You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
— Merle Travis, chorus of the song Sixteen Tons

Back in 1955, thunder-voiced Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded that song as the B-side of a single. Soon, nobody could even remember what the A-side was. DJ’s all over the country began flipping the disc — and within two months of its release Sixteen Tons had become the biggest single ever sold in America.

Sixteen Tons is a John Henry style fable about a coal miner who’s tough as nails — one fist of iron, the other of steel. He’s able to do the most back-breaking job and slaughter any opponent. But even though he’s been working in the mines since the day he was born, he can’t get ahead. Merle Travis wrote and recorded the song in 1946. But until Ford covered it, Sixteen Tons hadn’t done Travis a bit of good.

Far from it. Although Travis was a patriotic Kentucky boy, the U.S. government thought any song complaining about hard work and hopeless debt was subversive. The song got Travis branded a communist sympathizer (a dangerous label in those days). A Capitol record exec who was a Chicago DJ in the late 40s remembers an FBI agent coming to the station and advising him not to play Sixteen Tons.

Pretty big fuss over one little song.

By 1955, when the song finally became a mega-hit, most Americans had already moved away from coal-mine type jobs. It was the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the corporation man, the efficiency expert, and brokenhearted distress about conformity — from people who continued helplessly to commute, consume, cooperate, conform — and gobble their Milltown tranquilizers and beg doctors to treat their tension-spawned ulcers. This was a world far, far, far from the coal mines, with a seemingly very different set of tribulations.

Yet somehow that chorus still resonated: Another day older and deeper in debt.

Beyond all the fantasy lyrics about being raised in the cane-brake by an old mama lion, Sixteen Tons still resonates.

We don’t work for mining companies that pay in scrip redeemable only at the company store. But we work our asses off and end up with credit cards that hit us with 19.99 percent interest, $40 late fees, and other hidden charges so heavy it’s possible — even common — to pay for years and actually owe more than you started with.

We work even longer hours than our fathers, pay higher taxes, depend on two salaries to keep one household together, shove our alienated children into daycare and government education camps, watch our money steadily inflate away, and suffer mightily from a raft of job-related mental and physical ills.

We may not do manual labor. But we work even longer hours than our fathers, pay higher taxes, depend on two salaries to keep one household together, shove our alienated children into daycare and government education camps, watch our money steadily inflate away (while the TV tells us the consumer price index is holding steady) and suffer mightily from a raft of job-related mental and physical ills.

What’s changed but the details? For all our material possessions, we’re in the same old cycle of working, hurting, and losing.

And even though the FBI may not pay us a visit for complaining about it, rebelling against jobs is still a threat to the powers that be.

The government doesn’t have to worry about rebellion much, though. Because today we’re programmed from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed to value jobs, big corporations — and the things jobs buy us — over the real pleasures — and real necessities — of being human.

The news says it every day:

• 130,000 jobs were created in July. Jobs = Good.
• We’re losing jobs overseas. Losing jobs = Bad.
• Leading economic indicators say. Economic indicators (whatever the hell they may be) = Important.
• The Dow-Jones industrial average rose… The stock market = Vital.

Every day in the media, the health of the nation is measured — sometimes almost exclusively measured — in jobs and stocks, employment and corporations.

I don’t mean to imply that income, production, and other such measures aren’t important. They are important — in their place. In perspective. But why do we (via our media) believe these very few factors are so vitally and exclusivelyimportant when it comes to determining the economic health of our society?

We take it as a given that jobs = good, that high stocks = good, and that working harder and spending lots of money = more jobs and higher stocks.

Then we go off to jobs we mostly detest. Or jobs we enjoy, but that stress us out, take us away from our families, and turn our home hours into a frenzied burden, in which we have to struggle to do everything from entertain ourselves to making artificial quality time with kids who barely know us.

There’s something wrong with this picture.

In our current economic setup, which is an evolutionary, not revolutionary, development from 250 years ago, when the Industrial Revolution got started, yes, jobs are important. But that’s like saying that puke-inducing chemotherapy is important when you’ve got cancer.

Uh, yeah. But better not to get cancer in the first place, right?

In a healthy human community, jobs are neither necessary nor desirable. Productive work is necessary — for economic, social, and even spiritual reasons. Free markets are also an amazing thing, almost magical in their ability to satisfy billions of diverse needs. Entrepreneurship? Great! But jobs — going off on a fixed schedule to perform fixed functions for somebody else day after day at a wage — aren’t good for body, soul, family, or society.

Intuitively, wordlessly, people knew it in 1955. They knew it in 1946. They really knew it when Ned Ludd and friends were smashing the machines of the early Industrial Revolution (though the Luddites may not have understood exactly why they needed to do what they did).

Jobs suck. Corporate employment sucks. A life crammed into 9-to-5 boxes sucks. Gray cubicles are nothing but an update on William Blake’s dark satanic mills. Granted, the cubicles are more bright and airy; but they’re different in degree rather than in kind from the mills of the Industrial Revolution. Both cubicles and dark mills signify working on other people’s terms, for other people’s goals, at other people’s sufferance. Neither type of work usually results in us owning the fruits of our labors or having the satisfaction of creating something from start to finish with our own hands. Neither allows us to work at our own pace, or the pace of the seasons. Neither allows us access to our families, friends, or communities when we need them or they need us. Both isolate work from every other part of our life.

And heck, especially if you work for a big corporation, you can be confident that Ebenezer Scrooge cared more about Bob Cratchett than your employer cares about you.

The powers-that-be have feared for the last 250 years that we’d figure all that out and try to do something about it. Why else would the FBI try to suppress an obscure faux folk song? American history is full of hidden tales of private or state militias being used to smash worker rebellions and strikes. In the day of the Luddites, the British government went so far as to make industrial sabotage a capital crime. At one point crown and parliament put more soldiers to work smashing the Luddites than it had in the field fighting Napoleon Bonaparte.

Now, that’s fear for you.

But today, no worry. We’ve made wage-slavery so much a part of our culture that it probably doesn’t even occur to most people that there’s something unnatural about separating work from the rest of our lives. Or about spending our entire working lives producing things in which we can often take only minimal personal pride — or no pride at all.

We’re happy! We tell ourselves. We’re the most prosperous! free! happy! people ever to live on earth! We’re longer-lived, healthier, smarter, and just generally better off than anybody, ever, at any time on planet Earth. So we go on telling ourselves as we dash off to our counseling appointments, down our Prozac, or stare into the dregs of that latest bottle of wine.

