There’s a lot of debate in libertarian circles on such things as the value and proper role of electoral politics, and whether we should attempt to change the laws from within the system.  On one email discussion list I frequent, the LeftLibertarian2 yahoo group, such a debate was recently sparked by Michael Bindner of Christian Left, who argued for the necessity of one big movement of libertarians and decentralists—in order, among other things, to realistically address the existence of the state, and to achieve liberty for everybody instead of leaving some behind.

On the value of political efforts as such, I’m agnostic or even mildly favorable.  Running for office as an educational effort (and anybody who sees a Libertarian or Green candidacy at the national level as anything but an educational effort needs more help than I can give them) can expose the public to new ideas and encourage people to question the conventional wisdom they hear from the major party candidates.  Pressure groups lobbying to scale back the most harmful kinds of state action (a good example is political action by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to scale back the digital copyright regime) can sometimes be effective.  But I don’t see any sense in libertarians attempting to secure positions inside the state with a view to “fighting the system from within.” Organized effort to pressure the state from the outside and scale back oppressive laws may be worth something—so long as it’s seen as a secondary effort, a way of running interference on behalf of the counter-institutions whose building should be our primary effort.

And the focus on securing liberty primarily through political organization—organizing “one big movement” to make sure everybody is on the same page, before anyone can put one foot in front of the other—embodies all the worst faults of 20th century organizational culture.  What we need, instead, is to capitalize on the capabilities of network culture.  Network culture, in its essence, is stigmergic:  that is,  an “invisible hand” effect results from the several efforts of individuals and small groups working independently.  Such independent actors may have a view to coordinating their efforts with a larger movement, and take the actions of other actors into account, but they do so without any single coordinating apparatus set over and above their independent authority.  In other words, we need a movement that works like Wikipedia at its best, or like open-source product developers who independently tailor modular products to a common platform.

In my opinion the best way to change the laws, in practical terms, is through counter-institution building and through counter-economic activity outside the state’s control:  in other words, to render the laws so irrelevant and unenforceable, by our efforts outside the state, that even the state must make concessions to reality.

It seems to me that statism will ultimately end, not as the result of any sudden and dramatic failure, but as the cumulative effect of a long series of little things.  The costs of enculturing individuals to the state’s view of the world, and of dissuading a large enough majority of people from disobeying when they’re pretty sure they’re not being watched, will result in a death of a thousand cuts.  More and more of the state’s activities, from the perspective of those running things, will just cost more (in terms not only of money but of just plain mental aggravation) than they’re worth.  IOW, the decay of ideological hegemony and the decreased feasibility of enforcement will do to the state what file-sharing is doing to the RIAA.

There’s even the real possibility that, even before the total costs become absolutely prohibitive from the standpoint of a net benefit to using the political means over the economic, the elites running things will be eaten from the inside out by a loss of morale.  Roderick Long, of the Molinari Institute, further suggests that before it reaches that point, the elites will probably become divided among themselves.

The most cost-effective “political” effort is simply making people understand that they don’t need anyone’s permission to be free.  Start telling them right now that the law is unenforceable, and disseminating knowledge as widely as possible on the most effective ways of breaking it.  Publicize examples of ways we can live our lives the way we want, with institutions of our own making, under the radar of the state’s enforcement apparatus:   local currency systems, free clinics, ways to protect squatter communities from harassment, and so on.  Educational efforts to undermine the state’s moral legitimacy, educational campaigns to demonstrate the unenforceability of the law, and efforts to develop and circulate means of circumventing state control, are all things best done on a stigmergic basis.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Quitando Relevancia al Estado.

Let’s do a little thought experiment.

Never mind, for the moment, the question of the Drug War’s moral legitimacy.  Never mind whether the government has the right to prevent mentally sound grownups from deciding what substances to put in their own bodies, or what substances to buy from and sell to others.

Let’s just consider, as a practical question, what effectively enforcing the drug laws actually requires.

Imagine a government trying to enforce the drug laws, if the common law “search and seizure” protections, found in the Fourth Amendment and analogous provisions of the state constitutions, were enforced according to the plain meaning of their language.  That means the government couldn’t use “no reasonable expectation of privacy” exceptions to nullify the Fourth Amendment for the purposes of helicopter infrared snooping or footborne trespassing on people’s land, traffic checkpoints, and drug-sniffing dogs.  There would be no more “no knock” warrants.  There would be no such thing as roving wiretaps or “Know Your Customer” laws.

Imagine the government trying to enforce the drug laws, if it were held to the plain meaning of the “due process” clause of the Fifth Amendment and analogous state constitutional safeguards.  Can you imagine the consternation in police forces, if they had to file criminal charges and secure a conviction from a jury before they could seize your property?

Imagine how hard it would be for government to enforce drug laws, if courts automatically threw out evidence obtained from sting operations and entrapment in which undercover police actively solicited violations of the law.

Imagine how hard it would be to enforce drug laws, if the courts automatically threw out all “evidence” obtained in a manner that violated the alleged spirit of the law.  No more evidence — or perjured testimony — obtained by threatening jailhouse snitches or offering them more lenient treatment.  There would also be no guilty pleas based on “plea bargain” blackmail enforced by the manufacture of as many obviously spurious charges as possible; like “loser pays” rules in civil suits, this practice has the effect of artificially skewing the incentives so that the underdog has as much as possible to lose, and the big guy has little or nothing to lose.  Imagine, as well, the effect of eliminating all the informal harassment and muscling cops do on their turf on a daily basis, to intimidate people into cooperating with them.

Imagine the cumulative effect of all these changes on the Drug War.  I think it’s pretty obvious that without all the forms of lawlessness described above, the Drug War would be a dead letter.

And all the things I’ve described should be utterly loathsome and repugnant, to anyone who believes in principles like the due process rights of the accused.

It follows that the Drug War would be a moot point, in a society where the Bill of Rights actually served as a significant restraint on the powers of police and prosecutors, and due process rights of the accused had any real meaning.

Never mind whether the drug laws themselves are compatible with a free society;  without the enforcement tools of a virtually unlimited police state, they are unenforceable.

You could have the substantive drug laws of Turkey or Singapore — death penalty and all — and with common law due process and search and seizure rights vigorously enforced, the drug laws would be toothless.  The only people ever busted for drug production, sales, possession or use would be the most careless and stupid.  Among those smart enough to take the most basic precautions, the risk of getting caught would be infinitesimal and the drug laws held in utter contempt.  Every once in a while, some TV show does a “stupid criminals” bit with a news snippet about some brain-damaged hippie who leaves a sack of hash brownies on the steps of the police station, and then responds to a helpful “Lost and Found” ad placed by the cops on the local radio station.

The thing is, if cops were bound by the laws they claimed to enforce, such Darwin Awards fodder would be the only people ever arrested.

If you want the Drug War, you must sacrifice the Bill of Rights and the due process rights of the accused, and submit to a police state in which you have no rights or protections whatsoever.  There are no other choices.  It’s that simple.

This has broader implications. The market liberal notion of a written constitution as law that the state allegedly must submit to is ultimately just a temporary placeholder for the anarchist understanding of law being able to be derived independently of the state. This creates standards which the state ought to be held accountable to. Such accountability would result in its abolition.

The story originated in Washington State’s Tri-City Herald, but it was the Miami Herald‘s reworked headline that caught my attention: “What you want to know: How Sarah Palin spent Thanksgiving.”

No, not especially. As a matter of fact, not at all. But presumably a lot of people do want to keep up with her social calendar and know every little detail about her life. Her new book has sold half a million copies already.

That’s scary — and not just because Palin happens to be the glamour girl of the moment. This whole idea of “politician as rock star” seems to constitute a relatively new cultural trend and, frankly, it’s a disturbing one.

When did it start, and how long did it take to reach the point at which the Barack Obama’s preferred beer, or whether or not Hillary Clinton can hold her whiskey, became matters of intense interest to the public?

Don’t get me wrong: There’s always been some level of fascination with the “private” lives of politicians, especially where the personal might reflect poorly on an aspirant’s ethics. From James G. Blaine’s campaign jingle about Grover Cleveland’s out-of-wedlock child (“Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? / Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!”) to Gary Hart’s monkey business aboard the Monkey Business, prurient pursuits have generally been linked to “the public interest.”

A modicum of showmanship is also to be expected in politics — the First Lady breaking a bottle of champagne over the bow of a new naval vessel, the mayor cutting ribbon at the site of a new building project, what have you.

