In “1984,” Winston Smith reflected that there were no laws in Oceania — at least not in the sense of uniformly applied, written laws. You just knew you’d committed an offense when you found yourself doing ten years in a forced labor camp.

Funny how that keeps coming back to me.

A recurring theme in the news lately has been people arrested for recording arrests on their cell phone cams. Now, in most of these jurisdictions it’s formally specified in the law that filming public officials, in public, in the performance of their public duties, does not constitute illegal wiretapping. And it does not constitute “interference with police business.” And yet they’re arrested for it, on the grounds — as stated by the cops — that they’re engaged in illegal wiretapping and interference with an arrest. If you can afford a civil liberties lawyer, afford the risk of losing your job and getting blacklisted by employers, and are willing to spend time in lockup, you might possibly be able to fight it out in court and beat them. But the fastest way to get brutally taken down and arrested — regardless of what “the law” says — is to expose the cops to public scrutiny.

There’s no written law anywhere that defines carrying more than a certain amount of cash as a criminal offense. But if a cop pulls you over and finds a large sum of cash on you, you’ll almost certainly “civilly forfeit” your money for fitting the profile of a drug dealer.

But even when the laws and the rules are objectively enforced at any given time, if you figure out some way to come out ahead despite adhering to them, the people in charge will change the rules just as soon as they notice.

A good example is card-counting — the technique used by idiot savant Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man” to beat the house. Card-counting isn’t cheating, and isn’t violating the casino owners’ rights in any objectively definable way.  It isn’t even violating any previously defined rule.  It’s just using your eyes and your brain, and making deductions from what you observe. But if you start winning too much, the guys behind the security cameras will start bird-dogging you for any sign that you’re counting cards. And if they think you’re doing it, out you go.

I’ve argued that people who “work hard and play by the rules,” so beloved of Soccer Mom politicians, are suckers.  When you play by the rules, the house wins — because the rules are mainly designed to benefit the people who make the rules.

The whole point is that the rules, the law, are set up to produce a predetermined outcome. And that outcome doesn’t have much to do with the ostensible reasons the rule-makers set forth to justify their rules. When working people find a way to subsist comfortably with a reasonable amount of labor, without having to first obtain a huge amount of investment capital, and without having to work to support a ruling class in addition to themselves, that’s what the Quality Improvement theorists would call an “unacceptable process variation.” In the terminology of W. Edwards Deming, observed output is what a process is designed to produce. And if the observed output is found to be undesirable, then the process needs to be redesigned to produce the desired output.

When technological change enables people to produce the necessities of life for themselves without working extra hard to produce rents for the privileged, then the rules have to be rewritten. Hence increasingly draconian “intellectual property” laws, designed to overcome the imminent threat abundance poses to the privileged classes’ extraction of rents from artificial scarcity.

Regardless of the stated “public interest” intent behind economic regulations, the real effect of most of them is to mandate artificially high capital outlays or overhead costs in order to undertake production, and to put a floor under the minimum number of hours a person has to run in the hamster wheel to obtain a good or service.

If you’re not working to feed a useless eater, the system has failed.

The good news is that, no matter how harshly the laws are ratcheted upward to suppress the technologies of abundance, technological developments are also making them easier and easier to evade. For thousands of years, we’ve found the rules irrelevant to protecting our interests because they’ve rewritten them as often as necessary to keep that from happening. But that’s about to come to an end. They’re about to find the rules, for the first time, irrelevant to their own need for controlling us. The producing classes, like Samson, will break the bands of “the rules” as a man would break a cord of tow.

It is common to find an overly narrow view of what makes a statement or event “political.” This can be seen in Ross Douthat’s editorial, “Mr. Beck Goes to Washington” (New York Times, August 29, 2010).

Douthat writes that the August 28 Restoring Honor rally lived up to Glenn Beck’s promise of being “an explicitly apolitical event.” But as he describes later in the editorial:

There was piety — endless piety, as speaker after speaker demanded that Americans rededicate themselves to God. There was patriotism: fund-raising for children of slain Special Forces vets, paeans to military heroism (delivered by Sarah Palin, among others), encomiums to the founding fathers. There was an awards ceremony on the theme of “Faith, Hope and Charity,” in which community-service prizes were handed out to a black minister, a Mormon businessman and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols. And since this was (as you may have heard) the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech, there was a long tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

How does this count as apolitical? The question of Christianity weighs on every politician seeking high national office. Tea Party organizers and others have explicitly named the importance of some kind of Christian values to politics and governance. Praising military sacrifice is bound up with political values. Military personnel are honored for their obedience to government commands. Saying that it is noble to subject individual conscience to the commands of leaders is a statement that deals with the fundamentals of politics. Duty is defined as answering the call of service regardless of how honest that call really is –– just let the higher-ups decide that for you.

Even the choices of which American values to emphasize, and which interpretations of historical figures to promote, are political decisions. As is the choice of where to hold the event in the first place.

Opposition to conventional values is frequently labeled political, and therefore inappropriate in certain settings — like school or patriotic celebrations. Dissent is political while supporting the establishment is just going along with what is. In this way some things are placed outside the bounds of political discussion. The premises are off-limits and only the implementation can be tweaked.

But Douthat’s characterization of the Restoring Honor rally as apolitical appears to be for a different reason. Douthat says that the event “floated entirely on patriotism and piety, with no ‘get thee to a voting booth’ message.”

The assumption is that things are only political if they explicitly involve a political office or ballot measure. This view ignores what lies below the surface: The political climate from which campaigns spring or which they try to appease or co-opt.

Such a view leads to an incomplete picture of politics. It leaves out questions on the role of the Pledge of Allegiance, the shaping of ideas, workplace issues, new methods of economic transaction, perceptions of the military, ideas concerning sound character, and other things that greatly influence the arrangement of power over the individual’s life.

To open the realm of political change to more people, and open the future to new possibilities, it is essential that the political nature of everyday encounters be examined. “Where do you work?” and “Do you support the troops?” are as political as the question “Who will you vote for?” The influence of establishment ideologies on the functioning of politics ought to be recognized and questioned.

On Friday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered a message that — for those of us who inveigh against widespread, institutionalized violence — sounded a lot like a threat, that “much of the work of implementing financial reform lies ahead of us.” Fortunately for libertarians, the ciphers of the state, broadcast by its many mouthpieces, are not difficult to decode, transparently glorifying the policies of coercion that begot the “Panic of 2008.”

Still, appraisal of the ways that the state disseminates its economic message is a worthwhile project considering Orwell’s shrewd, ever-relevant observation that “[p]olitical language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It is an enduring and reliable frustration for anarchists that the state and its media pawns are intent on making statements such as “the economy is bad,” or “the economy is unhealthy,” but there is a reason, if not an outright calculated one, underlying the employment of this construct.

The notion that the economy, no more than the aggregate of consensual exchanges made by individuals, could be “bad” or “unhealthy” is completely incoherent. It would be more accurate (but less convenient for agents of government agitprop) to say that violent state intervention in the economy is “bad” or “unhealthy.” The arguments of the state rely on presenting “the economy” as a self-contained and distinct entity in and of itself, as something that can be acted upon or refined from without, as a doctor might act upon a patient, or a mechanic upon a car. Through this rhetorical misdirection, parasites like Bernanke assume the shape of beneficent caregivers, possessed of the antidotes for the country’s economic maladies.

“The Federal Reserve,” boasted Bernanke, “is already supporting the economic recovery by maintaining an extraordinarily accommodative monetary policy, using multiple tools.” He’ll have to pardon me for not saying “thank you,” for wishing that the state would keep its “tools” of power and brutality tucked in the tool belt instead of monkeywrenching around in the lives and decisions of free and competent individuals.

Just as the economy is not some elephantine life form capable of being tweaked or of concerted movement in any one direction, the state is not really an institution itself; more precisely, it is a category of human action, distinguished not by ornate buildings or volumes of Byzantine legal code, but by the initiation of physical force. And, it is important to remember, this initiation of force is undertaken by people — real, flesh and blood like you and I — not by gods, angels or neoclassical monuments in Washington. The state, then, is no more than an abstraction we use to represent these existing individuals who act in this particular way, and who do things that, if attempted by anyone else, would not enjoy the same presumption of legitimacy.

