The most obvious fact about movement toward a stateless society is that it’s a long-term project. Just as Rome was not built in a day, millennia of government and hundreds of years of the modern nation-state will not be un-built in a day.

Even if some catastrophic event came along and decapitated the world’s regimes for us, that wouldn’t get us where we are going.

For one thing, the attitudes and beliefs that kept those regimes going for so long would still remain. The disappearance of government as we know it would quickly be followed by massive, organized efforts to rebuild government as we know it.

For another, the stateless society is not a nihilistic concept. It isn’t a nothingness that excludes the existence of permanent (or at least longstanding) institutions. Far from it! What the anarchist advocates is the creation of new, better institutions — institutions built on a foundation not of coercive hierarchy, but of the uncoerced cooperation which flourishes in an environment of individual freedom.

History abounds with “end times” predictions. Often they’re of a religious nature, but radical politics has provided its share of such prophecies. When the Bolsheviks took control of Russia, for example, they believed that they were within years of instigating and leading worldwide revolution. Some early anarchists believed that they could usher in a millennium of statelessness through the right “Propaganda of the Deed” — kill the right politician, strike versus the right corporation, and the ball would roll quickly and unstoppably downhill.

Such predictions have always proven naive and premature, and my purpose in this column is not to stoke my readers with a false hope that they’ll live in a stateless society a year from today. Nonetheless, 2010 will be a year of opportunities, and I hope that we’ll exploit those opportunities to their last full measure.

The modern nation-state as such is in a period of crisis.

Governments around the world are standing atop the shoulders of their drowning subjects in order to keep the state’s head above a sea of debt. It’s a good bet that when the alternative becomes “shrug the burden off or breathe saltwater,” those subjects will choose the former. States will fall. Yes, most of them will be replaced by new states or by “reformed” versions of the old ones, but that whole process constitutes a window of opportunity to talk with the subjects and influence their thoughts and actions.

Many states — the US and the NATO governments, much of southern Asia, et. al. — find themselves locked in unsuccessful military struggles with non-state opponents. Say what you will about the al Qaeda network (and I’ll heartily agree that they are bad actors, that their tactics are repugnant, and that their aim is statist), but they’ve thus far proven themselves more resilient and adaptive than the states they are at war with. The inability of the state to grapple with such threats becomes more and more apparent each day, not only to its enemies but to the subjects who expect it to do so.

No, the state is probably not in its final crisis, but it is beleaguered. And proponents of the stateless society should seize the day given us by that fact.

The mission of the Center for a Stateless Society (a mission I hope you’ll continue to support) is to communicate anarchist ideas to the general public. We’ll continue doing that, but communication is only part of the big picture.

It’s time to start “building the new society in the shell of the old.” As we at C4SS work on communicating the ideas, I hope that you will begin putting together the post-state society in situ. “Build it and they will come.” We’re trying to send them your way. What will you have to show them when they get there?

It’s time for cooperatively organized mutual aid networks.

It’s time for non-government money.

It’s time for non-government courts.

It’s time for non-government security and defense agencies.

Most importantly, it’s time for those creating all of the above — and yes, I know that that’s a process well under weigh already — to begin more effectively networking with each other, to come out of the shadows and advertise yourselves as the alternative, to take your offerings to market in a big way. It’s time for the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre!

Over the course of 2010, I hope to be able to advise anyone and everyone my column reaches of the existence of many of the alternative institutions you are already building so that they can get involved and start transitioning their own lives out from under the burden of the state. Get those projects functional and ready for prime time, and let me know about them.

Let’s make 2010 the Year of the Anarchist!

A recent article run by the Associated Press, “Over Two Dozen States Weighing Marijuana Reforms,” is, for a change, somewhat encouraging:

“Washington is one of four states where measures to legalize and regulate marijuana have been introduced, and about two dozen other states are considering bills ranging from medical marijuana to decriminalizing possession of small amounts of the herb.”

Now, never mind that the folks who comprise these 28 or so mini-oligarchic “states” plan to restrict, regulate, and of course, tax cannabis sales once they give the green (no pun intended) light after so many wasteful, destructive years of arrogant and heavy-handed obstinance. Unlike tobacco, marijuana does not require the kind of protracted and involved drying and curing process necessary to make a quality, consumable product. In fact, anyone capable of growing good tomato plants can grow superb cannabis. The botanical techniques are nearly identical. Hence, private cultivation is set to explode.

This is precisely ex-Drug War top cop – now turned leading legalization advocate –Barry Cooper’s strategy, in that he wants to “outgrow the government.” That is, to have so much marijuana growing across the countryside that, in effect, the government’s Drug Nazis are simply forced to give up. (Of course, as an anarchist, I say we “outgrow the government” altogether and have done with it – Drug War, taxes, regulations, and all.) In fact, his two excellent DVD videos – both available at www.nevergetbusted.com – demonstrate how to both grow and transport marijuana, in relatively small amounts, without detection by government agents. Valuable weapons in any bid to bring Drug War madness to a grinding halt.

Here’s some more from the aforementioned AP article:

“’In terms of state legislatures, this is far and away the most active year that we’ve ever seen,’ said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, which supports reforming marijuana laws.

“Nadelmann said that while legalization efforts are not likely to get much traction in state capitals anytime soon, the fact that there is such an increase of activity ‘is elevating the level of public discourse on this issue and legitimizing it.’”

“’I would say that we are close to the tipping point,’ he said. ‘At this point they are still seen as symbolic bills to get the conversation going, but at least the conversation can be a serious one.’”

Well okay: Pressure within is as good as pressure without on some aspects of this – so all-pervasive has become the Holy State — and perhaps the tandem effect can accelerate the Marijuana Revolution. Still, as any anarchist, I would advise and encourage non-political means by which to affect change.

Here, after all, are the words of those who are enjoying the financial and egotistical benefits of the status quo in America:

“’There’s no upside to it in any manner other than for those people who want to smoke pot,’ said Travis Kuykendall, head of the West Texas High Intensity Drug-Trafficking Area office in El Paso, Texas. ‘There’s nothing for society in it, there’s nothing good for the country in it, there’s nothing for the good of the economy in it.’”

And this ridiculous blather, from another self-styled visionary:

“Ron Brooks, president of the National Narcotics Officers’ Associations’ Coalition, said that he feared that, if legalized, marijuana would contribute to more highway accidents and deaths, as well as a potential increase in health care costs for those who smoke it.

“State lawmakers, he said, need to ask themselves ‘if they believe we really will make all that revenue, and even if we did, will it be worth the suffering, the loss of opportunities, the chronic illness or death that would occur?’”

Spoken like a true Nicolae Ceausescu. But this Berlin Wall is going up in smoke, fast. The self-serving lies of government are piling up – here, there, everywhere. And it’s up to each and every one of us to insure that the State cannot roll this change over into another tax-and-regulate boon for itself. We must make it unprofitable and unworkable for the bureaucrats at all levels, everywhere, to have a hand in any marijuana industry.

Just as we must do the same in all areas of human life.

You’ve heard it all before, I’m sure:

“If you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain.”

“Not voting is a vote for the winner and whatever his policies may be. If you don’t like him and them, you should have voted for the other guy.”

These little pieces of the conventional wisdom are based on the claim — sometimes explicitly made, sometimes just implied — that not voting constitutes consent to the choices made by those who do vote. That same conventional wisdom generally attributes the decision not to vote to “apathy.”

I’m not going to try to tell you whether or not you should vote. There’s plenty of reasonable disagreement within the movement for a stateless society on the subject. If you’re interested in the arguments, I suggest that you read Carl Watner’s “A Short Introduction to Non-Voting” on the one hand and Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Problem of the Libertarian Party,” which constitutes chapter four of his essay “Konkin on Libertarian Strategy.”

Whether or not you vote is a personal decision. If you decide not to vote, however, I’d like to suggest that you make that decision more meaningful by turning it into an anti-political turd in the political punchbowl. Or, to make myself more plain, you should make every effort to get your non-vote interpreted as you intend it to be interpreted rather than simply allowing the conventional wisdom claim of “tacit consent” to go uncontested.

The conventional wisdom says that not voting for anybody is “voting for the winner.”

The conventional wisdom says that if you don’t vote, it’s probably because you don’t care.

Stand up for yourself!

Declare clearly and publicly that your decision not to vote, if it’s to be considered a vote at all, should be considered a vote for NOBODY. And, further, insist that that vote for NOBODY should be … counted!

You’re not apathetic. You just don’t like any of the candidates. You don’t believe that any of them can represent you, or should be held out as doing so. You do not consent to be ruled or represented, at least not by any of the people applying for the job of ruling or representing you.