But really, if you think about it, until recently politicians usually came off as a bunch of boring blokes engaged in a rather disreputable business. Nixon going to China to cut a deal with Mao, or Carter wearing a sweater and lecturing us on energy conservation. Nobody really gave a tinker’s damn whether the First Family spent a holiday weekend at Camp David or on Martha’s Vineyard. Excepting the occasional short-form “human interest” piece about who the President played golf with last Friday or which designer’s dress the First Lady wore to a state dinner, if it wasn’t related to policy, it really wasn’t political.

Was JFK and Jackie’s “Camelot” the beginning of the trend, or just an anomalous early indicator? When did politicians become … glamorous?

In a sense, they always have been. Remember, the real definition of “glamour” is an “artificial interest in, or association with, an object, through which it appears delusively magnified or glorified.”

Politicians have been weaving illusions for the public since time immemorial, on both the personal (FDR’s strenuous efforts to avoid being photographed in a wheelchair, for example) and policy end (From “Remember the Maine” to the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” to “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction,” to name three war-related examples).

What’s changed, in the decades since the introduction of television, and accelerating with the Internet’s 24/7 news coverage, has been the politicization of virtually every aspect of politicians’ lives.

Why did Barack Obama drink a Bud Lite at the “beer summit?” Because any President of the United States is going to drink an American beer, and any Democratic President of the United States is going to drink a union-made American beer. Why did Hillary make it a point to down a shot of whiskey in public now and again? Because the first female president will be a woman who has … proven her manhood!

Yes, this routine is an imposition on the politicians. They have to tailor their every action to send “the right message” to their base, and to as many undecided voters as possible, while endeavoring to offend as few as possible.

What do they get out of it? Face time. Name recognition. And, most of all, an inflation of their perceived indispensability in the minds of the public. After all, anyone who’s so important that his or her dinner menu and vacation destination is breathlessly reported on the evening news must be really important, right?

Or maybe not. Maybe they’re just B-List actors in a show we’ve all been forced to buy a ticket to, but that we’d be better off not bothering to watch. Maybe we don’t need them as much as they think we do, or as much as they want us to think we do.

I couldn’t care less how Sarah Palin spent Thanksgiving. Got plenty of turkey right here to worry about already, thank you very much.

Most Americans will celebrate Thanksgiving this year as they have done most every year in modern times – by family gathering to socialize, eat turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy – with perhaps a brief thought spared for the first Thanksgiving in 1621, when a small group of colonists from England broke bread with some Wampanoag indians in celebration of their survival a year after arriving at Cape Cod in their sailing vessel, the Mayflower.

Many present-day Americans have a kind of idolatry associated with those events and that time, and indeed such an untapped, almost entirely uncivilized and unpopulated wilderness has its appeal in an era where we now deal with an IRS, property taxes, the PATRIOT Act, a drug war, overflowing prisons, baseless hyper-inflating currency, overseas conflict, and the looming menace of government-mandated health care. However, here is a document drafted shortly after the pilgrims’ arrival, near what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts (I’ve long-since taken to calling it Marxachusetts) in 1620:

“In the name of God, Amen. We whose names are under-written, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland King, Defender of the Faith, etc.

“Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our names at Cape Cod, the eleventh of November [New Style, November 21], in the year of the reign of our sovereign lord, King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Dom. 1620.”

The document is known historically as the Mayflower Compact, and was signed by 41 men who, presumably, assented to its content. It needs no explaining to point out that this cryptic statement demonstrates a reprehensible shortcut to clear thinking. It endorses submission first to an invisible metaphysical entity, then to an arrogant regent thousands of miles away across an ocean, then to a fictional collectivist concept known as a “country,” then to each others’ mere opinions in the form of government “laws” under the rubric of a “civic body politic” – whatever that actually means. Thus, was most of North America doomed to the scatalogical fate we suffer today. Government, and its onerous, illogical presence, was here born.

We may be thankful for family, loved ones, friends – and even a certain degree of material prosperity. However, when we examine the origins of America, and the inadequate intellectual and philosophical concepts that later fueled a senseless and failed “revolution” (it only served to replace one government with another), it is clear to anyone of cogent thought that we are directing gratitude towards that which deserves only our condemnation. Thanks, in fact, should only be given to those who actively seek government’s dissolution into the ashcan of history.

In an earlier commentary piece, “Breaking Eggs to Make Libertarian Omelets,” I mentioned the Romanian “libertarian” Sorin Cucerai.  As I pointed out there, Cucerai doesn’t equate the “free markets” and “liberalism” he advocates with anything so simple as, say, doing what you want with your own stuff, or freely cooperating and exchanging with others as you see fit.  No!  The fundamental prerequisite of a “liberal” order, as Cucerai sees it, is separation of the individual from the means of subsistence.  A “market” economy can only exist when the individual is deprived (by such expedients as Enclosures) of direct access to a source of food, so that he has no choice but to produce for the money economy in order to purchase subsistence goods from others.

But that’s not the only contradiction in Cucerai’s thought.  According to John Medaille, who translated Cucerai’s article “Repeatable Present,” Cucerai treats human freedom as a means to the end of his more “efficient” capitalism in another way.  A second prerequisite of this more “efficient” capitalism is that durable goods disappear, so that our goods must be constantly replaced.  This is necessary because capitalist industry is capable of saturating markets, and at the same time uses specialized machinery that cannot easily be switched between products.  The solution is for us to keep buying the same things over and over, so they can keep producing them.

But this makes no sense.  Cucerai wants capitalism to exist because of objective efficiencies like technical progress that he sees resulting from it.  But at the same time, the prerequisites of his kind of capitalism include a great many inefficiencies—like the above-mentioned planned obsolescence.

More broadly, this seems to be a general phenomenon:  the imposition of artificial inefficiencies to protect capitalist mass production from more efficient forms of production.  They include the artificial imposition of overhead costs, in order both to shut out competition from more efficient low-overhead microproducers, and to render production artificially capital-intensive enough to soak up all the investment capital that would otherwise be superfluous.  They also include “intellectual property,” to enable the owners of patents and copyrights to capitalize the productivity benefits of innovation, and prop up commodity price that consists mainly of rents on such artificial property rights rather than actual production costs; the alternative, which must be suppressed by state action at all costs, would be for market competition to socialize the productivity gains.

Cucerai seems never to have considered the possibility that the removal of all these artificially imposed inefficiencies on which capitalism depends, taken together, might actually surpass the alleged efficiencies of capitalist mass production.  In particular, it seems never to have occurred to him that it might be more efficient to replace the expensive general purpose machinery with cheaper, flexible machinery capable of switching between products in response to demand, and thereby to eliminate the imperatives for push-distribution and planned obsolescence.  A society without planned obsolescence, in which production was organized in response to demand instead of demand being organized to meet the needs of production, and in which we could live comfortably with a 15-hour work week, would be eminently efficient.

The concept of “efficiency” is meaningless, except in reference to the values and priorities of  individual human beings.  Treating the sacrifice of human freedom as a means to the end of “efficiency” is a contradiction in terms.  A true market society is not one in which individuals are forced into the cash nexus against their will, but a society in which individuals are free to pursue their own goals by whatever means they see fit:  the cash nexus, subsistence production, or the gift economy.  Human beings were not made for the market, but the market for human beings.

The US Senate’s Democrats pushed the federal government’s latest corporate welfare scheme — fraudulently labeled “health care reform” — past a key cloture vote on Saturday. The outcome of that vote dramatically enhances the American insurance industry’s prospects for receiving what may be the largest taxpayer subsidy in history.

How big is the subsidy? It’s impossible to predict with any certainty, but we can rationally speculate. The Obama administration’s claims that “health care reform” will reduce patient costs are laughable on their face. When you force everyone to buy something — or, to put it a different way, when you forcibly increase demand versus supply for that thing — the price of that thing goes up, not down.

Per the US Census Bureau (Excel statistics file), there were about 78 million families in the US in 2008. Per the Association of Health Insurance Plans (PDF), the average family paid $5,799 per year for health insurance as of 2007.

If those numbers remain roughly accurate, the “individual mandate” provision of “health care reform” constitutes a guaranteed transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to the insurers of about $450 billion per year.

In fact, I suspect that that estimate is way, way low. The numbers are old. The estimate doesn’t account for non-family insurance purchases (individual policies cost more per person than family policies). And the prices are almost certain to rise dramatically once purchase is required rather than merely recommended. I’ll be very surprised if the final total take of this robbery scheme comes to less than a trillion dollars a year.