If, for instance, I wanted to buy something costing two dollars by tendering a torn in half one dollar bill and asserting that it had become two dollars, no one would consider that a justifiable position. When the surrogates of the state, however, maintain that their manipulations of monetary policy will hasten economic recovery, the truth of what that really means is obscured by their oratorical flourishes. The calibration of interest rates, taxation, regulations, all of these things steal your property and your labor, forcing you to work within an invisible scheme designed to siphon wealth to the colluding Big Business and Big Government.

Most individuals do not have a giant, well-paid lobby in Washington securing tailor-made policy (i.e., violence) to entrench their interests, so they should not for one instant harbor the delusion that the workings of the criminal Federal Reserve System are designed to do anything to alleviate their economic woes.

A famous passage from Orwell’s novel 1984 reads, “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” Through his suggestion that, due to theft and the watering-down of our money, “we have come a long way,” Bernanke is asking us to believe that two and two make five, but — as is always true of the state — the numbers just don’t add up.

Dear C4SS supporters,

The US media list is finally “finished” … and boy are my arms tired! At present, I’ve got 1,985 US newspaper contacts in my database. That will draw down a little as I process bounces, removal requests, etc., but I expect it may grow some as well as I notice publications I missed the first time around. The Canadian list remains at 333 newspapers. I just added 45 English-language newspapers in India, and plan to spend the next week or so working on central and southeast Asia lists.

And we’re definitely starting to get somewhere!

The Christian Science Monitor has informed us that it intends to publish Ross Kenyon’s “Anarchists at the Tea Parties ‘Want to Kill us all in Public Office?'” in its web edition on Monday.

Stacy Litz’s “Philadelphia: The City of Big Brotherly Love” will appear in today’s editions of two Massachusetts newspapers, the Malden Evening News and the Medford Daily Mercury (these are print-only publications, no web editions). I’m told that they’ve carried C4SS columns before, as well. Glad to hear it!

I just heard from the folks at Quebecois Libre in Montreal; they’ve published our material before, and my article “The Market is the Heart of the Organ Matter” will appear in their September 15th edition.

This week, I’ve made 3,655 discrete email op-ed submissions to 2,318 publications.

We’re still holding on, but not advancing, in Google News listings and search results. I still haven’t figured out why. I may seek professional search engine optimization assistance in the near future. Now that the newspaper lists are reasonably in order, I expect to start focusing more attention on radio and television bookings.

That’s this week’s update. Thanks for your support!

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society

PS: Speaking of support, you’ve probably noticed that C4SS is running its fundraiser — this one is to raise operations costs for two months rather than one. I’m paid $640 a month to serve as media coordinator, contribute some writing of my own, and assist with other editorial matters. Because I support the Center’s mission, and because I was out a little last month with medical issues, I intend to donate $100 of my August pay back to the Center [update, 08/28 — done!], as well as paying $30 out of my pocket for our phone service (pre-paid cell — that will extend it into December). If you’re a “matching funds” type of supporter, I’m offering those numbers up for your convenience 😉

In the introduction to Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman complained of the perversion of the word “liberalism,” which early in the 20th century underwent a shift in meaning from a philosophy favoring free markets and individual liberty to a philsophy favoring government intervention to guarantee individual security. He quoted Joseph Schumpeter’s statement that the enemies of the system of free enterprise had appropriated its label.

This is true in a sense which Friedman perhaps did not intend. Most people who call themselves “liberal” these days are, indeed, hardly friends of free enterprise. But if Friedman meant to imply that liberal Democrats are uniquely hostile to free markets, among political movements in the American mainstream, he was mistaken.

In fact, any time you hear a politician on C-SPAN or a wonk on one of the talking head shows praise “our free enterprise system” or “our free market system,” you can be morally certain the words are being spoken by an enemy of free enterprise and free markets.

The people who talk most about “free enterprise” and “free markets” in American political discourse, far from actually favoring those things, have appropriated the label “free enterprise” for their system of corporate welfare, corporate protectionism, and crony capitalism.

Quite frankly, I’m thoroughly sick of seeing right-wing Republicans referred to as “free market fundamentalists” by people like Thomas Frank. I’m sick of seeing “free market” treated, on the Left, as synonymous with a modernized version of Robber Baron capitalism. But it’s hard to blame them for this, considering that about the only people you see praising “the free market” in the mainstream media are, well, Robber Barons.

It’s a shame they’ve managed to get away with it. I have a more respect for those who, no matter how morally odious, at least are honest enough to admit where the interests of the corporate piggies at the trough really lie when it comes to free markets.

The private sentiments of the so-called friends of “free enterprise” — people like Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, and Dick Armey — are probably more honestly represented by former Archer Daniels Midland CEO Dwayne Andreas: “The competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy.” “The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.”

Tom Friedman, the foremost defender of corporate globalization, knows exactly what the system really requires:

“For globalism to work, American can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is.  The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

But then, I like the cheerfully sociopathic Blago unknowingly recorded on the phone (“effing golden”) a lot better than the guy on the talking head shows who lifts his eyes heavenward and compares himself to Gandhi and Mother Theresa. At least with people like Andreas and Friedman, you know what you’re dealing with. No hokum about “free enterprise.” Just flaming death from the skies for anybody who fails to ratify the Uruguay Round TRIPS accord or stops using the dollar as a reserve currency.

If you want a living illustration of the moral cancer at the heart of what passes for “free market” advocacy, just look at Dick Cheney saying “the government never made anyone rich” — while Halliburton/KBR gobbles down slop by the bucketfull.

It’s no wonder “free enterprise” and “free markets” have fallen into such ill repute among broad sections of the American public. You can thank their most vocal defenders. If “free markets” meant what the folks at FreedomWorks and AEI meant by them, I’d hate them too.

Fortunately, though, they don’t. Free markets — genuine free markets, without subsidies or protections for big business — are the enemies of corporate power. But you’ll never see anyone saying that on CNBC or the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

“People need to quit with this nonsense that the internet magically signals an inevitable death knell of the State,” writes “dL” at Liberale et Libertaire, in the course of responding to what he or she interprets as a somewhat triumphalist tone (“teh Intarwebs change everything!)” here at the Center for a Stateless Society. “The hell it does …”

Fair cop, dL. We are well and truly busted. We tend to concentrate on the liberating aspects of technology, the adaptive superiority of decentralized networks versus centralized hierarchies, etc., and this may have led us into forgetfulness with respect to two important facts:

First, the state has a head start of several hundred years on the modern market anarchist movement. It’s got a lot of what I’ll call, for lack of better terminology, “installed plant.” Not just physical infrastructure and internally evolved networks for the maintenance of that infrastructure, but “buy-in” from a significant percentage of the population who either make their livings doing the maintenance, or who just simply can’t yet imagine trading their existing ways of life (however many the down sides) for what’s promised in a pot of anarchist message. It’s definitely an uphill struggle, Internet or no Internet.

Secondly, when considering the probable reaction of the state should it come to understand that it’s losing that struggle, I keep coming back to a line uttered by the Architect in the film Matrix Revolutions: “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.”

An underlying assumption in the “liberal West” is that our governments — the same governments which don’t give a second thought to lobbing a few 500-pound bombs into a wedding party in Kandahar or a commuter train in Belgrade, or murdering half a million Iraqi children with disease through starvation sanctions and routine bombing of sanitary systems — would never, ever, ever shut down “their own” electrical grids or nuke “their own” cities or, yes, throw whatever “Internet kill switches” they might have at their disposal, even if doing so represented their last shot at clinging to power for another day.

That assumption is, I think, unjustified.

The purpose of political government is to suck the blood out of the productive class and pump it into the waiting veins of the political class.

The dilemma of the political class is figuring out how much blood it can take without killing the involuntary donor altogether.

And frankly, the political class only cares whether that donor is sitting at a desk fidgeting with sales forecasts in a high-rise office building, versus staring at the rear end of a plow horse a few yards from a one-room shack lit with candles, to the extent that one activity may produce more and richer blood than the other.