Horsefeathers! You know what we sound like, assuring ourselves of our good fortune? We sound like the mechanized voices whispering to the pre-programmed bottle babies in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

Alpha children… work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas.

To believe how happy we are we have to ignore our rising rates of drug abuse, our soaring rates of depression, our backaches, our carpal tunnel syndromes, and our chronic fatigue syndrome. We have to ignore the billions of dollars and billions of hours we spend on mood-altering pharmaceuticals, drug-abuse counseling, headache remedies, mindless escape entertainment, day-care centers, status purchases, unhealthy comfort foods, shop-a-holic sprees, and doctor’s care for all our vague, non-specific physical and mental ills.

You think that’s how a happy person spends his time and money? Gimme a break!

Quit listening to that little mechanical corporate-state whisper that tells you what you’re supposed to consider important — that tells you jobs are supposed to be the central focus of your life. Quit listening to that voice that tells you you’re happy when your entire body and soul are screaming at you that you’re unhappy.

Here’s something to shout to yourself: Jobs suck! Jobs are bad for you!

Shout it until you really hear yourself shouting it — then get out of the job madness, out of wage slavery, out of the grind that keeps you indebted to government, the boss, the bank, and the credit-card company.

Oh, but wait! You’ll die if you don’t have a job, just like a cancer patient might die without chemo. In our society, if you don’t have a job, you’re on the skids. You’re a poor unfortunate. You’re a lazy bum. You’re a leech. You’re a loser. And really, truly, if you don’t have regular employment of some kind, you’re in danger of going down life’s drain.

As an individual, of course you can escape the job trap to a certain extent. As a freelance writer, I have. I still have to work for other people, but I get to do it at an organic pace. When the sun is shining, I can often sit on the deck or go for a walk.

The man who sometimes mows my lawn has escaped somewhat. He can schedule his own day without having to ask permission or without screwing up anybody’s production line.

My ex-boyfriend the software engineer has escaped, too. He works out of his spare bedroom and gets to live and work in the computer dream world he most enjoys.

That’s the way it was for most people, prior to the Industrial Revolution. They may have worked hard and may not have had much. As in every age, they had to put up with the savageries of rulers’ power struggles, rulers’ wars, and rulers’ property confiscation. But generally they could move through their days as the seasons and their own needs (and the needs of their families and communities) dictated. They had a direct, personal connection to the goods they made and the services they performed.

Avon ladies, self-employed carpenters, security consultants, people who earn their living selling goods on eBay, reflexology practitioners, swap-meet sellers, self-employed gardeners, contract loggers, drug dealers, home-knitters, psychics — today they’ve all made a partial, personal escape from the job trap.

But escape can be perilous. When you’re self-employed, you often can’t afford to provide yourself the “safety net” that comes with a job (health insurance, vacations, sick pay, unemployment insurance, etc.). And the even deeper problem is that society — that hard-to-pin-down, but vitally important abstraction — still inflicts its values and its problems even upon those of us who make our best personal efforts to escape from them.

You and I may be smart and lucky enough to create for ourselves hand-crafted employment that doesn’t force us into gray cubicles, 9-to-5 routine, ghastly commutes, indigestion-inducing lunches gobbled at our desks, co-workers and bosses who grate on our nerves, three-piece suits, pantyhose, and total exhaustion at the end of the day.

But you and I, the cagey self-employed, are still stuck dealing with the consequences of a system that produces neglected, ill-bred kids, frantic consumer culture, impersonal corporations, television and drug abuse as a means of numbing the pain, unhappy and unfulfilled neighbors and family members and many, many more problems that hurt us as bad as they hurt the job holders.

Is it possible, then, to create a society in which work is more personally fulfilling and fits more organically into the rest of our lives? Is it possible to create such a choice for all who want to take it?

Nearly every writer who advocates the abolition of jobs and the celebration of leisure repeats the same handful of interesting, but slightly unhelpful messages.

First, they look back to hunter-gatherer societies (who work, on average, 3-to-4 hours a day) and say, If they can do it, why can’t we? They fail to note that hunter gatherers, whatever their other virtues, don’t invent vaccines, construct high-tech devices, or have such amenities as indoor plumbing.

Writers against jobs also talk about making work into a species of fun. That’s another great trait of hunter-gatherer societies. It’s easy to have fun when you’re harvesting berries or chasing deer with a group of friends. But nobody builds precision medical equipment for fun. Nor do they plunge a mile underground to “load sixteen tons of number nine coal” for amusement.

Finally, anti-job writers are big on utopian theory: Society could work so well, if only, if only. Utopian proposals are inevitably lite on key details. They fail to consider how to wean ourselves away from corporate job culture without coercion. They fail to note how modern goods and services could be produced without the large, well-funded — and job-based — institutions that provide so much of modern life. (You cannot splice genes, split atoms, or build computer chips in your quaint Amish workshop.)

So the questions are:

1. Is it possible to have an organic, work-and-leisure culture without slipping back to subsistence-level survival?
2. And is it possible to have the benefits of advanced technology without having to sacrifice so much of our time, our individuality, and our sanity, to get them?

As long as government and its heavily favored and subsidized corporations and financial markets rule our work days, the answers to these questions will never come. We can find our way to a humane work-and-leisure society only through experiment and experience. And we’ll be able to make those experiments only in conjunction with (pardon my using the cliched-but-accurate expression) a paradigm shift. The current job culture, which imprisons us in the silver chains of benefits and the iron shackles of debt, looms blackly in our way.

The necessary sea-change seems far away now. Yet paradigms do shift. Institutions do fall. And often they fall just when the old paradigms seem most entrenched or the old institutions seem most immovable.

Some of the machinery of change may already be in place. For instance:

• Although automation hasn’t yet put us out of jobs, as it was supposed to, it still has the potential to eliminate many types of drudgery.
• Although computer-based knowledge work hasn’t enabled millions of us to leave the corporate world and work at home (as, again, it was supposed to), that’s more a problem of corporate power psychology than of technology. Our bosses fear to let us work permanently at home; after all, we might take 20-minute coffee breaks, instead of 10! But what if, say, a fuel crisis or epidemic made it imperative for more of us to stay home to do our work? The paradigm could shift so fast our bosses would fall over.
• A wide-scale attitude change could also topple the traditional job structure. And that, too, may already be happening. How many parents are looking around and saying, This two-job crap isn’t getting us anywhere? It’s only a short leap from there to the real truth: one-job crap doesn’t satisfy our real needs, either. How many of us have spent 10 or 20 or 30 years buying into the jobs = good; spending = good hype only to decide to walk away from the rat maze and do something less lucrative but more gratifying?