What most people are missing is that this corporate welfare package is the whole point of the legislation. Any “health care reform” bill that makes it to President Obama’s desk for his signature will consist of two things and two things only:

1) The insurance industry subsidy; and

2) a bunch of hyperbole designed to disguise the centrality of the insurance industry subsidy.

What about the “public option?” Its chances of turning up in the final Senate bill, or of making into the final bill during the House/Senate reconciliation process, fall into the tiny range separating “slim” and “none.” And if it does turn up against all odds, it will be neutered so as to serve the single purpose of providing its insurance industry beneficiaries with a dumping ground for patients they can’t profitably insure even with a mandate and a monopoly.

The “health care reform” movement in Congress is a con, a fraud, a snow job. And how could it have been anything else? This is what government does. It seizes power — any power it can seize, under any pretext it can invent for doing so — and it uses that power to reward its friends and backers.

In the area of “social welfare,” or “the safety net,” the approach of government resembles nothing so much as the modus operandi of a boa constrictor on the hunt.

Boas are patient and loving predators. They don’t beat, bite or poison their victims. They just … embrace them. Give’em a big, squeezy hug. Each time the victim breathes out, the squeeze gets a little tighter, making it harder to inhale the next breath. The victim eventually dies … not from trauma, but from slow asphyxiation.

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are waiting for you to exhale so they can squeeze you and so their friends, patrons and benefactors in the insurance industry can eat you. They’re the boa’s muscle. The insurance industry is the boa’s mouth.

If we allow ourselves to be ruled by governments, those governments are, sooner or later, going to involve themselves in health care. And when government involves itself in health care, it does so at the expense of the productive masses and for the benefit of the privileged elites.

Substitute any phrase you like for “health care” and the statement will remain true.

In keeping with recent celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, let’s consider just how far the actual results fell short of their promise.

To take just one example:  the West systematically suppressed all economic alternatives to neoliberalism in the countries of the former Soviet bloc after the fall of communism.

In Russia, neoliberal intellectuals like Jeffrey Sachs eagerly supported derailment under Yeltin of  Gorbachev’s market socialist agenda for mutualizing state-owned factories as worker cooperatives.  (The latter “land to the tillers” and “factories to the workers” policy, by the way, was exactly the model of post-Soviet privatization Rothbard proposed:  treating state property as unowned and letting it be homesteaded by the work force.)

In Poland,  Lech Walesa was pressured to throw Solidarity under the bus, and to sacrifice their vision of placing the former state economy under workers’ control.

It’s interesting, by the way, how workers’ resistance against pro-Soviet regimes was used by the West for all it was worth, and then cut loose and discarded.  In virtually every anti-Soviet uprising of the post-WWII period, the resistance was libertarian socialist in character.  In East Germany in 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1967, and Poland 1981, the resistance organized workers’ councils in the factories and saw themselves as fighting against a bureaucratic ruling class that had supplanted the capitalists.  Come to think of it, as another example of history’s tendency to rhyme if not repeat, this sounds a bit like events in the Soviet Union before the Bolshevik party machine hijacked the sovyets and Lenin suppressed the workers’ committees and placed the factories under one-man management.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was persuaded to gut the ANC’s agenda for land reform, and to abandon any attempt at reparations, worker control, or otherwise addressing the issue of unjust acquisition in the mining industry (which had been built by slave labor).

Both Walesa and Mandela were coopted as brand-name logos, like Vlaclav Havel:  The Triumph of Democracy (TM), or The Walls Came Tumbling Down (TM).  Walensa and Mandela were eviscerated of everything substantive they’d fought for, and reduced to little more than patronizing “good guy” icons in Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” video.  If Gandhi’s national liberation struggle had happened today, the folks in the State Department and IMF would probably have reduced him to the same kind of superficial icon, taking away the spinning wheel and all the talk of industrial swadeshi.  Come to think of it, that sounds an awful  lot like the domesticated and non-threatening Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was allowed to keep the “I Have a Dream Speech” but had to lose the poor people’s movement).

And since then, there’s been a global Democracy (TM) industry, composed of such bodies as the Soros Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the International Republican Institute, busily at work replacing post-Soviet kleptocracies with telegenic suits willing to take orders from Washington and the World Bank.

The first order of business of such regimes, as in Poland and South Africa, and the new “democracy”  in Iraq, is to accede to the WIPO treaty and the Urugay Round of GATT, and organize the sale of state industry with all deliberate speed to international finance capital (on terms entirely favorable to the latter, of course).

The fall of communism and subsequent neoliberal revolution amounted, in practice, to the collapse of a wall encircling the Soviet bloc, and its replacement by a set of corporate walls surrounding the entire planet.

In the midst of all the hoopla around the Berlin Wall, let’s stop to reflect on what might have been.

Making recent news is the fact that the MV Maersk Alabama has been attacked by seagoing Somali gunmen again – last time was in April, when Vermont sea captain Richard Phillips and the vessel he was in charge of were hijacked. It was several days before U.S. Navy snipers were deployed to the area and killed Phillips’ captors.

This time no hijacking occurred. Why? Maersk had hired and embarked with an onboard armed private security team. As a further boon, although shots were fired, this time there were zero casualties.

Surprisingly, the decision by Maersk received considerable accolades from members of the American military Observe this quote from a November 18 ABC News article by Dana Hughes:

“In a statement, U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet Commander Vice Adm. Bill Gortney praised the actions of the Maersk Alabama’s crew and security team.

“’Due to Maersk Alabama following maritime industry’s best-practices such as embarking security teams, the ship was able to prevent being successfully attacked by pirates,’ he said.”

And this gem:

“Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Fifth Fleet told ABC News that ships cannot rely solely on navy and military patrols to protect them. The Indian Ocean area most prone to piracy is roughly four times the size of Texas.

“’We can’t be everywhere at once,’ he said. ‘It’s incumbent on individual shipping companies that they are able to either conduct evasive maneuvers or use embarked security teams or even use such things as fire hoses to prevent attacks.’”

Yes, you read that right, friends and neighbors. Even government military members readily concede that they are incapable of offering adequate protection on the high seas. Not that it is or should be their legitimate responsibility anyhow. A firm like Maersk should provide for defense of their own crews and property. Government navies, on the other hand, should be disbanded and the institution of taxation (government theft) that supports them abolished outright. Domestically, in America, numerous court cases at all levels of government have long established – in no ambiguous terms – that police and other government agents have no duty to protect members of the public. In short, they’ve all but openly stated that government itself is nothing but a lie; a cynical con-game designed to exploit and dominate.

But back to ships for a moment: I have long advocated for private vessels to be bristling with AR-15s and AK-47s; belt-fed .50 calibers and RPG’s. That should make any cargo or pleasure vessel pretty immune to any assault from anything but an ultra high-tech government warship. And when governments are gone, there won’t be any of those left either.

We’ve just seen a proof-positive example of the benefit of people taking individual initiative at their own expense to defend life and property rather than relying upon socialist tax-financed government. And we’ve seen how much better the results were. The whole tableau speaks well for itself.

In that spirit, I have little more to say myself. Except get armed, be armed, stay armed. Especially if you’re headed through the Gulf of Aden anytime soon. The precedent has already been set. All that remains is to make it common practice, and shut governments out of the defense business. That done, true liberty won’t be far behind.

According to Devin Dwyer of ABC News, “Enormous budget deficits in nearly every state across the country are “wreaking havoc” on government employees, the services they provide, and the residents who need them most, according to a new report by the Pew Center for the States. Dwindling state tax revenues during the recession have forced states to furlough workers, raise taxes, crowd more kids into classrooms, and trim social services. But experts say those measures and others can only go so far in keeping many states from going broke.”

This should have anarchists jumping for joy.

True, the part about raising taxes is no anarchist’s wish, but there is even some poetry involved there: Even when in extremis, the ability of governments to tax a populace is a limited one. With high unemployment, record home foreclosures, and failing businesses, bureaucrats and politicians soon learn that there is no blood to be drawn from stones. Meantime, such scum themselves shuttle into unemployment lines, public schools close doors, fewer cops are on the beat, and the rest of us all breathe just a little more freely.

Anarchists must capitalize on this situation. For what will be revealed for all to see is that, in spite of the state being forced to scale back its own activities for lack of funding, the world will conspicuously not stop turning on account of an absence of government.