If it comes down to a choice between giving up your blood altogether or reverting to extracting it in a pre-technological or even pre-industrial environment, I don’t doubt for a minute that the operatives of the political class will choose the latter course.

In point of fact, a great many human beings — perhaps a majority on the planet! — still live lives that more closely resemble a remake of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (with the anachronisms but sans the humor) than the lives of those pulling this article through fiber optic networks and onto their flat-screen monitors.

They live those lives precisely because their governments fear them too much to let them advance into the 21st century. And our governments, the western “liberal democracies,” likewise consider such freedom as they currently accommodate an “experiment” on which they’re fully prepared to pull the plug if they must and if they can.

On the other hand, it seems to me that our best chance of preventing the state from literally “getting medieval on our asses,” or of undoing the push back to the dark ages should it ever come, lies in maximum utilization of the tools at our disposal while they remain at our disposal. The faster we build the new society inside the shell of the old, the less we find ourselves at the mercy of those who will maintain the old at all costs.

Given what are widespread and prevailing misconceptions, one could perhaps be forgiven for identifying anarchy with unmitigated chaos and libertarianism with today’s corporate avarice. At the same time, Statists — whose systems have rendered nothing but destitution for those they purport to aid — enjoy an opposite but related misbelief, namely, that theirs is the philosophy concerned with economic or social justice. Not only, then, do the state and its influential manipulators use brutality to exploit productive individuals and despoil society of its wealth, they have also inveigled almost everyone into believing that their tools of plunder proceed from a genuine concern for those among us with the least. The coercive apparatuses of the state, however, have never been commanded by the poor and powerless, instead falling under the sway of elites all grasping at the levers of power in attempts to accomplish their ends through force as against voluntary, peaceful means. As characterized by political economist Frederic Bastiat, “When … the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gain in this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.” So in the mainstream, general discourse a view contending merely that no one ought to be able to initiate force against another is misconstrued as merciless and inhuman while the ethics of violence and theft are raised to the level of genuine charity.

Notwithstanding the obvious ethical problems with a social system that places brute force at the center of all human interactions, it should be clear from the empirical evidence that the state has been completely incapable, through its welfare apparatuses, of achieving anything but the most emetic failure, creating a system that is so obviously dehumanizing and arguably racist that it is incredible anyone can defend it in polite society. It is libertarians, though, who are the lepers under the political orthodoxy of today, who must defend voluntaryism as if coercion could ever be a morally tenable option. It is indeed difficult to imagine an arrangement less conducive to charitable giving than one that steals from individuals to provide services that do not even help their recipients, one that fritters away wealth for nothing but the consolidation of entrenched power. It is therefore the state and its flag-bearers who need to carry the burden of proof on the claim that violence and favoritism are the best way to alleviate the hardships of the poverty-stricken.

Rather than advocating the hyper-individualism that libertarians are so often arraigned for, market anarchism is the optimal expedient for social cooperation and harmony, substituting mutual respect between individuals for chaos and its actual source, the state. Though it may at first seem counterintuitive to associate anarchy with order and statism with chaos, even the most cursory inspection of the question reveals that truth. Owing to the state’s aggressive and unwarranted intrusion into our lives, we live at this moment in chaos, with violent crimes against the individual as the norm and with an absence of consistent rules or predictable outcomes. The state, the rule-giver and professed embodiment of order, is actually an institution defined by its regular and arbitrary breaking of social rules, both its own and those demanded by ethics, violating the rights of individuals with complete impunity. While the classic Hobbesian formulation insists that, without the “artificial man” of the state, society would plummet into a lawless war of all against all, that state is more appropriately and accurately descriptive of the strivings of special interests in a democracy than of an anarchic, natural order society. In our lives under the state, everyone competes in what Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls “the production of ‘bads,’” essaying toward positions that will allow them to avail themselves of the advantages of the “political means” to wealth. In contrast to this enshrinement of violence is anarchy’s consistent observation of rules, not capricious or authoritarian rules, but simple rules limiting permissible behavior and regarding what philosopher Roderick Long calls “equality in authority.”

This is what is meant by the statement often made by libertarians that “liberty is the mother, not the daughter, of order”; it is a restatement of the simple but far-reaching truth that excluding the use of aggression from human relationships necessarily gives rise to a “spontaneous order” and amity in society. Similarly, William Aylott Orton said, “In the end, given liberty to learn, men will find that freedom means community.” Anarchy therefore unites individuals as an engine of — in the truest sense — socialization, affirming the words of Friedrich Hayek that the “argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, … but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion … .” Order is the natural and automatic upshot of freedom, individuals aligning their interest not because they are forced to, not even necessarily by purpose or design, but because, insofar as everyone observes the rights of everyone else, it is to their benefit to do so. The organization contemplated by the state, on the other hand, was perhaps best articulated by Hegel, who wrote, “A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it.” Under such a view, the state is the entity with autonomy and volition, and the individual is relegated to the status of a mere organ in the body politic, to obediently — or, better still, reflexively — discharge its duty to that empyrean thing called “the state.” “[A]ll the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality,” continues Hegel, “he possesses only through the State.” It is no surprise that such a notion, completely disregarding individuals and treating them as disposable means to an end, would yield enmity and contempt between neighbors, dissuading them from philanthropy as they painfully endure the unremitting theft of the state. Statism is hyper-individualistic in the disadvantageous sense of isolating people from one another, of situating people in a defensive, inward-looking framework wherein no right is secure or certain.

This might be thought of as an overly paranoid, cynical assertion, but trade — meaning freed markets — is the most powerful tool human beings have for communication, for interaction between people of assorted cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. When two ostensibly very different people trade voluntarily, something edifying takes place on a psychological and emotional level. Differences, however ephemerally, fall away in the face of the realization that all individuals share the same basic needs, that they can treat one another with dignity despite any disagreements as to worldview. Conceptually, it may be useful to think of the full scope of state action as economic isolationism or protectionism, its decisions governing which of our wares or services can leave our own borders as sovereign individuals and which can enter. In making these decisions, the state accordingly determines how many of the incidents of ownership over our property we lose to its control and how many we retain. What might be thought of as the economic sphere cannot be severed from the rest of human life because, by forcefully hindering trade, the state chooses the areas of our life that are open to persuasion and free exchange as against monopoly. If individuals were allowed to make any consensual exchanges they so desired, then the state would necessarily vanish, its own very definition requiring it to forcibly prohibit any competition with it in the market for those services which it monopolizes.

The new communitarian philosophers have fulminated against what they see as a growing “atomism” and, concomitantly, dearth of higher virtues in our society. Libertarian anarchists could find much in their arguments with which to agree. It will never be possible for individuals to more fully turn their attention to the cultivation of their minds and souls until those minds need no longer be occupied with the war of “all against all” that the state has foisted on society, rather than delivering it from. The advantages of community, advantages that libertarians should more often celebrate, could never be attained through the state’s “safety nets,” or through anything else the state might do. As an institution, it cannot act but to wage war, whether against an individual or a number of them. In a free society, voluntary associations insuring for retirement or against loss of one’s job would replace government’s machine of violence and subjugation. In this way, rather than individuals living cordoned off lives with their property neatly sequestered from one another, they would be interconnected in voluntary relationships of varying complexities, a peaceful collectivism based on market principles. The anarchists have always known that we would have to rework our semantic frameworks if we were to understand how a free society, a society without a state, might look. “Liberty without socialism,” noted Bakunin, “is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.” No great theoretical leap is required to appreciate what Bakunin probably meant, that complete freedom to do anything, without some reciprocal respect for rights within the human community, would result in entropic pandemonium. Similarly, he knew that the objectives of social justice, to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met, could never be realized if the state — organized violence — were allowed to insert itself into relationships, only capacitating exploitation.

I got a (simultaneously horrifying and amusing) news item in the latest U.S. Pirate Party newsletter, about a new program in Cleveland to monitor recyclable bins with RFID chips (“Privacy Trashed,” August 24).

“This whole ‘chipping’ of garbage cans began in England and now it is spreading to our shores. Basically, they’re using RFID (radio frequency indentification) chips to ensure that people are recycling. The chips monitor how many times a recyclable container is brought to the curb. If you haven’t brought out your recycle bin in awhile, expect to have your trash rooted through.”

