Barack Obama is declaring “Something Accomplished” in Iraq. Behind the television smiles, 50,000 US military personnel will remain, the State Department is increasing the size of its contractor army, and the largest embassy in the world will serve as an imperial outpost. An Antiwar.com editorial by Jason Ditz pretty well sums up the story in its title: “US Announces Second Fake End to Iraq War.”

It’s no wonder that an administration struggling to maintain political dominance over a state that continually fails to deliver what it promises would play a back-patting opportunity for all it’s worth.

“Mission accomplished” is a frequent rallying cry of governments trying to keep up appearances of success. If the economy was in better shape now, recovery would be credited to the wisdom of our glorious leaders. But we’re supposed to believe that the benefits just haven’t reached us yet and without the bold measures of politicians, things could only be worse (but of course!). No matter the outcome, politicians will take credit for the good, and pass the bad onto rivals while claiming that they did not have enough control over your life to do what was necessary.

It’s the same as when failing state budgets are dealt with by kicking the ball down the road to the future and crime statistics are manipulated to make whatever point politicians are trying to get across.

Tough talk and reforms around the margins are meant to crowd out the real questions. Questions like: “How is military empire building, the biggest government program on the planet, affecting the economy?” “Who are you using political power to pay off this time?” and “Why are you telling us what to do in the first place?”

Fortunately the internet makes it easier to find out what the reality is behind the official story. But this is not enough when online information is selected through bias. So information must be made more accessible and interest-grabbing. It needs to be actively put in front of people who are accustomed to looking in specific places for answers.

And building up alternatives to state power while inspiring people to live independently from government will undermine the power of politicians until it is easy enough to resist and treat as any other crime.

The US government has decided not to prosecute school administrators who used laptop cameras to spy on students in their homes.

Officials from Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District in got in trouble earlier this year when it was revealed that they had used school-issued laptops supplied to students to photograph them at home. Wired.com coverage of the case quotes a legal filing that states “thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots” were taken of students in their homes, sometimes in bed or partially dressed (“School District Allegedly Snapped Thousands of Student Webcam Spy Pics,” April 16, 2010).

Although a civil suit against the school is still open, federal prosecutors have pled insufficient evidence to establish criminal intent.

Every now and then, a turf battle between bureaucrats or the need to keep up appearances of legitimacy leads to criminal proceedings against professional tyrants. But it’s not surprising that the federal government won’t be prosecuting these e-peeping bureaucrats.

Schools have an established role in government efforts to police behavior. High school students are expected to submit to total surveillance through police dogs, locker searches, cameras, and mandatory drug tests. As shown by the suspension of teachers for discussion the rights of citizens during police encounters, any obstacle to authority getting what it demands is viewed as an offense (see my Center for a Stateless Society commentary Is Learning How to Flex Your Rights Inappropriate for School?).

Creating an environment of submission for youth teaches unquestioning obedience early in life, which in turn makes it easier for federal bureaucrats to get away with whatever intrusive measure of the moment the megalomaniac-industrial-complex might fancy.

The computer surveillance case presents a literal depiction of government’s nature, that of Trojan Horse. The purpose of government is to enable some to exert power over others. When rulership is the ultimate end, all intermediate ends become subject to increasing the power of authority.

Buried in every government program, even one ostensibly centered around providing school laptops to students, is the incentive to use it to gain power. If the administrator wants to find new ways of controlling his wards’ behavior, he can use a school technology program to spy on them in their homes like the creepy busybody he is.

Government will not intentionally limit itself. It is up to us to limit its ability to govern.

“We need to start doing what other countries do,” says James Bredin, Toronto firefighter and father of two heart transplant patients (“New approach urged on organ donation,” Toronto Sun, 08/13/10). “[O]rgans become property of the state and they don’t need permission to take them.”

Writing from within the US health care system — an admittedly broken state capitalist system slouching toward something much like Canada’s failed state socialist model — I find Bredin’s sentiments disconcerting.

Why urge further travel down the road to ruin, from state socialism toward outright fascism? “Organs as state property” is something right out of Auschwitz, where Jewish prisoners were literally drained of their blood to provide plasma for the Wehrmacht, or the Chinese laogai system in which prisoners are executed for the express purpose of selling their organs to patients from the wealthier nations of the Pacific Rim.

Acknowledgment of property rights in one’s body is the obvious — in fact the only — solution to the problem of transplant organ shortages.

For decades, government has artificially reduced the available supply of donor organs by dictating that such organs may not be bought or sold. The results of such policies can be rationally expressed in two words: Body count.

How many patients have died awaiting the availability of an organ which never arrived? How many organs would have arrived had the owners of those organs been permitted to sell them, pre-mortem in the case of kidneys, liver and pancreas sections, etc., or post-mortem in the case of hearts and lungs?

In any transplant operation, the patient or the patient’s proxy pays through the nose. The hospital is paid. The surgeons are paid. The nurses are paid. The anesthetists are paid. The bookkeepers, bean-counters and bureaucrats all take home a paycheck. And the medical “ethicists” who inveigh against applying market principles to transplant organ supply? They do so on salary.

The only person not paid — the only person forbidden by law to be paid — is the one indispensable supplier, the owner of the organ. And we wonder why there’s an organ shortage?

Those who demand, on the basis of nebulous “ethical concerns,” that patients die rather than receive transplant organs love to regale us with horror tales of a dismal future: The alcoholic street-dweller induced to part with a kidney for the price of a bottle of rotgut. The working poor forced to make their mortgage payments with liver lobes and patches of skin for grafts. And so on and so forth.

The reality is that a market in organs would likely look nothing at all like these fairy tales.

In countries where health care is still at least nominally a private sector matter, medical insurance companies might offer their policy holders discounted premiums in exchange for binding post-mortem donation agreements. Over time, the pricing would stabilize and arrangements would be made for the discounts and the agreements to transfer from one company to the next — or for the discount to be subject to “clawback” — should the client change insurers.

Similarly, life insurance companies might offer substantial benefit bumps in return for post-mortem organ donations and act as middlemen between the deceased’s estate and the transplant industry.

For organs from living donors, it might be cash on the barrelhead, but price would similarly stabilize as hospitals and insurers discovered what rates kept the waiting lists empty or nearly so.

And in more thoroughly state socialist systems? There’s no saving such systems — and no good reason to save them if we could — but common sense says that patients should be presented with the option: Sign the donor form or forgo the system’s services.

What there’s no case for is claiming a “state property right” in people’s organs. That idea falls into the same moral class as chattel slavery, the drafting of “comfort girls” by occupying armies, and military conscription. The shades of Mengele and Mao and Tojo hover immovably over it.

Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman, among others, have been in a tizzy recently about the unpaving of roads. One result of Congress’s refusal to renew counter-cyclical stimulus grants to state and local government is that fiscally strapped governments are cutting back on highway maintenance. Specifically, dozens of counties in several states are replacing asphalt roads with gravel. As Maddow summarized, in her August 9 broadcast:

“The Wall Street Journal reported recently on the growing number of places across the country where local governments are unpaving the roads. They are turning paved roads into gravel roads because paved roads too expensive to maintain. It is not one little town‘s whacky Luddite solution. It‘s happening in North Dakota, more than 100 miles of road in South Dakota, in 38 counties in Michigan, and it‘s happening in Ohio, and it‘s happening in Alabama, and it‘s happening in Pennsylvania.”

Liberal economist Paul Krugman described the process, in an August 8 NYT op-ed piece (“America Goes Dark“):   “A country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself …”

Jim Kunstler could have predicted this, of course — and did, in “The Long Emergency.” The system of subsidized infrastructure on which the car culture and the long-haul trucking industry depend is unsustainable. Absent intensive maintenance, asphalt highways deteriorate rapidly until axle-breaking potholes render them impassable to eighteen-wheelers. As state and local governments are plagued by increasingly severe fiscal crisis, as part of the death spasms of corporate capitalism, and Peak Oil drives up the price of asphalt for roads, governments will defer maintenance on more and more “secondary” roads, retreating and regrouping to a smaller and smaller core of highways that are maintained regularly enough to support heavy trucks.

Anyone who understands the basic principles of economics will tell you that when you subsidize an input to production, you also subsidize business models that rely more intensively on that input at the expense of those who do not. So the subsidy generates geometrically increasing demand for more subsidized inputs, faster than the government can appropriate money to pay for them, until the system finally breaks down under its own weight.