Do you hear many people wailing with sorrow after walking away from the job world and establishing a more home-centered, family-centered, adventure-centered, spirit-centered, community-centered life? Only those few who, through bad planning or extreme bad luck, tried and didn’t make it.

Until the larger job = good illusion shatters, it’s certainly possible for millions of individuals to live more organic lives, without job-slavery. As more people declare their independence, more support networks rise to help them (for example, affordable health insurance for the self-employed, or health care providers opting to provide more affordable services through cash-only programs like Simple Care.)

And we can begin to consider: What types of technology let us live more independently, and what types of independence still enable us to take advantage of life-enhancing technologies while keeping ourselves out of the life-degrading job trap?

Take a job and you’ve sold part of yourself to a master. You’ve cut yourself off from the real fruits of your own efforts.

When you own your own work, you own your own life. It’s a goal worthy of a lot of sacrifice. And a lot of deep thought.

In the meantime, unfortunately, anybody who cries, Jobs aren’t needed! Jobs aren’t healthy for adults and other living things! is crying in the wilderness. We Elijahs and Cassandras can be counted on to be treated like fringe-oid idiots. And anybody who begins to come up with a serious plan that starts cutting the underpinnings from the state-corporate power structure can expect to be treated as Public Enemy Number One and had better watch his backside. Because like Merle Travis and Ned Ludd, he threatens the security of those who hold power over others.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Sombrios Cubículos Satânicos – É hora de acabar com a cultura do emprego!

The following article is translated into Portuguese from the English original, written by Kevin Carson.

Como alguém que mais defende Paul Krugman do que não, sei que me contraponho à corrente libertária majoritária. Dadas, porém, as realidades da forma de capitalismo de estado sob a qual vivemos — sistema essencialmente corporatista cujas semelhanças com o “livre mercado” são em sua maioria coincidências — descubro que os keynesianos estão certos quanto à análise das causas da Grande Recessão.

Aqueles da Direita que acham que o problema é aos ricos faltar dinheiro para “investir em empregos” estão vivendo num mundo de sonhos. Não, os ricos investiram dinheiro em esquemas Ponzi tais como a bolha imobiliária precisamente porque tinham mais capital nas mãos do que conseguiam encontrar meios produtivos de investir. A economia já andava afligida por excesso de capacidade industrial que mal conseguia ser utilizada, mesmo com o nível da demanda acelerado por dívidas assentadas em patrimônio líquido inflado pela bolha. Os ricos já têm mais dinheiro do que desejam investir, porque nenhuma pessoa sã contrataria pessoas para produzirem mais coisas num ambiente de menos pessoas empregadas comprando coisas — e de poder de compra dos empregados não mais inflado por empréstimos hipotecários da Ditech.

Em termos simples, não é o nível de investimento o problema — e sim o nível de demanda.

Portanto os keynesianos estão corretos quanto à causa próxima do problema — a análise deles aplica-se muito melhor à economia corporatista na qual vivemos, se não a um mercado genuinamente emancipado, do que a da Direita libertária. A principal falha deles é a incapacidade de avançar para além das causas próximas e ir à raiz do problema.

Bom exemplo é a coluna de Krugman no New York Times, “O Hiato da Produção”(19 de janeiro).  Ele aponta para um hiato estimado entre o PIB real e potencial, resultante de insuficiência na demanda agregada, de $903 biliões de dólares no próximo ano. Até aqui, tudo bem.

O que ele deixa de observar é que nem tudo que acrescenta um dólar ao PIB é bom. Muito do PIB equivale, na linguagem de Frederic Bastiat, ao custo de substituir vitrines quebradas. Muito do PIB, em seu ápice, resultou de desperdício subsidiado e obsolescência planejada. Portanto, com todo o devido respeito por Krugman, a maior parte da falta de produção que ele identifica é porcaria de má qualidade projetada para cair aos pedaços afim de manter a capacidade industrial plenamente utilizada, e a demanda respectiva foi alimentada inteiramente por pessoas endividando-se para continuar a comprar tal porcaria de má qualidade.

Não há como contornar o fato de que, visto ser nossa economia atualmente estruturada nos moldes do capitalismo de estado, grande parte das pessoas está empregada fabricando coisas inúteis. E simplesmente não há como impedir drástico decréscimo das cifras de PIB nominal e de emprego a não ser por meio do subsídio de comportamento patológico para manter as pessoas consumindo.

Krugman está inteiramente correto em argumentar que, do modo como a economia está atualmente estruturada, o único modo de obter-se pleno emprego é o governo gastar para compensar a queda da demanda. Não há porém cenário plausível no qual a economia, uma vez dado o pontapé inicial de acionamento da bomba keynesiana (desculpem-me a metáfora mista), continue a funcionar de modo autossustentável sem a continuação dos gastos do governo. Não há cenário plausível no qual a economia sequer atinja os níveis de demanda, ou de produção nominal, que existiam há três anos.

A “administração da demanda agregada” keynesiana funcionará este ano, se o governo incorrer num déficit de $1 trilião de dólares. Se, porém, o orçamento for equilibrado no ano que vem, a economia voltará à depressão. Assim, o antigo modelo keynesiano, no qual o governo incorre em déficit nos tempos difíceis e tem tal déficit pago ao gozar de excedente nos tempos bons está tão extinto quanto o pombo-passageiro. Não há tempos bons, do modo como hoje estruturado o capitalismo de estado, sem déficit perpétuo.

Portanto incluam-me entre os “deflacionistas” dos quais Krugman usualmente zomba. A realidade substantiva com que nos defrontamos é que são precisos menos investimento em capital físico, e menos horas de trabalho, para produzir o que a maioria das pessoas considera padrão de vida confortável.

A agenda tanto de Bush quanto de Obama foi a de sustentar os valores de ativos inflados por rendas, como fonte de demanda agregada, e inflar os dólares de investimento e horas de trabalho necessários para produzir dada unidade de valor-uso. A única saída, porém, no longo prazo, é exatamente o oposto: Eliminar a porção do preço de bens e serviços que resulta de rendas decorrentes de escassez artificial, de tal modo que a pessoa média possa viver confortavelmente com semana de trabalho mais curta.

No curto prazo, o keynesianismo é a única maneira de impedir o colapso do capitalismo de estado. No longo prazo, porém, o capitalismo de estado é insustentável. A única saída é ir além do capitalismo de estado.