But listen to the frenzified hysteria further in Dwyer’s article:

“Arizona lawmakers are staring down a $1 billion gap in their 2009 budget with no immediate solution in sight. Rhode Island, the smallest state, continues to post among the highest unemployment and foreclosure numbers in the country.

“Michigan is grappling with “a 1960s-sized budget,” while Nevada struggles to raise taxes in light of a provision that requires voters to first amend the state’s constitution.

“Oregon, which experienced the greatest drop in state revenue over last year, faces a similar dilemma as voters in January 2010 get the final say on new income taxes to close the gap.

“The Pew report lists Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and Wisconsin also among the top ten states facing the worst combination of foreclosure rates, jobless numbers, state revenue losses, budget gaps, legal obstacles to balanced budgets and legislators’ poor money-management practices.

“‘These are the worst numbers we’ve ever seen in decades,’ said Scott Pattison, director of the National Association of State Budget Offices. He says state budget crises have impacted every part of state government, including the employees and residents they serve.”

Novel idea for Pattison and the rest of his bureaucratic buddies: Stop “serving” people at the barrel of a gun. That would go a long way towards solving a lot of problems. But here’s more to make anarchists’ mouths water:

“‘The impact of plummeting tax revenues is really coming home to roost now,’ Steve Kreisberg of the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees told ABC News.

“More than 110,000 state and local employees have been fired in the current recession, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That number includes over 40,000 teachers and 4,000 police and firefighters.

“Some states have opted against layoffs in favor of forcing workers to take furlough days, or unpaid days off.

“On Thursday, New Mexico became the latest state to implement furloughs after Gov. Bill Richardson ordered 19,000 workers to take five unpaid days off. The move is expected to help the state deal with a $650 million budget shortfall.

“‘It amounts to a 2 percent pay cut in lieu of laying off maybe 400 people,’ Kreisberg said of the New Mexico case.”

I don’t see civilization exactly ending, folks. In fact, the fewer government workers there are, the more civilized the world becomes. After all, governments can only exist by initiating and implementing violence on a mass scale. This improves, rather than degrades (as the government apologists would argue) the quality of life. I rest my case with the fearmongering below:

“But furloughs come with additional costs for workers and residents.

“In Hawaii, where school teachers have been furloughed for 17 days this year, students will receive less time in the classroom and parents will be forced to find and pay for childcare.”

Awww, imagine that? Parents actually having to pay for their own childrens’ care?

“Furloughs are also meaning longer waits for unemployment claims processing and other services, in some states, and reduced numbers of police and firemen to protect public safety.”

Protect “public safety”? Sorry, but the federal government and all 50 “states” have already declared that the cops are not required to do that. See Bowers v. Devito, 686 F.2nd 616 or Souza v. City of Antioch, California (1997) if you have any trouble believing that.

“‘What’s also overlooked,’ Kreisberg said, ‘is the tremendous increase in stress on the workforce at a time when workloads have increased and pay has decreased.’ Staffing reductions and increased demand for state services during the economic downturn are making it impossible for some workers to afford taking time off.

“‘Many state workers have said they simply cannot afford furlough days. They work from
home or sneak into the office out of extreme dedication and passion for public service,’ Kreisberg said.”

You mean, “extreme dedication and passion for public pillage,” don’t you, Kreisberg?

“Is there a light at the end of the tunnel for states in murky financial waters?

“Kreisberg says unless states can devise creative solutions, the coming year will be ‘absolutely disastrous not just for state workers but for the entire economy.’

“The Pew Center’s Urahn agrees. ‘It’s tough to continue to do across the board cuts in states like Michigan, where you’ve cut for years and years and years,’ she said. ‘I think it’s gonna be tough… the challenge is that it’s not a ‘this-year’ problem; it’s a structural problem with how states spend.'”

The “structural problem” is even worse than that. It’s that governments tax, spend – or even exist at all in the first place. Dwyer’s article concludes with this:

“National Governors Association director Raymond Scheppach predicts, ‘states will not fully recover from this recession until late in the next decade.'”

Anarchists, freedom-lovers – let’s prove Scheppach wrong. Let’s kick these dogs while they’re down. Let’s keep spreading the word. Let’s make sure the “states” – which are really just one big violent usurper State – never recover. Not late next decade, not ever. We can do that by encouraging people to build an alternative economy outside of state control.

An interviewer recently interrupted Rupert Murdoch’s bellyaching about all the traffic and free advertising Google was sending News Corp’s way (I believe “steal our stories” is the expression he actually used) to ask him a seemingly obvious question:  if he was so bothered by Google’s links to his content, why didn’t he just use the robots.txt protocol to block indexing from Google?

His response:  “I think we will.”  That’s the first time he’s explicitly made that threat.

All the jubilation and cheering you hear is from Pirate Parties, anti-copyright activists and penguinheads all around the world.  Punishing people for directing traffic to your site seems, to put it mildly, a bit counterintuitive as a business strategy.  But then Murdoch’s always been an outside the box thinker.

Well, actually he just seems plain old befuddled.  Not only did he specifically cite the Wall Street Journal as a good example of the paid content business model; he also pointed out that the WSJ provides the first paragraph for free along with the subscription form to read more.  So he obviously doesn’t object in principle to giving readers a sample of what’s behind the pay wall.  What, then, is the point of preventing Google from indexing his online content?  As Stan Schroeder points out, it’s hard to figure out just what Murdoch’s thinking:

“If he plans to charge for websites, why hide them from the search engines? If you can’t actually read the content without paying, then making the content at least partly accessible to Google and other search engines can’t hurt? In fact, the WSJ that he mentions as an example isn’t hidden from Google’s indexes, you can easily find Wall Street Journal articles via Google.”

Google’s response, as you might expect, was a perplexed shrug and “OK, whatever”:  “Publishers put their content on the Web because they want it to be found.”

It’s probably a safe guess that Monty Burns—er, Rupert Murdoch—isn’t real clear on the difference between email and a search engine, and doing web searches on The Internets is a task he delegates to his secretary or grandkids.  “I’m really enjoying this so-called… ‘iced cream.’”

Blocking Google’s web crawlers, at first glance, seems like a clueless (not to say ass-brained) business model.  But what do I know?  Murdoch’s a big media mogul.  Maybe he’s a frigging genius, and I’m just too stupid to comprehend the loftiness of his vision.  Maybe he’s figured out a way your business can attract paying customers when nobody knows who the hell you are.  Sure.  And next week, maybe the grocer will come up with a winning new idea for making money by suing you for telling people where the store is.

By the way, has Murdoch started saving his own urine and wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet yet?

Maybe Google should give Murdoch a taste of his own medicine and block News Corp from all results pages for a day or two, all on its own.

Murdoch also reached into his, um, hat and pulled out this little gem:  “There’s a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether… but we’ll take that slowly.”  He must have been talking to the people who came up with the anti-”songlifting” curricula the RIAA has been generously distributing in the publik skools.

With enemies like this, who needs friends?  We don’t need to destroy the proprietary content industries.  They’re hanging themselves with their own rope.

Last Tuesday, an ex-soldier called Paul Clarke was convicted of possessing a firearm and may now face a minimum sentence of five years. One day Mr Clarke was standing on his balcony when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden, and on closer inspection he found that the bin liner contained a sawn-off shotgun. The reaction of Mr Clarke was instinctual – he went to the local police station and handed it in. Since he had technically ‘possessed’ the weapon on the journey to the station, he was deemed to be in breach of the law and will now be banged up for half a decade.

Also last week, there was Lorraine Elliot, the lawyer who lost her job after it was disclosed she had been wrongly arrested for forging her husbands signature on a nursery application form. Her DNA was taken and placed on the National DNA Database and the record of her arrest kept on file despite her being found innocent of any crime.

Then there was Mary Cooke, a pregnant lady from Staffordshire who was almost ran over by a speeding motorist. After reporting the incident to the police and inviting a policewomen into her home to take a statement, Mrs Cooke was reported to social services for the half-finished state of the wallpapering in her home – it seems that failing to decorate a home to the standards of the police is now indicative of potentially bad parenting.

Even worse is the case of a women from Nottingham who had her newly born child taken away because social services deemed her ‘too stupid’ to be able to look after the baby. Psychologists who assessed the woman disagreed, but non of this made a difference, and a similar case in Scotland has seen a young couple with an unborn child flee from their home town in order to escape the grasp of the local authorities.