The interesting thing about all this is that it gets to the inner contradiction at the heart of Michael Moore-style “Progressivism.”

Where Progressivism differs from regular old vanilla-flavored 20th century liberalism is in its critique — however diluted the coating of greenwash — of large-scale corporate capitalism: Mass consumption, planned obsolescence, and the car culture.

But Progressivism also sees itself as champion of the New Deal model of consensus capitalism. And the two mix like oil and water.

On the one hand, “Progressive” governments spend lots and lots of money on “infrastructure” like the Interstate Highway System.

On the other hand, mass suburbanization and the car culture, and the big box retailers’ “warehouses-on-wheels” distribution model, are direct results of the Interstate. They were built, after all, by auto industry veteran Charlie “What’s good for GM” Wilson.

As neo-Marxists like Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff at the Monthly Review never tire of pointing out, the automobile-highway complex was one of several government-created sinks for surplus capital, whose main practical effect was to overcome monopoly capitalism’s chronic tendency toward overaccumulation and overproduction. In other words, it served the same purpose that Emmanuel Goldstein ascribed to the perpetual warfare state: Utilizing enormous amounts of surplus industrial capacity by sinking billions of dollars worth of its output to the bottom of the ocean or blasting it into the stratosphere.

So we’re treated to the world historical irony of seeing Rachel Maddow come down on the side of the “growth machines”: Local coalitions of real estate developers whose main activity is lobbying government for more “infrastructure.”

Note to Rachel: The local Rotary Club yahoos who lobby to pave over entire counties with highways and more highways are the BAD GUYS. You can’t simultaneously be against the car culture and be a cheerleader for more government-subsidized roads. You can’t be for Alfred Chandler’s managerial capitalism and the Detroit Michael Moore’s dad lived in ca. 1948, and also be for all the hippy-dippy “act locally” stuff. Some things simply don’t go together. Your reflexive love for government, and a priori assumption that it is a “progressive” force that represents “all of us working together,” is blinding you to the essential corporatism of most of what government actually does.

Mike Gogulski: The Islamic Cultural Center: Political Misdirection [mp3, 1:37].

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

The Islamic cultural center scandal in lower Manhattan, New York City, may be one of the least-engaging political misdirections of the last year. It isn’t based upon any sensible political principle whatsoever. How far away from Ground Zero must the center’s builders go to mollify political opportunists like Newt Gingrich? Is five blocks okay? A mile? Some claim the entire city of New York, or even all of America, was attacked on September 11th. Where does it end? Are Muslims welcome at all within these arbitrary political borders?

Those most upset about the religious center are neoconservatives. Would the neocons agree if Democrats accused all Christians of endorsing violence and aggression because a few refuse to condemn the murders innocent gay men like Matthew Shepard for their peaceful sexual and gender preferences?

President Obama came out on August 13th to correctly explain that America’s respect for freedom of religion “must be unshakable.”

Both the Holy Bible and the Quran at times endorse forms of violent retribution for now liberalized behaviors, but most modern followers of these faiths have discarded or theologized their way around textual support for such outmoded forms of “justice.” Using inductive logic from scripture to paint all Muslims or all Christians the same color due to the actions of the fringe is treacherous.

Unless one takes a consistent anti-theistic objection to all creeds with (often rejected) canonized anti-liberal positions, these monolithic and simplistic views of religious demographics tend to miss all nuance and feed individual moral virtue into the sausage grinder without making society any more peaceful or free. In addition, one can only assume that this scandal will end in yet another law to expand the power of the state over us all. In other words, no good can come of politicizing any of these engagements.

Politicians are driving another incredibly boring wedge between people to distract them from the major issues. The longer we talk about whether Muslims have basic individual property rights, as well as whether queer people can marry each other in the context of Prop 8, the more we think of each other as members of groups instead of as individuals, and the less time there is to talk about the state’s murder of people abroad and its criminal mercantilist manipulations of the economy and intrusions into our personal lives.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have notified their parent, the US government, that they need more money. The demand is for billions. Both are owned by the Treasury Department. Before receivership, they were public/private entities known as GSEs: Government Sponsored Enterprises.

The GSE is a fundamental building block of state corporate socialism. GSEs are corporations created by Congress that enjoy an “implicit guarantee” that government will back them and refuse to allow them to default or fail.

Because of this, GSEs enjoy access to discounted credit and can sell their securities above market price. Due to these government provided market advantages, Fannie and Freddie reaped huge profits for years, enriching their private sector executives and shareholders. Despite these advantages, both blew it big-time during the housing slide and (after emptying the cash registers) called it quits and left the mess for the taxpayer. As they say, “private profit, social cost.”

These corporations were created under the guise of increasing availability of low cost mortgages to the public in order to increase home ownership. They do no such thing. What they do is provide investors with a state-subsidized investment tool and bankers with easy profits. Both agencies purchase mortgages from bankers and mortgage brokers. They guarantee and bundle the mortgages into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and sell these “guaranteed” products to investors. The MBS, which would probably never show its face in a free market, becomes a sure thing for investors. What better to the subsidized investor than reward without risk?

Bankers sell mortgages without worrying about the credibility of the homebuyer or even the feasibility of the loan over the long term, since the paper will soon be swapped for cash. Homebuyers may find increased availability of mortgages with somewhat lower interest rates, but they also find increased housing prices and as a result, larger monthly payments.

When capital is funneled to any sector of the economy or toward any produced good or service the result is higher prices. It’s true that if production increases at the same rate as available capital, inflation will be negated. Home builders attempt to accomplish this by throwing dwellings up wherever they can find dirt. But builders are no match for the combination of directed guaranteed capital from Fannie and Freddie and the Federal Reserve’s seemingly unlimited production of newly minted state backed paper money. We’ve witnessed time and again the ruthless cycle of inflationary housing prices and the inevitable subsequent downward spiral. Profits are pocketed on the way up, lives ruined on the way down.

The collusive relationship the federal government enjoys with the financial system, directing and discounting capital to its wards at will, while depriving the rest of us by withholding capital and instituting incessant monetary inflation causes damage far beyond the housing sector.

Supporters of Fannie and Freddie warn that interest rates will increase if they are liquidated. The truth of the matter is that housing prices fall when interest rates rise. It is the monthly payment that determines affordability in our credit obsessed world, not the interest rate.

The real solution is to dissolve all GSEs, examples of pure corporate welfare, and incorporate free and unrestricted competitive banking. Repeal legal tender laws and allow free creation and exchange of currencies and monies. With the medium of exchange freed up to truly reflect value, houses will cost exactly what they should; whatever those interested in purchasing them can afford and desire to pay. Bearing in mind recent events demonstrating the unrelenting drive of the status quo toward greater control and increased monopoly, these changes are probably out of the question.

An alternative is to remove all subsidies to housing price or security creation and allow the formation of true mortgage banks; banks that would directly transfer clients’ deposits to the needs of homebuyers.

These banks could store 50% of deposits and loan the other half toward mortgages. Using a 1% markup fee for overhead, mortgage banks would be able to outperform traditional banks on both ends of the transaction: the rate of interest for both depositors and mortgage holders.

A bank of this sort would establish the depositors as shareholders. They are the ones putting up the coin and rightfully deserve ownership.

That current banks have both depositors and shareholders is evidence that there’s little competition within the banking industry. In a true free market, banks that returned revenue to the depositor in the form of a greater rate of interest (or a lower mortgage rate) rather than to the shareholder as a dividend would have prospective clients beating down their doors to give them money. Conversely, try setting up a bank without depositors!

Any method that would directly benefit the actors involved, rather than third parties, would prove itself more efficient in a free market and would be a viable solution.

Anarchy, or “the state of nature” as it was often referred to in the past, is a way of living that requires responsibility from those living in it.  This requirement, however, is very often misunderstood.  This misunderstanding tends to lead to the Hobbesean argument that, since people are irresponsible by nature, Anarchy can never “work.”  I would like to know more precisely what some of those people mean by it “working” or “not working,” but let’s assume for the moment that by “work” they mean “allow us to live peacefully and harmoniously.”