No final, teremos de encontrar algum meio de sair da roda do hamster.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 21 de janeiro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

This July, I wrote an op-ed for C4SS about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would strengthen the patent monopoly’s power to restrict access to medicines. But medical access is not the only area where the Trans-Pacific Partnership would threaten liberty. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s leaked sections on “intellectual property” suggest that the treaty would restrict freedom of speech online. Earlier this month, EFF presented their concerns at an event hosted by the Office of the US Trade Representative. Their report on this event should be very interesting to C4SS readers. It shows the lack of transparency involved in the TPP negotiations, as well as the propaganda campaign that the entertainment industry is mounting to protect themselves from the competition and free expression the internet has enabled.

If you wish to understand how corporate capitalism operates as a state-guaranteed system of privilege, the TPP provides a perfect illustration. In a truly Orwellian fashion, basic liberties are being restricted for the explicit purpose of restricting competition, and yet it’s being passed off as “free trade.”

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There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. . . . These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. . . . And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

This quote is from the infamous surreptitious video made of Mitt Romney’s speech at a fundraiser last spring. What are we to make of it?

The first thing to note is that Romney is typical of the right wing of the ruling elite, which often portrays lower income beneficiaries of the welfare state as a threat to the established order. In this view, they are dependent on government; they wish to remain that way; and they see themselves as victims.

(more…)

It looks like Americans for Prosperity is planning to hold an anti-Occupy rally in New York. The Guardian quotes Steve Lonegan, who achieved fame for trying to force Spanish-language billboards out of Bogota, NJ while he was mayor and was later supported by Ron Paul when he ran for governor:

The Occupy Wall Street crowd is nothing but a fringe element of malcontents bent on mayhem and destruction… These are people who despise free enterprise.

Free enterprise, like advertising to people who don’t read English well?

A more perceptive quote is found in a comment on the article responding to Lonegan’s charge.

Americans have this myth that capitalism is free enterprise. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, capitalism is the enemy of free enterprise…Capitalists are the 1%, free enterprise is the 99%.

The Art of Being Free, by Wendy McElroy [Laissez Faire Books, 2012]

By Wally Conger

Long ago, when I was an evangelical libertarian punk, there were two tomes I hauled around in my book bag to help lure passers-by into the movement — Radical Libertarianism by Jerome Tuccille and Murray Rothbard’s monumental For A New Liberty.

Tuccille’s book, which hit the political landscape in 1970, is sadly hard to find these days (and terribly out of date, anyway). Rothbard’s 1973 classic is still in print, of course.

But now, here comes The Art of Being Free, a new manifesto from Wendy McElroy. And it’s not only a tremendous addition to the freedom literature, it will, I’m sure, also serve as a powerful recruitment tool.

As Wendy reveals in the book’s preface — and as anyone who’s spent twenty minutes in this movement should know — she’s no anarchist tenderfoot. At 15, Wendy was already reading Ayn Rand. This, plus her intense study of every American individualist from Benjamin Tucker to Murray Rothbard, led to a decades-long conviction that “whatever happens within society — from the free market to war — begins with the individual who agrees or dissents. The individual says yes or no and it is this lever of consent at which freedom lives or dies.”

Yeah, it’s that simple, which makes Wendy’s new book both eloquent and extremely persuasive.

The Art of Being Free is broken into four sections. The first provides a quick survey of natural rights, the State, and the theoretical footing for the freedom philosophy. The second section applies that theory to issues like public education, workers’ rights, foreign policy, and the war on drugs.

Where this volume really packs a wallop, though, is in the two sections that make up its second half. Here, McElroy tackles anti-political strategies and tactics for moving forward to a truly stateless society.

Section 3, “Principles Work Through People,” introduces five “historical friends” who embody Wendy’s ideals. Each of these mini-biographies — of French philosopher Étienne de la Boétie, French writer-historian François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, author-naturalist-tax resister Henry David Thoreau, American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and newspaper publisher R.C. Hoiles — is inspiring and insightful. And each illustrates a freedom principle. Listen…

“La Boétie stresses the role of habit in developing obedience, but habits can be equally important in becoming and remaining liberated. For example, develop the habit of questioning authority even if the question is asked quietly or only of yourself.”

And again…

“Garrison is a flesh-and-blood example of how effective one man can be in fighting against a massive injustice. … The smallest ‘group’ with an amazing ability to change the world is the person of principle who will not surrender. No force is stronger.”

And one more time…

“Through consistently applying his freedom principles to his daily basis, R.C. [Hoiles] richly prospered in family, finance and the respect of his associates. Living freedom does not mean sacrifice; it means enrichment both personally, professionally and financially.”

McElroy finishes up with a rousing — but qualified — call-to-action in the book’s final section, “Getting There From Here.”

Although she admits America is now a police state, Wendy confesses, “Nevertheless, I am an optimist.

“My optimism,” she continues, “comes from turning one question over and over in my mind like a worry bead. The question is, ‘What can be accomplished right here and now in my own backyard?’”

In other words, smaller is better.

“[W]hat I focus energy upon are the things I can affect and change for the better. I concentrate on grassroots movements in which individual voices are the driving force and individuals make an incredible difference. It is in the grassroots movements that are springing up and spreading like fire across North America that I see the future of liberty. … Freedom may be dead within the institutions like government, but it is unquenchable within people. It lives in the grassroots.”

How does McElroy define a grassroots movement?

“It begins,” she writes, “with isolated individuals who are desperately dissatisfied with an issue that deeply affects their lives. … It starts with an issue so deeply personal that people who have never said ‘no’ to authority before stand up and refuse to sit down. Grassroots movements usually begin by saying ‘no’ on a local level, to a local school board, at a town meeting or to district court. Sometimes they never proceed beyond the local level. But if the injustice they are confronting is widespread, then the voices multiply and spread. They become the most powerful political force on the face of the earth: the voice of the people. …

“Grassroots movements are the path from here to there.”

But Wendy advises against focusing on the struggle alone. Beyond the battle, we libertarians should center our attention on living the liberty lifestyle ourselves.

“This is a pitfall of caring passionately for freedom and being politically active: sometimes you forget to live. You forget that life is not about opposing things but embracing them.”

As an example, she points to Thoreau, to whom the business of living was immensely more important than politics. When he was released from jail for refusing to pay a tax that supported war, Thoreau “did not file a grievance. He immediately went on a berry hunt with a swarm of young boys. No bitterness. No brooding. No lingering resentment. Without missing a beat, Thoreau simply returned to living deeply.”