In any given election, those votes for NOBODY — votes not cast by registered voters, votes not cast by those eligible to vote who choose not to register, and votes not cast by those barred by the election laws from voting — would, if counted, generally constitute at least a plurality and usually a majority of all votes.

Your alleged representatives will, of course, studiously ignore you, and go about their business of pretending that they represent you, if they can get away with doing so.

If you don’t let them get away with it – if you and other non-voters make some real noise to the effect that these guys aren’t “your representatives” by any reasonable definition – it should get fun. Ever heard an egg-stealing dog yelp when the farmer catches it near the chicken coop and unloads shotgun shell full of rock salt at its ass? It’s very much like the sound a politician makes when forced to contend with the claim that his “services” are neither needed nor wanted. Personally, I find that sound curiously musical.

If you’re not going to vote, publicly declare before each major election that you’re not going to vote. Write a letter to the editor. Call a local talk radio show. Comment on your local newspaper’s web site beneath an article on the forthcoming election.

After the election, follow up in the same way:

“Of the 400,000 people living in this district, more than 300,000 did not vote for candidate X. More than 200,000 voted for NOBODY. The ‘winning’ candidate received the support of less than 25% of his alleged constituents. If this is really a democracy, shouldn’t that seat remain vacant for the term? That’s the unambiguously expressed will of the majority, after all.”

No, you’re not going to “win” an election in this way – the system is set up to prevent that from happening at all costs – but that’s beside the point. If you’re going to refrain from voting as an expression of your rejection of that system, the next step is to use that expression as an outreach tool. Raise your voice so that others like you can hear it and join in!

Translations for this article:

• Dutch, Anti-politieke politiek

To me the funniest part of the novel Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, was his description of the internal management practices of the Feds.

In the fictional world of that novel, most centralized states had collapsed, and the territory of the former United States was home to dozens of competing networked “government” franchises.  The Feds, or the former federal government of the United States, was one of those competing governments (although it claimed continued jurisdiction over the former territory of the United States).  Its main source of revenue was software design for private clients.

From the way the Feds organize their software design operations, they seem to have read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, recoiled in horror, and decided instead that Brazil was the way to go.

Everybody’s assigned their tiny little share of the project on a need-to-know basis, with their individual pictures of the project resembling that subcommittee of a subcommitee Winston Smith sat on to decide whether the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary should put braces inside brackets or vice versa.  Smith’s assignment was actually a model of transparency, in comparison, because at least he knew it had something to do with the Newspeak Dictionary.  The overall design of the Feds’ software, or even its basic purpose, is outside the scope of anyone’s need-to-know below the highest level.  And nobody can alter a single line of code without reference to endless policy manuals in three-ring binders; what’s more, since these policy manuals are revised every few weeks with endless interdeparmental meetings, most of the new code written has to be thrown out every time the policy is changed.

The coder’s first order of business, after clearing the hurdle of urine tests and personality profiling to get to work, is to spend until noon or so reading all the interdepartmental memos on new regulations or changes to the existing rules for writing code.  Most of the afternoon is spent rewriting the portions of code rendered obsolete by changes in the rules (with none of the hundreds of programmers working on any project having any idea what it’s actually for, of course—that’s classified).

Even the interdepartmental memos include suggested reading times, with the surveillance system monitoring compliance.  Anyone who scrolls through in less than the suggested time lacks proper respect for the importance of policy memos, while anyone who takes too long is suspected either of incompetence or of taking an unauthorized bathroom break.  And anyone who reads it in exactly  the suggested time to the second is a smartass who needs attitude counseling.

I’m not sure who the customers for the Feds’ software are supposed to be, but I get the feeling the IT department at my employer (and probably yours) would be among them.

Until last week, I thought Stephenson’s farce—hysterically funny as it was—was a grossly exaggerated depiction of even the worst real-world bureaucracies.

But no more.  According to an op-ed by Jonathan Vaccaro at the New York Times, it takes 96 hours after the Taliban arrive in an Afghan village for an Army commander to secure the necessary approvals to  act.  The company in which Vaccaro was embedded failed to interdict the Taliban in some 70 percent of cases because its commander failed to get the required eleven approvals in time.  Travel in anything but a 20-ton mine resistant vehicle requires “written justification, a risk assessment and approval from a colonel, a lieutenant colonel and sometimes a major” (over half the villages in Afghanistan are inaccessible to such vehicles).  The Taliban walk in or ride donkeys.

The bureaucracy runs to the highest echelons.  Small aid projects require endless delays for approval (the opening of a small free health clinic was delayed eight months after it was built “while paperwork for erecting its protective fence waited in the approval queue”).  While Taliban propaganda operations turn on a dime in response to events, “our messages have to inch through a press release approval pipeline, emerging 24 to 48 hours after the event…”  Battlefield commanders are required to submit reports in PowerPoint, “with proper fonts, line widths and colors so that the filing system is not derailed.”  So, um, if you could put the new cover sheets on the T.P.S. reports, that would be great, m’kay?

John Robb, who blogs at Global Guerrillas, makes a couple of points about the American military’s organizational model.

First, “risk mitigation trumps initiative every time.”

Second, rather than using new communications technology to “enable decentralized operation due to better informed people on the ground,” the military instead uses it to “enable more complicated and hierarchical approval processes—more sign offs/approvals, more required processes, and higher level oversight.”

Just another example of why state capitalism is doomed.  Small, agile, bottom-up organizations will eat government and corporate bureaucracies alive.  One of my favorite sayings is that the twentieth century was the era of the large organization; by the end of the twenty-first, there won’t be enough of them left to bury.

For me, 2009 actually started on election night, 2008.

Tamara and I spent an evening with fellow Libertarian Party candidates and activists (yes, we’re among those heretical anarchists who remain involved in electoral politics) — pizza, beer and conversation — then headed home. Along the way, every thirty seconds or so, we’d pass a car with its horn honking, its lights flashing, fist pumps out the window from the driver. Barack Obama was very popular in St. Louis.

I recall two conflicting thoughts at the time.

The first thought was “maybe it won’t be so bad.”

“Hey,” I figured, “Obama can probably be counted on to keep the Iraq withdrawal ‘timeline’ established by the Busheviks. Maybe he won’t put the pedal to the metal on his AfPak war rhetoric. He’s promised to close Gitmo and that’s an easy promise to keep. And surely he’ll put the kibosh on the torture thing and maybe send a few of the most egregious offenders to jail. Sure, he’ll try for a New New Deal, but McCain would probably have done the same on slightly different lines.”

The second thought was “give these guys a year and they won’t be honking their horns and pumping their fists for Obama.”

I was wrong on both counts.

The Iraq shoe hasn’t dropped yet, but I’ll give you even money there are still US troops there long after we drop off the right edge of the “timeline.”

Obama has announced, and begun implementing, his “Afghanistan surge.” He’s also re-authorized, and announced an expansion of, the “murder by remote control” drone campaign in Pakistan.

Gitmo’s still open and its planned closure isn’t an actual closure but just a transfer to a new facility for the abductees. “Indefinite detention,” tweaked, is officially part of the Obama Doctrine. The torture probably continues, its perpetrators remain at large, and “the most transparent administration in history” has gone to court to prevent the public from knowing its full extent.

It’s hard to compare Obama’s actual New New Deal with the hypothetical New New Deal McCain would have brought us. McCain’s might have been worse or not, but we got what we got and it ain’t good.

While Obama’s popularity ratings have dropped considerably, and while a few brave liberals and Democrats have tried to hold his feet to the fire on detention and torture, he remains fairly popular with most of the people he was popular with a year ago. Yeah, yeah — just keep pumping those fists, that’ll help.

I never really fell for the whole “hope and change” scam myself, but I thought maybe we’d get a little relief. The main effect of the Obama presidency on me personally so far is that I’m a more convinced anarchist than I was a year ago. He’s living proof that in politics at least, the more things change the more they stay the same. New boss, same as the old boss.

Why is that? Because even if one president wanted to, he couldn’t change the nature of the state. Government is a big machine, built on layers and layers of previous machinery below it. It’s on rails, going in the same direction it’s always gone — downhill on a steep grade, terminating in a cliff edge — and its mass gives it momentum.

The idea that one guy could come sit down in the train’s cab, push a few levers or tighten a few bolts, and actually change the direction of the thing is absurd. Not in a year, not in four years. He’d be lucky to slow it down, and chances are he isn’t going to really want to do even that. More fun to blow the whistle and yell for the fireman to stoke the boilers. Toot, toot — let’s see how fast this thing can go!

The history of libertarian involvement in electoral politics is a history of attempting to get in the cab and turn the train around, reverse its direction, or even just slow it down a bit. Even for a political junkie like me, that’s a marginal activity … an addiction, or a fascinating hobby.