Anarchy does not depend on people behaving responsibly.  Anarchy depends on nothing except the understanding that no one has a legitimate claim to any power that anyone else doesn’t have.  It’s more the case that Anarchy imposes responsibility on people.  This imposition is not understood or acknowledged by most statists.  If people behave badly in an anarchist society, they are the ones who will ultimately suffer most.  This may seem counter-intuitive to those of us who grew up and live in a society whose edges are delineated by the state, but it is precisely the state which allows the irresponsible to get away with their irresponsibility.

One way in which this is so is in the nature of centralized enforcement.  The state takes upon itself the function of meting out justice and reward.  The more it does so, the more complex its task becomes and, thusly, less efficient.  The police (or what passes for the “punishing authority” in a particular situation) cannot be everywhere at once, looking in every nook and cranny of the world for evildoers.

Ironically, it is the worst of the evildoers that are the most equipped to evade detection and capture.  As that old cliché goes, if we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.  To take it a bit further, the more you outlaw guns, the more of an outlaw those who still have guns will be.  The obvious real-world example is the so-called “war on drugs”.  Only the most violent and clever drug dealers will survive, the more the government succeeds in cracking down on drugs.  A less obvious example is the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  As antibiotics become stronger, every bacterial strain that survives ends up more and more resistant to antibiotics.

Another way is in the corruption of the state itself.  The ability to mete out justice is precisely attractive to the unjust because it is the perfect way to evade it.  Even if you started with a government of angels, in a few generations it would become a government of devils.  Their primary motive is to use this power to evade responsibility and thrive nonetheless.  Our entire corporate economy is predicated on just this sort of evasion of responsibility, quite openly and explicitly.  Mechanisms of interlocking debt and selective enforcement establish an elite who are “too big to fail”, while pushing their burdens onto those who cannot enlist the state to their advantage.  When someone in the government does do something horribly irresponsible and gets caught, some spokesman will come out on television and say something like “Mistakes were made”.  That line right there, tells you all you need to know about the mindset of the state. Everyone by now has heard stories of police who abuse their power and suffer nothing more than a paid vacation and possibly their name in the paper.  These stories are more commonplace than one might think.  Radley Balko’s blog, The Agitator, has done a good job of collecting and documenting these stories.

For a more recent example, look at the recent Wikileaks “controversy”.  The US government would like to spin the story that they are trying to protect lives by keeping all this information under wraps, but if you look at what is coming out, they are really just trying to evade responsibility for their actions.  Some of this stuff has no specific information that could be used to hurt anyone, but is very embarrassing for the US government.  Wikileaks has cleverly even asked the US to go over their documents and “redact” anything that has specific information that could hurt someone.  This of course was refused; because that would entail admitting that some of those documents had no good reason to be classified.

Beyond all that, even in its ideal form the Hobbesean statist idea is putting the cart before the horse.  It says “People are irresponsible; therefore we shall institute a state which can take on ‘responsibility’ for them.”  With this guiding attitude, there is no incentive for anyone to take on any additional responsibility, since, on the one hand doing so will not reward them much compared to what they risk and not doing so will not expose them to much, if any, danger.  It is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.  It creates a system of avoidance, where people become more concerned with evading punishment than seeking reward.  And in the final stages of this madness, the state begins to punish people for taking responsibility for their own lives, thus creating the perfect feedback loop into apathy and slavery.  “It’s not my job.”  Or the famous Ebenezer Scrooge line “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor then?”

In an anarchist society this is not so.  No one may evade the consequences of their actions, unless the mercy of their neighbors allows such.  To be sure, here and there, a bit of it may slip away through the cracks, but a systematic pattern of irresponsibility cannot exist in anarchy.

One reason for this is that it is the state of nature that determines what counts as responsibility in the first place.   For an example, if there’s a person who doesn’t seem to do very much, makes silly impractical decisions, fails to live up to their agreements, and yet, this person manages to scrape by in an anarchist community, there must be some reason they put up with it.  Maybe he’s a genius engineer who manages to build stuff that is so awesome, that people will put up with his other quirks.  Maybe he’s really entertaining to be around (the Dude from the Big Lebowski comes to mind).  But whatever it is, he’s responsible enough in context in order to survive.  In the end, scarcity itself imposes certain limits.  A society of Dudes wouldn’t last very long, nor would a society of thieves, without a central authority who can protect them from the consequences of their actions by shifting the consequences onto someone else (assuming there was someone else to exploit).  But however we the people decide to organize ourselves, we will have to be responsible for ourselves and each other without any external “authority figure” to pin the blame on, or to give credit to, or to appeal to.

A Hobbesian might claim that what I’ve said is true, yet people are incorrigibly irresponsible nonetheless and will insanely and suicidally misbehave even in the face of their impending doom.  In fact maybe they will not recognize that doom in the first place, even with all of the signs pointing to it.  In that case, if that is true, no attempt to establish a state will help one bit.  If people do not respond to incentives, they will not respond to the incentives added by a state.  Because that’s what a state does, in practical terms, it shifts incentives.  The purpose of punishment and policing is to create a deterrent, or a set of behavioral incentives that will change the behavior of people.  If people don’t respond to incentives, then the state can’t improve the situation.

We know from practical experience that people do respond to incentives.  If they didn’t, simple robbery would never work, or it would work so randomly that it would never have developed as a recognizable form of behavior.   But if people do respond to incentives, then there is no need for a state.   The people themselves can police themselves.

To claim that large scale irresponsibility and anarchy can co-exist, is to claim that there is a set of values that make up responsibility that is external to the values of people at large, and in contradiction to the laws of nature.  It is an attempt to impose a specific, preferred code of behavior on people that don’t share that code with you.  In short, it’s tyranny.

As I’ve outlined above, even if you feel justified in your particular “benevolent tyranny” it won’t do what you want it to do.  And if your code is contradictory to scarcity, then not only is it tyranny, but it is hardly benevolent, because someone will have to pay for everyone whom you shield from the consequences of their actions.  In fact it is the more corrupt and flexible forms of tyranny that have survived, because they are able to bend to the laws of nature and the will of the people, when they have to.  A rigid idealistic state that was contrary to human desires would fold up in a few years (and if it’s not contrary to human desires, it’s unnecessary).   So if you’re a statist, and you’re a benevolent statist, you’re just making your own system more unstable, the more you clean it up.

In the end it’s about us, our values, the laws of nature, and our ongoing struggle against scarcity.  There’s nothing in that situation that a centralized authority can add to a society, but much that it can take away.  A state is only good for shielding people from responsibility, which implies punishing responsible people, shifting the costs of irresponsibility onto them.  The state is either unnecessary or evil, or both.

The core libertarian test of any human behavior is whether it forces itself upon any unwilling party. So, it would be a core libertarian position that doing anything by yourself in private on your own property — or privately between or among universally consenting sentient beings — should not be invaded to prevent it by any outside party.

10. Fox News commentator/comedian Greg Gutfeld, has proposed the opening of a gay nightclub adjacent to the “Ground Zero Mosque.” I’ve already watched a documentary about a pro-life center operating across the street from an abortion clinic. Do you believe White Supremacists should be able to open offices next to NAACP centers, and that Neo-Nazis should be able to operate offices next to Jewish Synagogues?

Dear C4SS supporters,

I’m going to skip right to a couple of high points:

– Some earlier efforts are starting to bear fruit! The folks at Montréal’s Le Québécois Libre informs us that Darian Worden’s “Who Would Maintain Roads Worse Than the State,” from back in June, will appear in their next edition.

– My own “The Valley of the Shadow of Wikileaks” appeared on popular non-interventionist web site AntiWar.Com on Monday.

Why the high points first? Because, as predicted, I’ve not been able to do as much this week as I’d have liked. It was kind of a “perfect storm” week that included two doctor visits, lab work and a diabetes diagnosis as well as wrapping up the last of my commitments to the Libertarian Party so that I can give market anarchism my full attention and efforts, etc.

As an indicator of the week’s stressful effects, I weighed 227 pounds on Monday and 217 on Friday (down from ~250 a few months ago; the unexplained weight loss was part of what triggered my health concerns).

I did get some C4SS commentaries out to newspaper editors, but the number was in the high hundreds rather than the low thousands, and very little media list data entry got done.

I apologize for my semi-absence this week, but I expect to get back on track and then some starting this weekend.

