A report in the Guardian reveals that Britain’s Ministry of Defence has trained, and continues to train, the Saudi force that helped suppress demonstrations in Bahrain earlier this year (“UK training Saudi forces used to crush Arab spring,” May 28). As usual, those who rule are more concerned with maintaining the “stability” of their power than they are with the people on the receiving end of that power.

The Guardian notes that the Saudi Arabian National Guard was “established by the kingdom’s royal family because it feared its regular army would not support it in the event of a popular uprising.” Sounds like a true force for freedom, doesn’t it? Since 1964 the National Guard has been trained by the British government in “weapons, fieldcraft and general military skills training, as well as incident handling, bomb disposal, search, public order and sniper training.” Some of these skills were undoubtedly put to use by the hundreds of Saudi troops who helped put down a popular uprising in nearby Bahrain.

The training these men received is just one element in the latest episode of Western intervention in the Middle East, a show running at least since Napoleon’s day. It’s part of the tradition of making a deal with local strongmen who will work in your interests — often at odds with the interests of those the strongmen rule over. This tradition includes the US School of the Americas, where many graduates went on to leave a path of pillage and torture across Latin America. It includes US support for the Shah of Iran’s brutal SAVAK security service. It’s done with the same motivation as trading weapons for political support, an act countless governments have involved themselves in, recently seen in the “Made in the USA” teargas canisters used unsuccessfully to maintain autocracy in Egypt.

Politicians in powerful countries want local strongmen on their side to extend their influence globally. A dictator might be a “son of a bitch,” but as the saying goes, if he’s “our son of a bitch” then he’s okay.

And what of the training and weapons given or sold to such upstanding individuals? Thugs use them to seize control and political power. Loyal forces like the Saudi Arabian National Guard use them to keep the cannon fodder in line. And superior firepower tends to be helpful in keeping the population from rising against the government.

Even a cursory examination of human rights in Saudi Arabia paints an ugly picture: Widespread censorship, curtailedreligious freedom, women forbidden to even drive automobiles, homosexuality a crime, prisoners tortured, and official punishments include amputation, flogging, and public execution. Saudi forces in Bahrain reportedly discriminated against Bahrain’s majority Shi’a population — discriminated, that is, at the point of automatic rifles.

When the West provides military training and weapons to regimes that actively suppress the freedom of millions of Muslims and engage in sectarian repression, it highlights the absurdity of the claim that Westerners are primarily hated for our freedom. Sure, there are people who harbor resentment for greater degrees of liberty than they are willing to tolerate — and not all of these people are native-born Westerners. But is it any wonder that people are attracted to violence or seek answers in repressive religion when Western governments help suppress peaceful options for reform?

It also reveals the arrogance of Westerners who proclaim that people from a certain area are “not ready for democracy.” This is like giving a person a swift kick to the knees then announcing that he isn’t ready to run.

So long as enough people insist on ruling over others, and enough people let them, violence and repression will be subsidized. The practice of statehood is the expansion of power on behalf of those who rule and those whom rulers need the most. If there is power to be gained in helping governments murder peaceful demonstrators, then weapons and trainers will be sent. Authorities at home export brutality abroad.

Tom Friedman, in an admirable moment of frankness, once said “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. … 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.”

As imposing as this global corporate order may seem, we would do well to remember how vulnerable it really is.  It’s only as strong as its weakest link.

Its vulnerability is most recently demonstrated by Iceland’s apparent secession, during one of those brief fluid periods when governments actually succumb to popular pressure, from the global corporate order. A public referendum rejected a Hamiltonian bank bailout on the American TARP model.

Meanwhile, one of the world’s most powerful information freedom movements has prompted Iceland’s Althing (parliament) to establish Iceland as an information freedom haven. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), introduced over a year ago with widespread support in the Althing, passed unanimously last June. The idea, to quote Althing member Birgitta Jonsdottir, is to make Iceland a “haven for freedom of information, freedom of expression and of speech.” In particular, that means a safe place for people to put Internet servers and host online material that their governments might want to shut down.

Among the leading activists and organizers behind the initiative, in close cooperation with Birgitta, is my online acquaintance Smari McCarthy of the P2P Foundation. He specifically mentions the goal of providing webhosting services for whistleblowers and leakers of state secrets. And it will be a refuge for evading insane libel laws like Britain’s, next time some corporation like Trafigura gets a “super-injunction” against reporting an embarrassing question from an MP in the House of Commons.

There’s been some speculation as to whether the information freedom agenda will include repudiating the Washington Consensus’s proprietary content industry-driven, maximalist understanding of “intellectual property” rights. Might Iceland become a haven for successors to The Pirate Bay, as well as Wikileaks?

Taking on IP policy doesn’t seem to be on their immediate public agenda. Apparently the folks behind IMMI have decided confronting IP head-on immediately will undermine the rest of their effort.

But I’m familiar with McCarthy’s writing and the groups he frequents, and he takes a decidedly negative view of copyright on principle. The movement behind IMMI includes digital rights as well as information freedom activists.  And McCarthy knows a number of members of the Althing who favor at least a scaling back of the American maximalist version of digital copyright law.

The new constitution’s draft articles include some language on information freedom that offers great hope for addressing digital rights in the future. In English, draft Article 26 (current numbering may change) reads:  “Everyone can create, seek, receive, store and disseminate information.”

Remember, it’s not necessary to repudiate copyright in principle in order to make digital copyright unenforceable.  As Cory Doctorow points out, the desktop computer’s a machine for copying bits, and any business model that depends on stopping people from copying bits is doomed to failure. Enforcing digital copyright is simply impossible within traditional principles of copyright law. It requires a totalitarian lockdown of the communications media, enforced by a global superpower and its hangers-on, unprecedented since the fall of the old Soviet Empire.

Simply restoring traditional fair use and first sale doctrines, treating ISPs as safe harbors, and putting the burden of proof on plaintiffs, would kill digital copyright deader than Judas Iscariot. That — essentially an application of print copyright law ca. 1980 to digital content — was more or less the import of Spain’s old copyright law, for which the U.S. and other countries of the DRM Curtain threatened to turn her into a pariah state.

Even the new Icelandic legal provisions protecting intermediares like ISPs from liability will go a long way toward undermining enforcement. And it’s doubtful whether the courts will be any more compliant with attempts to shut down ISPs in the face of legal threats without due process in cases of alleged “piracy,” than in cases of libel and revealing state secrets. Simply eliminating the content industries’ ability to enlist ISPs as accomplices will be a huge blow.

It’s a safe bet that, even without further legislation, Iceland will be a pretty unfriendly venue for the Copyright Nazis.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, Islandia Podría Convertirse en un Oasis Libre de la Propiedad Intelectual.