The real task — not just for libertarians and anarchists, but for anyone who’s interested in survival at a level above that of, say, the Dark Ages — is laying new track, uncoupling the cars of society from the locomotive of government, and routing ourselves in a different direction so that it doesn’t take us over the edge with it when we reach the bottom of the hill. Let’s make this next year about that.

Brian Doherty, in reviewing Michael Moore’s “Capitalism:  A Love Story,” makes this telling comment:

“He loses the whole game when he asks a woman from the factory why the workers don’t form a co-op and run it themselves. They don’t have the money, she explains; they aren’t capitalists. That’s a benefit the wealthy provide to the working man that Moore won’t acknowledge.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if Doherty thinks Moore is stupid.  But surely even he doesn’t think Moore is so  stupid as to be unaware that some people have money and others don’t, or that people engaged in wage labor most likely do so because they don’t have as much money as the people employing them.  As Basil Fawlty would say, I’ll take the bleeding obvious for $500, Alec.

A major part of Moore’s critique of corporate capitalism hinges on the reasons that some people have so much money, and others have to work for them.  I’m incredulous that Doherty could have sat through the movie without noticing that the concentration of wealth and polarization of income was an issue in its own right.  Moore’s critique is muddled, sure enough.  But the question itself is entirely legitimate, and for Doherty to treat it as if it doesn’t exist is just dumb.

Doherty regurgitates, as if he’d only just thought of it himself for the first time today, one of the most complacent, one of the most unreflective—one of the dumbest—knee-jerk apologetics out there:  “Without rich capitalists, who would employ people?”

An analogue of Doherty eight hundred years ago might have asked, smugly:  “But without feudal landlords providing land to work on, how would the peasants be able to feed themselves?”

A parallel Doherty in the old Soviet system, the same sort of Hegelian enthusiast for the rationality of the real in the context of a state planned economy, might have similarly taunted disgruntled Soviet workers on their dependence on state industrial ministries to “provide” them with the “benefit” of employment.

I can imagine a parallel Doherty crowing, similarly, in response to antebellum slaves’ admission that they lacked the capital to buy out the plantation and run it themselves.  This is not to say, by any means, that the cases are parallel, or that modern workers are under the same constraints as slaves.  The point is that to take labor’s dependence on capital as a legitimization of capital’s position, without first examining the brute facts of the background power relationship, is just plain stupid.

In all these cases, the obvious question—never addressed by any of the class systems’ analogues of Doherty—is why.  Why is the feudal landlord, the state manager, the corporation, in a position to provide the only available jobs?  Why do those working for such employers lack the capital to employ themselves?

Doherty’s argument—if you can call it that—presumes three things as just given, part of the natural state of affairs:  1) the concentration of capital in the hands of a few absentee investors, 2) the lack of same on the workers’ part, and 3) a production model that requires massive capital investment in product-specific assets.

That the working classes might have been systematically robbed by Enclosures and other land expropriations, that the state might have barred access to vacant and unimproved land, that the state might have raised entry barriers to the aggregation of capital outside the existing finance system—that the state has systematically impeded the bargaining power of labor and shifted income upward—never occurs to Doherty.  That the state has systematically promoted a particular industrial model at the expense of others, and thus artificially raised the capital outlays needed to enter the market, likewise never occurs  to him.

Aside from all the rest that’s wrong with Doherty’s “argument,” it assumes an archaic finance model that really applies only to startups:  a manufacturing corporation gets its “capital” from sales of stock and loans.  In fact, of course, the overwhelming majority of most large corporations’ investments are funded by retained earnings.  And the “capitalists” who actually make the decisions are managers pretending to represent the shareholders when they’re really just a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a mass of capital with (de facto) no real outside owner.

The parallel with the Oskar Lange model of market socialism back in the ’20s (endorsed both by Frederick Taylor and Joseph Schumpeter, by the way) is interesting.  Mises argued that it would be simply playing with markets, because the manager of a market socialist firm wouldn’t be risking money he contributed himself.  But that is, in fact, pretty much the position of corporate management in the West.  They didn’t contribute the capital stock of the corporation; they’re gambling money accumulated at no cost to themselves.  So if they get a multimillion bonus this quarter and then run the company into the ground, they’re not only out nothing themselves, but ahead several million dollars.  Hence the perverse incentives to go for big wins, with no regard to the possible downside.  Hence the perverse incentives to game the quarterly numbers, even at the expense of gutting long-term productivity.   Exactly the kind of irrational allocation of capital that Mises said Lange’s market socialism would lead to, in other words.

Doherty, in praising the corporation for giving the workers crutches for their broken legs, shouldn’t forget the extent to which the system depends on—and profits from—the systematic breaking of legs.

You just gotta love those self-styled anti-government Republocrats. First this, from an article by Yasha Levine titled: “Michelle Bachmann: Welfare Queen,” published recently at the leftist truthdig.com:

“Michele Bachmann has become well known for her anti-government tea-bagger antics, protesting health care reform and every other government “handout” as socialism. What her followers probably don’t know is that Rep. Bachmann is, to use that anti-government slur, something of a welfare queen. That’s right, the anti-government insurrectionist has taken more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts thanks to corrupt farming subsidies she has been collecting for at least a decade.

“And she’s not the only one who has been padding her bank account with taxpayer money.

“Bachmann, of Minnesota, has spent much of this year agitating against health care reform, whipping up the so-called tea-baggers with stories of death panels and rationed health care. She has called for a revolution against what she sees as Barack Obama’s attempted socialist takeover of America, saying presidential policy is ‘reaching down the throat and ripping the guts out of freedom.’

“But data compiled from federal records by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit watchdog that tracks the recipients of agricultural subsidies in the United States, shows that Bachmann has an inner Marxist that is perfectly at ease with profiting from taxpayer largesse. According to the organization’s records, Bachmann’s family farm received $251,973 in federal subsidies between 1995 and 2006. The farm had been managed by Bachmann’s recently deceased father-in-law and took in roughly $20,000 in 2006 and $28,000 in 2005, with the bulk of the subsidies going to dairy and corn. Both dairy and corn are heavily subsidized—or “socialized”—businesses in America (in 2005 alone, Washington spent $4.8 billion propping up corn prices) and are subject to strict government price controls. These subsidies are at the heart of America’s bizarre planned agricultural economy and as far away from Michele Bachmann’s free-market dream world as Cuba’s free medical system. If American farms such as hers were forced to compete in the global free market, they would collapse.”

So much for rejecting government socialism and defending free markets (which of course is impossible while government exists at all in the first place – in this regard, even quasi-libertarian Texas congressman and 2008 Republican presidential primary candidate Ron Paul, never so hypocritically involved in such hijinx, is powerless to be a purist). The article goes further:

“Chuck Grassley, the longtime Republican senator from Iowa who warns his constituents of Obama’s ‘trend toward socialism,’ has seen his family collect $1 million in federal handouts over an 11-year period, with Grassley’s son receiving $699,248 and the senator himself pocketing $238,974. Even Grassley’s grandson is learning to ride through life on training wheels, snagging $5,964 in 2005 and $2,363 in 2006. In the Grassley family they learn early how to enjoy other people’s money.
“Sen. Grassley railed against government intervention in the health care market, telling The Washington Times, ‘Whenever the government does more … that’s a movement toward socialism.’ As the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, he ought to know, especially because the government has done more for him and his kin than for Americans struggling with high medical bills and mortgages. Even the free-market think tank the Heritage Foundation criticized Grassley on his deep connections to farming interests and his stubborn lack of transparency.”

So it seems Bachmann is not the only right-wing farmer on the take. But after all, ‘tis the season of giving – a season that never ends in Washington, or at any level of political government. The problem is, it’s never your choice or mine whether we “give” our money to the politicians and their heavily armed bureaucrat minions. We pay at gunpoint, they play at leisure – all the while preening and posturing as if we actually needed them. As if they were actually doing or producing something useful.

When I give gifts to my friends and family this Christmas, I’m doing it because these are special people in my life who I care about. When I give forced tribute to government at Christmas, and every other day of the year, I do it to avoid being shot dead – the ultimate result of continued and determined resistance to the aggression the State initiates against us all.

Take some time to examine the difference this holiday season, and then you decide which you like better.

For me, an anarchist, it will always be peace on earth, good will to women and men everywhere.

Recently the climate science community suffered something of an embarrassment with “Climategate”:  the servers of the Climatic Research Unit were hacked, opening thousands of emails over a thirteen year period to scrutiny. Some of these emails, if not undermining the validity of all global warming research, at least shows some climate scientists in the unflattering light of spinning data to promote a politically predetermined outcome.

But global warming advocates don’t have a monopoly on the political abuse of science.

It’s funny how the same libertarians who gleefully pounce on “junk science” when it serves an agenda they regard as inimical, are so fond of it themselves when it confirms their own prejudices.

