free).

To repeat, DRM generates demand for pirated content.

And as it happens, Hugh D’Andrade of the Electronic Frontier Foundation claims Kindle’s DRM has already been cracked. Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay, last September expressed interest in the Kindle; he requested third party assistance in purchasing a reader and setting up a dummy account. Sunde was one of recently convicted The Pirate Bay defendants, but when it’s “hack Kindle’s DRM” time cracking down on particular individuals is like standing on the beach and commanding the tide to halt.

So please, somebody—hack the Kindle. The real pirates are at Amazon.

“The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this,” wrote William Graham Sumner in 1883: “A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C’s interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man.”

Graham’s formula is simple, compelling — and wrong.

In any voluntary scheme of philanthropy or humanitarianism, C’s ability to refuse support or service to the scheme is key. With that support or service, the scheme may succeed. Without it, the scheme fails from the start.

That’s why your mailbox is always full of letters urging contributions to this or that charitable organization. You’re the C who’s being asked to fund A and B’s project to cure D’s cancer or provide a laptop to D’s poor children.

In fact, it’s quite likely that A and B lavish more attention, and spend more money, on you as an actual or prospective C than they do on their chosen D. Many organizations spend as much money raising money from a multitude of Cs as they spend on serving the needs of their chosen Ds.

Provided that the solicited Cs regard the object of the exercise (some service to the identified Ds) as worthy or valuable and make their contributions voluntarily, and provided that no fraud is involved, this is all well and good.

The essence of government “scheme[s] of philanthropy or humanitarianism,” however, is encapsulated in the “made to do” clause in Graham’s formula. This clause makes C no more, and in some ways, less, forgettable.

Perpetual mass muggings are likely to rouse large numbers of the mugged (the Cs) to defensive or retaliatory action, even if the muggings are advertised as supporting the delivery of needed sustenance to some deserving Ds. No government could long survive on such a bald assertion of intent or undisguised method of operation.

Over time, the devotees of the state have developed a modus operandi for milking C without inspring such a rebellion — a method which requires them to convince C that he’s not merely C, but rather A, B, C and D all rolled into one.

“Yes,” C is told, “you must pay taxes. But these taxes are levied on you by you. You’re represented in government, and you’re given a voice in who acts as your representative. You are not merely C, but also A and B.”

“Yes,” the politician says, “the money taken from you is used for the benefit of many people. You are among those people. You are not merely C, but also D.”

If C plays along with these fictions of state, he’ll find that those fictions correspond only loosely to the operations of voluntary “scheme[s] of philanthropy or humanitarianism.”

In those voluntary schemes, absent fraud, his contributions as C benefit the Ds he prefers to support, in the way he has chosen to support them.

His fractional A/B representation in the institutions of state, however — even absent the corrupting influences of lobbying by more well-heeled Cs seeking treatment as Ds — is far from certain to carry the day either for his preferences as C or for his putative needs as D. His contributions are fungible and their distribution is determined by the majority of the moment, not by his preferences as a contributor.

C remains C, and involuntarily so. He may not opt out of playing the role of C, even if he chooses to forego his putative, representative A/Bness and the alleged benefits of his Dness. Should he attempt to do so, he’ll likely find himself in a position similar to that of the lamented dead — “gone but not forgotten,” at least by the state’s tax collectors; a missing person only to the extent that he can avoid their attentions.