Dear C4SS Supporters,

I’ve got a problem. It’s a great problem to have, but it’s still a problem, and it goes something like this:

I try to set aside time every day to Google for C4SS op-ed “pickups,” on a “look back 24 hours” basis. When I can’t avoid missing a day, I search back a full week.

But even at the “daily basis” level, we’re starting to enjoy enough blogosphere links, etc., that I’m afraid I’m missing “mainstream media” pickups among the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of results that my searches return.

It got even “worse” — read “better” — this week when our own Kevin Carson got name-checked in Forbes, and when alternative currency blogs (e.g.) noticed his recent thoughts on Bitcoin.

Like I said, it’s a good problem to have. But I’m asking your help in solving it. If you notice a C4SS op-ed in a publication that you consider even nominally “mainstream” — a daily newspaper, newsstand magazine, what have you — please drop me a line. If you’re unsure whether or not I might have already noticed it, just visit our “press room” and see if the link is mentioned there if you like. Thanks in advance.

So far this week I’ve found only six pickups:

• The South China Morning Post, one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious dailies, ran David D’Amato’s “The Politics of Hunger” in its print edition (and online for subscribers only) on May 21 under the title “States are starving the market of true competition.”
• The Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age ran three C4SS pieces this week: Kevin Carson’s “Those Libyan ‘Freedom Fighters’: The Fix is On” and David D’Amato’s “Government is Civil War” on May 23, and Carson’s “Bitcoin: More important than you realise” on May 25.
• David D’Amato’s “Strauss-Kahn: As Sleazy as the IMF in General” appeared in The Canadian on May 24 under the title “The IMF’s Strauss-Kahn reflects the capitalist mentality.”
• “Strauss-Kahn: As Sleazy as the IMF in General” also ran in Iowa’s River Cities’ Reader on May 26.

Not as many pickups as I’d have liked, but a nice mix — an important first-time picker-upper and a long-time partner in Asia, and two old North American friends we hadn’t seen in awhile.

As for what’s out there waiting to be picked up, I submitted 10,271 Center op-eds to 2,818 publications this week, and have actually had more reply queries than usual already (including one from an editor in Alaska who objected to a particular phrase, but otherwise found the piece interesting enough to consider; we talked it over).

Have a great weekend!

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

Kevin Carson’s twelfth research study for C4SS has been released. . . Legibility & Control: Themes in the Work of James C. Scott (Winter and Spring 2011, PDF).

EXCERPT: “. . . Scott’s major concepts . . . all reflect a common underlying theme: the conflicts of interest and social contradictions created by authority . . . In every case, power distorts the flow of information and the incentive to produce as efficiently as possible.”

DOWNLOAD: Legibility & Control: Themes in the Work of James C. Scott

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Legibilidade e Controle: Temas na Obra de James C. Scott.

The Political Compass, a popular online quiz, was supposedly designed to remedy the simple-mindedness of the left-right spectrum by replacing it with two axes:  political and social libertarianism vs. authoritarianism, and economic Left vs. Right.  Basically, everything nice you say about big business puts you further to the economic Right — which the quiz equates to a preference for free markets — and everything negative you say about corporate power puts you further to the Left (i.e. collectivism).

The quiz explicitly identifies the economic Right with libertarianism and neoliberalism.  The horizontal Left-Right axis, the explanatory page says, is “economic.”  “Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet.”  The fact that the designers of the quiz refer to “Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market,” and that that they equate support for free markets as a right-wing position, says it all.

Remember the old “Pinochet was politically authoritarian but economically libertarian” canard?  Right.  Pinochet sent soldiers into factories and asked managers to point out union troublemakers for arrest.  The clear intent was to prevent the owners of a “factor of production” — labor power — from exercising full bargaining rights on the market.  Imagine if he’d carried out a similar program of terror against the owners of capital to force them to offer better terms to labor — do you think the designers of this quiz would call that “economically libertarian”? Pinochet took land from the people cultivating it and restored it to a landed oligarchy based on quasi-feudal titles.  He “privatized” taxpayer-funded state property to crony capitalists on sweetheart terms.  Somebody obviously never heard of the distinction between “pro-market” and “pro-business.”

Some of the questions have a “have you stopped beating your wife?” quality to them.  For example:  “Because corporations cannot be trusted to voluntarily protect the environment, they require regulation.”  Or “A genuine free market requires restrictions on the ability of predator multinationals to create monopolies.”

I believe the main reason corporations rape and pillage the environment is that the government is actively intervening to protect them from the consequences of pollution — subsidizing waste, preempting tort liability, and the like.  The main function of government is to subsidize the operating costs of monopoly and enforce the entry barriers that protect monopolies against competition.

But the implicit framing of the questions suggests the government and big business are naturally enemies, with state intervention as the only way to prevent corporate malfeasance.  So how’s a left-wing free marketeer like me, who believes big government props up big business, supposed to answer questions like those?  Given the designers’ preconceptions, there’s no way to answer truthfully without giving a false impression.

And how about this little gem:  “What’s good for the most successful corporations is always, ultimately, good for all of us.”  Want to guess whether an “Agree” or “Disagree” puts you closer to the “free market” end of the spectrum?

The test placed me squarely in the middle of the Economic Left/Right axis.  I suspect my answers cancelled each other out because, while I regard all my positions as perfectly consistent with genuine free market libertarianism (as opposed to being a shill  for big business and the plutocracy), the compass works from the unstated assumption that any critique of corporate power is somehow “anti-business” or “anti-market.”

This wretched quiz  takes for granted all the worst assumptions of our dumbed-down political culture.  In so doing, like Newspeak, it reinforces all the ways in which our corporatized political culture obscures critical thought.

“Both sides” in American politics share the unstated assumption that corporate economic domination is the natural outcome of a “free market,” unless the state intervenes to obstruct the process.  They just disagree on whether that’s good or bad.  But they share a common interest in promoting this misconception.  Mainstream “conservatives” have an interest in pretending the size and power of big business, and the wealth of the plutocracy, result from success in the competitive market — and not corporate welfare.  Mainstream “liberals” have an interest in pretending the regulatory state — run by people like themselves — is all that stands between us and corporate tyranny, when in fact it’s propping the tyranny up.

If I may allude to Plato, this quiz minutely measures our beliefs about flickering shadows on the wall of a cave.  If reality is what you’re interested in, then tear up this wretched quiz, free yourself from your mental chains, and turn around and face the light of day.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, A Bússola Política: Não Perca Seu Tempo.

I must be getting old. I remember “full service” gas stations. Actually, I worked at one in high school. When I car passed over the rubber hose across the driveway and the bell rang, I’d come running out to “filler’up, regular or unleaded,” wash the windshield and check the oil. Those days are gone — now it’s all “self service,” pump the gas yourself after shoveling money through the slot in the bulletproof window.