A good example is Rachel Carson’s alleged responsibility for millions of deaths from malaria, as a result of her role in banning DDT. The neocon FrontPage magazine accused her of “ecological genocide,” and a character in a Michael Crichton novel went so far as to say she killed more people than Hitler. The JunkScience.Com (!) website even has a malaria death clock featuring Rachel Carson’s face.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those things everybody knows that just ain’t so. Here are some of the holes in the received version of the story:

1)  The various national bans on DDT all left a loophole for mosquito eradication when other available means were inferior to DDT. Controlled use of DDT for mosquito eradication is entirely legal.

2)  DDT was already losing its effectiveness for mosquito eradication in the 1960s because mosquitoes were becoming resistant to it.

3)  DDT had numerous side-effects that outweighed its limited effectiveness as a pesticide. Most importantly, and like most synthetic pesticides, it also poisoned the rest of the food chain above the mosquitoes. This meant, among other things, that it killed off mosquitoes’ natural enemies, so that it took larger and larger amounts of DDT to achieve the same results as before. In the process, it also caused significant collateral damage. For example, by killing the parasitic wasps that previously kept down the population of thatch-eating caterpillars, DDT indirectly caused an epidemic of collapsing roofs. Another example:  it poisoned geckoes who ate the mosquitoes, and who in turn poisoned the cats who ate the geckoes, thus resulting in an epidemic of rats.

The canard can be traced back at least to a campaign by Roger Bate, a right-wing economist who worked for a variety of industry think tanks. He personally conducted funding pitches around the corporate world, selling his propaganda campaign as a stiletto between the ribs of the environmentalist movement. “The environmental movement, he said, “has been successful in most of its campaigns as it has been ‘politically correct.’” DDT offered the potential of using the environmental movement’s erstwhile advantages against it, he crowed:  “the correct blend of political correctness ( . . . oppressed blacks) and arguments (eco-imperialism [is] undermining their future).”

Reason magazine science reporter Ron Bailey was an early and enthusiastic adopter, regurgitating the urban legend in most of its particulars in 2002 (he linked to an article based almost entirely on Roger Bate’s work).

Picking and choosing evidence to believe based on what its truth would entail, rather than whether it’s valid or not, is a bad thing—regardless of which “side” it comes from.

In the case of anthropogenic global warming, the reflexive opposition of many libertarians is just as cavalier with the truth as the folks crowing over Climategate accuse global warming advocates of being.

That such libertarians feel compelled to take the strategic position they do in regard to global warming speaks volumes about their basic view of the world. It’s a view of the world that shares a lot in common, ironically, with that of the average liberal Democrat.

The reasoning process goes something like this:

If global warming is real, all is lost for libertarians, because the need for statism follows as a direct implication. If global warming is real, it will prove the liberal Democrats are right: the free market has led to disastrous results at least in one particular, and the state is necessary in at least this one case to correct market failure. In other words, given the premise of global warming, libertarians of this stripe see the big government argument as something that follows legitimately from it, as a matter of course. So global warming cannot be happening. QED.

Funny. I’m fairly friendly toward the anthropogenic global warming thesis, and I don’t see global warming as a market failure at all.  I see it as a government failure. If we removed all the government-created externalities that promote consumption of energy and transportation inputs, and protected the fossil fuels industry from full liability for torts committed in the course of its operations, global warming would never have arisen as an issue in the first place. The free market is not the problem, it’s the solution.

But maybe some libertarians see the free market as something that needs protection from the truth.

Ah, Christmas! The season of good cheer and caroling and presents under the tree!

So why is the US Congress and the Obama administration going instead with a more Halloween-type routine? You know, the one where they put a bag full of dog feces on the porch, set a match to it, ring the doorbell and run away.

Answer: They’re politicians. It’s what they do. And in their minds, it really is a gift they’re giving you.

As I write this, the US Senate has achieved “cloture” (a successful vote, requiring the support of 60 of the 100 Senators) on its version of ObamaCare, a piece of legislation falsely and cynically advertised as “health care reform” and formally titled “The Affordable Health Care for America Act.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has announced that he expects the Senate to pass the bill before Christmas.

The bill has little to do with “health care,” of course. It also has nothing to do with “affordability,” and what it does accomplish would, if truth in advertising rules were followed, be described as “to,” not “for,” America.

The poop in the bag is 100% pure Grade A corporate welfare, no more, no less. The bill’s central provision, referred to as “the individual mandate,” is an undisguised gunpoint “your money or your life” demand — write more checks to the insurance companies, or else.

Like I said, they’re politicians. It’s what they do. And hey, it’s the thought that counts, right?

As I’ve noted in this column a number of times, the primary function of government (any government, any type of government) is to transfer wealth from the pockets of the productive class (you) to the bank accounts of the political class (the politicians and those who successfully woo them).

From professional licensure laws to protect industry cartels from competition, to endless war to provide “defense” contractors with a lucrative raisson d’etre, to subsidizing Big Insurance with the “individual mandate” — it’s all the same game, and in the post-WWII era the US government in particular has become quite adept at playing that game while pretending it’s doing other things entirely.

Note that I’m not trying to pass this off as a post-WWII American phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. It’s part and parcel of the modern state’s history, observed and satirized at least as early as 1845 by French political economist Frederic Bastiat in “The Candlemakers’ Petition.”

Many have described “the people” as sheep being sheared or cows being milked. While those metaphors were once quite apt, I believe that America has passed out of that phase and into one of plain, unadorned cannibalism. The politicians and their masters have given themselves completely over to their appetites, unwilling — unable — to accept the fact that they’ve long since ceased merely to bag some wool or bottle some milk and are now tearing at the living flesh of their victims.

It’s a natural error. Livestock is livestock, and the leap from dairy to beef isn’t a great one. We’re what’s for dinner. Past and present experiments of this kind of menu expansion — the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, the People’s Republic of China, every backwater state socialist hellhole you can think of come to mind — demonstrate the end state at which we can expect to arrive if we continue to tolerate that error.

Look under the tree at your gifts. The one marked “from Barack, Harry and Nancy” is shaped rather like a sausage grinder, don’t you think? And by way of holiday reciprocity, they expect you to run some of yourself through it. Merry Christmas.

I remember a friend of mine, the current anti-income tax political prisoner Irwin Schiff, drawing me an analogy: “Imagine if you, Alex, walked into a room full of people, and just started indiscriminately breaking people’s noses. Then, after you left, imagine those same people holding their hands over their bruised and bloody faces saying, ‘Gee, you know, that Alex is a great guy – but those fists of his need to be reigned in and put under greater control!’”

This is the typical American’s reaction to the IRS. Most Americans don’t make the further associative leap indicating exactly who the IRS ultimately take their marching orders from. Now while you’rte contemplating that fundamental state of affairs, here’s an excerpt from a recent column by Jack Cafferty, published by CNN:

“It happened quietly at the White House this week – almost like they didn’t want us to notice:

“President Obama signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill which increases budgets in many federal agencies by about 10-percent.

“The bill includes almost $450 billion for the operating budgets of different departments. Among those seeing increases: The FBI, the Veterans Health Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

“Democrats say this spending is critical in order to help the economy out of the recession. But Republicans are slamming what they call out-of-control spending – and criticizing about $4 billion going to more than 5,000 earmarks requested by individual lawmakers.

“Doesn’t exactly sound like the change President Obama promised, does it?

“One watchdog group says the earmark projects include the construction of a Kentucky Farmer’s market, the renovation of a historic theater in New York and the restoration of a Rhode Island mill.

“The bill also approves a 2 percent pay increase for federal workers.
Meanwhile the 50 million Americans receiving Social Security won’t be getting any increase next year – for the first time in more than 3 decades.

“So nothing for the country’s seniors… but there’s always money for more government.”

That should tell you a thing or two about just who those in government care about first … and it isn’t you (unless you’re a government employee) or I. This is the supposedly “servant” government – a concept so ludicrous it barely qualifies for consideration. Yet many Americans remain deluded in this way. They desperately need to wake up.

Here are a few more tidbits about the IRS I found at Wikipedia:

“During Fiscal Year (FY) 2006, the IRS collected more than $2.2 trillion in tax net of refunds, about 44 percent of which was attributable to the individual income tax. This is partially due to the nature of the individual income tax category; containing taxes collected from working class, small business, self employed, and capital gains. Of the Individual Income Tax, the top 5% of income earners pay 60% of this amount.

“Recently, the IRS has altered its policies. The current Service plus Enforcement equals Compliance motto has led to more investigations of abusive tax schemes.

“As of 2007, the agency estimates it is owed $300 billion more than it collects.”