This is just another example of the utter stupidity of the typical lawmaker’s mindset.  It’s like it literally never occurred to them that people might try to circumvent laws.

A good example is the sign on the gas pump:  “The penalty for stealing gas is loss of your driver’s license.  If you steal gas, this could be the last time you drive.”  So I’m not afraid to steal gas — but I’m TERRIFIED of driving without a license.  Do these Barney Fifes even think, or do they just assume that passing “a law” on paper will have some magical effect on reality?

Any kid who ever squeezed the toothpaste tube and wet his toothbrush to look like he’d brushed his teeth could figure out how to thwart Cleveland’s idiotic recycling program.

I believe strongly in recycling, and normally separate all my recyclables into the bin.  But if this RFID program were implemented where I live, I’d STOP recycling.  I’d just carry the empty bin out to the curb and bring it back once a week to fool Big Brother, and then I’d cram the trash cans with recyclables.

I recall a similar high-tech handwashing verification system in the news about ten years ago, that used embedded chips in name badges to check if employees had gone near the sink or turned on the water after using the toilet.  As with the recyclable bin, any kid who ever faked brushing his teeth could easily thwart this.  And even though I’m normally quite fastidious about washing my hands, I’d be sorely tempted to whiz on them and fake a handwash just to prove to myself that management’s smug confidence in their own authority over me was unwarranted.

As it is, I frequently leave notes on those “Employees Must Wash Hands” signs:  “How do you plan to enforce this?”  My goal is not only to undermine the authority of anonymous sign writers in the eyes of the public, but to make management look ridiculous and ineffectual in the eyes of workers and get them thinking in general terms about how much of management’s authority is unenforceable.  And if I can make management paranoid that their authority’s held in contempt, I’ve hit the trifecta.

This is one of the ways that authoritarianism, and statism in particular, defeats itself.  It really seems never to have occurred to these smothering schoolmarms that there’s a nontrivial minority of the population (and I’m one of them) that takes such intrusive attempts at micromanagement, and our would-be overseers’ smug confidence in their own authority, as a challenge. People like me make it our mission in life to prove that “you’re not the boss of me.” And offensive enforcement measures like RFID chipping recyclables bins will be guaranteed to provoke the behavior they’re trying to discourage.

It’s really comical just how clueless they are about the counterproductivity of such heavy-handedness.  Take, for example, the anti-drunk driving PSAs put out  by the Arkansas State Police:  “If you drink and drive, you WILL get caught, and you WILL go to jail.”  Even the most dull-wittedly obedient citizen out there will immediately discern that such an extreme assertion of their enforcement capabilities is a bald-faced lie.  Just about anyone who drinks at all can probably recall — even if they don’t want to admit it — more than one case where they got behind the wheel with blood alcohol that was technically over the limit, even if it was only after two or three beers, and DIDN’T get caught.  Assertions of enforcement capability and threats of punishment that clearly can’t be backed up seem almost calculated to bring the state into contempt.

In other words, they done goofed — and the consequences will never be the same. Sometimes it’s almost as if Matrix reality has commercials for red pills embedded in it.  The beauty of it is, the Matrix generates its own glitches.

A functional libertarian political order will rise the strongest from fertile ground. To maximize individual liberty it is necessary to promote the best kind of individualism at all levels.

Controversy over the building of various mosques and the Park 51 Islamic cultural center shows the influence of anti-Muslim sentiment on United States politics. Opponents hold all Muslims responsible for crimes that a few Muslims have committed, and want to exclude them at least symbolically from America. The numerous Muslims in the New York area have all the rights of any individuals, and a new 13-story building will fit in nicely at 51 Park Place anyway – if you believe it will tower over everything, take a look at the Street View in Google Maps.

Prejudice feeds authoritarian power. Ethnic slurs were often heard in popular attempts to justify the Iraq War. Years later, a lot of people are dead or wounded, wealth was transferred from productive uses to military-industrial black holes, and the general economy is poorer because of it. Demagoguery against Obama’s blackness has been used to rally people behind right wing authoritarians, and outrageous claims against everyone who practices some version of Islam give fake populists like Newt Gingrich a platform to stand on. An enemy “other” is created for those who are included under “us” to rally against. And in this way people are placed into categories and united based on the needs of authoritarians.

Promoting an individualist view of society will create an environment most likely to foster liberty.

Libertarians will often describe the zero-aggression principle – that no person may initiate force against another – as the only requirement of libertarian society. But the zero-aggression principle implies some measure of equality if it is to apply universally. If people are regarded as somehow inferior, this will likely translate into inferiority before the zero-aggression principle. Collective guilt can mean “they” started it because they are falsely associated with the individuals who attacked the World Trade Center. And if an individual’s personhood is not valued, his rights will not be respected.

Individualism means treating every individual as an end in himself or herself, not as a means to some goal, and recognizing that individuals must be judged on their own merits.

People should not be judged on the attributes of groups they’ve been assigned to by others, but the groups that individuals choose to join do make up a part of their identity. However, the attributes that other people assign to groups individuals identify with should not be used against them. This means recognizing individual choices: those who choose a uniform or other symbol may be held to answer for what that symbol says, and al-Qaeda affiliates ought to be approached differently than people who merely fall into the broad category of Muslim.

The best kind of individualism has a broader social element to it which could be labeled solidarity. The pursuit of maximum individual liberty suggests the benefit of promoting the maximum level of individual autonomy – taking steps to reduce dependence on people who try to control others. This is where cooperation and competition both enter the picture. Recognizing the mutual benefit of cooperating for greater autonomy, free people work together in solidarity. Viewing one arrangement as less conducive toward individual flourishing, free people create competing arrangements and advocate for them.

When the diversity of groups is given priority over diversity of individuals, there is a danger of emphasizing the group over the individual (which leads in practice to favoring the dominant members of groups) and the identification of the individual with a group that he might have less in common with than he does with someone outside the group. In short, it can reinforce divisions between people by subordinating individual identity to people who are in charge of deciding identity. Then respect for a person for what they have in common with others takes precedent over respecting their individual uniqueness.

None of this should be used to say that all groupings or traditions are inherently evil. Using them as means to greater individualistic flourishing can be good. When individuals are treated as means to prop up groups or traditions – when the specific group or tradition instead of the ability to choose groups and traditions becomes the purpose of life – it is negative.

Similarly, class analyses can be very useful in determining tendencies, motivations, and likely characteristics. But it is ultimately the individual’s character and actions that determine who she is.

A hierarchical social order – where one person is ranked objectively higher than another person, is antithetical to social individualism. Certainly, hierarchies will spring up where a difference in ability or quality can be measured (a faster runner, a better painting, etc). But it is not so innocent when society in general functions through hierarchical lines. In this case individuals will not interact as equals, but the inferior will be expected to yield to the superior. Whether or not such an arrangement relies on coercion, it will make coercion easier to accomplish as the inferior is conditioned to accepting commands, and the superior feels more valuable than those supposed to be beneath him.

Hierarchy in the workplace is a microcosm of broad social hierarchy, and ought to be reduced as much as is practicable for the same reasons. While infrequent wage-work or competing bosses are not necessarily oppressive in a society where there are plenty of other options to the worker, a situation based on “kissing ass” of superiors to labor according to their goals, shaping your life around the requirements of a company you do not control, means putting decision-making power over large areas of life into the hands of other people.

In application, the political, economic, and social intersect and build off one another. Individualism that is social and solidaristic in nature, not atomistic or promoting self above others, lays the ground from which a functioning libertarian political order can most likely spring.

Lifting oneself from the philosophical atmosphere of the times is a difficult proposition, much like a fish lifting itself from the life-giving water that surrounds it. It’s possible to ignore that atmosphere and embrace anarcho-capitalism as a political/economic position and compartmentalize its influence on your being, say, a practicing Buddhist or Catholic or Muslim. This wasn’t the case for the first anarchists, for whom the political position seemed a necessary part of free love and radical experimentation in personal relations. Of course anarcho-capitalism is grounded in a radical idea of self-ownership, and it’s difficult to hold personal views inconsistent with that fundamental idea. But I’m talking about the cultural context – the spiritual universe – of an idea that gives it life, that shapes it, that determines what questions are asked or discarded, often unconsciously.