She adds: “As he tramped the trails in search of juicy treasure, Thoreau found himself standing on a high point in a field. He gazed about at the continuous, sprawling beauty that surrounded him and observed ‘the State was nowhere to be seen.’”

And so Wendy McElroy lives her own life.

“I act as though the State does not exist,” she says. “Make space for the ‘business of living’ — the areas of life that allow you to say, ‘Here, the state is nowhere to be seen.’”

The Art of Being Free is educational, instructive, and ultimately inspiring.

I can ask for no better guidebook to fighting for and living the stateless life.

A libertarian–a radical, decentralist, pro-market, but anti-capitalist left-libertarian, at any rate–could tell that Alex Cockburn was exceptional when even his eulogy for a departed Marxist compelled interest.

After the Marxist economist Paul Sweezy died, Alex wrote that Sweezy “trenchantly detected and explained: the reasons for the New Deal’s failure, until World War II bailed out the system; military Keynesianism and the Korean war as the factors in US recovery after that war; underdevelopment in the Third World, consequence of dependency that was created by imperialism . . . ; the increasing role of finance in the operations of capitalism. . . .”

The implied debunking of the standard left-right fairy tale that constitutes most people’s notion of American history, is–or should be–of great interest to libertarians, who ought to understand that capitalism equals, not radically decentralized freed markets, but exploitative corporatism.That insight and attitude are what drew me and my left-libertarian comrades to Alex. My last contact with him was to ask that he blurb a book to which I contributed, Markets Not Capitalism, edited by Gary Chartier and Charles W. Johnson. He delivered the blurb: “We on the left need a good shake to get us thinking, and these arguments for market anarchism do the job in lively and thoughtful fashion.”

We who were associated with the book were ecstatic that Alex appreciated the distinction we were striving to make, and that he was willing to be associated with it and us.

Unfortunately, I only met Alex once, in 2008. We both spoke at an extraordinary conference put on by the Future of Freedom Foundation in Reston, Virginia titled “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties.” What was extraordinary was that this well-attended anti-empire, pro-Bill of Rights gathering featured the most prominent conservatives, progressives, leftists, and libertarians who were alarmed about imperial war and domestic tyranny. They included: Glenn Greenwald, Bruce Fein, Stephen Kinzer, Robert Higgs, Justin Raimondo, and Ron Paul.

I knew of Alex’s work long before that, and followed his writings in The Village Voice, The Nation, even The War Street Journal. Now, finally, I would have my chance to talk to him. (He had already published me at CounterPunch.) He did not disappoint; he was funny and charming, and interested in what subversion I was up to. I’d like to think we hit it off.

In his wonderfully wide-ranging talk, he discussed the prospect of an alliance between the libertarians and his kind of left. “There has to be more utopianism, and there has to be more straightforward spirit of mutiny, which I think you libertarians are good at offering. If the left would offer a little bit of utopia-some of the utopia may differ-then I think we can continue to have an enjoyable and hopefully a creative association.”When I asked him to elaborate in the Q&A, he referred to an earlier attempted alliance, namely, the old Inquiry magazine (which I helped edit, 1982-1984), which assembled the best anti-statists no matter where they placed themselves on the political spectrum. Acknowledging that there are “some big issues [between libertarians and him] that . . . have to be sorted through,” he continued, “I think a battle of the ideas, maybe one a year, would be a lot of fun. We should talk about it. I hope we do.” Alas, we never got to do it.

The following article is translated into Portuguese from the English original, written by Anna Morgenstern.

O problema de qualquer tipo de ideologia “política” é ser formado em grande parte de uma “lista de itens” de proposta de temas específicos. Isso é verdade haja ou não uma ideia subjacente coerente por trás desses temas.

Examinemos primeiro o bode expiatório favorito de muitas pessoas, o “libertarismo”. O problema, como algum dos esquerdoides mais sagazes já argumentaram, é que a classe dominante vasculhará a tal lista de itens e lançará seu peso em favor das partes dela que fortaleçam sua posição, desprezando o resto, tornando assim o libertarismo uma forma menos socialmente agressiva de conservadorismo.

“Impostos mais baixos?”
Não há problema, reduzamos os impostos dos ricos.

“Menos regulamentação?”
Bem, removamos a regulamentação que contraria o poder corporativo, mas não qualquer outra (ver: Enron).

“Legalizar drogas?”
De jeito nenhum, chefe.

O que, porém, não é claramente entendido é que isso é também verdade do “liberalismo” e da assim chamada “democracia social” ou “socialismo democrático” ou o que mais seja. O moderno “liberalismo” estadunidense é simplesmente Corporatismo(*) de Massa com esteroides. É puro burocratismo. Você joga limpo e segue as regras e se você for excelente burro de carga ganhará dinheiro, mas não demais, a menos que se torne alguém da panelinha. Sob certos aspectos é uma versão um pouco menos severa de Corporatismo, mas da qual muito mais difícil evadir-se ou escapar. Os conservadores dão a você mais oportunidade de fazer as suas próprias coisas, mas também acabam com sua vida se você falhar. (*Ver Wikipedia em inglês, Corporatism e, dali, também o texto em outras línguas, inclusive Português.)

Não há ideologia política que consiga escapar desse processo de cooptação levado a efeito pela classe dominante. O que levou a um princípio chamado Lei Férrea da Oligarquia o qual afirma que toda forma de organização política termina tornando-se uma oligarquia. Acredito isso ser verdade de qualquer estrutura política, mas não necessariamente de toda estrutura social.

Em contraste, ser renegado, anarquista, agorista ou sindicalista é bem diferente. É o que chamo de ideologias  “antipolíticas” ou “apolíticas.” Nesses esquemas a classe não dominante assume a tarefa de criar sua própria subsociedade que funciona fora da superestrutura político-econômica, em vez de tentar influenciar aquela superestrutura. Isso, naturalmente, leva a conflito nas margens o qual, até que seja alcançada certa massa crítica, requer dissimulação e evasão em relação à estrutura autoritária.

À medida que a superestrutura torna-se mais avançada e integrada, o conflito direto torna-se, ao longo do tempo, cada vez menos eficaz. Assim, em certo sentido, todas as ideologias “políticas” são o baluarte, as forças da linha de frente, da oligarquia da classe dominante. A era das greves de massa acabou-se depois da Primeira Guerra Mundial, nos Estados Unidos, e dos anos 1960, na Europa. Há, porém, formas de ação direta que sutilmente as substituíram, nas quais trabalhadores e autônomos tomam de volta da oligarquia sua mais-valia.