If you’ve read Irwin Schiff’s research, you may have arrived at the conclusion that the IRS itself is an “abusive tax scheme” and that no one “owes” a red cent of Section 1, Subtitle A “income” tax to the IRS or anyone. It is likely that you view the entire income tax system as a legal sham and criminal fraud kept alive by a scared and ignorant public, and a conspiratorial bench, bar, and bureaucracy.

Regardless of this, however, anarchism takes us a step further: None of those “laws,” regardless of how they are written, or supported or not supported by implementing regulations, or by court rulings, or by reams and reams of counterproductive mumbo-jumbo, have any legitimate bearing on anyone at all. They are the mere opinions of politicians and bureaucrats backed up by lethal violence so that the Mafioso organization known as government can continue to do whatever it pleases at my expense and yours. It’s literally as simple as that.

Now this little gem, also from Wikipedia:

“Congress passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights III on July 22, 1998, which shifted the burden of proof from the taxpayer to the IRS in certain limited situations. The IRS retains the legal authority to enforce liens and seize assets without obtaining judgment in court.”

“Certain limited situations,” huh? So when dealing with the IRS, in most instances the enslaved taxpayer is guilty until proven innocent, on the mere allegation of some nameless, faceless IRS bureaucrat. And the next part is even better – IRS liens and asset seizures may occur without any form of judicial process whatsoever. Just like in the government’s equally tyrannical Drug War, the IRS is granted the authority to take everything you own anytime they want to. It’s then up to you to sue in the self-same government’s courts to try and get your property back. Good luck to you there. You might as well try to part the Red Sea.

Wikipedia has further cheery news:

“In July 2008, the office of the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration reported that the number of federal criminal tax investigations referred by the Internal Revenue Service to the Tax Division of the Justice Department is at an eight-year high. According to the report, the fiscal year 2007 ended with 4,600 investigations. The increase is nearly 50 percent from fiscal year 2002 to year 2007. The report also concluded that federal criminal tax convictions increased by 6.7% from fiscal year 2006 to fiscal year 2007. The number of persons convicted in fiscal year 2007 was 2,155.”

Those are 2,155 ruined lives too many. The IRS loves to proclaim: “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” Wow. That kind of logic is from whacked-out, la-la zombie robot land. I can’t even begin to comprehend a mind so warped as to believe that taxes and government and taking of property and kidnapping people to put them in cages represents any kind of civilized behavior whatsoever.

But further in the article, observe the arrogant misplaced pride with which the following is proclaimed:

“Since CI’s inception in 1919 to the present, the conviction rate for Federal tax prosecutions has never fallen below 90 percent. This is a record of success that is unmatched in Federal law enforcement.”

“Success,” even. Friends, these people (I’m doing them a favor by calling them that) are very, very sick. They are about as dangerous as it gets.

Next time you see a police car in your neighborhood, understand that what it says on the side door, near or as part of the emblem is true: “To Protect and Serve.” It is also just as true that the Internal Revenue Service is providing a service. The upshot is that in neither case is the “protection” or “service” directed towards anyone except those in government – you know, the government that is allegedly supposed to “serve” us (whether we want its “service” or “protection” or not)?

And this inequitable arrangement — inherent to the very notion of government and as such unchangeable within the context of same – is why it will not do to simply abolish the IRS or scrap the tax code.

Government itself must be outright done away with as soon as physically possible, if we wish to realize civilization.

Barrack Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech included this self-congratulatory little gem:

“But the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions—not just treaties and declarations—that brought stability to a post-World War II world.  Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this:  The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.  The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans.”

Before Mr. Obama dislocates a shoulder patting himself on the back, maybe we should look at the record.

When it comes to guaranteeing stability and promoting democracy, the United States’ record is pretty clear.  “Global security” and “stability” mean the security and stability of a particular global order guaranteed by the United States—a global order that reflects the interests of the coalition of class forces that control the American government.

The United States’ record with regard to “enabling democracy” is also clear.  When it has best served the interests of the corporate world order to replace a dictatorship with a formal democracy, the United States has done so.  But when it has best suited the interests of corporate power to overthrow a democracy by force, the United States government has not hesitated to do so.

A lot of American blood has, indeed, been shed in battlefields around the world.  Even more blood has been shed by the people who lived in those countries, fighting American soldiers.  And the wars in which all that blood has been shed have had little to do with the prosperity, freedom, or other interests of the people where the wars were fought.

The list of killing fields, stained with “the blood of our citizens”—and of many other people—is indeed a long one.  It includes the millions killed by military regimes and death squads in Central America, from the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954 to U.S. support for the Contras’ terrorism in the 1980s.  It includes the victims of the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone of Latin America, installed with the support of Operation Condor in the ’60s and ’70s.  It includes the hundreds of thousands massacred by Suharto (with the CIA’s Jakarta station drawing up the hit lists) and millions more by Mobutu.

“Freedom,” in operational terms, has translated into whatever degree of freedom was compatible with secure profits for United Fruit Company and ITT—which wasn’t much.

More often than not, the United States has intervened to protect the corporations who own the world from the people who live in it.  As Noam Chomsky put it, the Cold War in practical terms can be summed up as a war by the U.S. against the Third World, and by the USSR against its satellites, with the “threat” of the opposing superpower in both cases serving mainly as a pretext.  It’s a lot like Emmanuel Goldstein described the three rival superpowers of “1984”:   three sheaves of corn propping each other up, and enabling one another to defend their respective internal systems of power.

One of the most central items in the American creed is the belief that the troops “protect our freedom.”  By definition, any war the United States fights is to “defend our freedoms.”  Just watch the cable news shows,  or read your local newspaper’s editorials on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, if you don’t believe it.  If any one belief is central to the ideology of One Hundred Percent Americanism, this is it.

But it doesn’t bear much looking into.  I once saw JCS Chairman Richard Myers on C-SPAN, addressing the Army War College, criticizing China (with a straight face) for having military forces beyond its “legitimate defensive needs.”  This from the highest-ranking military officer in a global superpower whose military budget exceeded those of the rest of the world combined.

When most people of common sense think of “defending our country,” the first thing that comes to mind is probably defending against an actual military attack on the territory of the United States.  But if you look at all the foreign “threats” the U.S. government “defends” itself against, strangely enough they mainly involve what some country on the other side of the world is doing within a few hundred miles of its own borders.  Most of them don’t even have the logistical capability to project force more than a few hundred miles outside their own borders.  So if you think about it, it’s only fair that the U.S. military “defend our country” and “protect our freedoms” on the other side of the world.  If Uncle Sam weren’t generous enough to meet them more than halfway, we’d never get to have any wars.

Myers’ comments about China, and the nature of the other “threats” the U.S. national  security state points to, provide an interesting glimpse into what “American exceptionalism” is really all about.  The United States is the only country in the world that is permitted to define as “excessive military capabilities” the ability to successfully resist an American attack.  The United States is the only country with the right to define as “aggression” what another country does in its own immediate vicinity on the other side of the world—while the United States itself intervenes militarily all over the globe to force others to obey its will.  The United States is the only country which is allowed to define a “threat” as another country’s ability to disobey the orders of the global hegemon within a few hundred miles of its own borders.  By definition, a “threat” is any country that doesn’t do what it’s told.

So when Liz Cheney criticizes Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism, she’s all wet.  He believes in it, all right.  As Chomsky pointed out, American liberals, as much as American conservatives, share the implicit assumption that “we own the world.”  They may believe that Vietnam or Iraq was a “mistake,” but never for one second do they question the premise that the United States has the right to intervene in such cases.

Let’s get something clear.  The United States’ military does not “defend our freedom.”  There hasn’t been a war in my lifetime that involved a genuine foreign military threat to our freedom, and the United States government has been actively involved in suppressing freedom around the world for decades.  The United States government is a threat to our freedom, and the freedom of people everywhere.

“The bottom line is, having the government shut down is not an option,” says congresscritter Russ Carnahan (D-MO).

I beg to differ. It most certainly is an option, probably the best among those available to us. It’s also one that falls well inside the parameters within which the government in question was allegedly established: The right of the people to alter or abolish any form of government, even one that provides Russ Carnahan with a comfy sinecure, is a primary claim around which the Declaration of Independence was centered.

Unfortunately, the stakes in the game Carnahan is playing at the moment aren’t “keep the government running” or “shut it down,” but rather “have the government borrow more money” or “have the government live within its extremely ample means.” He was speaking to the US House’s passage on Wednesday of legislation to raise the US government’s “debt ceiling” from $12.1 trillion to $12.4 trillion.

As you may have noticed, I don’t normally use this column for the purpose of urging readers to contact “their” representatives. The Center for a Stateless Society isn’t a lobbying group or a PAC. Our purpose is not to affect policy, but to educate the public about the case against the state per se.