Progressives and other naifs once dreamed of the “full service” state: Cradle-to-grave health benefits, guaranteed job security and a complimentary mint on your pillow from Uncle Sugar. What we got instead, and what we’re always going to get, is the “self service” state: You help yourself if you can, while the state helps itself to anything and everything it wants.

The purpose of the state is to serve the state. To protect the state. To perpetuate the state. To grow the state’s power.

I’m not arguing the metaphysics of identity or the epistemology of individualism versus collectivism here. It’s simply an observable fact that the state, regardless of the putative reasons underlying its formation, acts like an organism in and of itself, with its own interests and its own survival imperative.

That’s why Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid get together behind closed doors, unvexed by trivialities like public debate, to ram an extension of the USA PATRIOT Act through the US Senate. It’s certainly not something they did for their constituents. It benefits only the state.

It’s why Congress is giving President Barack Obama a pass on his illegal war in Libya, entered into without congressional declaration. That war has now continued past even the unconstitutional “War Powers Resolution” deadline without the requisite congressional approval — but hey, he sent a polite note informing Congress he doesn’t give a damn about the law and appreciates their support in violating it. And they’ll blink — beacuse once the state has acted, its actions must always be supported and never, ever questioned.

It’s why it never seems to have crossed Obama’s mind that the “legitimate” job of White House staff might not involve actively propagandizing America on the Inherent Goodness of Dear Leader. Whatever justification we’re offered for creating the position of “Director of Progressive Media & Online Response,” the position’s purpose is to … gently assist … the serfs in learning to love their master.

“To secure these rights …?” If you’re still buying that one, let’s talk real estate. I’ve got some for you. Oceanfront. In Arizona. Priced to sell.

“To serve and protect?” Yeah, right. Ask Jose Guerena about that one. Wait, you can’t. He’s dead. After diligent service to the state himself, he fell inadvertently ran afoul of one of his own employer’s death squads earlier this month.

The state serves only itself — and demands that you serve it too. Like any parasite, it will happily kill its host to further engorge itself. Your only possible escape from that fate is to pry its teeth out of your skin, throw it to the ground, and stomp on it, hard.

C4SS Media Coordinator Tom Knapp joins host Todd Andrew Barnett and a panel of distinguished libertarian activists to discuss the week’s news. 8pm Eastern time, live stream via BlogTalkRadio.

For years, global digital copyright treaties and the IP provisions of assorted “free trade” agreements have been drafted in secret by proprietary content industries. Even the digital copyright laws of ostensibly independent countries are drafted by lobbyists from those same industries, then rubber-stamped by the national parliaments with most members never even having a chance to actually read them.

For example, a large batch of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks in April includes several on a massive effort by the global entertainment industry to model Canada’s copyright laws on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Wikileaks also released hundreds of cables showing that the U.S. content industries essentially wrote New Zealand’s “three-strikes” legislation — and the U.S. government even offered to fund New Zealand’s copyright enforcement police at American taxpayer expense.  Spain’s new copyright law was also written by global entertainment industry lobbyists.

The old Spanish law, incidentally, was comparatively sane, with private file-sharing for personal use covered by the “fair use” doctrine and third parties like ISPs and torrent sites treated as safe harbors. As a result Spain, like Canada, made it onto the U.S. copyright cops’ “Special 301” list of the “worst of the worst” offenders.

In cables released by Wikileaks on the negotiation of ACTA, support for the treaty by such countries as Russia and China was treated as a gauge of “free market” friendliness of those countries, to be used as a stick in negotiations over other trade provisions desired by those countries.

Against this background of secrecy and corruption, it’s interesting that the major developed countries previously involved in drafting digital copyright treaties are now squealing like stuck pigs about a proposal by developing nations to hold their own private inter-regional conferences on IP laws within the World Intellectual Property Organization framework. In response to complaints from the developed countries, the developing countries proposed making only the first conference private and allowing the developed countries to attend a second one with non-voting “observer status.”  No dice, said the rich fat white boys. “No meeting should be restricted to only some members” (seriously!).

One law for the lion and one for the lamb is tyranny.

One recurring theme in most discussion of corporate globalization is the importance of the state in the global economy. It’s commonly argued that the transnational corporation has eclipsed the nation-state as the dominant actor, and that hollowed-out states are no longer capable of restraining corporate tyranny. But the truth is just the opposite: Corporations can’t afford to enforce, at their  own expense, the monopolies and artificial property rights on which they collect rents and tribute. Absent a state to enforce copyrights and patents, and to externalize those enforcement costs on taxpayers, proprietary content companies and manufacturers would bleed themselves dry.  And without the U.S. Navy to keep the sea lanes open at general taxpayer expense, and without the World Bank and U.S. foreign aid budget to subsidize the road and utility infrastructure Western-owned factories need to be profitable in the Third World, offshoring would be a lot less popular.

In the days of gunboat diplomacy, colonial regimes depended on the puppet governments of their protectorates to enforce the extraterritorial rights of their nationals and corporations against the local population. Corporations are just as dependent today on governments to suppress competition at gunpoint and externalize their operating costs.

Likewise, the corporate world order depends for the enforcement of its centrally important “intellectual property” rights on a “DRM  Curtain,” enforced by the satellite states of the U.S. and the Washington Consensus.  If states defect from this global corporate order, or if their populations simply render the law unenforceable, global corporations will shrivel like garden slugs covered with salt.

Global corporate power, and the authoritarian information order on which it depends, cannot survive in a freed market.

Since the embattled former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, occupies the headlines with some consistency as of late, it seems as good a time as any to note the perfectly legal crimes the IMF perpetrates daily. Without at all trivializing the unspeakable crimes Strauss-Kahn stands accused of, market anarchists regard the official acts of the IMF itself with similar disgust.

Established by the world’s most powerful states as an agency of empire, the IMF is an inflationary machine designed to make cash all too accessible for the West’s corporate titans. The White Mountains of New Hampshire are the radix of the IMF, having hosted the Bretton Woods conference of nations in the wake of World War II. That summit, conceived to reconfigure the global financial system for the demands of the post-War framework, positioned the United States as a global hegemonic authority.

If America’s corporate neocolonialism was to function, then the “developed” world would need an effective way to funnel money to its new outposts, the countries that would host its subsidiaries and sweatshops. The loans, of course, were — and have ever since been — channeled to infrastructure projects that dilute currencies and cheat the taxpaying common man to benefit a handful of oligarchs.

Like the Federal Reserve System on the domestic level, the International Monetary Fund and its companion, the World Bank, are the ruling class’s counterfeiting mechanisms. As Murray Rothbard trenchantly observed of such counterfeit bank notes, they are not neutrally and uniformly conferred on society at large. Rather, Rothbard contended, “those who get the money early in this ripple process benefit at the expense of those who get it late or not at all.”