Consider the fundamental question that distinguishes so-called “anarchists of the Left” from so-called “anarchists of the Right” – which indeed distinguishes Left from Right in general: Is man’s nature fundamentally fluid, or is it fixed? The Left says fluid; the Right, fixed. Historically the Right is associated with the Church, which says that man’s nature was created at one moment to last until Judgment, that it is “fallen” (inclined to “sin” and error) and that nothing, at least in this life, will change it. Two great influences on the anarchist movement say “fixed” for other reasons: Ayn Rand just flatly asserts this without too much reasoning; Austrian economists find a “fixed” human nature in praxeology – man must act in a world of limited resources, and his key attributes proceed axiomatically from this fact. In this way, they effectively skirt a nest of problems associated with defining “human nature.” (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn would say that the Right is still based in the Church, and that otherwise it lives on a “whiff from an empty bottle.”) It would be a mistake to suppose that the real distinction between Left and Right is the role and size of government. The influential Leftists typically did want a larger government, but they would have readily settled for a “night watchman state” of Ferdinand Lasalle if it could have created the “New Socialist Man:” For them, government was only a tool for shaping a fluid human nature into something new, and we must say, frightening.

The great project of the Enlightenment was to provide a universal, culturally-independent justification for ethics, based in science. Using praxeology, the Austrians can declare at least a partial success in that project. But praxeology is not ethics. And what’s worse, as shown below, the overwhelming impulse of the Zeitgeist is to affirm that man’s nature is not fixed, but fluid. It seems to me that the Enlightenment project rests upon deontological ethics and that it finds itself at a historical and cultural dead end – failed because its success depends on a fixed and eternal human nature in a Christian context … and that there is a way out.

*

To read the supposedly sentimental tales of Hans Christian Andersen is to discover what a tough-minded ethics shapes them and to discover what an enormous distance separates us from the spiritual universe of only several generations ago. Reading them invites the question: “Which generation has the more sentimental outlook?”

In one of those tales several good spirits visit a young prince and bestow a divine necklace of blessings upon him: riches, health, and happiness. But the last spirit – a good spirit – decides to give him the greatest blessing of all, the one that “will make the others shine more splendidly” and give those others their worth. It is the blessing of sorrow. In another tale, a poor washerwoman not only endures crushing poverty and the odium of respectable citizens for the sake of her child, but she also agrees with the evaluation of her, that she is a “bad woman” in spite of her sacrifice.

Now imagine Anne Darwin (a serial liar), or Janet Cooke (Jayson Blair’s precursor in the art of journalistic fiction), or Darlie Routier (killer of her young boys) saying, “Yes, they’re right. I’m a bad woman.” Hard to imagine, isn’t it? But then, the washerwoman had no sophistication. It never would have occurred to her that she might steal, lie and murder, and expect her behavior to somehow stand apart from her character.

I don’t mean to suggest that people were better a few generations ago than they are now. What I do suggest is that one of the greatest differences between then and now is the respective attitudes toward human potential.

It was formerly conceivable that sorrow might be a blessing because it was not generally believed that it was final. Something was believed to be redeemed from the suffering – something which would last an eternity. Formerly, a secret sacrifice would find its reward, despite a lifetime of poverty and suffering. In the story of the washerwoman, the mayor’s son might have rescued her from suffering by marrying her, but both of them knew that their difference in character and station would have made them miserable.

According to the modern view, however, which claims to celebrate the human potential, such suffering and sacrifice is pure waste. Why, only a “chump” would allow such waste. If not marry, at least the two of them could have shacked up for a while. Yes, not to realize one’s potential here and now is a terrible tragedy – or since that realization is only for here and now, perhaps a terrible joke. Indeed, doesn’t this very outlook account for the paradox of tragedy and cheapness in modern life?

Yet it is possible to lack the courageous self-evaluation of the washerwoman and still lead an agreeable life. In other words, it’s quite possible to sucker oneself to the very grave with the thought of some late-in-life blossoming of potential. There’s the example of Grandma Moses, right? And didn’t Colonel Sanders build his empire in white-haired old age? However, that self-deception conceals the worst thing.

The worst thing is to believe that one’s potential is the seat of the “real” self, and that one can generally do as one pleases and yet never blemish it. For, since potential is by definition unshaped, there is no action which can shape it. For the soul with no life beyond itself, good actions leave an empty sense of frustration because they cannot perfect it, and bad actions arouse only indifference because they cannot stain it. Here is the paradox of tragedy and cheapness in modern life. And although the “sentimentality” of Anderson is in its way nobler than its modern expression, it would be wrong to suggest that these are warring visions. Indeed, at least on the subject of infinite human potential, there is no ultimate disagreement between its Nietzschean or Randian realization, or flourishing, and Christianity in its popularized version.

No, it would be easy to say that these were warring visions, and to stop here with a disparaging quote about gnosticism from Chesterton (to please the Catholic tribe) or C.S. Lewis (to please the Protestant tribe). But the fact is, the worship of potential is the logical dead end of Christianity itself. Consider: Christianity is supposed to guarantee the everlasting survival of your personal identity. Yet such an identity is shaped by the most ludicrous of accidents: The man who was born with a lisp or stutter is shaped by that accident; so too the woman with a disfigured nose and the child with a chemical imbalance in his brain. Either these accidents were deliberately inflicted by the Christian Creator as part of the soul’s earthly trial, or else there is some "pure" self existing prior to, or apart from these accidents. Most apologists would save their Creator, and affirm the latter. If so, then what is difference between a "pure" or “redeemed” self and the self of boundless potential?

At this point only two paths are open: To turn finally and completely away from this notion of individual permanence rooted in a fixed human nature, or to affirm it by attaching the individual to something beyond itself.

To take one step in the rejection of the idea of individual permanence we must see it as something desirable. For as Aristotle says, nobody aims at the bad. The most concise statement of this position is by Milan Kundera, in his novel The Joke:

Yes, suddenly I saw it all clearly: most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deed, errors, sins, injustice). Both are a sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion. No one will rectify wrongs; all wrongs will be forgotten.

I am always open to instruction, but for the life of me I cannot see anything more than bitterness on this path. Has any society ever existed where a significant number of its members saw nothing permanent in the lives of men? The apostle Paul in Acts 17 says that when Athenians heard of everlasting life they laughed and mocked him as a “babbler.” That is easily understood. But would any of them have said that everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified? That is beyond understanding. Are men born to breed and die like flies, creatures of a single day?

To take one step along the other path, that all men desire to attach themselves to something permanent, we must avoid any altruistic self-denial or negation of the self: For there must be a something to attach to something permanent. Also, the self that attaches to something permanent must feel that his real identity shapes it in some way, not that he is swallowed up by it, else there is no difference from annihilation.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, already 30 years old, is a forward stride along this path. His virtue ethics rejects the Enlightenment project, based in deontology, that hoped to provide a universal, culturally-independent justification for ethics. It is that deontology I think that Kundera wants to overthrow. And although MacIntyre may be uncertain about the compatibility of Confucianism with Aristotle, it seems to me to offer a breath of air, a possibility.

“Bad air! Bad air!” Nietzsche exclaimed in the stifling corridors of this project. But a modern Confucianism: Free of the eschatological absolutism, free of the skull’s echo chamber of an “omniscient” god, free of “personal” prayer, free of the need for “redemption,” free of an “original sin;” a polity legitimized by the mandate of heaven, not majoritarianism; a public goal of being a gentleman, not egalitarianism; a self-sufficient middle kingdom, not an empire. In its clear, skeptical atmosphere one can breathe! Good air! Good air! Something is possible!

The media have remained in a tizzy about the implications of the release of 75,000 or more documents and the Iraq War video “Collateral Murder” by the whistle blower web site WikiLeaks. Activists all across the political spectrum have been as well. Those of an anti-statist persuasion tend to see WikiLeaks as an organization that is useful for keeping the state accountable or transparent to at least some degree. But how effective has WikiLeaks been in this endeavor and is it the answer anti-statists should be looking for to begin with?