There was Sherif Abdel-Fattah, the doctor who was given a speeding ticket whilst rushing to the hospital to save a bleeding womans life after her Cesarean Section went wrong. There was Demetrios Samouris, the Student who was fined £80 for dropping a matchstick. There was the Mother that was followed home by an off-duty policeman, interviewed by police and investigated by social-service Nazis after she threatened to smack her misbehaving children in a supermarket. Finally, (this one I quite enjoyed) there was the police car that was filmed being given a parking ticket for illegal parking.

But why is it that as individuals we seem unable to stop ourselves being Stasi-like jobsworths with a compulsion to enforce the line of the law whilst ignoring the spirit of it? Why do so many ‘public servants’ feel it necessary to leave at home their natural tendencies for common sense when they set off for work in the morning? Put simply, why is common sense not common anymore?

One answer is that we have a state that believes it can improve society through a plethora of centrally dictated targets for arrest, conviction, education, equality, morality, parenting and any other number of things. All noble aims, but all unachievable when the state is the driving force behind them.

The more a government legislates on our day to day activities, the less we take ownership of those activities ourselves. We begin to lose the ability of self-determination in our responsibilities, and as a consequence we have nothing else to fall back on apart from the rigid framework of state diktat. The disempowerment suffered by individuals under the thumb of the state leads to a stupefaction of social intercourse, and a learned helplessness that infects an ever increasing number of our daily interactions.

These observations do not lead me to a negative conclusion in regards to the human condition and our potential for creating autonomous order in a stateless society. Far from it, the same human characteristics that lead to seemingly defeatist and subservient social patterns, are the very characteristics that will enable our liberation from this malaise.

Humans are not fixed moral beings with an unchanging socio-psychological makeup; we are adaptive and complex. We are programmed as individuals to survive at all costs, but the survival methods we adopt are dependent on the environment we find ourselves in. When the state creates an environment where survival of the individual is best served by adopting an ‘it’s more than my jobs worth’ attitude, then community – which is an emergent property of our need to survive in nature – begins to fade away.

In this light, the characteristics of officiousness and subservience that we observe in many walks of life, can be seen as the evidence that individuals have adapted their behaviour to fit in with a social protocol distorted by government. Take away the artificial order of the state however, and society will begin once more to self-order. People will regain their motivation to engage in patterns reciprocal behaviour and mutual support, and common sense will become common once again.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, El Sentido Común ha Dejado de ser Común.

That’s how the song and the story go, anyway. Two of those sons in particular, Isaac and Ishmael, are said to have founded two divergent tribal lineages known today as the Jews and the Arabs. And to the extent that those two ethnic groups today tend to identify with particular religious beliefs, those beliefs still share a deity in common.

Where the line between history and mythology is, I won’t pretend to know. But whenever I notice the latest developments in the “Palestinian statehood controversy,” I think back to a point in the putative chronology at which the deity in question argued forcefully, but to no avail, that Israel would be much better off remaining a stateless society. Here it is, in 1 Samuel, chapter 8:

And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king.

And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.

And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.

Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;

That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

God as anarchist advocate. Whodathunkit?

The Israelites just wouldn’t listen … and consequently the conditions of their existence went to hell in a handbasket. They ended up conquered, enslaved, passed back and forth between the Babylonians and Persians and Greeks and Romans, and finally scattered across the face of the planet for close to 2000 years — a period of forced conversion, ghettoization, persecution and, finally, near extermination, all at the hands of various states — before re-establishing a toehold in their land of ancient origin.

And what did they do with that toehold? Why, they proved that they hadn’t learned a damn thing. They decided that they absolutely, positively must, at any cost, once again create a state of their own.

They wanted a state so badly — despite the failure of their previous state and despite the lessons of two millennia of persecution at the hands of states — that they whipped the armies of five existing states to get it.

And since getting it? The people who whipped five states have found themselves utterly unable, for six decades now, to effectively suppress the aspirations of a dislocated, poverty-stricken, demoralized stateless Palestinian Arab population, just as the combined might of the Arab states and the British Empire and the Third Reich and the Soviet Union had proven powerless to suppress 50 years of non-state manifestations of Zionism.

If there’s a God, and if that God is the one the Bible talks about, I rather suspect that He’s still an anarchist and waiting for His people to puzzle out the lesson He tried to teach them so many years ago.

Start a discussion about either or both of two topics — victim disarmament (“gun control”) or anarchy — and invariably, sooner or later, you’re going to get an earful about private nukes.

“We must have some restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms — after all, we can’t have every Joe Sixpack walking down the street with a hydrogen bomb strapped to his back.”

“If we get rid of governments, what happens to all those nukes they have lying around? What if al Qaeda gets them?”

These two lines of argument are intended to shut down the respective discussions, and they’re often successfully deployed to that purpose. But just this once, let’s have a look at the facts instead of throwing up our hands in horror and conceding the validity of.

The first fact to take into consideration is that nuclear weapons (or even primitive atomic fission devices) are incredibly expensive and difficult to develop and build. So expensive, in fact, that it generally takes a huge organization with a coercive monopoly on the incomes of lots and lots of people — in other words, a government — to build one.

The US government spent about $23.6 billion (in 2008 dollars) on the Manhattan Project, which yielded three fission weapons: One detonated as a test, the other two dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Altogether the US government has probably spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $7 trillion (once again in 2008 dollars) — or, to put it a different way, more than half its “national debt” — on nuclear weapons development, testing, maintenance and production. Even relatively well-funded governments of relatively populous nations — that of Iran, for example — haven’t figured out a way to make the production of nukes cheap or easy.

The second fact to keep in mind is that nukes really aren’t really good for very much. Or, rather, they’re not good for much here on Planet Earth. Elsewhere they may be good for quite a few things, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Here on Earth, the only thing they’re useful for is extortion or deterrence of same, and then only in the context of huge populations whom small groups of individuals — in other words, governments — claim the authority to negotiate on behalf of.

Those two facts taken together inevitably lead us to two conclusions:

First, that no matter how badly someone might want a private nuke, there aren’t more than a handful of people on Earth who could afford one.

Second, that among that handful of people on Earth who might be able to afford a private nuke — if they liquidated all their assets and devoted those assets exclusively to the purchase of one — it’s likely that not a single one of them would see any reason to buy/build one for terrestrial use.

The threat of “private nukes” is non-existent, and would be so even in the absence of laws forbidding them. Anyone who pulls out the “private nukes” argument in favor of “gun control” — or the continued existence of the state — is, by doing so, confessing that they’re all out of real arguments and grasping at straws.

But let’s come back around to my note that there’s a potential use for “private nukes” off-planet — and that hanging threat of nukes just “lying around” in the absence of government. These two topics were made from each other.

Off-planet, nukes could be useful. For example, they could be used to propel a Project Orion type spacecraft. Or they could be used to terraform Mars — detonated over its polar caps to melt them and release their water and carbon dioxide, thickening the atmosphere, etc.

On-planet, nukes are a threat because they are, in fact, just “lying around,” waiting to either be unleashed on all of us in war, or to be stolen and used by al Qaeda or some other nefarious group. For either outcome, we can thank government, if we live through the experience. The existing nuclear threat isn’t the threat of “private nukes.” It’s the threat of stolen “public nukes.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t believe in rewarding knotheads who bring threats like this by leaving them in charge. Government should go, and so should its nukes … preferably at a deep discount to private space exploration/exploitation firms which promise to get them the hell off of our home planet and put them to some useful purpose elsewhere.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson’s sixth study — SOCIETY AFTER STATE CAPITALISM: Resilient Communities and Local Economies [PDF].

Resilient Communities: Society After State Capitalism

By Kevin Carson

“For centuries, as described by Pyotr Kropotkin and other thinkers, the institutions of civil society have been crowded out or actively suppressed by the state. As the state capitalist system reaches its limits and the state exhausts its capacity to prop up the system further, we can expect a revival of civil society—a Great Thaw in which all the human capacities for voluntary cooperation and mutual aid, atrophied for so long, will revive and flourish. Past examples and current experiments in creating resilient local communities are especially promising building blocks for a post-corporate society.”

This “ready to print” version of Resilient Communities was created by Invisible Molotov.

Invisible Molotov is a market anarchist zine distro & publishing house.