Tin pot dictatorships the world over have used the Bretton Woods institutions as an ATM to line the pockets of elites and lay the groundwork for the Western state capitalism. In return, all the American imperialists and their collaborators in Europe have asked is for a bit of prime real estate on which to site their military compounds, and submissive compliance whenever a new “free trade” agreement comes around.

The Third World’s isolated elites have happily and predictably obliged them. The standard apologetics for the specious, corporate variant of “free trade” argue that the professed goals of the IMF — something like aiding the development of global markets—are not in themselves the problem.

These arguments suggest that the developing world’s governments just need a more central role in decision-making, that Western multinational corporations are today too dominant in the process through which IMF and World Bank funds are dispersed. What these well-meaning critics fail to comprehend, however, is that the relationship between corporate and state power is not inverse, but symbiotic — they grow in tandem.

Vehicles of corporate welfare such as the IMF and the World Bank, among many, many others, are hallmarks of state domination of the economy. Today’s business giants depend completely on active fraud by governments against their own citizens. Their conceptions of “development” give short shrift to the living conditions of people in the “developing” countries.

The corrupt governments of the weak countries are no different from those of the Western powers, caring little for ideas of national self-direction as long as they’re cozy in the lap of luxury. Genuine free markets — real free trade between individual producers — function opposite the state capitalist system represented by the Bretton Woods system and its corporate welfarism.

True deregulation and freedom empowers those in the economy who actually carry the weight. For these people, bank credit and favors are not so easy to come by. When you consider Strauss-Kahn’s flashy, sleazy lifestyle, consider also the unsavory policies of these hallowed institutions that have become symbols of global faux “free enterprise.”

Consider that they don’t at all represent free markets, but instead a corrupt game of upward redistribution. And, upon consideration, perhaps you will conclude that the entirety of the IMF belongs behind bars.

Dear C4SS supporters,

This week I’ve submitted 10,274 op-eds to 2,719 publications, and tracked nine “pickups” of those op-eds:

• The Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age accounts for four of the nine pickups, including two from last week that apparently hadn’t made the Google crawl when I did last Friday’s update: Kevin Carson’s “Childhood’s End for Humanity?” on May 7; David D’Amato’s “The Taliban Won’t Negotiate with Terrorists” on May 8; “Intellectual Property is Murder,” by Kevin Carson on May 14; and “The Politics of Hunger,” by David D’Amato, today.
• In its May 15 edition, Quebecois Libre published Carson’s “Childhood’s End for Humanity?” and D’Amato’s “Japan’s Broken Windows.”
• The Deming, New Mexico Headlight published David D’Amato’s two-part series “No States, No Borders” — part 1 on May 17 and part 2 on May 18.
• The St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph ran David D’Amato’s “The Politics of Hunger” in its May 19 edition [PDF].

Reciprocal blogospheric link love: Unqualified Offerings, Micro Effect and Sosyalizm

That last one represents a particularly welcome phenomenon: Kevin Carson’s article on the Libya situation was picked up by Antiwar.com; from there it was grabbed by two Turkish newspapers, and now it seems to be picking up both reprints and citations in the region’s blogosphere. I hate to grab an abused and over-used word, but it seems to have gone at least mildly “viral.”

If you follow these updates, you can’t help but notice a “usual suspects” feel to the “pickup” reports. Every week we get our material out there. Every week some of the same newspapers run with it, and occasionally one or two new names pop up.

Obviously we’d like to see C4SS material in more newspapers — please talk to your local publications about picking up our op-eds! — but we’re also very encouraged by the newspapers that stick with us on a regular or semi-regular basis.

Take, for example, the New Age. It is not the largest newspaper in Bangladesh. It’s not even the largest English-language newspaper in Bangladesh. But it runs our material regularly to its daily readership of 15,000+. We believe that has an impact. We hope our work is helping to create, educate and motivate anarchists in the country which gave birth to micro-lending and whose populace seems possessed of nascent revolutionary consciousness. And we’re grateful to the New Age for letting our voice be heard.

The St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph, a weekly print publication, is owned and published by long-time libertarian activist Mike Bozarth. Mike’s not an anarchist himself, but he appreciates C4SS’s perspective and publishes our material alongside the writings of more “respectable” minarchist libertarians. While no reports of black flag parades down the streets of St. Joe have reached our ears yet, we deeply appreciate the opportunity that Mike is giving us to incite same.

Most weeks, these and other publications bring the market anarchist perspective to their readers. Most weeks, a new publication or two joins in, be it on a one-time basis or more regularly.

More than 250 C4SS op-eds have now appeared in publications on every continent of Earth except for Antarctica.

At the current rate of “pick-ups,” I expect we’ll hit 500 before the end of 2011 … and I’m working as hard as I can to increase that rate.

Thank you for your continuing support in making that happen, and have a great weekend!

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

Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age takes place in a future where encrypted currencies and e-commerce have moved most economic transactions into “darknets” beyond government’s capability of monitoring and regulation, causing tax bases around the world to implode and bringing on the collapse of most nation-states.

Encrypted currencies and darknet economies have been promoted by such thinkers as David de Ugarte and John Robb as a real-world model for resilient communities in the impending age of hollow states. So you can imagine my reaction to recent news of Bitcoin, “a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

Jason Calacanis and his colleagues at LAUNCH describe Bitcoin as “The Most Dangerous Project We’ve Ever Seen” (May 15, 2011).  Not only is it “the most dangerous open-source project ever created,” but “possibly the most dangerous technological project since the Internet itself.”  It “could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband.”

The beauty of Bitcoin is that there’s no central server network to shut down. Bitcoin is traded from one desktop or mobile device to another via public key encryption. Short of catching and prosecuting end-users with harsh punishments — and we all know how well that’s worked out for proprietary content companies versus file sharers — there’s no way to stop it.

There are currently 6 million Bitcoins in circulation, with a total value of $40 million. Bitcoins are generated by a complicated algorithm, with the total to top out at 21 million. After that, increases in exchange of goods and services will be offset by appreciation of Bitcoins in value and deflation of Bitcoin-denominated prices.

This fixed upper limit and requirement for price deflation thereafter is one ground on which Bitcoin has been criticized. Another is that, since it’s not denominated in a familiar unit of measure like dollars, it’s confusing as an instrument of exchange for the average person.

As an alternative currency geek, I’d add the criticism that you can only engage in Bitcoin-denominated exchange if you’ve already obtained Bitcoins from previous transactions. This is definitely a downside, compared with the kinds of “mutual credit clearing networks” proposed by Tom Greco.  Greco’s mutual credit isn’t a store of value from past transactions — just a measure of value for denominating exchanges of present or future goods and services.  The backing comes entirely from the goods and services themselves.  Like the many local barter networks that flourished during the Depression, mutual credit is a system for facilitating exchange even when there’s “no money.”