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

[Addendum: Darian Worden and the Center were mentioned and quoted in this roundup of reactions to the Stephen Slater / JetBlue story this week. — Brad S.]

Laws against peaceful, consensual activity always seem to be in the news. Dianne Feinstein takes a hardline stance against marijuana law reform. Raids on raw milk distributors are a regular occurrence. Every little while a story breaks about another “family values” politician soliciting a prostitute who turns out to be an undercover cop.

A sizable share of people in the criminal justice system is made up of those who ran afoul of some law commanding “Touch not, taste not, handle not.”

If you support such laws, there is no ground on which you can consistently do so without believing that other people are your property, or are your inferiors and subject to your command.

You may argue that “society” collectively decides what to permit and not to permit, based on some vision of the “common good.” But remember those high school civics texts with the stuff about government exercising only powers delegated by the governed, government’s function being to protect the rights of the individual, and all that? Well, you can’t delegate a power you don’t have. And government can’t protect a right, on your behalf, that you don’t possess as an individual.

So you can’t delegate to government the power to tell other people what foods or drugs to ingest, or whom to have sex with, unless you, as an individual, already have the right to boss other people around. You as an individual, or acting together with any number of other individuals, cannot delegate to government the power to boss people around against their will in regard to peaceful and consensual actions, unless you own them. “Society” has a right to criminalize peaceful, voluntary behavior only if each individual is the property of society as a whole.

Roderick Long of the Molinari Institute (the parent body of Center for a Stateless Society) describes it as a simple matter of equality. If other people are your equals in dignity, authority, and self-determination, you don’t have the right to tell them what to do. You can’t boss another person around about their food or drug habits, or their sexual practices, unless they’re your subordinate in some sense. You’ve probably seen a kid tell some bossy stranger, or remember telling someone yourself years ago, “You’re not my daddy!” Exactly.

We anarchists don’t believe other people are our property. We don’t believe we have the authority to tell other people what to eat, drink, smoke, or whom to have sex with. We’re not their bosses. We don’t own them. And we have no right to act through government to do things we have no legitimate authority to do as individuals. In other words, we anarchists actually believe the things the authors of your civics texts claimed to believe.

The big difference is, we’re consistent about it. We judge all groupings of individuals, even groupings that claim to represent a majority of people in a community and call themselves a “government,” by the same moral principles that govern individuals. The legitimate powers an individual possesses — the right to life, liberty and property, and the consequent power to defend those rights without harm to innocents — can be exercised cooperatively by any number of individuals in concert.

But even if they comprise a majority of people in a community, they have no rightful authority to bind those who did not freely join their cooperative venture. No group, including a group made up of a majority of individuals in a community, has any powers or rights beyond those already possessed by its individual members. Individuals cannot delegate any powers to a government that they do not possess as individuals.

Like any other association, a government exists for the ends of its members, and has no authority over anyone outside it. The state has no aura of majesty, and exercises no divine power. Like any other human association, it has only those legitimate powers which individual human beings can rightfully grant it in the first place.

If you, as an individual, go to your neighbor’s house and order him to stop smoking dope or parking his car on the lawn, and shove him around or take him prisoner for refusing to comply, you’re nothing but a thug. Your neighbor has the right to tell you to mind your own business and leave him alone, and to resist your aggression if necessary. If you and a large number of other people in the community do the same thing to your neighbor, under cover of a so-called “government,” you’re still just thugs — plain and simple. And your neighbor has just as much right to tell you all to mind your own business, or to resist if necessary.

As an individual, or as a member of a group of individuals — no matter how large — you don’t own other people.

I stumbled across an old 2006 commentary by Wilikeaks’s Julian Assange, from his defunct blog, courtesy of Internet Archive. It’s reproduced on the P2P Foundation’s Wiki: “Non Linear Effects of Leaks on Unjust Systems of Governance.”

“The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership …. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive ‘secrecy tax’) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems.”

In other words, authoritarian hierarchies handicap themselves by suppressing the information they need to adapt to real-world conditions and remain viable.

Irving Janis, in a 1972 scholarly study of government decisionmaking processes, called it “GroupThink.”

I encountered it at work myself a few weeks ago. One of the night shift nursing supervisors stopped by our ward for a bit of conversation, and we got to talking about the administration’s utterly brilliant plan for shutting down the pediatric ward and mixing kids in with the general patient population on acute care wards. Yeah, you read it right — sorry I can’t adequately convey an eye-roll in a column. Of course we all laughed ourselves silly, although the hilarity was mitigated by slack-jawed disbelief. The marketing departments at the other regional hospitals are surely salivating at the opportunity to advertise: “We STILL have the specialized pediatric care your children need!”

The Super said, “Oh, sure, I know it won’t work.” My response: “What does it mean to say it ‘won’t work?’  No idea those people come up with EVER works. But it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work, because we’ve got an entire organization dedicated to telling naked emperors how great their clothing looks.”

As counter-culture philosopher Robert Anton Wilson pointed out in the Illuminatus! Trilogy: Nobody ever tells the truth to someone with a gun — or someone who can fire them. (“Right you are, C.J.!”). As organization theorist Kenneth Boulding notes, “there is a constant tendency for hierarchy to corrupt communications, and for necessary information to be filtered out before it reaches the top decision makers. The bigger the organization, the more likely are its top decision makers to be living in a wholly imaginary world.”

Hierarchies are extremely prone to maintaining a death grip on their subordinates even when it’s ultimately suicidal. A good example is the TSA approach to airline security. It’s been repeatedly demonstrated that the volume of information concerning possible terrorist threats is simply too great for a single organization to process. So the Bush administration failed to stop the 9-11 hijackings, even though there was already sufficient information in its possession to indicate they were coming. There was just too much information to connect the dots. And their solution after 9-11 was to acquire new surveillance powers and cast the net even wider, gathering even more indigestible information. This information paralysis was why the underwear bomber was able to board a plane despite warnings that would have raised red flags if the system were at all capable of processing the information it took in.

TSA countermeasures, in every case, involve creating a new set of rules to prohibit what the terrorists tried the last time — even though the terrorists are smart and agile enough to change tactics every time. So we take off our shoes and throw away shampoo bottles, wasting billions of hours a year, to thwart tactics that will never be repeated.

Every failed attack since 9-11 has failed either because of the attacker’s incompetence, or thanks to the vigilance of people actually on the ground using their own initiative. And given the information paralysis at the center, this is the only solution: Decentralize the network and empower the “last-mile network.” But the TSA, in every case, responds by further restricting the initiative of passengers.

Even when hierarchies see the need for incorporating networked organization, their own machinery sabotages the process. There is an entire “Fourth Generation Warfare” school of thought in the military academies centered on emulating Al Qaeda’s networked organization style, and using networked communications technology to empower the “boots on the ground.” But attempts to implement this vision come up against the petty authority of mid-level commanders. Far from increasing the information and autonomy available to small units, the technology has been used to increase the number of sign-offs required from dozens of dotted-line superiors to do anything at all — by which time it’s too late for the action to matter. (And the front-line commanders have to submit their proposals in the correct PowerPoint format, as well!)

In the end, the state and its corporate symbiotes will be defeated by those of us who don’t need permission.

Flight attendant Steven Slater quickly became a minor celebrity after his dramatic exit from a plane at Kennedy International Airport. Following an argument with a passenger, the attendant delivered an angry speech over the plane’s public address system, grabbed a beer, opened the emergency chute, then slid out of the plane and went home.

The New York Times characterizes the incident as “the latest round in what is seen as an increasingly hostile relationship between airlines and passengers” (“Fed-Up Flight Attendant Makes Sliding Exit,” August 9, 2010).

Official narratives of conflict can conceal the true conflict behind an event. Though it’s hard to be sure what happened from sketchy and seemingly contradictory news reports, it’s more likely that the incident was a notable flare-up between people who treat others as human beings, and jerks who don’t.

In the New York Times version, a passenger ignored Slater’s instructions to wait until the plane stopped to retrieve her luggage. She could have addressed his concerns, possibly explaining why she needed her luggage immediately. Instead she ignored Slater and hit him in the head with her luggage as if he was just an obstacle in the way. And she reportedly got offended when an apology was asked for.