Unfortunately, WikiLeaks doesn’t represent salvation for any person who wants some form of transparency in the United States government — or any government, for that matter. What makes WikiLeaks effective is the attitude of the individuals within it, including the organizer himself, Julian Assange. What makes his viewpoint so important is that he sees government as an enemy to society, especially when it is not transparent to the people that it is supposed to be held in check by and accountable to. WikiLeaks is a great organization and has a noble goal, but it’s the individuals within such organizations that make great things possible to begin with.

What Assange is doing, however, comes with risks and some fear he may get arrested or worse. Witness the recent and just as recently dropped baseless rape charge against Assange. Let’s suppose the worst. Let’s suppose that somehow the United State federal government could bring down WikiLeaks and Assange. Forgetting how unlikely this may be, let’s assume it for the sake of argument. What would happen? What seems most likely is outrage among millions of individuals. It would only further show that government is nothing but force and an oversized bully when it doesn’t get its way on matters of politics and information.

What would happen without Assange and WikiLeaks? In little to no time they’d be most likely be replaced. The social networking revolution against top-down hierarchies like the state will continue with or without them. It is a given that there is no reason to rely on WikiLeaks or one organization to carry on the work of delegitimizing the state in the public mind. Rather, this can be continued through networking on an anonymous, decentralized, and horizontal basis. There is no need for any central organization such as Wikileaks in the first place; the individuals that take the action and have the drive to go against the state are the true heroes.

But why are people like Assange and Manning heroes to begin with? It’s because they take risks in standing up to the state on behalf of people who increasingly see the state as less of an allegedly necessary organization. That is, people like Assange are heroes for openly defying governments and unilaterally implementing a degree of transparency. In short, they’re heroes for their words and deeds backing up said words — regardless of the consequences.

The problem with people who purport to value transparency in government, unfortunately, is that they tend to not take the matter any further than giving the ideal lip service. The natural impulse is to leave it there and think, “Things will get better if we just elect the right people to rule over us.” People like Assange and Manning show them otherwise. They show them, not as an organization but as individual heroes, that the state is an unnecessary evil that will never be as transparent as people want it to be. This is why legal threats from lawyers working for the government have been made against Assange and his organization, after all. There’s even talk of charging Assange with espionage — which in the present US legal climate means that he could potentially be hunted down in the streets of European cities with Predator drones and damn the “collateral damage.” Though many political difficulties would result from this, it’d be nothing the US government could not work through or spin via the media if its leaders were convinced the alternative would be worse for them politically.

People like Assange and Manning are what we need in the world, not spineless liberals or conservatives telling us we need an opaque state (or even a state at all). More so than organizations, we need brave individuals who will confront the state but do it in such a way as to show the people of the world that government is an evil that we cannot afford to keep.

With modern information and publishing technologies, it’s easier than ever for average folks to actively participate in the spread of information. We can look beneath the official stories and create our own narratives that are not based in helplessness, isolation, or politicians’ posturing.

To be sure, misinformation isn’t a solved problem, but the tools are there and the way is easier to find than before.

Everyone knows about Wikileaks now, and the site has even featured documents that show the US government has plans for dealing with them. But so far Wikileaks is winning.

Today’s landscape of information has other features, of course. There are numerous alternative news sites that cater to a variety of concerns. LibertyActivism.info provides a libertarian library where users can view books, flyers, and how-tos, as well as upload files they find valuable. YouTube and cheap recording devices democratize video broadcasting — what once took a studio can now be done on widely-owned equipment. Podcasts sidestep the FCC and corporate directors, and the Liberty Radio Network provides a ready-made programming schedule for the pirate radio operator.

But what role is there for the current media establishment? It can be used as leverage by content producers, as seen when Wikileaks made agreements with major news companies concerning its Afghan War Diary files. And user-generated news will certainly influence established media from the outside as it struggles to adapt to a changing environment. Blogging communities, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking tools are obviously useful in spreading ideas and creating connections. But when they are used to spread news stories that users find interesting, feedback is provided from users to producers. And the reader who posts the stories that interest her takes a more active role in deciding what is important than she does when viewing the arrangement of newspaper headlines or broadcast airtime.

It is easy to see the negative side of information democracy when establishment media picks up one narrative it finds in the blogosphere and throws its weight behind a particular kind of sensationalism. But the media can pick up on sensationalism from any source and has in the past published the falsehoods of government reports. The new information landscape makes the generation of untruth more accessible, but also makes it easier to counter false claims.

What the current information landscape represents is an inkling of a free society in practice. Cheap startup costs and the distribution of knowledge foster nearly unlimited competition. Trust can be verified by sourcing (which makes news research more participatory), by recommendation from trusted services (which is based on individual choice and reputation, not on legislative mandates), and by peer recommendation. This is good news for those of us who don’t trust the authorities to put our interests ahead of the interests of those who make a living by advising them.

With the spread of knowledge this state of affairs can be brought into other areas of life — from the meeting of basic needs, to the creation of resilient communities that foster individual flourishing, to the most ambitious projects. From the existing information infrastructure we can build up the skills to take care of human needs, and promote while refining the ideas that motivate people to learn and practice these skills.

Mike Gogulski: Net Neutrality [mp3, 2:49]

Podcasters, radio producers and all other media are welcome to replay this clip in its entirety in their productions.

Michigan State University student Ahlam Mohsen is in jail with bail set at $250,000. She faces up to five years in prison. She was arrested for throwing an apple pie at US Senator Carl Levin’s face.

The “Support Ahlam Mohsen” Facebook group says that Levin was chosen for the insult because he chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, and thereby holds significant influence over United States military policy.

US military policy has destroyed many thousands of lives in pursuit of power for Washington policy-makers. JustForeignPolicy.org estimates more than 1.3 million Iraqi deaths due to the US occupation. Fallujah has seen dramatic increases in birth defects and cancers since the 2004 US invasion. Attacks by unmanned aircraft frequently kill civilians in Pakistan. The US military covers up shootings of civilians and puts whistleblowers like Bradley Manning in cages.

This, after decades of covert and overt interventions to project United States power around the world, and all the death, misery, poverty, and tyranny they entail. Those responsible for these crimes suffer no punishment, while a person who threw a pie at a member of the ruling elite is sent to prison.

The parallels of Mohsen and her pie to Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush (a president who rode a wave of bigotry to lie America into war) are obvious. Al-Zaidi was imprisoned and Bush retired to his ranch.

Insults like hurled shoes and pies don’t exactly mimic the effect of a wooden shoe (a “sabot”) dropped into the gears of the war machine (“sabotage”). But they can be an effective statement of dissent.

A prominent display of disrespect demonstrates that not everyone is with the program, that not everything is under control. It is a public refusal to show reverence for the higher-ups as they direct the focus of oppression. It can also be used to point out individuals who should be held accountable for the actions they’ve taken or ordered taken. There is no single person who is to blame for a war, and all the politicians who would rather sign off on murder than risk losing their precious political power should be implicated.

Showing support for those who insult authority figures shows disapproval for what the authorities are doing. Those who would condemn a pie-thrower for being disrespectful ought to explain why the targets deserve respect in the first place.

It’s quite common for mainstream liberals to dismiss as “naive” and “utopian” the anarchist vision — all varieties of anarchism, not just market anarchism — of a society governed by voluntary associations between free people. Without the state to prevent it, society and the economy will be dominated by the savage, combative, greedy and self-centered.

But if anything is naive and utopian, it’s the view of the state as something that protects ordinary people against big business. If the liberals’ implicit Hobbesian view of human nature is correct, rather than my Kropotkinian view, then we’re all doomed in any case.

So it’s utopian to believe that the ruthless people in charge of businesses will be restrained from making those businesses bigger and bigger at the expense of their competitors, or the ruthless rich will be restrained from getting endlessly richer and richer at the expense of a progressively poor working class and disappearing middle class, by the simple removal of entry barriers and the presence of unfettered competition. But apparently, in the mainstream liberal view of the world, it’s not utopian at all to believe that simple procedural rules and paper restrictions can prevent the state from being controlled by the same ruthless people for their own ends.