Despite my reservations, I consider Bitcoin grounds for enormous excitement.  Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge calls it “the Napster of Banking” (Falkvinge.net, May 11, 2011).

As Falkvinge argued, it’s usually not the most feature-rich version of a new technology that achieves popular acceptance.  Rather, it’s the most user-friendly.  “… [I]t takes about ten years from conception of a technology, or an application of technology, until somebody hits the magic recipe in how to make that technology easy enough to use that it catches on.”

Technologies for sharing digitized music had been around for ten years when Fanning came up with Napster.  Geeks had been sharing videos for ten years when YouTube came along.  Falkvinge thinks Bitcoin will do the same for encrypted e-currency.  It’ll do to banking what BitTorrent’s doing to the music industry.

Here’s how Falkvinge describes the ramifications:

“The governments of the world are on the brink of losing the ability to look into the economy of their citizens. They stand to lose the ability to seize assets, they stand to lose the ability to collect debts. … All the world’s weapons in all the world’s police hands are useless against the public’s ability to keep their cryptographic economy to themselves. … The decentralized, uncontrollable economy where one lifetime employment is no longer central to every human being is something I’ve called the swarm economy, and I predict it will redefine society to an immensely larger extent than the ability to get rap music for free.”

This is vitally important to a central theme in my work: The emergence of non-state spaces within which the low-overhead informal and household economy can function, outside the state’s ability to impose artificial scarcities  and entry barriers and collect tribute for the usurers, landlords and proprietary content owners.

Bitcoin is monumentally important.  Encrypted currency has been at the Altair stage of development. If Bitcoin isn’t actually the Apple II — and it may not be — we’re still just around the corner from that level of popular adoption.

A couple weeks ago in The Guardian, Ellie Mae O’Hagan very thoughtfully bewailed the mainstream media’s treatment of anarchists. “The problem with the contemporary media narrative on protest,” she said, “is that, in its refusal to understand the nuances of anarchism, it is using the term as a euphemism for ‘dangerous’, ‘violent’ or ‘bad’.”

O’Hagan couldn’t be more right, and while she has no trouble recognizing that anarchism is a “broad-based political philosophy,” she points out that the media at large is intent on using it as a proxy for vandalism and destruction. The smearing of anarchism, she argues, is approaching the level of McCarthyism, with spurious, “Orwellian charges” becoming more and more frequent in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

The anti-anarchist, police state phenomena highlighted by O’Hagan cry out for anarchists to instruct society in our creed, not to explain it away in a way that compromises its radical message, but to convey what it really is. And that, as O’Hagan correctly notes, is a tradition of thought that “accommodates people of significantly contrasting viewpoints.” Arbitrary violence and destruction of property are about as much (or rather as little) a part of anarchism as they are of any other political persuasion.

Governments enjoy playing up “propaganda of the deed” as necessarily a feature of anarchism; it allows them to turn around and use the phrase “known anarchist” in the headlines when they throw people in a cage on trumped up charges. Random, warrantless police raids are far more palatable to a public that has been suckled on the lie that anarchists are thoughtless agents of chaos.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first to explicitly style himself an anarchist, did not choose the word out of a desire to promote chaos or disorder. Indeed, Proudhon identified himself as “a firm friend of order” and saw anarchy as expressing the “highest limit of liberty and order to which humanity can attain.” Through the history of anarchist thought, its proponents have taken great care to emphasize the differences between the kind of order offered by the state and that by free and voluntary society.

The former, they argued, was no order at all, but a war executed by a small elite against its own subjects, an abrogation of the natural, social order that would obtain in the state’s absence. Quite contrary to championing disorder or some kind of lawless mayhem, Proudhon imagined the coercive apparatuses of the state “dissolved” within a true market, with “political functions … reduced to industrial functions.”

In a very real way, it is the state that substitutes the chaotic and the violent for what is otherwise innate in the value-for-value trades between sovereign people. Government intrusions against, for example, a farm in the French village of Tarnac and a peaceful community action group in London demonstrate all too clearly that simply concerns about public safety is not the whole story.

In fact, it has been increasingly obvious that public safety is a mere subterfuge used to mask the state’s blatant attempts to discredit anything that might expose it for the band of criminals that it is. Since anarchism opposes hierarchy, authority and an economic system grounded in coercive privilege, it is eminently understandable that the state would want to bring its advocates into disrepute.

Against the rubric of senseless violence, however, anarchist couldn’t hope to approach the carnage rendered by the state. So when anarchists or other political dissidents are taken in for things like “suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance,” a healthy dose of skepticism is in order.

If anarchists succeeded in replacing the state with voluntary, consensual institutions, it wouldn’t mean a perfect, crimeless utopia. What would surface, though, would be a society that could avail itself of all the latent potential now stamped out by the rigid, decaying force of statism; it would be a society without sanctioned coercion, without the ancient idea, absurd on its face, that society’s worst, most powerful criminals are to be revered and respected.

That the state is a moral abomination is easy enough to show and to understand. What is more difficult is communicating that message in a world rigged so that people can’t understand, so that disinformation becomes truth. That’s the state’s game, but, as they say, truth will out.

On his Fox News show the past couple of months, John Stossel has been taking what I consider a rather odd position:  people who walk away from underwater mortgages are “freeloaders.”  Back in March, he interviewed John Maddux, CEO of YouWalkAway.com, which helps people default on their mortgages when the amount they owe exceeds the current market value.  He excoriated Maddux in the harshest terms, on the grounds that he was encouraging people to violate their moral obligation to honor their contracts.  Maddux, apparently unprepared and blindsided, responded rather weakly.

Yesterday, May 16, Stossel had Maddux on for a rematch, in response to complaints that he’d treated him unfairly.  Stossel opened with his old standby — honoring our contractual obligations.  This time Maddux was ready, pointing out what those “contractual obligations” actually are.  As he explained to Stossel, the seizure of collateral in the event of default is part of the written contract.  But, said Stossel, the mortgage contract provides that the home-buyer will pay so much a month, on a certain date, etc., etc.  Yes, said Maddux — and it also specifies that if the buyer defaults, the home will go back to the bank.  That’s part of the contract, too.

Stossel, grudgingly conceding that maybe default wasn’t technically a violation of the contract after all, still wasn’t satisfied.  It’s still morally shady.  Defaulting makes mortgages cost a little more for other people!  And it lowers property values in the neighborhood!