So, when I share the following letter to “my” politicians with you, please understand that I am not urging you to go and do likewise. I’m just sharing it with you as an introduction to a point I’d like to make. This is the version I sent to US Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). Identical (except for the names) versions went to US Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) and US Representative Lacy Clay (D-MO):

Dear Senator McCaskill,

I notice that the US House yesterday approved a $290 billion increase in the government’s “debt ceiling,” raising it from $12.1 trillion to $12.4 trillion.

Presumably the Senate will take up similar legislation in the near future.

I am not writing to yourself, Senator Bond and Representative Clay in order to urge any particular vote or action on the matter, but rather just to inform you that I’m not responsible for, nor do I intend to pay off, your debts.

I’ll be publishing this letter in one or more public spaces so that your creditors will be aware of this fact. If they’re going to loan money to the three of you and your 532 colleagues in the House and Senate, they may want to run credit checks first. Just so long as we’re crystal clear on the fact that I won’t be co-signing for you, the rest is between you and them.

Best regards,
Thomas L. Knapp

Carnahan’s claim of the “non-optionality” of taking away his toys, and of an assumed power to borrow money in your name and mine, is a risible echo of King George III’s claim versus Britain’s colonies in America, to which Thomas Paine aptly responded in “The Crisis No. 1”: “Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to tax) but ‘to bind us in all cases whatsoever,’ and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth.”

George III learned the hard way that “his colonists” were possessed of more options than he had previously believed. Is Russ Carnahan aware that the descendants of those colonists are possessed of the same options … and then some?

The founding fathers were ahead of their time, and not only in a good way. When they brewed up their hot cup of successful revolution, Bastiat and Molinari hadn’t yet disproved the necessity and utility of the state. Paine, Jefferson, et. al. were thus constrained to feeling their way toward mere “better government,” not yet apprehending the possibility of Thoreau’s “best government” (“that which governs not at all”). Jefferson began to grapple with the idea later in life, but anarchism didn’t come into its own until later.

Those were the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We don’t suffer the same handicaps — or have the same excuses — that the founders did. We understand (or should understand) that Russ Carnahan’s power, and the power of his co-conspirators, is a function not of Jefferson’s mythical “consent of the governed,” but of politicians’ ability to hoax us into believing that we need them. And we should understand by now that we don’t.

Let’s keep all our options, even the ones Russ Carnahan can’t bring himself to admit the existence of, on the table.

As the U.S. Senate works feverishly to further distort the marketplace and deprive Americans of even more of what remains of their liberty by “overhauling” the health care industry, I offer you these excerpts from a December 16th article run by CBS News:

“Obama repeated his demand for action, telling ABC News ‘the federal government will go bankrupt’ if the health care bill fails. He said Medicare and Medicaid are on an ‘unsustainable’ path if no action is taken.

“To make matters more complicated, the Senate stumbled into health care gridlock after a Republican senator forced the clerk to read aloud a 767-page amendment.

“GOP Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had sought approval to require that any amendment considered by the Senate must be offered 72 hours in advance and with a full cost report.

“When he was rebuffed by Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, Coburn invoked his right to require that an amendment by another Democrat be read aloud. That sent the Senate into limbo, since the amendment by Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders was 767 pages long. It called for guaranteeing coverage to all through a public program similar to Medicare.

“Sanders withdrew his amendment some three hours later, after 139 pages had been read, with a broadside at Republicans. Pounding the lectern on his desk, his voice rising, he accused Republicans of trying to shut down the legislative process. ‘That is an outrage,” Sanders said. ‘People can have honest disagreements, but in this moment of crisis it is wrong to bring the United States government to a halt.’”

To Obama I would say that the federal government is not “going” bankrupt – it already is. The amount of federal debt is irresolvable, unpayable, and entirely beyond repair. What is even more outrageous about this statement is that Medicare, Medicaid, and so-called Social Security overall have been unsustainable for decades. What do you expect from a socialist system modeled after Otto von Bismarck’s 19th century Prussia? But Obama’s solution is pouring more money into the mouth of the monster, and further impinging upon individual choice – not necessarily health care provider, but whether one chooses to purchase health care or not. In Obama’s collectivist universe – along with most of his fellow statists – it’s okay, in terms of bureaucratically sanctioned progressive escalation of force, to ultimately kill people who choose to resist mandatory health care. Sick indeed.

Health care reform isn’t about making sure people are healthy. It never was. Like all actions of government, it is a justification for further control and enslavement of a population. It’s about non-productive fat cats living high off the hog at the expense of the politically unconnected working class. It’s about simple ruthless domination. It’s a cynical, insidious power play. If politicians and bureaucrats were truly concerned about people’s well-being (other than their own, of course), they’d resign their posts, find jobs that are actually useful and beneficial, and put government out of business forever.

This is where I need to address Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed and proud socialist directly: “’…in this moment of crisis it is wrong to bring the United States government to a halt.’”

No, Sanders, you just don’t get it. That is precisely what we need, and soon, and permanently. And since at least the time of Gustave de Molinari, market anarchism has been there, waiting only to point out the near-infinite ways in which that is possible.

Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was stopped on November 25 en route to Vancouver, where she was scheduled to speak at a benefit for public radio stations.  Armed border guards ransacked her car (and papers and laptop hard drive), and interrogated her for ninety minutes.   Their line of question leaned heavily on the subject matter of her planned remarks at public appearances in Vancouver and Victoria.  They seemed especially concerned (not to say obsessed) that she might make negative comments about the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Goodman actually had a hard time figuring out what the goons were talking about.  At first, she thought they were worried for some reason about Obama’s recent effort to promote Chicago as an Olympic host.  When they explained their concern over the Vancouver Winter Olympics, her response was “Oh I hadn’t thought of that.”  In her subsequent remarks on the event, she gives every indication that their chickenshit Winter Olympics were the last thing on her mind.

Well, if she hadn’t thought of it before, she certainly has now—and so have millions of other people who otherwise wouldn’t have given it a second thought.  The border goons’ attempt to suppress negative comment on the Winter Olympics was about as ineffectual—and comical—as Basil Fawlty’s attempt to avoid talking about the war.

In an interview with the Globe, she said she planned on discussing the border incident in her public appearances.  “Clearly,” that is, “if it’s okay with the border police.”

This is a classic example of the Streisand Effect at work.  Attempts to suppress negative publicity lead to far worse negative publicity—worse by several orders of magnitude.

Rather than a relatively small number of people hearing what Goodman thinks about the Winter Olympics, a very large number of people will hear about border guards trying to shut her up about the Winter Olympics.  As Keith Olbermann said, if they’re worried about Goodman embarrassing them, it’s pretty counterproductive to provide her with a script for the next day’s show.  Not only have the border goons done more to cause the Winter Olympics more negative publicity than Goodman could ever have dreamed of (assuming she’d been bored enough to bother), they’ve make themselves look like a bunch of incompetent buffoons in the process.

This is just another example of what a hard time the old state and corporate hierarchies are having adjusting to a networked world.  We see them constantly being blindsided by negative publicity.  They’re still encultured to a world of unidirectional broadcast communications with centralized, high-cost hubs, where a quiet phone call or lunch with the right person could hush things up just fine.  They’re just beginning to learn that that world is gone forever.

Every attempt to nip bad publicity in the bud, by schmoozing with some gatekeeper, winds up exploding in their faces.  And no matter how many times it happens, it never stops being funny.  Imagining the looks on the faces of Trafigura management and those Canadian border clowns, I laughed the way I used to at the sight of Elmer Fudd after a shotgun blew up in his face.

We can talk to each other now, and replicate suppressed information infinitely (or as near as dammit), with near-zero transaction costs.  Not only can’t they shut us up, but their attempts to do so just cause more embarrassment.  Every attempt to suppress a leaked document winds up being circulated over the Internet.  Every police beating winds up on YouTube.  They can’t hide any more.

As Sheldon Richman put it, in commenting on an earlier column about the Streisand Effect, “We’re watching Big Brother.”

Randall McElroy III at The Distributed Republic beat me to it. “Other than Steve Jobs and Usain Bolt,” he writes, “the specific people on that list are all scumbags, and in a just society would be treated like crooks, not celebrated by an adoring press.”

“That list,” of course, is Time magazine’s “short list” for its Person of the Year Award.

The award is handed down each year to the person who, in the opinion of Time‘s editors, “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year.” An interesting standard. If the Holy Roman Catholic Church adopted it, we could look forward with enthusiasm to the spectacle of Pope Benedict announcing the beatification and impending sainthood of Satan.

Not that Time actually follows the standard reliably — if they did, Osama bin Laden would have been a lock for “Person of the Year” in 2001. Instead, the award went to Rudy “a noun, a verb, and 9/11” Giuliani, whose influence had exacerbated the effects of, but by no means overshadowed, bin Laden’s.