A reação tem sido o projeto de guerra-terceirização, no qual a classe dominante devasta os estados periféricos e em seguida implacavelmente explora a classe trabalhadora sobrevivente ali. Para conseguir isso é que foram planejadas a “guerra fria” e, agora, a “guerra contra o terror.” Orwell previu muito bem essa faceta das coisas em seu livro 1984. Quanto aos estados centrais, pão e circoou soma, impedir que a população resvale para as zonas cinzentas e mantê-la apoiando a oligarquia. Huxley, em seu livroAdmirável Mundo Novo, previu muito bem essa faceta das coisas.

O problema da classe dominante é que ela de fato não tem como manter esse estado de coisas para sempre. Nós a estamos fazendo sangrar, e ela está comendo suas próprias matérias primas para manter uma ineficiente economia oligárquica. Esse é o motivo de a ideologia do “verde” ter-se tornado popular nos últimos tempos. A classe dominante usa o medo da destruição ambiental para suprimir o consumo da classe trabalhadora(*), o que lhe permite “sustentar” a hegemonia corporativa. O medo de destruição ambiental tem base na realidade, mas é a própria oligarquia estado-corporação quem está causando a destruição. Ela usa os conservadores como forma de distrair a atenção, ao estes defenderem uma posição cômica e irresponsável “antiambiental” que ajuda a impelir a porção mais sensata da população para o arraial “pró-ambiental.” (*Ver o comentário, abaixo do original, de Misteriousness Al, que começa dizendo: ‘Os produtos verdes ou são mais caros ou em realidade dão à corporação controle estável sobre o movimento verde ao afastá-lo de ideias revolucionárias, trazendo-o para o consumo. …’)

A máscara da liberdade política e/ou da justiça está começando a exibir rachaduras em demasia. A classe dominante é forçada a agir cada vez mais aberta e diretamente para manter em andamento os pratos girando no ar, na medida em que as ineficiências e crises inerentes a grandes sistemas hierárquicos começam a ocorrer mais amiúde. O que impele mais pessoas para a zona cinzenta, para várias teorias de renegados (inclusive a do simples “não dou a menor bola-ismo). Isso cria mais crises para a classe dominante — faça espuma, enxágue e repita. A pergunta que se coloca diante de nós é se ela conseguirá recompor-se depois do colapso.

Tomar uma Rússia e acabar com ela, fazendo o colapso funcionar como “válvula de escape” de sua ineficiência estrutural e voltar à cena em forma levemente menos totalitária, mas não menos autoritária… ou talvez a China, equilibrando gradualmente a liberdade econômica para alguns com a hegemonia cultural sobre todas. Essas duas nações representam, talvez, experimentos para a classe dominante.

Nós renegados precisamos encontrar-nos mutuamente e fortalecer nossas próprias sociedades não políticas, a despeito de nossas diferenças de opinião, se tivermos a esperança de oferecer alternativa melhor do que esses experimentos.

Artigo original afixado por Anna Morgenstern em 5 de junho de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Michigan’s Secretary of State removed Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson from the November ballot pursuant to the state’s “sore loser” law — prior to his Libertarian Party candidacy, he appeared on the Republican primary ballot due to that same Secretary of State’s failure to remove him from said primary ballot at his request.

In Oklahoma — a state where a candidate who is not a Republican or Democrat has about as much chance of getting on the ballot in the first place as a candidate in Iran who isn’t chummy with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini, and for the same reasons — Johnson has also been removed from the ballot, after having been duly put on said ballot by Americans Elect, pursuant to skulduggery by that state’s election officials and AE’s national umbrella organization.

In California, a court hit activists who sued versus the state’s “top-two” election system — a system specifically designed to ensure that Republicans and Democrats face no meaningful competition from third parties — with nearly $250,000 in sanctions, requiring them to pay their opponents’ attorney fees for having had the gall and temerity to contest the matter.

Around the country, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is working overtime to get Johnson and other third party presidential candidates kicked off of state ballots and narrow voters’ choice to Romney or US President Barack Obama.

Back when I was still involved in electoral politics, I’d have found this year’s ballot access battles depressing. These days, I find them encouraging. They’re a symptom of the increasing brittleness in, and the impending breakdown of, the existing system.

The “duopoly” — the Republican and Democratic Parties — claim to not agree on much, but they certainly agree on one thing: Only Republicans and Democrats are permissible candidates for election to public office.

They began their attempts to foreclose other options in the 1880s with adoption of the “Australian ballot.” Before that, voters wrote their own ballots or procured pre-printed ballots from the candidates or parties of their choosing. Ever since, the (Democrat- and Republican-controlled) government has printed the ballots, making it more and more difficult over time for “third party” candidates to appear on them.

This year, even 120 years of increasingly draconian legislation to keep alternatives off the ballot and out of the public eye has proven insufficient to the duopoly’s purpose. Since mere law (and, in the case of the GOP, internal party rules) hasn’t sufficed to produce the beauty pageant coronations they desire instead of the real elections they fear, they’re just openly breaking those laws (and, versus the specter of Ron Paul, internal party rules) in a desperate attempt to keep themselves strapped atop the Rube Goldberg machine they’ve built.

It’s not that the duopoly fears that third parties (or even radically different alternatives within their own parties) will win elections on anything like a regular basis.

What they fear is that voters will notice that there ARE alternatives, even mild and reformist alternatives, to their continued and unquestioned rule.

The status quo is in a precarious position: It can no longer afford for its subjects to think. Its survival requires an electorate composed entirely of coin-flipping robots. It’s the American “democratic” equivalent of Stalin’s obsession with airbrushing Trotsky out of all the old Soviet photos.

The fiction that the American duopoly is actually a “two-party” system in anything but name has ceased to be innovative or novel. Now it’s just boring. But the solution to the problem is not to cast — or to fight for the “right” to cast — quixotic “third party” votes. The solution is to withdraw our consent entirely. It’s time to stop participating in the charade and to stop humoring those who put it on.

Ceterum autem censeo, status esse delendam.

In 2003, activist Rachel Corrie was run over and killed by an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozer.  Last month, an Israeli court dismissed a lawsuit by her family.   Rather than holding the Israeli government responsible for killing this woman, the court’s ruling blamed the victim.