So other people’s right to high property values trumps my economic freedom?  And I’m obligated to go beyond the contractual terms I agreed to in order to guarantee other people access to cheap mortgages?  Where have we heard that sort of thing before?  From people I wouldn’t normally expect Mr. Stossel to agree with.  If anyone claimed a business owner was morally obligated to keep sinking money in a losing investment in order to keep people employed, for example, I expect Stossel would laugh them off his set.  Someone who defaults an underwater mortgage, likewise, is simply putting a tourniquet on a money hemorrhage in full accordance with the terms of the mortgage contract — in exactly the same manner as anyone would walk away from any other losing investment.

I’m trying to imagine a case of a consumer being hurt by a large company adhering to the letter of its contractual rights, or of a corporation’s assertion of its full legal rights under the terms of a contract resulting in a greater cost or property value to consumers, in which Stossel’s sympathies would lie with the consumers.  And frankly, I’m coming up with bubkes.

I’ve seen a similar reaction by some “libertarians” to the alleged “freeloading” of people who declare Chapter Seven bankruptcy on their credit card debts after a severe illness, divorce, or prolonged period of unemployment.  Wrong.  It’s not freeloading.  On my authority as a libertarian, with an official secret decoder ring and everything, I give all of you permission to declare bankruptcy — without guilt — if some unforeseen catastrophe renders you unable to pay your bills.

You know that 18% or 20%, maybe even more, you’re paying in credit card interest?  That’s a risk premium to insure the lender against the possibility of default, because it’s an unsecured loan.  So you’ve been paying sky-high interest rates all this time precisely in order to compensate for the possibility you might walk away from the debt.  If the state’s going to coerce you into repaying the debt under any and all circumstances, no matter what, shouldn’t the lender repay all that interest you’ve been shelling out against the possibility of default?

As market anarchist Lysander Spooner argued over a century ago, promises are unenforceable.  When someone defaults on a debt because of unforeseen circumstances, their obligation extends to the means at their disposal there and then — and no more.  It’s up to the lender to assess the borrower’s ability to repay before issuing the loan.  Government attempts to change the terms after the fact, through so-called “bankruptcy reform,” are nothing but corporate welfare for the credit card industry.

I suspect Mr. Stossel would respond with derision, in most cases, to suggestions that individuals should refrain from exercising their economic rights in the general interest of “society.”  But when banks enter the equation, apparently, all bets are off.

On Tuesday, May 17, 2011, Reuters reported that Tea Party groups “in states like Wisconsin, Indiana, New Hampshire and Ohio have pushed ‘right to work’ bills to take on the unions.” Such laws are making news this year on the heels of the controversy sparked months ago in Wisconsin.

When the Badger State’s Governor, Scott Walker, proposed elimination of collective bargaining for state workers, thousands protested in Madison. Besides precipitating legal battles and public protests, Walker’s tendentious law has stimulated interest in labor issues generally, provoking all of the standard right-wing panegyrics on Big Business.

Defenders of supposed “free enterprise” have predictably damned unions and hailed “right to work” statutes as keepers of the American way. The federal government’s labor law regime under the Taft-Hartley Act left significant power to states to make their own rules, and nearly half have exercised that discretion and passed “right to work” laws. Since these laws prohibit employers and unions from contracting to make union membership a condition of employment, the knee-jerk response among many Tea Partiers a knee-jerk response is in their favor.

Workers shouldn’t be forced, the argument goes, to join a union, and to thereby be compelled to pay dues for things they may not support. But while individual rights are apparently the grounds for opposing the “closed shop,” they apparently don’t extend to those voluntary agreements that employers and unions might make to establish such compulsory membership.

The truth is, the entire context within which bargaining between unions and employers takes place is defined by coercive constraints. Within that context, far removed from hypothetical notions of a genuine free market, it becomes difficult to paint with a broad brush on issues like “right to work” rules. No one ought to be forced to join a union (or any other organization), but neither should labor be prevented from dickering for terms that protect its bargaining power.

Market anarchists argue that exploitation resulting from unequal exchange is made possible by the state’s coercive power. Rather than proposing to remedy the lopsided, corrupt political economies of the state with still more aggression, however, market anarchists would remove force and authority from the market altogether.

When American anarchist Josiah Warren exhorted for what he called “Equitable Commerce,” or the exchange of “equal values,” he did not mean to compel such a system by force or overarching regulation. Warren instead believed, as do today’s market anarchists, that free and open competition itself would “exert [a] power upon all professions that are paid above equivalents.”

The state’s favorites derive their unjustified profits or rents from deliberate restriction of competition, not from any free market worthy of the name. Today, the perfect compatibility between the ideas that labor ought to have its due and that the market ought to be left alone has largely been lost to history. Free marketers like Warren, who believed that genuine competition was the best hope of the working man for justice, are looked upon — if at all — as historical anomalies.

But some radical libertarians on the left still hold to the judgment that, if actually allowed to compete freely with capital, labor would be justly compensated. Remove the state’s thumb from the scale, we maintain, and each individual will be rewarded to the extent of her productive work, of her doing something of value. Contrast such a free market to the rigged one the state has given u, one where rules purportedly for the consumer’s “safety” and “protection” have obstructed every route unattended by a corporate gatekeeper with his hand out for a toll.

In a commercial environment wherein markets are fenced off for giant corporations by the cartelizing effects of regulations, the issues around “right to work” laws are far from clear. The demonization of unions by the right ultimately makes about as much sense as the statist left’s insistence that free markets are responsible for the evils of corporate capitalism.

The aggression that permeates every cell of the existing system obscures both economic truths and potential alliances. Voluntary exchange and association, consistently applied, are the solution, but American capitalism is not so much as a distant cousin of that solution.

“Detentions of undocumented immigrants,” reports Fox News Latino, “have become big business for private companies operating prisons in states like Arizona … ” The story goes on to observe that “[c]ontractors come to Arizona attracted by the increase in militarization and the criminalization of immigrants.”

Whatever one thinks about the substance of the immigration debate, it’s not hard to see why massive prison companies like Geo Group and Corrections Corp. of America (who contract with the federal government) support making criminals of desperate people crossing an arbitrary line on a map. If you’re anti-immigration for some other, less mercenary and arguably more philosophical reason, you might wonder whether some corporate exec is having a chuckle at your expense.

Part of the reason why market anarchists reject the state altogether is the understanding that the political process is not “broken” in the sense that word is used by “reasonable,” “moderate” commentators. Rather, the empty shifts that do take place within politics are only those permissible to the ruling class — the small group ultimately served by the aggregate of state actions.

As an incident of the fundamental right of self-ownership, each individual has a right to move freely wherever she’d like, provided that, on her way, she gives due regard to the rights of all others. Taking away that right, however, is a money machine for the powerful. In a way, then, the immigration issue is a good microcosm for the arithmetic that provides the basis for every policy that the political class undertakes to effect.