In a recent post to the P2P Research email list, Adam Arvidsson (author of “The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy”) referred to Marx’s “cryptic passage” in Grundrisse, in which he wrote of communism emerging as the result of “the collapse of the law of value driven by the increasing role of cooperation and General Intellect.”  A growing share of wealth is “produced outside of the processes commanded by the wage relation,” so that “wealth creation is socialized and made to coincide with ‘life itself.’”

Arvidsson is part of a movement of European Marxists centered around the Oekonux mailing list, who  see open-source culture (get that “-nux” at the end of the name?) as the core around which a post-scarcity communist economy will be organized.

But it seems the vision of communism sought by these Marxists coincides, in many ways, with the kind of society envisioned by free market anarchists like us folks at C4SS.

Some people take the growing portion of wealth created by general social labor or intellectual labor as grounds for breaking the link between labor and reward altogether, and creating some sort of guaranteed minimum income as a “dividend” on the social product.

But a genuine free market would do this quite effectively, without the middleman of a state.  The market socializes the benefits of innovation through competition.  Absent patents and copyright, which erect barriers to the general diffusion of new technologies and processes, the effect of innovation in reducing labor time and physical input costs for a given level of output would be entirely socialized through reduced commodity price.  When advances in technology enable desktop publishing at a hundredfold cost reduction compared to traditional publishing, or cheap CNC machine tools lower the cost of a garage factory to two months’ wages for a skilled worker, the portion of commodity price that disappears as a result is a form of social labor that’s appropriated collectively.

The natural process of a free market is to socialize the benefits of innovation through lower prices.

The main thing that prevents this from happening is artificial scarcity.  Tom Peters, in The Tom Peters Seminar, was quite enthusiastic about the fact that parts and labor amounted to maybe a tenth of the price of his Minolta camera, the rest of the price consisting of “intellect” and “ephemera.”  But by their very nature, the products of intellect are “social property” once they become public knowledge.  The only way to capitalize “intellect” as a source of rent is to prevent people from using each other’s ideas.  Do away with patents, and that Minolta camera will cost a tenth as much.  The ninety percent of its price that disappears in a free market is socialized general intellect, socialized more effectively than it could ever be by a guaranteed income.

Austrian economist Carl Menger wrote of “non-economic goods”—goods whose supply was so abundant, in relation to supply, that they ceased to be objects of “economizing man.”  They were, in effect, “too cheap to meter.”

And the material prerequisites of production (the raw materials going into commodities and the labor required to  produce them) are growing less and less important compared to “General Intellect”—the social body of scientific-technological knowledge, which is available for free, and adds nothing to exchange value unless it is made the object of a state-enforced monopoly.

As the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker wrote over a century ago,  the effect of competition on the free market is to socialize the benefits of land and capital.  Likewise, the effect of competition in a genuinely free market is to socialize the benefits of “General Intellect.”

This socialization of the benefits of innovation is at the heart of the open-source movement.  Hardware and software hackers, by reducing the labor time and materials cost required to produce the things we enjoy, are removing larger and larger shares of what we consume from the realm of economic value and the cash nexus.  As larger and larger shares of the price of a good are destroyed by general socialized intellect, and the hours we must work to buy it fall to a fraction of their former value, it approaches ever closer to the status of a non-economic good.   When the consumption goods once created in a forty-hour week can be produced with ten hours of labor, we’re all living off a “guaranteed income” of sorts.

A November 12 editorial appearing in Vermont’s Rutland Herald titled “A Turning Point” reveals in fineness the blind cult of statism; the idea that government, by using its power of violent coercion, is somehow capable of exercising a kind of noble compassion.

In lambasting “conservatives” (always the manner in which dogmatic leftists paint with a broad brush anyone who may even question the notion of government being anything but mankind’s greatest invention), the piece states:

“For 30 years or more, they have seen history going in their direction, even if the conservative revolution, as it has been styled, never achieved completion. This has been a span of history dominated by the idea that government was an impediment to progress and an enemy of freedom.”

Had any of this actually been the case – to wit, that “conservatives” had truly embraced the aforestated concept, likely government today would either be skeletal, or entirely non-existent. The government-worshippers would’ve all been discredited and discarded generations ago.

The editorial continues: “And yet the decades prior to the Reagan revolution were shaped by another view – that government had a vital role to play in guaranteeing security from attack by our enemies abroad and from economic catastrophe at home.”

Note immediately the ignorance and arrogance expressed by this collectivistic buffoon. Sorry, the U.S. government’s enemies are not necessarily my enemies, so don’t try dragging me under that umbrella with you, Mr. Statist. If the government you love like a religion hadn’t spent over the last 100 years meddling violently (and government only exists by use of violence) with people in foreign lands, Americans would have little to fear in terms of war or terrorism. And as for economic catastrophe? Explain to me how governmental interventionism, distortion of markets, baseless debt-driven fiat currency issued by the Federal Reserve, and heavy-handed taxation have helped anyone except politicians and others who produce nothing – much less anything of actual value.

It gets even better: “Roosevelt [Franklin D., not Teddy] saw both his great programs as essential in protecting freedom – his program to attack the Depression and his program to win World War II. It was his insight that no one can be free who lacks a job, a meal, a house, or good health.”

I could pull this apart in a thousand different ways while standing on my head, but let’s keep it simple: The Depression happened because the Federal Reserve wanted it to. When certain independent banks – yes, there were still some in those days – balked at becoming part of the Fed’s sinister system, they brought the walls down as a little punitive incentive to get all dissenters in line. As for WW2, it was only after FDR deliberately started a stell-trade war with the Japanese and insisted on shipping American arms to England at taxpayer expense that America got involved. Had he not been such a provocateur, no Americans would have died in or been forced to pay for that war. American ships and lives would’ve never been attacked. And further, how was “freedom” ever “protected” by a military draft, wage withholding (introduced in 1943 as a “voluntary” – and supposedly temporary — wage tax), rationing, etc.? And, I further fail to understand the logic behind the idea that forcing others at gunpoint to subsidize someone’s meals, house, and health is “essential in protecting freedom.” It sounds like one of the best ways, rather, to rationalize taking any and all freedom away. More of the same irrational bunk appears later in the piece: “Some of Roosevelt’s greatest accomplishments had to do with protecting Americans from the ravages of unchecked capitalism. He brought the nation’s banks under greater regulation. He established a system to protect farm income. He created Social Security for the elderly.”

Capitalism evil. The “nation’s” banks under tighter rules than the Fed. Farm subsidies. The SS Ponzi scheme first developed in Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia. Yeah, just great stuff.

This continues: “Social Security requires a government bureaucracy – ‘big government’ – but few would argue that establishing a basic level of economic security for the elderly does not secure freedom for them and their families.”

I guess I’m one of those few, pal. What this scam fosters is dependency on one end, and slavery on the other. There is no “freedom” being secured. That’s an illusion all in your Marxist mind, Mr. Statist.

The piece continues in the same collectivist vein – that housing, education (read “indoctrination”), food, health care, and a job are all somehow “rights” that must be payed for by others. This dimwit actually hails federal food stamps and housing (some of the worst slums around, by the way), Medicare and Medicaid as huge successes of government, when in truth they have all been miserably bureaucratized failures that have only succeeded in destroying individual liberty.

Towards the end, the author invokes a quote from FDR, the socialist: “In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people.”

If FDR can hear me, I’m an individualist all the way, 100% And the only way you can drag me down with your deluded notion of there being a “nation” or “one people” – both fictitious mental concepts at best – is at gunpoint.

And that kind of a system has nothing at all to do with freedom. Thus, neither does anything government does.

US President Barack Obama, we are told, is weighing four alternative plans for the future of America’s military adventure in Afghanistan, and will discuss those plans with his “war council” on Wednesday.

Not on the table: Bringing the US entanglement in Afghan affairs to an end. Au contraire — all four plans entail an increase in the number of US troops deployed to central Asia, and presumably all four plans call for throwing yet more good dollars into the swirling drain of “AfPak” after the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of bad dollars already down it.

The troop numbers Obama are considering range from a high end of 40,000 — that’s how many General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the US operation in Afghanistan, has requested — to a low end of “as few as two or three brigades.” The latter option would increase US reliance on special operations troops and attacks with unmanned drone aircraft.

This obsession with numbers is symptomatic of the personal political dilemma which Obama got himself into when he sought and won election to the presidency. And that personal dilemma is itself symptomatic of another dilemma pertaining to the condition of the state itself.