Such victim blaming is appalling, but not surprising.  The Israeli government was the arbitrator in a dispute about itself.  Institutions cannot be held accountable for their abusive actions when they hold a monopoly on arbitration and legal accountability.  We have seen this repeatedly in cases of police brutality, prosecutorial misconduct, and war crimes.  The state holds a monopoly on law.  When it commits crimes, it won’t hold itself accountable.  Instead, it will blame the victim.

According to Google Analyics, 10.2% of the Center’s web visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The German government recommends otherwise.

I agree.

Fox News bewails the fall of the United States in the 2012 Economic Freedom of the World report, a study co-authored by Florida State University economist James Gwartney. Perusing the report, which finds Hong Kong and Singapore in first and second places, I was reminded of a passage from Marx Edgeworth Lazarus’ review (in an 1885 issue of Liberty) of the work of individualist and land reform champion Joshua King Ingalls. Praising Ingalls, Lazarus describes how he “exposes the hypocrisy of defending the actual business world by laws of tendency, as it were, in a vacuum; while ignoring the continual intervention of circumstances, and especially of government,–i.e., of arbitrary wills,–to frustrate [those laws of tendency].”

Throughout his life and work, Ingalls always contended that genuine laissez-faire could cure most of the ills associated with the labor question. The problem was that many economists and mainstream commentators had mistaken a system of state privilege for a condition of economic freedom. We’ve never gotten away from that, of course, with outlets like Fox News keen to brandish the guidon of a most unfree capitalist domination of the earth under the pretense of “Freedom of the World” reports. Coercive state protection of capital’s prerogative of demanding tribute, it must be said, has nothing to do with free markets or laissez-faire. But those are used equivalently by the great and seemingly growing list of these reports–themselves fairly interchangeable. We might do well to remember that, just as Ingalls and Lazarus had a conception of freedom quite different from those of many laissez-faire advocates of their day, so do many contemporary libertarians recognize the distinct difference between the now strictly potential freedom of the world and the “Freedom of the World” we apparently have.

For over a year, C4SS has been hosting a Tor relay node. Hosted at a freedom-friendly data center in the Netherlands, the relay is part of a global network dedicated to the idea that a free society requires freedom of information. Since June 2011 we’ve continuously added nearly 10 Mbps of bandwidth to the network (statistics). And although we can’t know, by design, what’s passed through the relay, it’s entirely likely that it has facilitated communications by revolutionaries, agorists, whistleblowers, journalists working under censorious regimes and many more striving to advance the cause of liberty.

Operating the node does come at a cost. The hosting will cost C4SS just under $250 for for six months.

If you believe, as we do, that Tor is one of the technologies that’s serving to make both state and corporate oppression not only obsolete, but impossible, please click through and contribute today.

All the best,
-C4SS

The following article is translated into Portuguese from the English original, written by David S. D’Amato.

O fato de “vivermos num mundo posterior ao 11/9” tornou-se refrão conveniente para repressão legal ao longo da década passada — a qual aparentemente pode ser invocada para justificar aumento ilimitado do estado policial estadunidense.

Esta semana, noticiando os protestos ainda em andamento contra Wall Street, Joseph Goldstein, do New York Times, observou que as “ações da polícia sugerem o outro lado de uma força treinada para combater terrorismo.” Isso porque o Departamento de Polícia de New York – NYPD vem lidando com os manifestantes com toda a brutalidade característica que nos acostumamos a esperar das patrulhas militarizadas de nossas cidades.

Rápida pesquisa no YouTube é bastante para revelar os tipos de táticas excessivas e violentas que a polícia empregou, detendo muitos manifestantes sem causa sob a desculpa esfarrapada de “conduta desordeira.” A reportagem nos relembra que os departamentos de polícia de hoje em dia são mais amiúde maior ameaça a uma sociedade pacífica do que os criminosos dos quais pretensamente nos protegem.

John Locke disse que “os homens ingressam na sociedade,” instituindo um estado, a fim de poderem preservar sua propriedade e proteger suas pessoas e — ao dizê-lo — deu-nos uma ideia romanceada de governo. As leis dos estado eram, defendia ele, para ser como “guardas e cercas” ao redor das “propriedades de toda a sociedade, para limitarem o poder e moderarem o domínio de toda parte e membro da sociedade.”

Protegendo os fracos contra os fortes, situando todos os indivíduos em condição de igualdade perante a lei, o estado de Locke é o paradigmático “vigia noturno,” protetor benigno tendo como auxiliar a cega senhora justiça. Essa é a descrição do estado como servo da comunidade e da civilização, como guarnição contra o cruel estado de barbárie que nos espreita ameaçadoramente a partir de um passado não tão distante.

Contudo, apesar de todas as tradições e baluartes intelectuais construídos em torno dela, essa visão do estado é de longe mais utópica do que mesmo as mais otimistas representações do anarquista típico (se em verdade se possa dizer que tal pessoa exista).

Os apologistas do estado assumem, sem reservas, que uma instituição com o monopólio da violência legal, sempre administrada, na prática, por uma minúscula elite, usará esse monopólio apenas para a defesa da liberdade e da justiça. Essas são as mesmas pessoas que acreditam na ideia de que a polícia existe simplesmente “para servir e proteger.”

Com pouco ou nenhum incentivo para brandir o poder do estado para qualquer uso exceto seu próprio enriquecimento, a classe dominante é nada obstante vista como só tendo as melhores intenções. Enquanto, em todos os outros assuntos, todos os nossos instintos nos alertam de que a ninguém deveria ser confiado tal poder, acostumamo-nos a ver certas esferas da vida humana como território típico do estado.

Entre esses importantes papéis está aquele de proteger-nos uns dos outros, presumivelmente algo que só pode ser conseguido por meio de um monopólio territorial. Por que, contudo, permitir que tal presunção siga sem ser questionada?

Numa época em que o estado total tem impacto sobre praticamente todas as facetas da vida social e econômica, poucos se dão ao trabalho de lembrar que a noção moderna de estado soberano é relativamente nova no cenário. As instituições das cidades livres da Baixa Idade Média, por exemplo, cujas fronteiras eram amiúde mal definidas e com abrangência limitada, basicamente competiam pela lealdade de populações voltadas para a esfera local.

Ao longo daquela época tudo, de exércitos a tribunais a coletores de impostos, era obrigado a essencialmente competir, tendo sua legitimidade e primazia testadas — e solapadas — por outros fazendo a mesma coisa. E embora possa ter-se tratado de nada próximo da sociedade sem estado que nós anarquistas de mercado visionamos, aquele período fornece testemunho instigante de completa desnecessidade de monopólios com índole de carrasco para proporcionar esses serviços.