The state is a parasitic, predatory, antisocial device. It is a utensil of the ruling class not inherent in society or organization, but superimposed on human relationships from without. Even given the dialogues within market anarchist thought — differences as to the meaning of aggression and to what self-ownership implicates in the world of scarcity and tangible things — the opposition to authority and hierarchy is a constant.

Once one accepts the individual, her agency and sovereignty, the state is precluded as a matter of course, ruled out as a “solution” to societal problems. Since the state is, in Benjamin Tucker’s familiar formulation, “the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will,” it cannot be reconciled with the most basics notions of human autonomy.

Neither can it be squared with the requirements of social justice. Many of the forms of privilege that are so pervasive in — and so defining of — state capitalism are wrongly considered features of a free market, their coercive character either underestimated or ignored completely.

Kevin Carson’s examinations of taxpayer subsidies to transportation — propping up American capitalism’s “warehouse-on-wheels” system — are a revealing example of the kind of intervention that goes so unremarked upon in mainstream “debate.” Similarly, the cable news version of the immigration question isn’t as simple as they’d have us believe.

Market anarchists have demonstrated time and again that, without the economic suffocation of force and privilege, there would be more than enough “seats at the table,” that constraints are instituted by elites to squeeze more out of and give less to those of us who don’t have Washington lobbyists.

The idea that immigrants are “stealing jobs” or that they’re putting a strain on government budgets are intended to mislead. The current substance of the debate works just great for Geo Group and CCA; a market freed from the violent, plutocratic interventions of the state, though, would include neither of them.

Favoritism and venality are not things that can be fixed through “good government” reforms or anti-corruption slogans, but are the essential and indelible characteristics of the state. Market anarchists seek to replace its borders and restraints with free movement, free exchange, and free collaboration.

Limitations on the movement of people through immigration laws are like those on the movement of goods, profiting the few at the expense of the many. When society is purged of the state and its sponging class, so too will it be purged of the infirmities they thrust onto it.

C4SS Advisory Panel member Gary Chartier joins host Corey Moore on Voice of Radical Dissent. Live-streamed at 6pm Eastern on Sunday, May 15th, 2011.

Dear C4SS Supporters,

Friday the 13th … it doesn’t feel unlucky.

I’ve got “only” eight media “pickups” to report this week (my goal at the moment is to get the average up to 10 per week), but in addition to some long-time partners, those pickups represent publication in at least two countries where our material hasn’t appeared before to my knowledge, as well as our first publication in “the conservative voice of Arizona.”

• Kevin Carson’s “The Defeat of the United States by al Qaeda” appeared on May 7 in the Portland, Oregon Skanner, and on May 9 in Islam Daily (a Muslim religious publication of indeterminate location) and Effedieffe (an Italian Catholic newspaper) as “Come al-Qaeda ha sconfitto gli USA.”
• “Those Libyan ‘Freedom Fighters’: The Fix is On,” also by Carson, ran on May 10 at Antiwar.com, and on May 12, as “Libyali ‘ozgurluk savascılari,'” in two Turkish publications, Dunya Bulteni and Kizil Bayrak.
• On May 11, Arizona’s Sonoran News published Carson’s “Hillary Clinton Lets the Cat Out of the Bag” on the web and, I’m given to understand, to its 40,000+ “dead tree” readership.
• On May 14th (yes, I know it’s just the 13th here … “and yet it moves”), The Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation ran David D’Amato’s “Japan’s Broken Windows.”

This week, I submitted a total of 11,273 Center op-eds to 2,819 publications, on every continent except Antarctica.

Random reciprocal link love to the blogosphere: UrukNet, Rad Geek People’s Daily, and The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom.

Have a great weekend!

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

Spotlighting China as an example, BBC News reports that “[t]he Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index is at its highest level since being created in 1990. As food prices rise,” the story adds, “so does poverty.” In just the first few months of this year, some Asian markets have witnessed as much as a 10 percent increase in local food prices, a shift that could potentially plunge almost 65 million people into poverty, according to some estimates.

Though observers and commentators are quick to importune governments to act, making all the usual allegations of “market failure,” the worldwide food problem is a consequence of state intervention.

As law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan observed (regarding intellectual property laws), “Content industries have an interest in creating artificial scarcity by whatever legal and technological means they have at their disposal.” And the same is true of commodity providers whose interest it is to ensure that the nutrition we need to survive comes through them.

If a few giant, state-subsidized and -protected farms, wholesalers and retailers can unilaterally command supply, they can demand in payment whatever capricious price they determine. This propensity — ever more cartelized industry with ever fewer “competitors” — is endemic to state capitalism, but it is alien to genuine free markets.

Free markets divide and moderate market power by denying special protection and privilege and opening competition to a wide assortment of both entrants and methods. Only where potential threats to corporate monopolization are precluded by force of law — through, among other impediments, “safety” and “consumer protection” standards — can today’s “captains of industry” ascend to market dominance.

It is too often assumed that the behemoth conglomerates populating the landscape of corporate capitalism wince at regulations supposedly aimed at health and safety. These rules, however, routinely function to outlaw the farm stand down the street, the small, local producer who can’t afford to jump through the arbitrary and unjustified hoops put up by the political class.

Powerful elites lobby for and welcome new laws that further constrain consumers’ options, preventing you from “taking your business elsewhere.” Today, the price we pay for food is quite detached from the actual costs of producing it. Where the natural pressures of a legitimately free market would push prices downward to reflect a product’s true value, state capitalism’s restrictions on competition allow big business to squeeze out monopoly profits.

In still another departure from real market discipline, taxpayer subsidized transportation means that most people get their food from hundreds or thousands of miles, rather than hundreds or thousands of yards, away. When the price of oil rises, then, so too does the price of food. With so few alternatives to the mass-produced garbage of state-fortified big agribusiness, there’s no real reason to give the powerless consumer anything like a good product at a good price. So much for “consumer protection.”

In places like China and Southeast Asia, governments have dealt away to rich companies land that was cultivated by farmers for thousands of years, land that fed their families and their community. The state and its favorites have no justifiable claim to these lands under any well-founded standard of property, but the ethic of the state has never amounted to much more than might makes right.

The rising costs and shortages of food, a growing crisis all around the world, are a creation of the state, a phenomenon that exists completely apart from anything that could, with a straight face, be called “market forces.” Market anarchists would remove the constraints and coercion from food production and allow voluntary exchange to feed the world.

Rather than pining after some utopian paradise, market anarchists argue that, without state-created scarcities for rich rent-seekers, people around the world be able to provide good food for their families with a fraction of their labor today. We can look to elite members of the political class to “fix” a problem that they created, or we can allow cooperation and genuine free trade on a human scale to fulfill people’s needs.

We’ve seen the way that political solutions work. Now it’s time for society to get out from under the stranglehold of the state.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, La Política del Hambre.
• Portuguese, A Política da Fome.