Frankly, in terms of gritty realism, I’ll put my belief in the power of market competition to restrain business against their belief in the power of democratic majorities to control the state, any day of the week.

The state, since the beginning of history, has been the instrument of a ruling class. It first came into existence when human predators figured out the peasantry produced a sufficient surplus to be milked like cattle; since then, starting with the king, priests and nobles, moving on to feudal landlords and capitalists, one ruling class after another has been milking us.

It’s utterly naive and utopian to believe a majority of the public can exert meaningful control over the state apparatus. A minority of insiders will always have an advantage in time, attention span, interest, information, and agenda control over those of us on the outside. The average person on the outside only has a limited amount of time or energy for maintaining an interest in politics, after dealing with the primary issues of work and family, friends, and local community. But for the elites that control the state, politics IS a major part of their daily work and social life. Can anything be matched for sheer naive optimism with the belief that, in the long run, we can maintain a higher degree of vigilance over the functioning of the state than they can?

If the state exists as a level of economic control by which a ruling class can profit, you’d better believe the most savage, combative, greedy and self-centered will always have a leg up in gaining control of it. Our only hope, in that case, is that the self-centered savages who gain control of the state will be smart enough to see it as in their self-interest to take good care of us so they can get more work out of us. That’s essentially what happened in the New Deal. The so-called “progressive” policies of the 20th century were brought about, not by democratic pressure (as in the Art Schlesinger received version of history), but in the interest of one faction of the capitalist elite.

So anything done by the state to make our lots more bearable will be done, not because the state is “all of us working together,” but as a side-effect of plutocratic and managerial elites pursuing their own self-interest. Apparently the same people who cannot be trusted in the economic sphere become fully trustworthy when they’re sitting in the “executive committee of the ruling class.”

May the liberals’ illusions rest kindly on them.

Al Franken has just released another video regarding his take on net neutrality, which he has dramatically called “the First Amendment issue of our time.” This may or may not be true, but the trust proponents of net neutrality are placing in government to ensure that corporations do not dominate the internet is completely unmerited.

There are two models for government action at work here. The first one is endorsed by supporters of net neutrality legislation and those who employ a general progressive mindset:

1. Corporations in our free markets do bad things in an attempt to dominate the marketplace.
2. Government, as the neutral and just voice of the people, steps up to correct such market abuses.

By thinking in terms of government vs. the market/corporations, advocates of the aforementioned outlook obscure the fact that not only are both the state and the major corporations controlled by the elite, but both groups actively and substantially shield themselves against the privilege-abolishing powers of the market, as it would halt their shenanigans.

Those of this paradigm also miss the premise that the government is a corporation, and the worst kind of all, because it benefits from an extreme amount of protectionism. It is, in fact, the coercively monopolistic corporation which “provides” us our defense and justice services, often against our will.

A more accurate model of government action is the dialectical relationship described below. This is not specific to the internet whatsoever, but occurs in countless areas of politics. It goes like this:

1. Corporations do something bad, usually as the result of special anti-market privileges awarded to them by the government.
2. The self-interested politicians and bureaucrats, pretending to be benevolent and there to fix the corruption of the previous officeholder/opposite party, swoops onto the scene to “fix” the unjust privileges given to the preferred group and then proposes a new law, which subsequently gives them more funding and more power over our lives.
3. Repeat until population is completely subservient.

As someone who opposes the corporate domination of society, the last thing I want is a bunch of cigar-chomping fat cats squashing my access to alternative media content, considering I create a small nugget of it professionally. I empathize with the ends that proponents of net neutrality seek. However, corporations clearly own the American state, so trying to get the government to pass a law against their own interests in the halls of their stooges is pure madness.

Passing an “anti-corporate law” through the American Congress is exactly the type of game our rulers want us to play. Virtually every law Congress passes entrenches special interests through more regulation, which creates barriers to entry for new entrepreneurs and concentrates power and wealth in the hands of the elite at the expense of the average person.

Net neutrality is but a band-aid on the elbow of a sick statist society. It addresses the symptoms but not the causes of our woes. If we want to oust our corporate rulers, it is not going to come from the halls of their Congress, but from the abolition of that infected mercantilist tentacle. The creativity and productivity which would be liberated with the abolition of the state would crush the one-size-fits-all bureaucratic ideal of corporate political economy.

Even if we concede that the internet is at this moment largely monopolistic, there is no better way to break a monopoly than to allow unbridled competition. I’d take my chances with competition over the odds that a law will make it through Congress that doesn’t solidify the elite’s stranglehold on the American people. The smart money says the state isn’t here to protect us from the corporations, but to expose us to their predations.

In a recent column (“Why Networks Defeat Hierarchies,” C4SS, Aug. 12), I examined the tendency of hierarchies to suppress negative feedback on their own performance.  Paranoia over leaks and the obsessive desire to protect the leadership’s monopoly on information leads to knowledge being denied those in the organization who need it to make effective policy.  Data from below is systematically filtered to create a false image of the world at the top of the pyramid.  And the discretion that subordinates need to cope with the unexpected, against a background of information overload, is hampered by management’s need to have a finger in every pie.

Another, related problem is the cognitive biases that authority itself implants in the mind of the individual manager.

In an essay at (of all places) The Wall Street Journal (“The Power Trip,” August 14), Jonah Lehrer describes the findings of psychologists’ experiments on how power affects one’s view of the world. According to Lehrer, the experiments found that people in a position of power display behavior patterns commonly associated with damage to the portions of the cerebral cortex that govern empathy and the ability to imagine the world from others’ perspective.  Power, in other words, kills the ability even to understand that there are other perspectives than those of the hierarchy.

One part, in particular, was interesting:  after being assigned to superior and subordinate positions in a role-playing game, participants were exposed to fake cell phone ads.  Some of the ads emphasized product quality and price, while others “featured weak or nonsensical arguments.”  Interestingly, subjects who’d been role-modeling positions of authority “were far less sensitive to the quality of the argument.”  Lehrer writes:

“This suggests that even fleeting feelings of power can dramatically change the way people respond to information. Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn’t, then the facts are conveniently ignored.”

So if you wonder why the MBAs at corporate seem to be literally unaware of any alternative to the Nardelli/Fiorina/”Chainsaw Al” model of downsizing everybody and giving themselves a bonus, the answer is:  they probably are.  Their own power has made them stupid.

I think part of the explanation for the outcome of the cell phone experiment might be that people in power are encultured to shut off the capacity to critically evaluate communication based on internal logic or sense, and instead to evaluate it based on how authoritative the source is. After all, if they’re not at the very top of the pyramid,  they’re expected to “buy in” to whatever comes from above and uncritically pass it along down the conveyor belt.

And applying critical thought processes to policies or other communications from management is, for ordinary workers, clear evidence that one doesn’t have his mind right. To evaluate communications from above in terms of their content, rather than simply tucking one’s head and saying “I obey,” suggests (however faintly) that the evaluator views the source of the communication as in some sense their equal or peer, and sees the communication as an attempt at persuasion by an equal rather than someone under whose authority they have been set.

In conversations with authoritarians about the stupidity of the pointy-haired bosses, I frequently encounter statements  that “they’ve been put in authority for a reason, and it’s been decided that blah blah woof woof.”  Note the passive voice.  The people in authority, and their policies, are just part of “the way things are,” embedded in the nature of the universe.  If you state it instead in the active voice (“So-and-so says to do this”), there’s the danger that someone will see the issuer of the order as a mere mortal with individual goals and desires and subjective judgment.  Then, rather than accepting “the rules” as something that’s “been decided” like tablets handed down from Mt. Sinai, they might start actually examining the motivations and judgment of their superiors, and evaluating — from the standpoint of an equal — whether they’re good or bad.

Once you start viewing as equals the people who set the speed limits for a particular stretch of highway or write the instructions on a box of mac and cheese, or who send you all those idiotic memos every day, and you evaluate their communications based on whether they make sense rather than the authority of their source, your mind is no longer right.  Once you view the makers of rules as your equals, and their rules as arguments or suggestions to be evaluated and followed based on your own judgment of their merits (If it’s not “a good idea,” I don’t CARE if it’s “the law”), you’ve established that you’re a dog with too much ancestral wolf DNA to be safe around humans.