Back in the day, Time does seem to have given the nod to the truly influential even if they were also overtly evil (Hitler in 1938 and Stalin in 1939, for example). These days, the award is pretty much a set-aside for second-raters — a publicity/propaganda model gravy train of “mainstream media” construction, upon which second-rate politicians of theoretically “good” orientation (Barack Obama in 2008; George W. Bush in 2000) take their victory laps around an artificial model of the political universe.

It’s hard to over-emphasize the role of the media in making politicians seem more important than they are — in giving them the “influence” which Time celebrates. Without Time and its ilk, who among us would take seriously the pretensions to “leadership” of a Connecticut Yankee trust-fund baby transplanted to Texas for the apparent purpose of bankrupting various oil ventures before finding his niche as welfare pimp for the local baseball franchise? Or the presidential aspirations of a small-time Chicago identity politics chiseler?

Any fast food fry cook who manages to serve up a decent burger at a reasonable price exercises more positive influence in the world than the most highly-posted politician. He’s creating value, exchanging it for value, making the world a better place for himself and for others. Politicians don’t create value. They merely consume it, at gunpoint … and all they return for it is aggression, coercion, death, carnage. By definition, any politician who makes Time‘s “short list” weighs in on the “for worse” side of the ledger.

Of the two non-politicians (excluding groups) on this year’s “short list,” I lean toward Steve Jobs. After all, if not for Jobs, the computer I’m writing this column on wouldn’t exist. Considering the amount of time I spend on the Internet, it’s safe to say he’s had a tremendous amount of influence on me personally, and on most of those reading this column (even if they’re not reading it on a Mac). He’s played a huge role in making the world better, more connected, more productive, more fun to live in.

The other non-politician, Usain Bolt, is an athlete of incredible ability who’s thrilled and inspired millions with his feats of speed and strength. While I personally don’t see that his overall influence even comes close to that of Jobs, at least it can be said of Bolt that his achievements are positive demonstrations of human potential instead of the coercive and aggressive “achievements” typical of those which politicians boast of.

Time is conducting an online poll for “Person of the Year.” It’s non-binding (the editors will pick the winner), but it would be nice to see the laurels go to a non-politician, and they currently look likely to. “Iran protesters” — politicians of a sort, but not the usual sort — are way out front, with Barack Obama a distant second and Jobs in third. Weigh in.

A long time ago, George Washington made a very dangerous and arrogant statement: “It must be laid down as a primary position and the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property, but even his personal service to the defense of it.”

So this alleged hero of the “Revolution” was not so revolutionary after all, it would seem. He felt perfectly comfortable establishing a “primary position” instantly applicable to everyone everywhere, in addition to “our” system. He was entirely ignorant that there were and would be no such thing as “citizens” (as anyone who has ever read Marc Stevens’ Adventures in Legal-Land will point out), and likely cared not that some might not wish to be availed of the “protection” this “free government” (which is like saying “alive dead” or “incorrect correctness” – it’s inherently self-contradictory) proposed to provide on a compulsory basis – and later ruled that it had no duty to do so. And of course, Washington even went so far as to state that an individual’s life and property are entirely secondary to this arrogant one-sided command and control philosophy.

Smash cut to Obama, 2009: In a recent speech delivered in Norway as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, this is how Ben Feller of the Associated Press characterized and quoted Obama:

“It was a jarring moment when Obama, in the midst of the ceremony, said of his troops in Afghanistan: ‘Some will kill. Some will be killed.’”

“He lauded Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., preachers of nonviolent action. But he added, ‘A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida’s leaders to lay down their arms.’”

Note: It appears Obama has never read Carl Watner’s excellent essay, “Without Firing a Single Shot: Voluntary Resistance and Societal Defense,” available in the Non-Violence section of www.voluntaryist.com.

“’To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism, it is a recognition of history.’”

“The president laid out circumstances in which war is justified — in self-defense, to come to the aid of an invaded nation, on humanitarian grounds such as when civilians are slaughtered by their own government.

Further Note: Then Obama is okay with me using armed force in defending myself from the naked aggression of government agents? From the military or the BATFE or the DEA, who invade so-called “nations” (a specious concept)and slaughter people all the time in a most unhumanitarian manner, exclusively so as to do no more or less than to impose government will and pit it mercilessly against the will of the individual?

“At the same time, he also stressed a need to fight war according to ‘rules of conduct’ that reject torture, the murder of innocents and other atrocities.

“’We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend,’ he said. ‘And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.’”

What on earth does Obama call it when a cop tasers someone for something so simple as not moving fast enough? That’s torture in my book. And it’s more than obvious that the American government murders plenty of innocent people every day – both overseas, and here at home. The ideals Obama has in mind are bred of Washington’s of old: the arrogant domination of others’ lives and property under threat of lethal violence in order to advance the self-serving agenda of the State.

It is the hope of every anarchist to make enforcing such “ideals” not just hard, but ultimately impossible – by abandoning and then eliminating government altogether.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo on Thursday, US President Barack Obama attempted to defend his escalation of the US war in Afghanistan, making use of “just war theory.”

The concept of a “just war” emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the forced used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.

The war in Afghanistan fits this definition, Obama implies, because “of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense.” And in fact the war in Afghanistan does fit into “just war theory” if we move one letter from the begining to the middle.

The war was not launched, nor has it been waged, in “self-defense” or as a “last resort.” Far from it. While most people rightly felt that the 9/11 attacks required a forceful response, an invasion of Afghanistan and what’s shaping up as a decade of occupation there were far from the only, or even best, options available. Most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan. Much of the planning and preparation were done elsewhere as well. And even if Afghanistan was a natural focal point for the response due to Osama bin Laden’s presence there, it was an ill-conceived response which doubled down on the policy errors which had led to 9/11 in the first place.

The US could have complied with the Taliban’s request for evidence, upon presentation of which they claimed they would extradite Osama bin Laden to the US for trial (a lower burden than would have been set by, say, Canada, which wouldn’t have extradited him unless it was guaranteed that the death penalty would not be sought). Would the Taliban have kept their word? We’ll never know — then-president George W. Bush chose to sneer at that request and invade rather than fulfill a single, simple, reasonable requirement for achieving his alleged objective.

The US could have utilized special operations forces to specifically target al Qaeda and bin Laden, but chose the conventional warfare/invasion route instead. Bush launched a war of “regime change” and “nation-building” — not “last resorts” but preferred options exercised at the expense of the alleged main objective. The “regime change” element tied down American forces in the lowlands for a good six weeks, giving bin Laden and al Qaeda plenty of time to relocate to Pakistan. The “nation-building” element has kept the US forces tied down in a no-win situation of their own making ever since.

Eight years on, Obama has chosen not only to continue, but to escalate, an optional, non-defensive war which has already resulted in more than 30,000 completely unnecessary civilian deaths and which serves not only no defensive purpose but no discernable purpose at all. Afghanistan is not “a just war.” We need to move the “a.” It’s “just a war.”

In Obama’s version of history, “[w]ar, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease — the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.”

To an extent, he’s right — but he goes off the rails and off into fairy tale material. Along came government to fix things! How? Through “[a]greements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development.”

One of these things is not like, is in fact incompatible with, the others. Nation[-state]s, strong [government] institutions and [government] “investment” always come at the expense of human rights … and, sooner or later, at the expense of peace.

It may very well be that the war in Afghanistan was initially just a mistake — that the previous administration lacked clear vision, over-estimated or misunderstood the threat, panicked under pressure, dropped the ball. Within months, however, it became quite clear that no legitimate defensive, or even preemptive, mission remained to be accomplished.

For a good 7 1/2 of its eight years, the war in Afghanistan has been merely — and clearly — a function of “agreements among nations, strong institutions and investment in development.” Or, to put it a different way, a way for bureaucrats and rent-seekers to fleece the taxpayers of the US and the NATO countries and transfer as much of their wealth as possible to the bank accounts of war profiteers (euphemistically referred to as “defense contractors”). That conspiracy has thus far succeeded to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, with no end in sight.

Just a war, folks. That’s all it is — a picking of your pocket, and if some carnage is required to distract your attention, so be it. There is no “higher purpose” … this is government’s main purpose and primary activity, your tax dollars at their intended work.

In an article for the January issue of Reason, Matt Welch compared his experiences in the “private” American healthcare system and the French “socialized” system, and found the latter a lot more attractive from the perspective of the average healthcare consumer.  The “waiting lines” were a lot less of a problem in France than in the U.S., and the French system was a lot more user-friendly and simple from the standpoint of bureaucratic hassle.  While people rich enough to pay for major procedures out of pocket might prefer the American system, the average American insurance policyholder would probably find the French system heaven on earth.