On May 11, the Los Angeles Times reported on President Obama’s visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas in order “to push for an overhaul of the immigration system.” With all the usual political parlance, the President bragged that “his administration had made great strides in stopping immigrants from illegally crossing the border,” even while ridiculed Republicans for “want[ing] a higher fence.” For all his talk of fences, the President made no mention of the one he was attempting to straddle before a crowd including many Latinos.

There’s no easy way to completely or exhaustively define the many terms and sides of the American immigration debate. Calls for “reform” subsume everything from unadorned xenophobia and racism to (perhaps just as ridiculous) the fear that immigrants, in and of themselves, represent an undue burden on the U.S. economy, “stealing our jobs” or depleting government entitlement programs.

Laws that restrict and control immigration are the kith and kin of protectionist measures, the tariffs and other special favors that — under the pretext of protecting American workers — fortify Big Business and drive up consumer prices. On a fundamental level, laws that tell people where they may live are no different in kind from any other arbitrary restrictions the state places on peaceful existence.

Although the bands of criminal that we call states have covered and divided amongst themselves most of the world’s inhabitable territory, market anarchists don’t for a moment defer to their claims. As the ultimate absentee landlords, states control where people can live, work and trade in order to compel us into a plutocratic game of monopoly that we would never otherwise choose.

If it means anything at all, self-ownership means the right to move freely from one place to another, pressuring local markets to compete for labor. As Kevin Carson observes in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, among the principle uses of England’s Poor Laws and Laws of Settlement for the ruling was to disallow “laborers from voting with their feet.” Since, for example, young manual laborers are often more willing to move for a job, mobility is one of labor’s principal sources of bargaining power.

It’s a rather blinding irony that those conservatives warning most frantically of open immigration’s exhaustion of the government coffers are often those least troubled by welfare for the rich. The war industry and the prison industry (just to name a pair) motor along at a breakneck clip, ravenously devouring taxpayer dollars all the way, but God forbid a brown child from south of the border find her way into a public school; that kind of privilege is just for U.S. citizens. So although, as an anarchist, I’m as opposed to the government education apparatus as I am to the government anything apparatus, the hypocrisy is clear enough.

Worries about immigrants’ impact on domestic unemployment and the scarcity of jobs are better directed at cartelization measures that capture the labor market for a handful of giant corporations in each industry. Each time a new “consumer protection” rule is launched, one more of the “little guys” is forced to close up shop, contributing to the pile of new applications at the local Walmart. As recently pointed out by economist Steven Horwitz, immigration is “no zero-sum game” whereby “any job a person acquires must have come at the expense of someone else.”

Rather, in a genuine free market — without today’s oligopolistic limitation on labor opportunities — there’s “room for everyone.” The crime of “illegal immigration,” like all victimless crimes that outlaw peaceful, noninvasive acts, ultimately translates to: “You don’t own yourself — the state does.”

Contrary to shrieks that a sovereign state has the right to protect its borders, a state can have no rights at all, at least not in any legitimate, moral sense. Only human beings have rights, and those are violated by dictates that determine where you can and can’t live.

Among the terms of a so-called “free trade agreement” between the European Union and India is a requirement for “data exclusivity” which will eviscerate India’s generic drug industry.

“Data exclusivity” means that clinical trials conducted before marketing by the company that originally produced the drug cannot be applied to meet government safety or efficacy requirements for the generic version. Each separate company that wants to market a generic version of a patented drug will first have to conduct its own clinical trials as a precondition. That directly contradicts one of the arguments commonly put forward by patent apologists — that patents are an antidote to trade secrets because they require openness as a condition of obtaining a patent.

“Data exclusivity” is a death sentence not only for those in India who can’t afford to pay tribute to the owners of state-granted patent monopolies, but also for the people of such countries as South Africa and Brazil, where the availability of cheap medicine for treating HIV depends on the output of India’s generic drug industry.

Let’s be clear on something: Those who call this abomination a “free trade agreement” are liars. It’s like calling the Nuremberg Laws a civil rights act. The people in the drug industry and their lackeys in Washington and Brussels heap coals of fire on their own heads every time the words “free trade” come out of their filthy, lying mouths.

Those who claim that drug patents are necessary to recoup the expenses of developing drugs are wrong. The patent system skews R&D toward gaming the patent system rather than developing the most effective drugs.

First of all, there has been a dramatic shift away from fundamentally new kinds of blockbuster drugs, because it’s much more cost-effective to put money into tweaking the formulas of drugs whose patents are about to expire just enough to qualify for repatenting them — so-called “me, too drugs.”

Second, a great deal of the basic research on which drug development is based is carried out at government expense in publicly funded universities. Around half of the overall cost of drug R&D is taxpayer-funded. And in the United States, under the terms of legislation passed in the 1980s, the patents on drugs developed entirely at taxpayer expense are given away — free of charge — to the drug companies that produce and market them.

Third, most of the actual R&D cost for developing drugs comes not from testing the version of a drug actually marketed, but from securing patent lockdown on all the other major possible variants.

Another example of this phenomenon is Monsanto’s patents on “high-yield varieties,” one of the ostensible benefits of the so-called “Green Revolution.” Such varieties, as Frances Moore Lappe points out, are more accurately called “high-response varieties.” That is, they’re not hardy or resilient under the normal conditions experienced by local peasant subsistence farmers, like native varieties that were developed over the course of many generations to be hardy under local conditions. Rather, they’re engineered to produce high yields under artificial conditions like heavy applications of expensive synthetic fertilizer and government-subsidized irrigation water.

“High-yield” seeds like Monsanto’s genetically modified varieties, in other words, are ideally suited to the needs of large-scale cash crop agribusiness on plantations owned by sundry landed oligarchies around the Third World — usually on land stolen from evicted peasants whose traditional titles to subsistence plots were nullified — with preferential access to government-subsidized irrigation. So Monsanto’s seeds are associated with a particular business model which is rendered artificially profitable by the state against subsistence production.

The practical effect is to shift production from widely distributed small subsistence holdings to large-scale commercial production for the export or urban markets. Under pressure of eviction (essentially a modern-day reenactment of the Enclosures) and state-subsidized competition, people who were formerly able to feed themselves on their own land now lack the purchasing power to buy food from the landed oligarchs’ agribusiness plantations.

And Monsanto’s patents, which criminalize saving seed, add insult to injury by ensuring that the seeds remain too expensive for any small producer who might otherwise be able to afford them.

The words “intellectual property” should be emblazoned on the standards of two horsemen of the apocalypse:  Pestilence and famine.

Violating copyright and patent claims is sometimes called “theft” by apologists for IP. The exact opposite is true:  “Intellectual property” is theft. But more than that, it’s murder.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, La Propiedad Intelectual es Asesina.