Retail and service workers are often not viewed as individuals. They are regarded as machines in place to get the customer what he wants, no matter what the customer’s attitude. Any humanness they exhibit becomes an obstacle in the way of getting what the customer wants.

Everyday dehumanization leads to raging out. Air rage, road rage, and plain old general disgruntlement are often the result of offense at some injustice. Saying “I’m not gonna take it anymore” often means reclaiming some measure of humanity.

Unfortunately, getting angry can create a vicious cycle where innocent people become the focus of anger that they didn’t cause, which in turn motivates them to behave angrily toward others.

But those who cause legitimate rage should be stood up to: the assholes with authority, the ones who tell you to put on a happy face and get back to work, the ones who tell you to refrain from showing any emotion that doesn’t fit the official ambiance. Especially the ones who tell you to unconditionally back down from bullies. Backing down not only gives bullies (those who use some kind of rank to exert power over others) free rein to treat people like dirt, but it will probably mean that your rage will be transferred to target someone lower in the hierarchy — someone who might not deserve it.

With constant submission to petty power trips, occupations that could be adventurous, instructive, or otherwise interesting ways to make a living become processes that reduce the worker to an automaton. Causing a scene and grabbing a drink on your way out the emergency chute might just be a rational way to deal with that kind of nonsense.

One of the recurring themes in my column is the war for digital freedom.  The bad guys, of course, are the forces I like to call the Copyright Nazis:  the RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, NewsCorp, Microsoft — pretty much the entire proprietary content industry.  And of course those guys wouldn’t be much of an enemy if it weren’t for legislation like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, the Uruguay Round TRIPS Accord, and the increasingly authoritarian surveillance state required to enforce such legislation.  Together, the proprietary content industries and the surveillance state constitute one of those much-vaunted “complexes,” like the paradigmatic “Military-Industrial Complex” to which all others are compared.

But my focus here is on the good guys — the guys in the opposite corner, in the white trunks, who play Roadrunner to the proprietary content industries’ Wile E. Coyote.

Past heroes singled out for praise include The Pirate Bay, the most successful file-sharing operation to date.  Some reflected glory also belongs to assorted Pirate Parties around the world, to the extent that they run political interference for the free culture movement and raise public awarness about just how despicable the Copyright Nazis really are.  (I really should mention the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is at the forefront of groups performing the latter function).

The Falun Gong also deserves high praise for its efforts in developing proxy server technologies for combatting the Chinese surveillance state, and generally staying ahead of the Chinese government in an offensive-defensive arms race against Internet censorship.   The Falun Gong has been very generous in sharing its technical know-how with other dissident groups around the world.

The bar was recently raised for any future competition by the heroic efforts of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, in the Wikileaks story (which some of you may have read about).  Assange has set up a high-volume website for government and corporate whistleblowers worldwide to publish leaked documents — and since it relies on an international server network, it is beyond the power of any government to shut down.  Manning leaked the biggest cache of classified documents since the Pentagon Papers, subsequently published on said Wikileaks, which has resulted in an amusing impromptu dance in recent weeks by assorted members of the Obama administration’s national security apparatus.

And now there’s Haystack  It doesn’t exactly top Wikileaks, but it still ranks pretty high up there.  Haystack is the baby of Austin Heap, a 20-something hacker who decided — after witnessing the turmoil in Iran following the disputed election — to put his geek skills to work on behalf of that country’s dissident community.  Heap was helped enormously in the effort by a disgruntled Iranian government official, who provided considerable technical detail on the functioning of the government’s filtering software.  Heap wound up developing desktop software — Haystack — which not only encrypts but disguises connections and outgoing data, so to the government it looks like someone surfing a revolutionary website is visiting some other popular site like The Weather Channel.

Haystack is distributed on the same invitation-only, friend-of-a-friend model originally used by Gmail.  That reflects Heap’s vision of steady, organic growth, rather than a rapid expansion of “low-value demand.”  He specifically says he’d prefer it be used by freedom activists rather than file-sharers.  But we all know how this is gonna turn out.  Now that the genie’s out of the bottle, it will wind up in the hands of file-sharers sooner rather than later.  (Anyway, I thought file-sharers WERE freedom activists).

And the beauty of it is, the Copyright Nazis’ own authoritarian state is helping to distribute the rope  to hang itself.  Heap has talks scheduled with John McCain, and the State Department is on board with his project.

The U.S. government is so gung-ho about the immediate appeal of helping dissidents undermine the system of power in an official enemy state, it’s lost sight of an important consideration:  the technology of resistance has no borders.  For the Obama administration to help Heap spread this technology to Iranian dissidents is the equivalent of attacking Iran with a virulently contagious biological weapon for which the United States has developed no vaccine.  But there’s one big difference:  this virus only kills THEM.

A recent Liberty on Tour video gives a good look at how government policing works. In their August 9, 2010 LibertyOnTour.com post Edgewater Police Officer Intimidates LOT’s Mueller for Filming, they present an eight minute video that shows an officer acting through intimidation, and how other officers respond.

An unorthodox crowd has gathered in an area open to the public – in this case, tuners and bikers showing off their vehicles with others who share their interests. When the officer who initiated the encounter was asked if anyone was being hurt he replied, “That’s not the point – we got called.” If police were called, that would mean someone decided that a disagreement over the use of a parking lot was best solved by calling the police.

When the officer gets off his motorcycle he immediately acts to intimidate the person holding a camera in a parking lot open to the public. He walks toward him in an aggressive manner, then closely follows him while speaking in a threatening tone.

During an exchange at the end of the video, the motorcycle officer states that the point of his behavior was to “intimidate” the camera holder so he would “back off.” When the camera holder asked what he was supposed to back off from, the cop answered filming the “nonsense” in the parking lot that wasn’t hurting anybody.

It should be noted that the officer got off of his bike and approached the camera holder when he appeared to notice that the camera was obviously pointed at him.

To an officer whose mindset is to control the situation by intimidating anyone present into obedience, a challenge to his power is viewed as a threat. And it is very possible that he will threaten physical force in response.

As the cop is walking back towards his motorcycle, a couple tells him about an individual who appears to be passed out. The two Liberty on Tour activists then talk to other officers who respond to the emergency. These cops appear concerned for the privacy of the individual laying on the ground and act in a much less aggressive manner than the motorcycle officer.

However, when the police supervisor was shown video footage of the exchange with the motorcycle officer, he said that since he was not there he will not comment on the officer’s actions. If the cameraman had done anything that would reasonably provoke the officer’s aggressive attitude – even acted in a discourteous manner – the police officer would likely have said something about it in the video. The supervisor says that the event will be internally investigated if the camera operator files a complaint.

As numerous stories at CopBlock.org and GangstersInBlue.org show, internal investigations often fail to yield concrete results (though the hassle might sometimes be worth it). If cops will not hold other cops accountable for bad behavior, that will encourage more bad behavior by police. If external pressure is exerted on police forces through videotaping and public commentary, that might compel positive actions.

The motorcycle officer explained his behavior by saying that he worked a 16 hour day and the people who hang out there annoy him. This could certainly make a person angry, but will a cop be held accountable if he takes out his anger on a regular citizen who “just happened to be in the line of fire” – especially if the cameras are turned off?

There are services that police provide. Responding to a man passed out wouldn’t seem to require the amount of forces there to control the situation. But if there was a disagreement between parking lot owners and several individuals in the parking lot, it could be beneficial for a third party to intervene. But is creating a hostile environment by entering a situation with threats instead of with questions the best way to do that?

Policing among equals, not enforced deference to those who wear badges, would likely be less incentivized toward disruptive and hostile behavior. But this goes against the cult of professionalism, where designated “approved” people answer to internal regulations, not to the external public. And tribal loyalty to the Thin Blue Line probably does not encourage treating people as individuals.

Individuals taking action to hold others accountable, and speaking their mind even in intimidating scenarios are taking positive steps toward freedom. And the communication that Liberty on Tour fosters can show people the benefit of libertarian alternatives to statist monopoly and coercive hierarchy.

Dear readers,

In theory, this update is always supposed to be a short note, and I’m going to try really hard to keep it that way this week. I’m dealing with some personal medical issues, but the work is still getting done.