Eight years after 9/11 gassed it up, the Jingo Jalopy is out of gas. There’s simply no substantial “national will” left to be fired up for the prospect of sending every available soldier — and making more available by hook, crook or conscription as necessary — to this or that foreign battlefield until the designated enemy’s guns fall silent. Matter of fact, if there’s any whiff of a detectible “national will” in the air at all, that will has the whiff of popular demand for a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But that won’t do, either, because America’s politicians don’t take their orders from the “national will” in any case. If they can harness that “national will” to whatever they’ve already decided to do, that’s all well and good, and if not then they’ll genuflect to it as much as absolutely necessary to avoid being run out of DC on rails. But when push comes to shove, it isn’t the “national will” that hooks them up with campaign funds while in office or with post-government-service lobbying sinecures, six-figure speaking fees and corporate directorships.

The people who bestow those blessings on America’s politicians understand only one word, or at least have only one word to say on the subject of military expenditures and the interventionist policies used to justify those expenditures. That word is “more.”

Obama’s dilemma, then, is this:

On the one hand, how many more troops can he send, and how many more dollars can he spend, without waking up a grumpy “national will” and having it get up on the wrong side of the bed on him?

On the other hand, how few additional troops can he propose to send, how few more dollars can he propose to spend, and still keep the military-industrial complex on his side, or at least on the fence and not quite ready to pull the plug on him?

The sound of adding machines chattering away in the Oval Office is the sound of empire in decline. The ship of the imperial state lacks fuel for its boiler and powder for its cannon … but its captain and crew dare not take it into port for maintenance. They’ve convinced themselves — and they may very well be right — that the barnacles infesting its hull are the only thing holding it together, and that it (and their jobs with it) will disintegrate if the fouling organisms are removed. And so they limp it along toward its next target, nursing as much mischief out of it as they can and hoping it holds together until they’re retired and it becomes someone else’s problem.

Bob Guccione used to crown people Asshole of the Month or Year, respectively, based on the sheer egregiousness of their assholery.  I’ve  previously featured copyright and patent twits of the week.  But sometimes you run across a twit whose twittishness rises above the ephemeral standards of the week, and deserves special recognition.  Mark Helprin’s twittishness belongs to the ages.

Remember that old saying of Gandhi’s?  First they ignore us, then they mock us, then they fight us, then we win.  The forces of proprietary content, in their war against the open-source movement, have scrambled those stages in an utterly perverse fashion.  In the 1990s, when the digital and network revolutions were barely underway, rather than ignoring us they attacked us full force with the Uruguay Round TRIPS accord and the DMCA.  Then we won (we have for all intents and purposes demonstrated the unenforceability of the digital copyright regime).  Now they try to swing public opinion when the war’s already been lost:  not only introducing clumsy and laughable publick skool anti-”songlifting” campaigns likely to be received about as respectfully as abstinence education, but bringing out their least competent spokesmen—clownish pedants like Mark Helprin—to mock us.

Helprin, in Digital Barbarianns, seems to be coming from an ideological place much like Andrew Keen and Thomas Frank:  a resentment, by New Class intellectuals whose values were shaped in the old Broadcast Age, of the kind of democracy that network culture permits.  Helprin’s disdain for “blogging ants” and Wikis “written the way Popeye talks” is comparable to Keen’s resentment of the old cultural gatekeepers’ dispossession by the “cult of the amateur,” and Frank’s knee-jerk defense of Taylorism and Weberian industrial bureaucracy against the New Economy (with the Whole Earth folks as tattooed and pierced fellow travelers of Dick  Armey and Tom DeLay—a mirror-image version of Helprin’s view of Creative Commons).

What pass for arguments, in Helprin’s polemic, are utterly incoherent.

Helprin nowhere states any objective standard of property rights, beyond a reflexive blanket genuflection toward all things called “property,” and the utilitarian principle that creators ought to be paid.

Take, for example, his opening anecdote:  he stops to eat an ear of corn growing on a roadside farm in Iowa during a cross-country bike trip, and is ripped a new one by the angry farmer.   One of the commenters at the NPR website (where the story was posted) pointed out the delicious irony of a subsidized American corn farmer (“someone whose entire industry would collapse without a system of government patronage”) lecturing Helprin on theft, and Helprin’s use of the anecdote to assert the moral authority of the similarly coddled and protected culture industry.

Apparently this trauma, and Helprin’s appropriate guilt over having taken the tangible property produced by another person’s labor, was transmuted into an uncritical reverence for anything called “property.”  Property, he says, is the “guarantor of liberty,” and “to be defended proudly.”

You may recall that Huck Finn had a similar uncritical reverence for all things designated by the word “property.”  Having run away with the Widow Douglas’s slave, Jim, Huck was torn apart by guilt over having thus wronged his benefactor (she who tried to “sivilize” him).  In the end, the sivilizing didn’t take, because Huck proved himself to be better than the morality of the slaveocracy.  His final resolve, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” was followed by the first peaceful night’s sleep since he left home.

It’s not always possible to tell just what Helprin’s so worked up about.  For example, he decries the loss of “authorial voice” in a world of peer production and Wikified collaboration.  But it’s hard to figure out what digital copyright even has to do with any of this.  His legislative agenda affects mainly the unauthorized reproduction of proprietary work under the original author’s name.  The misappropriation of identity is a very minor problem—which stands to reason, if you think about it.  When people go to The Pirate Bay, they’re shopping for a free download of a known work by a known author.  Who’s going to download a pdf of Pet Sematary by Joe Blow, or an mp3 of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by I. P. Freely?  If by “authorial voice,” on the other hand, Helprin means borrowing other people’s ideas and building on them in your own way, copyright law can’t do a damned thing about that:  as he himself admits, you can’t copyright ideas.

And his alarm over the loss of “authorial voice” is ironic, given his almost complete failure to cite any major anti-copyright writers as the source of the arguments he attempts to refute.  In fact, he fails to address many of the major anti-copyright arguments at all, giving little indication (despite the fact that this book was written in response to the debate sparked by his earlier NYT op ed in which he called for the indefinite extension of copyright terms) that he is even familiar with the arguments of the other side.  All the alleged copyright communists he mentions by name are actually quite mushy moderates:  no Stallman,  no Boldrin and Levine, no Kinsella—just lots of Lawrence Lessig.

At times, the juxtaposition of Helprin’s criticisms of the free culture movement with the rights he claims for proprietary content owners seems to be an act of deliberate sabotage:  intentionally or not, he does to the Copyright Nazis what Stephen Colbert does to the Republicans.  Helprin is not just an ignoramus, but the kind of muddled thinker who mercilessly contradicts himself and spins out non-sequiturs with a total lack of self-awareness.

Helprin denounces the Left’s sense of entitlement, their demand for guaranteed outcome, and their hatred of property.  And he does all this in the course of arguing that proprietary content owners are entitled to a guaranteed right of return on their “intellectual property,” even if it requires violating the real—i.e., tangible—property rights of all the rest of us.

For example, one of the alleged strikes against the anti-copyright folks is that they favor a world that is “planned, controlled, decided, entirely cooperative, and conducive of predetermined outcomes”—as opposed to his own preference for “market based systems that admit and honor chance, competition, unexpected developments, peril and reward.”  But the whole purpose of copyright is to protect proprietary content owners against such chance and competition, and to guarantee them a predetermined outcome.

He views the limitation of copyright as privileging the collective over the individual—when in fact copyright privileges one individual over another, to the extent that one individual is restricted in his use of his own property, in order to guarantee an outcome to the privileged party.

He asserts that the elimination of copyright would only be practicable in a centrally planned economy without private property—showing an utter lack of awareness of business models by which content creators can and do make money without copyright.

Helprin says he favors free markets and private property, but contrasts what private sector non-profits to what he calls “private industry.”  He justifies the distinction by pointing to non-profits’ tax-exempt status. But (wait for it!) he argues elsewhere that “intellectual property” should be given special treatment for purposes of taxation, and exempted—alone, among other other forms of property—from taxation.

Despite his avowed fondness for private property, he singles out the Creative Common license—in fact a regime under which authors license their own work under the terms of copyright law—for repeated denunciation.  He recounts seeing an expensive car driven by rich kids, with an “Eat the Rich” bumper sticker, and describes them as the direct ancestors of the Creative Commons movement.  Creative Commons, he argues in an astounding leap of illogic, is a movement of rich parlor socialists who want to give away others’ “intellectual property” for the sake of “economic justice.”  The Creative Commons movement, he says, is based on “the infantile presumption that a feeling of justice and indignation gives one a right to the work, property, and time… of others….”  Such people, he writes indignantly, “should first divest [themselves]” of their own property.  Huh?  Creative Commons simply allows copyright holders to license their own work for use under comparatively liberal terms; if one can license someone else’s work against their will under CC, it’s a new one on me.