Dear readers,

I’m back in the saddle and the news is looking pretty good.

So far this week, 2,084 US and Canadian newspapers have received commentary submissions from C4SS. Some of them have received more than one such submission — I’ve sent out a total of 3,529 submission emails.

We’re starting to get noticed:

– Darian Worden’s “Steven Slater and Narratives of Conflict” appears in this week’s St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph. That same article was cited in last Friday’s Toronto Star, after my update for last week had already gone “to press.”

– We’ve received a “head shot” photo request — which is pretty good evidence of intent to publish — from Saskatchewan, Canada’s Melville Advance for my recent piece on organ donation.

– City News of Kankakee, Illinois has informed us it will be publishing my “No War But Class War!”, and Delaware’s Cape Gazette has requested a “head shot” photo to accompany the same piece.

So, it looks like at least four print pickups and one citation this week.

And to top it off, our own Kevin Carson’s life story has been made into a major motion picture debuting today. Or maybe not. I’ve been unable to either confirm or debunk the rumor that our Kevin is in fact the inspiration for that story.

More news next week.

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society.

American political debate has recently centered on manufacturers that relocate overseas and “abandon” American workers — and the alleged need for government to stop them from doing it.  But maybe we need to figure out a way to abandon the corporate employers, instead.

Conventional community economic development policy — this is equally true of Chambers of Commerce, state industrial development commissions, and World Bank technocrats — starts from the assumption that the path to economic development is colonization: Get a giant corporation to set up an outpost in your community and provide a lot of jobs (preferably with government seed money to lure them in).

The rationale was simple: For a couple of centuries, the propertied classes’ privileged access to big piles of capital and millions of acres of stolen land made them a chokepoint on economic development.

But technological developments in recent years — the desktop/Internet revolution in the information sphere, and the revolution in cheap digitally controlled machine tools in manufacturing — are freeing us from this dependence.

The main material reason for the factory system and predominance of wage labor was the technological shift a couple hundred years ago from relatively inexpensive, general-purpose artisan tools to expensive machinery.  Only the very rich could afford the machinery required for production, and they then hired wage laborers to operate it.

The computer revolution, and the revolution in cheap garage-scale machine tools, have reversed this shift.  The computer is a cheap, general-purpose artisan tool that destroys the quality gap between what a person can produce at work and what he can produce at home, in a whole range of industries:  Software, recording, and desktop publishing among them.

And now cheap digital machine tools mean the same thing for manufacturing.  Open-source hardware hackers have cooked up homebrew versions of CNC routers, cutting tables, milling machines, lathes, 3-D printers, etc., that cost one or two thousand dollars (or less) to build — compared to tens of thousands for commercial, proprietary digital tools, and millions for a factory equipped with old-style mass production machinery.

A garage “factory” with $10k worth of homebrew machinery can do most of what used to require a million-dollar factory.  And with a network of open-source hardware designers, it can design its own products, and produce “lean” style:  Producing in small batches and switching back and forth between lots of different products as the orders come in, and gearing production to a local/neighborhood market.  That means low overhead, no inventory, drastically reduced shipping costs, and no mass-marketing costs.

In a lot of manufactured products, a major portion of price is either brand-name markup or embedded rents on patent and copyright, rather than labor and material cost (Tom Peters crowed, in The Tom Peters Seminar, that 90% of his new Minolta’s price was “intellect”).  Competition will strip out that part of price (along with the portion of your work hours that go toward earning money to pay tribute to the owners of artificial property rights).

It helps that relocalizing manufacturing to “a hundred thousand garages” essentially makes proprietary designs unenforceable. The costs of industrial patents are such that they only pay for themselves if you produce in large batches, and enforcement costs are minimized by the fact that a handful of oligopoly firms distribute their products through a handful of corporate retail chains.  When thousands of garage factories are producing knockoffs or riffing off of proprietary designs, in small batches at the neighborhood level, the costs of enforcement will destroy the patent regime.

Patents are also the main legal support to planned obsolescence, as well as to the whole model of price-gouging on parts and accessories (e.g. cheap phones and expensive service plans, cheap printers and expensive toners, etc.).  With no patent restrictions on competition, there would be no legal barrier to competitors producing generic modular accessories and spare parts for other companies’ platforms.  So the competitive pressure would be toward developing products that were compatible with other companies’ stuff and easy to repair by simply replacing one modular component — instead of designing products that only work with your own marked-up accessories, and can’t be fixed without throwing the whole thing away.

And all this renders the conventional strategy for community economic development totally obsolete. A low-capital, low-overhead approach to development is an enormous force multiplier for the community’s own resources. When the capital outlay for building a factory to produce everything you need falls a hundredfold, the propertied classes’ longstanding advantage in access to land and capital is completely nullified — communities can bootstrap local economies, starting with almost nothing, without begging a Daddy Warbucks for help.

So maybe this is the beginning of a shift away from the idea of “jobs,” and back to work as something working people do for ourselves and for exchange with each other.

Frédéric Bastiat nailed it when he defined the state as “the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

If that was as far as it went, political government would pretty much be a wash. We’d all get back about what we put into it, less the “friction” of transaction costs and such. Eventually we’d presumably notice that the state is a hamster wheel and get off it.

Unfortunately, that’s not as far as it goes. Any state — even (or perhaps especially!) the most putatively egalitarian or democratic one — eventually metastasizes under the pressures created by the competition of “everyone to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Even if first intended as a mere abstract transactional crossroads across which mutual aid assets or reciprocal rights protections pass on their way to and fro, the state is quickly reified by its more clever admirers. It becomes a concrete entity with its own interests. A new class of keepers, tenders and purpose-evolved parasites — the political class — emerges to make those interests its own.

Eventually the state drowns in the waste generated by its parasitical classes. The French monarchy collapsed beneath the weight of the Bourbon dynasty’s wars and palaces and intrigues. The Soviet Union’s apparatchik class drained its blood until that reddest of red states became a pale, lifeless husk — whiter than Kolchak’s armies! — ready to be blown away by the slightest gust of popular discontent.

It is for this reason that I’m very much encouraged by the American situation. After more than 200 years, the United States seems to be reaching the end of the same rope.

Its politicians have racked up more than $13 trillion in direct debt, at least $100 trillion in “unfunded liabilities” (i.e. promises of future payments), and at present are borrowing and spending $150-$200 billion more per month than they can figure out how to forcibly extract from the populace through taxation.

Where’s all that money going?

“At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn …” (“Federal workers earning double their private counterparts,” by Dennis Cauchon, USA Today, 08/10/10)

“We have already spent close to $1 trillion in Iraq …. When all is said and done, the combined cost of caring for veterans, continued Iraqi operations, replenishing and transporting equipment and paying interest on the debt will bring the final tally to well over $2 trillion. Including the economic costs — both to individuals and to the economy as whole — the bill easily tops $3 trillion.” (“Iraq war winds down, but costs soar,” by Linda J. Bilmes, San Francisco Chronicle, 08/15/10)

“We spend $7 billion a month on the war in Afghanistan and every day it becomes more and more clear that we are pursuing a failed strategy that doesn’t make America any safer …” (US Rep. Chellie Pingree [D-ME], quoted in “Mitchell meets, greets,” by Susan M. Cover and Rebekah Metzler, Kennebec Joural, 08/02/10)

This, my friends, is what we call “not a tenable situation.” But the state keeps doubling down, as with last week’s $26 billion payout to save 300,000 government employees from falling off the teat.

America’s politicians, by habit, frequently call upon the populace to eschew “class warfare,” by which they are generally understood to mean war between the rich and the poor.

Left unsaid, but becoming increasingly clear even to those who generally take little interest in matters political, is the fact that every operation of government is, by definition, an exercise in “class warfare” — a raid by a political class whose very survival depends on its continued ability to loot your wallet, your wealth, your work.

Like everyone else, the political class has to eat.

Unlike everyone else, the political class proposes to eat us.

Now that the pesky mosquitoes have mutated into gnawing rats and threaten to grow into rabid wolves, more and more Americans are finally starting to take notice.

It’s class war, to the death, like it or not — a war for survival, the political class or us. Personally, I’m for us.