– This week, I made 2,299 discrete submissions of C4SS commentaries to 1,663 newspapers. Both of those numbers should continue to rise. my US newspaper list is nearly done and then I’ll get started on Europe. I’ve also doubled my “email send” capacity so that I don’t find myself with stuff to send and no ability to send it.

– I’m aware of at least two C4SS pieces which achieved external media publication this week. The St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph picked up Kevin Carson’s “‘Free Enterprise is not Free Enterprise,” and the Portland, Oregon Skanner published his “In Praise of Bad Attitudes.”

– Google News? Meh. We’re not dying out there, but more content isn’t translating into more search results, either. I’m obviously going to have to research their selection algorithm to get the Center more “face time.”

– Remember that exclusive I mentioned last week, the one we never heard back on? We eventually did hear back — and it was accepted for publication by a major US newspaper. Now we’re waiting on that paper’s release forms and such. We submitted two other exclusives this week, both to top US newspapers (by both reputation and circulation); one was politely rejected, one we’ve yet to hear back on. We’re just getting started with the “exclusives” thing, but I think we’re going to make progress there.

And that’s the update. Due to the aforementioned medical issues, I’ll probably be in and out of “the office” in the coming week (worst-case scenario, “the office” moves to a hospital bed for a few days), but I’ll do my best to keep up with directing the flow of great commentary C4SS’s writers are producing into the “mainstream media.”

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

Leave it to the US Department of “Defense” to continue fighting a war it’s already irretrievably lost.

On Friday, the Pentagon “asked” online whistleblowing facilitator Wikileaks to “do the right thing” by erasing all classified US government documents from its servers and handing over any copies. I put the “asked” in scare quotes because although that’s how CNN headlined it, the actual story used the far more accurate “demanded.”

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell hinted at a range of threats which might be deployed versus Wikileaks should his demand be rejected. “If doing the right thing is not good enough for them,” he said, “then we will figure out what other alternatives we have to compel them to do the right thing.”

War Party mouthpiece Marc Thiessen hints in the Washington Post (“Sorry, Time, Assange is a criminal, not a journalist,” 08/07/10) that Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange may be (may already have secretly been!) indicted under the 1917 Espionage Act, World War One’s prototype “national security state” legislation under which a number of individuals were imprisoned for criticizing US military policy.

Other options presumably — the current US regime is fond, to the point of obsession, of the phrase “everything is on the table” — include everything from “cyber-warfare” to actual military action against Wikileaks servers using special operations troops or drone aircraft.

Let’s leave aside for a moment — but only for a moment — the fact that this demand is the equivalent of stomping one’s foot and screeching that some huge quantity of toothpaste, currently gumming up hard drives around the world, must be recalled to a single location and put back in the tube. From a technical standpoint, it’s simply not going to happen, as anyone at the Pentagon who’s used a computer since … oh, 1983 or so … could have told Morrell if he’d bothered to ask before making himself look silly in public.

That practical consideration is important, but let’s not allow it to distract us from the moral context of the larger situation.

The state (any state, but in this case the United States) claims a right to keep secrets from those whom it governs, from those upon whose consent its purported “legitimacy” rests, from those who are taxed to pay in the first place for the activities which generate those secrets.

Ixnay on that aimclay!

It’s the equivalent of the janitor telling the building owner “it’s none of your business whether or not I cleaned the toilets, and if you try to have a look yourself I’ll hit you over the head with my mop and lock you in the broom closet. Now hurry up and sign my paycheck, I’ve got a date tonight.”

That the US government considers publication of the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary even remotely controversial shatters the whole “consent of the governed” myth. The state doesn’t work for you and in this matter it’s not even pretending to.

That it’s the disclosure of this particular type of bundle of “state secrets,” i.e. “defense”-related material, which evokes the most hysterical reaction from the bureaucracy tells us a lot about whom the state really does work for.

The primary function of the state — all states, everywhere, at all times — is to transfer wealth from the pockets of the productive class to the coffers of the political class.

Since the end of World War Two at the latest — at least intermittently earlier, but whole hog since then — that political class has been dominated by what President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed “the Military-Industrial Complex.”

The Military-Industrial Complex is an overlapping, interlocking mass of individuals, firms, political lobbies and government offices with one thing in common: The livelihood of the Complex and the livelihoods of the individuals comprising it are entirely dependent upon the forcible transfer of wealth from your pockets to theirs via a perpetual regime of “war and rumor of war.”

If it wasn’t already obvious that the Military-Industrial Complex and its members scruple not at all to lie, cheat, steal or kill pursuant to the maintenance of that regime, well, Geoff Morrell just told you so, didn’t he?

Morrell and Company have met a worthy foe — and you have gained an equally valuable ally — in Wikileaks.

They can’t say they didn’t expect this. The US “national security” establishment has spent the last 20 years fretting over the potential of “stateless / non-state” actors and networks to subvert its power. Wikileaks is that potential fully realized.

The state has been put on notice: From here on out, it walks through the valley of the shadow of Wikileaks. The toothpaste is out of the tube, and out of the tube it shall stay. If Wikileaks should be destroyed — or for that matter even if it isn’t — ten similar projects will spring up to take its place.

The Era of Secret Government is over.

[C4SS News Analyst Darian Worden gave the following presentation at Drexel University this past weekend. – ed.]

I’m Darian Worden, an individualist anarchist writer with experience in libertarian activism. I write fiction and non-fiction, which you can find at my website DarianWorden.com. I affiliate with the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. I’m a News Analyst at the Center for a Stateless Society, a regular contributor to ALLiance Journal, a co-host of the internet radio show Thinking Liberty, and contribute to the multimedia website LibertyActivism.info.

I’m here to talk about anarchy!

Anarchy is actually a simple idea. It comes from the Greek anarchos, which means no ruler. Mon-archy is one ruler, an-archy is no rulers. You’re free do what you will, until you start trying to rule over other people.

One way I like to think of it, which I got from Roderick Long’s essay “Equality: the Unknown Ideal,” is that true liberty involves an equality of authority – we each rule our own lives, but do not get to rule over others. No individual or combination of individuals gets special privileges that other people don’t have – even if they put their colors on a banner and get called a “state.” For anarchists, organization should be done on a consensual basis, and social and economic relations as much as possible conducted between equals.

What’s difficult is getting to the point where you’re willing to embrace the idea of no-rulers, after a lifetime of being told that we need people in charge of us and we need to obey those who outrank us.

“Because that’s the rules, that’s why! Now don’t make get an even higher-ranking person to talk down to you!”

Thinking of anarchy as positive and practical can be difficult when it goes against so much of what you’ve been taught. So hopefully this talk will shed some light on why anarchy is good, why advocating anarchy is good, how anarchy might work in practice, and how to get there.

Let’s start with principles.

Each individual exists for his or her own sake. Nobody has a better claim to the life of any person than the person who actually lives it.

From this we could formulate The Law of Equal Liberty, as described by the 19th century philosopher Herbert Spencer (who is often derided by people who probably haven’t read him). The Law of Equal Liberty, in various forms, states that “each has freedom to do all that he wills provided that he does not infringe on the equal freedom of any other.” Government inherently takes a position of superiority over the subject. The state is the concentrated force of authority which invades liberty to extract wealth and compel obedience to whatever has been legislated by the most powerful elements of society. Government does not obey The Law of Equal Liberty.

Where force is concerned, we can look to some form of the zero-aggression-principle, though it might be less confusing to call it the Principle of Not Initiating Force: coercion may only be used to stop someone from unjustly coercing another person. Government is defined by the coercive authority that it exercises. An organization that does not claim the right to compel obedience to all of its decisions by force, is not really a government. At most it is a pretentious power structure with high potential to become a government.

Government exists to protect and serve rulers at the expense of the ruled. It responds to political demand, where those with the most political pull get the most, not to market demand, where those who want something arrange to get it consensually.

Advocating anarchy is more practical than advocating minimal government.

To say that government should only be involved in matters of force gives off the perception that you want to use government only as a club, and never as a crutch – to hurt people, not to help them. You’ll be seen not as a principled individual, but as someone who wants to make oppression run more efficiently and cares most about keeping people in line. It will be easier to confuse you for the conservative reformers who wish to keep forcing people to obey and support coercive monopolies, while giving them less in return besides a politician’s promise of eventual lower taxes. And if you say that you believe that a free market will enable the poor to advance themselves and the sick to be cured more easily, a critic might wonder why you believe a government is necessary to provide security and arbitration.