A anarquia não é falta de lei, e sim ausência de estado; ela pede fim não da organização da lei e da defesa, mas aperfeiçoamento dessa organização e a retirada dela das mãos das quadrilhas criminosas que hoje vagam por nossas ruas.

Artigo original afixado por David S. D’Amato em 27 de setembro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

The US Congress broke out its smoke and mirrors kit again last week, with the House passing an “emergency” spending bill to “prevent a government shutdown,” and the Senate expected to follow this week. Once that’s done, the kit’s tools will remain in action through Election Day as both major parties tout their diligent work to prevent “sequestration” — a package of mandatory “cuts” to the federal budget scheduled to kick in if politicians can’t come to an agreement otherwise by January 2nd.

This perennial kabuki is interesting not so much for the acting — let’s face it, most American politicians phone their performances in these days — as for the props. The US government’s budget process is a prime example of what Wendy McElroy refers to as the “democratization of reality.”

“‘Facts,'” writes McElroy (“The War on Words and Facts,” Laissez Faire Books, September 15), “are manufactured by those who control information and, then, they are broadcast widely to unquestioning people who believe them because the ‘facts’ spew from authorities or the media.”

Let’s look at some of the “facts” involved in the US government’s budget jiggery-pokery.

The current “emergency spending bill” nonsense is just that — nonsense. No “government shutdown” is at stake. In Washington, a “government shutdown” means that certain “non-essential government services” are temporarily stopped. The government employees who get laid off for a day or a week in order to heighten audience suspension of disbelief get paid for that time off when they return (as they inevitably shall). And if a “government service” is not, in fact, “essential,” then why is government providing that “service” in the first place, and how does the prospect that it might cease to do so become an “emergency?”

As far as “sequestration” is concerned, the “cuts” it implies are, for the most part, not really “cuts” at all, let alone cuts of “draconian” scale, or cuts that will “hollow out” Leviathan, as the nation’s politician-actors assure us.

Take, for example, the prospective “sequestration” “cuts” to the US Department of Defense. As the Federal Times‘s John T. Bennett notes (“Sequestration might be manageable, experts say,” September 18), “The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that even if the sequestration cuts stick, the annual Pentagon budget would dip below $500 billion [to approximately 2006 levels] for just one year, return to current levels by 2017 and approach $600 billion by 2020.”

And if “sequestration” doesn’t happen? The debate over the US “defense” budget is between the Obama administration’s proposal to grow “defense” spending by 10% between 2013 and 2018 (that’s the “draconian cuts — hollowing out the military!” end of the spectrum) and Republicans’ insistence on 18% growth over the same period.

To top that steaming pile of legerdemain off, it’s likely that the aforementioned “defense” spending won’t include the costs of already ongoing, or prospective, US foreign military adventures. Those have generally been funded — at least during the post-9/11 “war on terror” period — through “emergency supplemental” bills that don’t appear in budget forecasts.

It really is just theater, folks. I can’t think of a single sitting federal politician who actually proposes to cut the size or cost of the federal government.

US Representative and GOP vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s vaunted “austerity” proposal doesn’t even theoretically balance the budget for decades and grows government over that whole period, hoping for tax revenues to eventually catch up from the “stimulus” of top rate cuts.

Even the alleged “fringe gadflies” who talk a good line on the subject (yes, I’m referring to Ron Paul) are just giving lip service to “fiscal conservatism” packing budget bills with pork for their districts before casting symbolic “no” votes that they know won’t have any effect.

There is no “reform” path that gets us from “big government” to “small government.” Like sharks, states never stop growing. The only way to get to “smaller government” is for the existing state to die. And the only way to keep “smaller government” is to prevent that dead state’s replacement by another state.

Reminding us that states are merely marauding bands, violently appropriating land (and other) resources that they have no labor title to, long-held antagonisms between the Chinese and Japanese reignited this week. Sure enough, the land question remains, its importance brought to the forefront whenever we’re shown the utter chaos that the “order” of the state actually produces. It’s a matter of course that the dueling, turf-warring gangs holding us captive should demand our loyalty, and no less surprising that most have come to genuinely identify with their respective captors. Nationalism, as a central piece of the liturgical framework of statism, operates to shift attention away from the flaws underlying each and every instance of political rulership in favor of more immediate and concrete enemies. The islands that China and Japan both claim dominion over are but a small instance of a historical pattern of political titles placed in opposition to those that would be created and/or recognized by libertarian principles. If the Chinese are sore about these islands (Senkaku to the Japanese, Diaoyu to the Chinese), how sore indeed should all of us be at the history of political conquest that gave us the distribution of land (and other resources) we have today?

This article at Fast Company does a good job summarizing the philosophy behind the project.

Is their use of China’s special economic zones as their best example of how to lift millions out of poverty the most blatant vulgar-libertarian fallacy?

Or am I missing something?

According to Mitt Romney, 47% of Americans “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

So 47% of Americans are members of Congress and/or the armed forces?

A historical snippet of the left/right distinction that left-libertarians are sympathetic to from dictionary.com.

Sinister? I am sure “they” think so. “The better one”? I am sure “we” think so. Would sit on the left side of a King expressing our opposition to a monarch and monarchy, and favoring more democratic institutions? You got us, dead to rights.

During the election season the words left and right denote political affiliation more than spatial direction. But where do these associations come from?

The left hand has long been associated with deviance. The word “sinister” originally meant “to the left” in Latin. The word “left” comes from the Old English word lyft, which literally meant “weak, foolish.” To avoid the negative and superstitious associations of the left side, many languages used euphemisms for it. In Old English the left side was called winestra, which meant “friendlier.” In Greek it was called aristeros or “the better one.”

When did the political affiliation of these two common words arise? In fact, the association is not American at all. It originated during the French Revolution. In the 1790s, King Louis XVI  was fighting with the Legislative Assembly. Like our modern-day House of Representatives, seating in the French Legislative Assembly was arranged based on political affiliation. The King sat in front of the assembly. To his right sat the conservative Feuillants who backed the king and believed in a constitutional monarchy. To his left sat the liberal Girondists and radical Jacobins who wanted to install a completely democratic government. Oddly enough, in the U.S. House of Representatives the tables have turned: members of the Republican party sit to the left of the House Speaker and members of the Democratic party sit to his or her right.

It wasn’t until the early 20th century that Left and Right denoted political affiliation in Britain and the US, and the more politically loaded terms “leftwing” and “rightwing” were not widely used until after 1960 according to Google’s NGram viewer.