The point, Welch said, is not that a socialized system is better than a private system.  The point is that their honestly socialized system is better than our socialized corporate system masquerading as a “private” one.  He’d prefer a genuinely free market system to either the French or American system.  But enemies of Obamacare need to drop the bullshit about the American healthcare system being “the best in the world,” and defending it as “our free market system.”  Anyone with direct experience of foreign healthcare systems will be more than happy to expose such lies.

One of the commenters on Welch’s article, at Reason Hit&Run blog, made a good point:  there’s really nothing all that astonishing about a comparatively well-run socialized system beating a really incompetent and slipshod mixed government-private system.  But a genuine free market system wasn’t even in the running.

The fact that we’re dealing in the U.S. with a choice between two or more alternative state-private mixes is one reason I haven’t gotten too worked up about the whole Obamacare debate.

I especially don’t understand why the public option, of all things, is where self-described opponents of a “government takeover of healthcare” chose to draw a line in the sand.

The features of the plan that the Democrats, Republicans and Blue Dogs all agree on are far more statist than the public option as such.

An individual mandate, coupled with taxpayer subsidies of hundreds of billions over a ten year period to people at various multiples of the poverty rate strikes me as about as statist as you can get–especially when the “reform” maintains the insurance cartel’s jacked-up prices.  As far as I’m concerned, a “private” insurance company that gets a huge share of its income from the taxpayers, and “sells” insurance to people who were forced to buy it, is as much a component of the state ruling class as a straightforward government agency.  Even more so, in a sense, because the taxpayer-funded overhead includes an additional layer of parasites known as “shareholders.”

Prohibitions against denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, and other forms of denial of coverage, don’t bother the insurance companies at all.  Since the entire industry is  required to do these things it’s not a competitive issue, and the lack of cost controls means they can simply pass on increased costs to policyholders with a generous markup.  They will subsidize coverage of the sick and currently uninsured by increasing everyone else’s premiums.

Consider this in light of the principles of dialectical libertarianism.  A particular government measure is not to be evaluated on an atomistic basis, but in light of its contribution to the level of statism in the system of the whole.  As Brad Spangler pointed out, when you’re held up at gunpoint the bagman who collects your money is just as much a robber as the guy holding your gun.  The corporate bagmen who lobby for government intervention and profit from it are, therefore, part of the government.  And when government intervenes to grant special privileges for nominally “private” actors, that is a net increase in statism.  On the other hand, when a second government intervention qualifies or limits the exercise of this grant of privilege for the sake of ameliorating the worst effects of privilege, it is a net decrease in statism.

In this light, the public option would actually have represented a net decrease in statism.  The major components of the healthcare “reform” that everyone agreed on were a naked power grab by a state-enforced cartel, forcing the entire population to purchase insurance at cartel prices and taxing the public to buy it for those who can’t afford it.  The public option, on the other hand, would have been entirely self-financed after the initial seed money of a few billion, and nobody would have been forced to buy it.  But it would have offered price competition to members of the insurance cartel.

It’s interesting, don’t you think, that all the professed enemies of “big government” and friends of “our free market system” objected to the public option of all things.

Lieberman and others explicitly said that competition to “private” insurance companies was what they couldn’t abide.  But holding up taxpayers and forcing them to buy insurance at gunpoint, at whatever price the insurance companies choose to charge, with no competition–why, that’s not “big government” at all.  Because the insurance companies are businesses, you see, and anything that benefits business is part of “our free market system.”

Whenever you see a Republican or beltway “libertarian” talking about “our free market system,” remember that they’d have been using the same rhetoric about Krupp and I. G. Farben if they’d lived in Nazi Germany.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson’s seventh paper — The Alternative Economy as a Singularity. [PDF]

“Localized, small-scale economies are the rats in the dinosaurs’ nests. The informal and household economy operates more efficiently than the capitalist economy… And in the end… we will bury them.”

Even if you concede some value to electoral politics and lobbying,  the best way to maximize bang for the buck in such efforts is simply to capitalize on the potential of network culture:   that is, put maximum effort into just getting the information out there, giving the government lots and lots of negative publicity, and then “letting a thousand flowers bloom” when it comes to efforts to leverage it into political action.  If you do that, the political pressure itself will be organized by many different individuals and groups operating independently, spurred by their own outrage, without even sharing any common antistatist ideology.

This is the same kind of stigmergic effort I wrote about in the previous two columns.  In the case of any particular state abuse of power or intervention into the economy, for every libertarian who opposes them on principled non-interventionist grounds there will be ten or a hundred people who oppose them on grounds of fairness or personal interest that are completely independent of the nonaggression principle as such.  Millions of people oppose police rioting and lawlessness, or the grossly unjust digital copyright regime, without being libertarians in any consistent philosophical sense.  If libertarians simply expose the nature of state action and its unjust particular effects, it will be leveraged into action by people in numbers many times larger than those of movement libertarians.

The state and the large corporations are a bunch of cows floundering around in the Amazon.  Just get the information out there, and the individual toothy little critters in the school of piranha, acting independently, will take care of the skeletonizing on their own.

A good example is what Radley Balko does every day, just through his own efforts at exposing the cockroaches of law enforcement to the kitchen light, or that CNN series about gross civil forfeiture abuses in that town in Texas.  When Woodward and Bernstein uncovered Watergate, they didn’t start trying to  organize a political movement to capitalize on it.  They just published the info and a firestorm resulted.

At the same time, we should engage in general efforts to change the terms of debate, to push the center in a libertarian direction, and to bring “radical” and “extreme” libertarian ideas into the realm of respectable discourse.  One way to do this is to propagate the same memes, over and over again, in reference to a wide array of specific cases.  The general “Baptists vs. Bootleggers” meme, especially, is worth propagating far and wide.  This meme was the thesis of Gabriel Kolko’s “The Triumph of Conservatism,” in which he argued that (despite all the “progressive” rhetoric used to sell them), economic regulations have generally been created to protect the regulated industries.  This theme needs to be driven home, hard and repeatedly, in libertarian commentary on regulatory legislation.  The goal is for increasing shares of the public to internalize the general lesson, by sleeper effect, until more and more people automatically greet “progressive” proposals by cynically wondering who the Bootleggers are in this particular case.

Balko’s work at The Agitator, simply exposing the truth about the mechanics of the police state consistently on a daily basis, has probably done more to increase public skepticism about the drug war and law enforcement than a thousand libertarian pot decriminalization petitions.  And the kind of reporting TechDirt and BoingBoing do on the standard abuses of the DMCA will eventually, I believe, have a similar effect on public consciousness in regard to IP law and its contribution to the exploitative corporate economic  environment.  Shifting public consciousness to the point that the downloaders are seen as “good guys,” and the people sending out DMCA letters are the “bad guys,” will result in a revolutionary transformation of what is and is not feasible for the state capitalists.

The only real way to change the institutional environment of politics is to change the culture to the point that there are new limits to the kind of shit the state can get away with.

Such cultural changes are the reason that most states renamed their military establishments as ministries or departments of “defense,” and international aggressors shifted from framing their actions in straightforward and unapologetic Lebensraum terms (like the 18th century dynastic states and the 19th century imperialists) to “self-defense” against some “foreign threat” manufactured for mass consumption.  They’re the reason any politician publicly recorded saying “nigger” might as well hang up his hat, and the reason the CIA bothers to hide its overseas torture facilities.

They’re the reason Hitler felt he had to make even a minimal effort to manufacture a “Polish threat” to Danzig via false flag operations, and the U.S. war propagandists had to come up with lies about Kuwaiti baby incubators and mobile biological warfare labs in the previous two Iraq wars.

It’s true that it typically hasn’t taken much of an effort to manufacture enough “evidence” to overcome the low public threshold of doubt, in the past.  But thanks to network culture, the cost of  manufacturing consent is rising at an astronomical rate.

Just compare the significance of the Iraq war opposition from 2002 on, and the speed of its emergence, with those of the parallel antiwar movement in 1990-91.  The communications system is no longer the one described by Edward Herman, with the state and its corporate media allies controlling a handful of expensive centralized hubs and talking to us via one-way broadcast links.  We can all talk directly to each other now, and virally circulate evidence that calls the state’s propaganda into doubt.  For an outlay of well under $1000, you can do what only the White House Press Secretary or a CBS news anchor could do forty years ago.

Since Woodrow Wilson’s suppression of the working class press and the rise of corporate “professional” journalism ninety years ago, consensus reality has depended on the cost of owning a printing press, and the fact that the people (and governments) rich enough to afford them had more interests in common than not.  This state of affairs is now coming to an end.  The forces of freedom will be able to contest the corporate state’s domination over public consciousness, for the first time in many decades, on even terms.