Challenging these perceptions is probably just as difficult as challenging the idea of government itself. And keeping a small government from growing when politicians and administrators are incentivized to expand their power is a bigger challenge than keeping states from growing out of a society in which there is broad participation in consensual organizations of freedom.

The military, police, and court-prison systems are actually the worst offenders of government and support the rest of its crimes. They should be delegitimized to stop authority’s attacks on freedom.

It is best to be a consistent supporter of maximum freedom, a consistent libertarian – and learn how to be an anarchist.

The history of classical liberalism is instructive.

Classical liberalism’s support of government prevented the promise of freedom from being realized by those on the receiving end of authority. After the abolition of slavery, government still prevented many from advancing. Liberty didn’t reach into workplaces because established interests were supported by artificial barriers on land use, money creation and banking, and intellectual property. Reformers who accepted the legitimacy of government did not address the problems inherent in the classical liberal order – problems created by an unwillingness to embrace full liberty.

Milton Friedman, rather than being remembered as a liberator, is often is held up as the human face of efficient exploitation through governments that allowed enough liberty for the right people to stay in power. This really isn’t fair, but it’s not an unexpected result of trying to reform, to refine, what is fundamentally destructive.

But why associate with bomb-throwing maniacs by using the word anarchy? I’ll tell you why.

To an anarchist the state is the enemy. It is not a wayward institution to be reformed or a power structure to be seized. It is the number one thing that must be dismantled. Identifying as being in opposition of rulership implies a clear and consistent libertarian program.

If you identify as an anarchist, people will probably get that you’re opposed to the system because of you don’t like authority. The roots of the word anarchy – no rulers – presents a simple conversational direction on why you do not believe in rulers, instead of starting with complex economic theory that has often been misapplied and misnamed. But you can always say libertarian in company that is more receptive to the l-word, because a consistent libertarian is an anarchist.

And some of those bomb-throwers had good ideas anyway. Anarchists have defied state regulations, defended themselves from oppression, improved working conditions, killed a king, fought bravely against state-communism and fascism, and stood for maximum individual autonomy. So what if there were a few who did things you don’t agree with? How many people claim the label of libertarian who advocate deadly oppressions like government war policy or militarized borders? The label is a conversational shorthand that signifies a general affinity, not a chain that binds together everyone who uses it to describe themselves.

What might an anarchist society look like?

I can give generalities, but the specific forms of organization are up to those who will actually make them. I cannot centrally plan a free society, and different arrangements will work best for different individuals.

The economy will be open for all kinds of experimentation, and any consensual arrangement that satisfies enough people will exist. This will lead to work being more satisfying. And because economic activity would not be distorted by government action, and money would not be taken by taxes to be poured into bureaucratic and military dead-ends, people could work less and get more for their effort. Privileges will not be locked in by artificially high costs of living and restrictions on starting businesses, so the economy will be more flexible, provide more opportunity, and be more responsive to individual choice.

Grassroots and netroots organizing will take the place of government regulations written by lobbyists in ensuring business ethics and housing and workplace standards. Product quality is better ensured by independent testing and certification than by government standards that are greatly influenced by industry lobbyists. A bad reputation will find its way online where potential workers and consumers will make the choice to use one of the other numerous options that will be made available by the liberation of human creativity.

Labor relations will be significantly different when workers have more options available to them. Management would not only have to compete against other companies for laborers, but also against options that will be more viable in a free economy populated by people who fiercely value liberty. This would include self-managed firms, self-employment (possibly as part of a guild), labor federations, and communes. Whatever mode of production a group of individuals chose, it would have to give participants at least as good of a deal as its competitors in order to stay in existence.

How about defense and arbitration services? Like any services, there’s no reason that competition and cooperative organization could not provide them better than the coercive monopoly of government.

An anarchist society would likely see much less crime than we see today. Reduced poverty and inequality, combined with the greater ease of creating legitimate economic opportunity, means that there would be less motivation to commit crimes. And when society is not arranged by the authoritarian lines that enable government coercion, less coercive behavior will trickle down to the streets. Government prohibitions that empower the biggest cutthroats of the underground to compete with violence would be ended. Also, crime will likely be deterred by more people being home and awake at hours of their choosing. As I said above, fewer working hours would be necessary to meet living needs, and there would be no restrictions on home-based businesses that do not harm others.

Responses to crime might often be through an informal militia model of armed neighbors working together for common defense. Whether agreements are made for volunteer patrols of the neighborhood, or consensual associations hire patrols, or both, would depend on the circumstances. But no group that infringed on liberty would be allowed to continue doing so. There would likely be professional detectives, as this is a skilled trade, but there’s no need for government to get it done.

This would facilitate a safer society, because security workers and other peaceable individuals would actually have the same interests – unlike today where the cop is looking for a way to dominate the citizen, and the citizen is looking for a way to avoid the cop.

Military defense would likely be done by a mix of militias and professional units. This would be more flexible and quicker to respond than bureaucratic power structures. But there’s no reason to think they would go to war with each other with anything close to the frequency that governments do. War is generally not in the interests of people who actually live in the war zone. And rogue defense organizations would have to deal with a population sensitive to infringements on liberty, and deal with all the other defensive services that were supported by a liberty-loving population.

Remember, I said at the beginning that for anarchists, “No individual or combination of individuals gets special privileges that other people don’t have.” People voluntarily associating to meet needs like the common defense do not qualify as a government. It is only when some individuals claim the right to coerce peaceful individuals into obedience – to exert authority over other people – that government is formed.

Transportation infrastructure is another thing that government is expected to provide. But how well does it really do that? What is seen might be giant interstates, airplanes usually not crashing into each other, and busy trains. What is not seen are the transportation options that could have been created in a free society. Roads that serve to unite communities by facilitating all kinds of traffic instead of restricting mobility to those with cars, greater automation in air-traffic controls, and mass transit companies that can actually support themselves are some possibilities. And a free economy might even see less of that surreal enragement called rush hour as people are more able to work from home or start businesses locally.

Mobility is something that people demand, and transportation is depended upon for a functioning modern society. It would really not be that hard to satisfy this demand outside of state controls. Independent companies might spring up to manage freeways, while local roads could be handled by residential or business associations. If you perceive someone as not pitching in their fair share for road maintenance, they can expect no help or business from you. And egregious freeloaders might find their reputations noted online with the ability to sue for damages if falsely accused. So freeloaders would face social costs.

But how might courts and arbitration work in an anarchist society? However people found worked to solve problems. Numerous systems of arbitration were created in the American Western frontier before the arrival of formal government. A peaceful society is in the interests of those who want to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and those who do not comply with arbitration can be isolated until they make restitution. Multiple arbitration organizations could exist on a reputation rating system, similar to with independent product certification.

So maybe this anarchy thing sounds great and all, but how do we get there?

I’m going to put action under four categories, but they can certainly overlap and specific activities might fit under more than one category. They are: One, education. Two, direct action. Three, mutual aid. And four, counter-economics.

Though my individualist anarchist views can be placed under the category of market anarchism – where exchange of goods for monetary value takes place – I want to take a short aside to talk about other types of anarchists and what we can offer each other. A free society would be an inclusive society and the best way to actualize libertarian principles depends on the desires of those applying them. Every individual will need to work with people who don’t agree with them 100%, so it’s important to find ways to make things work with people who hold different views.

If you can frame your discussion of market anarchy in a way that notes the reduction of the power of bosses over laborers, then social anarchists will often be receptive to your ideas and be interested in having you around. Although the most obnoxious and intolerant adherents of any philosophy tend to stand out in internet comment threads.

Though I don’t see anarchist communism, exchange of goods between federated labor groups (anarcho-syndicalism), or gift-based economies being the dominant forms of organization in a free society, they certainly have their places and will deliver more value to those who adhere to them than the varied types of monetary exchange would. So long as a mindset of maximizing individual liberty is firmly in place, specific structures come second.

Let’s talk about anarchist education. This is the basis of all action. Because anarchists do not wish to seize power and compel obedience, but to distribute political power among all peaceable individuals, a broad base of people must be willing to act in accordance with anarchist ideas. The increase of libertarian sentiment is how to get to an anarchist society and how to keep it free.