He denounces collaboration—voluntary collaboration by consenting adults—as the first step toward Red Ruin.  So Helprin supports free enterprise (so long as it’s not a nonprofit or cooperative), intellectual property (so long as the rights-holder doesn’t give it a CC license), and freedom of economic choice (so long as no actor on the market decides to collaborate with anyone else).  Helprin, in other words,  is a vulgar libertarian:  he likes “free markets,” so long as “free market” is tacitly understand to mean a world dominated by for-profit corporations.

He supports private property and free markets, so long as nobody organizes or invests in the kind of business enterprise he doesn’t like, licenses their copyright in ways that he doesn’t like, or cooperates with other free individuals in ways that he doesn’t like.  So long as the entitled class of actors he favors get their guaranteed outcome, the “free market” is great.

On December 17th, 1989, Romanian troops fired on anti-government protesters in Timisoara; on Christmas day, dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife Elena were executed. More than 40 years of Communist rule and nearly 25 years of personal rule by Ceaucescu came crashing down in a week and a day.

When US President Ronald Reagan urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this [Berlin] wall” in 1987, few expected that wall to actually come down only 2 1/2 years later. Heck, few expected it to come down any time soon on the day that it did come down, 20 years ago next week.

For that matter, it was only six months from the election of Abraham Lincoln to the opening shots of the “Civil” War. Six months for one nation to become two, and for the two to go to war against each other!

When things political fall apart, they have a way of doing so incredibly fast.

Unlike many, I’m not inclined to just dismiss the predictions of Russian academic and former KGB agent Igor Panarin who thinks that the United States is on the verge of disintegration as a coherent nation-state.

Although some of the logic underlying Panarin’s forecast is … well, not exactly logical (California becoming province of China because most laptops are of Chinese manufacture, for example) … there may be some “there” there in the general outlines.

The wishful “one nation, indivisible” thinking of those with a nationalist mindset aside, the United States is a hodgepodge country: 300 million people scattered over 3.8 million square miles of non-contiguous territory.

For awhile after World War II (the most important domestic effect of which may have been putting English over the top as a “common language”), cultural homogenization — a McDonald’s on every corner and the latest sitcom one-liner told around water coolers from coast to coast — seemed unstoppable.

But it wasn’t. Anyone who lives in or visits a reasonably densely populated metropolitan area can attest to the fact that discrete cultural communities tend to separate themselves out from the larger whole, asserting their own identities and holding to their own customs and languages. It’s not so much that “national identity” is inimical to that process as that it’s irrelevant to that process. Within minutes of my own home in suburban St. Louis, I can find communities where Spanish is the predominant language; communities of Indian expatriates; communities of Bosnian Muslim refugees. They’re in America; they may even be “American” in one sense of the word or another. But they’ve also got their own things going.

And, of course, there’s the “Internet effect.” These days, it’s as easy for the average person to watch Al Jazeera as to watch Al Bundy, or to indulge any number of other interests that even two decades ago would have required extensive travel and a large bankroll. As our ability to establish meaningful relationships without reference to geography expands, our reasons for clinging to relationships based solely on geography diminish.

This whole trend of history is at odds with the notion of “national rule” by 537 politicians in one city on the Potomac … and the ties that bind us so are visibly fraying.

The media scream “polarization!” as the Washington establishment attempts to drag the entire country one way or another on this or that issue, and the cry is believable: A considerable portion of the populace is always dragged kicking and screaming regardless of which way that might be.

State legislatures are beginning to formally assert “10th Amendment” claims against federal power, and they may even make those claims stick. They’ve scared the federal politicians into writing “opt out” provisions into ObamaCare, at any rate.

Is it really such a giant leap from what’s already happening to the idea of the whole thing tumbling down, with its constituent parts reassembling themselves — or not — in various ways?

I don’t think it is. It’s happened before, here and elsewhere, more or less convulsively, and I see no reason to believe that the United State as currently configured is immune.

I don’t know if 2010 is the year, as Panarin predicts, but I think it’s coming. And when it does, I’m cautiously optimistic that people in at least a few odd corners (New Hampshire? The Colorado and Wyoming Rockies, perhaps?) will resist any meaningful reassembly of the machinery of state.

In last year’s election campaign Obama came across as vaguely more friendly to open-culture than the alternatives, among other things supporting “fair use” reform of the DMCA and opposing requirements for ISP data retention (both issues on which Hillary waffled).  As somebody put it, “Obama’s a Mac and Hillary’s a PC.”  Even the U.S. Pirate Party endorsed Obama as the least evil candidate.

But if recent events are any indication, Obama’s stance on the preexisting digital copyright regime is that of Rehoboam:  “My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins.  For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more to your yoke.”

It was a safe bet something was up when Obama refused to discuss—for “national security” reasons, of course—the terms of the forthcoming Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a secret copyright treaty).  Now the Internet chapter has leaked, according to Cory Doctorow, and “It’s bad.  Very bad.”  Among other things:

It requires ISPs to “proactively  police” user-generated content for copyright violations.  This effectively puts the legal onus on hosting services for enforcing digital copyright, resulting (according to Doctorow) in liability issues that will destroy the business models of services like Blogger and YouTube.

This “proactive policing” means, in particular, requiring DMCA-style “takedown notices” as standard practice in all signatory countries, and requiring automatic takedown and cutoff of Internet service on accusation—not conviction.  As we’ve already seen in the U.S., takedowns are a virtually 100% effective form of censorship, since ISPs typically respond immediately and with a complete lack of due process.  It will also impose DMCA-style restrictions against breaking DRM on the whole world, even when it’s for an otherwise lawful fair use purpose like making content you already purchased more usable to you.

Most commentators seem to agree that, if this is enforceable, it will effectively destroy what’s variously known as Web 2.0 or the writeable Web.  If the treaty is literally and effectively enforced, it will mean a return to the Internet of the 1990s, when most websites were high-tech sales brochures and/or PR  handouts for large corporations and government agencies.  Or as one commenter under Doctorow’s post put it, “The problem with the Internet is that it is not TV. This will be fixed by ACTA.”

The good news is, it’s probably not enforceable.  If it’s ratified by the U.S. in its present form, I expect non-signatory countries all over the world will become web-hosting havens and instigate a mass exodus from signatory countries, and for this to give the biggest push yet to mainstream adoption of anonymizing services.  And as a commenter at Doctorow’s BoingBoing story points out, in an age of local wireless meshworks, ISPs have a lot less power than they used to:

“OH FOR CRYING OUT LOUD PEOPLE!!!  Just open your wireless port, call it parasite.net, and then set yourself up as an ‘ISP’ with an FTP, web server, torrent tracker, etc. If you can convince enough people in your area to create access points and mirrors of the content we’ll eventually cut out the telecoms and have a truly distributed data and communications network.”

I’m not enough of a techie to know whether that would work, or even entirely what it means.  But I share Arthur Silber’s gut reaction (Silber cited that comment himself) that this isn’t the end of the world.  Charles Johnson once posted, on Rad Geek blog, a “Cat and Girl” cartoon in which the girl lamented the election of George W. Bush and all the horrible laws that would likely be passed under his leadership.  The cat responded, “Since when do we obey the laws?”

There’s a country that already has all these draconian rules on paper:  China.   How’s that been working out for them?

One thing I do believe:  These people and everything they stand for are doomed, no matter how much damage they cause on the way down.  We’re rats in the dinosaurs’ nests, waging Fourth Generation Warfare against those dying monsters.   We’re agile and resilient, and we treat their surveillance and censorship as damage to be routed around.  As their lumbering bureaucracies spend hundreds of thousands of committee man-hours fighting the previous war, adding new concrete to the Maginot Line by the thousands of tons every day, we’re turning on a dime thinking up new ways—cheap ways—to destroy them.   We will bury them.

In the meantime, we’ve reached a point where “the authorities” need to get a lesson in their own impotence, loud and clear.  We need to treat laws like these with the contempt they deserve, and break them every chance we get.  The people who draft such filth behind closed doors need to learn the meaning of the words “HELL NO!”

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, El Tratado ACTA es una DMCA Aumentada.