Education could take the form of discussion, or the form of propaganda. With propaganda, one party has an idea and propagates it as widely, and as effectively as possible. With discussion, there is an exchange of ideas among multiple parties. I’d consider a conference to be an atmosphere of discussion, which might also make people better at discussing and propagating ideas outside of the conference.

Direct action is opposed to parliamentary or electoral action. Direct action is when people directly affect the changes they want instead of building a giant expensive political campaign to exert pressure from inside the state.

Direct action makes the authorities give concessions – the game is for them to appease the people as much as they can to keep in control. The more anarchist principles and practice spread, the more they have to give until things spiral out of their control.

An example of direct action would be hampering military recruiting efforts by removing their advertisements or blocking recruiting centers. These would also be educational opportunities.

Mutual aid, when individuals help each other for mutual benefit, is an essential anarchist tactic. If we don’t help each other out, who will? The state?

The famous anarchist Peter Kropotkin observed that species that cooperate do better than those that don’t. So will political movements that cooperate have a greater chance of success. This is related to the idea of solidarity, which is perhaps best expressed by the slogan “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

And mutual aid provides something that people can fall back on when the state fails or is brought down.

Counter-economics, the creation of an economy that operates counter to the interests of the state, and facilitates resistance, is an essential part of creating effective opposition to the state. The less that people rely on the state-run economy, the less attached they will be to the status quo. Though he sometimes might focus a little too much on breaking the law to get wealthy, the works of Samuel Konkin will be very valuable in crafting personal counter-economic strategies.

Talking amongst friends to create informal networks of trade and defense could fall under the categories of counter-economics, mutual aid, and direct action. It would also probably teach you something about anarchist practice, so it would be educational too.

Anarchism is a well-developed philosophy of freedom with a clear path to reaching liberty. Anarchy is more practical than limited government at achieving the ethical and practical end of maximum individual liberty.

While much is up for debate about the capitalistic system, we are assured of one fundamental truth: the worker cannot purchase his own product. At the end of the day, he comes up short.

In fact, the driving motivator of the capital system, second only to the search for ever increasing monopoly profit, is the search for someone, anyone, to buy the results of production. For if the worker who produces the product can’t buy the product, who will?

It has been suggested that the capitalist system is simply a re branded version of the Monarchial system, with the serfs toiling away in the third world while the noble Euros and Americans divvy up and devour the produce. While this is a decent observation, it misses a fundamental point. The physical product of monopoly capital is primarily infinite multiples of run of the mill consumer items. While the system copiously rewards its controllers with great wealth, the system cannot operate without the worker, not only to toil but to buy.

How can this be achieved when labor cost of the finished product can run as low as ten percent and seldom over thirty percent of the product’s selling price? How to do this when American corporate industry profits seldom run below fifty percent of selling price? How to do this when the bulk of profits are recapitalized, driven back into the process with the intent of increasing production efficiency, increasing profits and in the process further lowering the ability of the worker/consumer to purchase and consume?

The initial answer came unwittingly from Monopoly Capital itself in the form of price competition. While the wage was always suppressed below market value, the product pricing was initially subject to market competition. This had the effect of nullifying some of the wage loss and allowing the worker to at least purchase what was minimally necessary and alleviate inventory accumulation.

But by the twenties, price competition had been eliminated in many sectors through collusive industry cooperation and government intervention. Counteracting this trend was union progress which had increased purchasing ability for those protected by unions.

Still there was a great capital surplus, much of which was invested in stock paper Ponzi schemes. When the house called in the chips and the economy sank, the days of Monopoly Capital seemed numbered.

While infinite war spending was credited for pulling the nation out of the depression, two factors continued the expansion and fed the capital machine; the advent of large scale social spending and the long term decline of oil prices that lasted through the mid seventies. Social spending allowed many to purchase goods that were unaffordable left to their own devices. The sustained fall of the price of oil allowed industry to base profits on energy consumption and forego for a time dismantling the labor pool. The massive energy subsidies and incentives provided by the government helped push industry in this direction.

The reversal of oil prices in the mid seventies changed the game. Capital went on the warpath to raise profits by scaling down labor costs. Reaganomics, the revival of the robber baron mentality, exacerbated the perennial problem of monopoly capital, finding consumers who can afford to purchase the product, by concentrating ever increasing capital in the hands of the capitalists.

Debt became the “modern” solution; both government and personal debt. Debt enables the purchase of what is unaffordable now with the notion it will become affordable in the future. To the wage earner, it is similar to the pension, the promise that his inadequate wage will be made whole again at some future point. Debt is a justification of monopoly pricing.

But, the capital machine is always trying to consume itself. It strives to profit not only from the productive output of industry but also from the non productive output of its financial arm. Laws require debt to be repaid with interest, whether the result of investment is profit or loss.

And the flow of non productive interest is almost always from the capital poor class to the capital rich class, further undermining the balance. Even when the capital rich class stumbles and falls over one of their harebrained alchemy schemes to magically produce capital from capital, the state refuses to allow the inevitable capital losses to tip the scales back a bit and intervenes with socialized loss insurance known as “bailouts”.

Such is the “capital conundrum”: the continuing effort of Monopoly Capital to undermine its own stability by depriving the wage class of the ability to purchase its own product.

The interesting paradox is that while the primary inclination of the controlled system is to concentrate capital and ultimately starve itself by withdrawing too much from the labor side of the production mode, the solution, diverting capital back to the labor/consumer force, if left to its own natural course, eventually has the reverse effect but the same outcome: dispersion of capital and the disintegration of monopoly capital.

It seems the long term outlook for Monopoly Capital, no matter how you look at it, is not so good. What a shame!

When I wrote my last column on Wikileaks (“Wikileaks:  Our Weapon Shop of Isher,” C4SS, July 30),  I didn’t expect to do a follow-up.  But this seems to be shaping up, if the folks in the U.S. government really turn out to be as stupid as they’re suggesting, into the first really full-scale showdown between network and hierarchy.

There have actually been calls (Marc Thiessen, “Wikileaks must be stopped,” Washington Post, Aug. 2)  for the “kidnapping and rendition” of Julian Assange.  Now, you’d hope even the U.S. national security state wouldn’t be quite that stupid.

But Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell has issued a demand for Wikileaks “to return all versions of these documents to the U.S. government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records.”  Translation:  I’m gonna stamp my foot and make unenforceable demands in my best Barney Fife voice, because if I don’t I’ll look, you know, impotent.  When asked how the government intends to compel obedience to its demand in the likely event it was ignored, Morrell simply stated “we’ll cross the next bridge when we come to it.”

Keep in mind that Assange fled Australia when the Obama administration requested the Australian government’s assistance in detaining and interrogating him.  And as a matter of general principle, the U.S. government asserts the right to “arrest” people, under the power of “extraordinary rendition,” without the approval of the government on whose soil the arrest takes place.

While you’d like to hope the USGov isn’t that stupid, there are ominous signs that the government’s escalating things into a confrontation from which there’s no dignified way to back out without a severe loss of face.

The thing is, though, they’d have to be stupid almost beyond belief to take drastic measures against Assange’s person or against the Wikileaks site.  A reader of my previous Wikileaks column pointed me to news that Assange has taken out an insurance policy of sorts (“Wikileaks posts insurance policy,” Antemedius, July 31).  The story disappeared, interestingly, but its Google cache is still preserved).   It’s an enormous file — 1.4GB, ten times larger than the other files combined — heavily encrypted and simply labeled “Insurance.”  Speculation as to its content centers on the hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables that Manning claims to have leaked.  It seems quite plausible that Assange has a dead-man switch for distributing the encryption key to everyone who’s downloaded the file in the event anything happens to him or Wikileaks.

So if this thing comes to a head, it’ll be the Shot Heard Round the World for the Network Revolution.  And when it’s over, the hierarchies won’t come out looking very good — understatement of the decade.  If the encrypted file contains what it’s purported to contain, and anything happens to Assange, this will blow up in the Obama administration’s faces like an atomic bomb.  Make that a hundred gigaton H-bomb with a cobalt casing.  And when it’s over, state and corporate hierarchies the world over will know that their “secret” internal communications are liable to enter the public domain at any time, without warning.  And there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

We’re watching Big Brother.