Today is the national day of action to free the Holy Land Five, who have been imprisoned by the US government.  Why are they being locked up?  Their donations of food and medicine to impoverished Palestinians were deemed “material support for terrorism.”  I’ll let the Committee to Stop FBI Repression explain:

The Holy Land Five need our urgent solidarity. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide in late October whether their final appeal will even be heard. The Holy Land Five are five Muslim charity leaders wrongly imprisoned due to U.S. government political repression. They are being punished for publicly sending charity to Palestinians, at a time when U.S. domination is being challenged in the Middle East.

The first Holy Land trial ended in a hung jury, but a second one — using secret witnesses who were never identified to the defense, hearsay evidence and a ‘shock video’ showing protesters in Palestine burning an American flag — contributed to prejudicing the jurors. The result is that five men, who did nothing wrong, are suffering long sentences, between 15 and 65 years.

The lead prosecutor who used these dirty tricks in court is Barry Jonas. Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry Jonas is now in Chicago, conducting the ongoing investigation of 23 Midwest anti-war and international solidarity activists. Jonas is a pro-Israel ideologue, politically motivated and willing to trample on people’s rights.

As thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters learned this past year, the U.S. is becoming a more repressive place. For more than ten years now, hundreds of Arabs and Muslims have faced and are facing unjust prosecutions. Many are already behind bars. Help us turn this injustice around!

This is naked political repression by the state, and amounts to nothing less than the criminalization of compassion and solidarity.   To learn more, visit http://freedomtogive.com/

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

“Na mais recente manifestação de uma economia viciada em estímulo artificial,” escreve Colin Barr, daFortune, “o Sistema da Reserva Federal divulgou, na segunda-feira, lucro recorde de $81 biliões de dólares em 2010.” Barr destaca que a bolada do banco central é “mais dinheiro do que área bancária inteira ganhou ao longo dos últimos três … anos.”

Observa, também, que a maior parte desse dinheiro veio de juros dos empréstimos hipotecários podres que o Fed assumiu para aliviar seus compadres bancgsters quando a exploração, por estes, do mercado subprimário começou a dar errado. Pessoas leigas em economia podem ser desculpadas por se perguntarem como, no meio dos presentes problemas econômicos, o Fed está conseguindo resultados tão favoráveis, e poderíamos até olhar isso como prenúncio de recuperação mais vasta.

Isso, contudo, seria um equívoco. Do mesmo modo que o dinheiro que imprime, os lucros informados pelo Sistema da Reserva Federal não são o que parecem, representando retornos de investimentos precários que nenhum investidor com juízo faria. Esses investimentos pútridos incluem não apenas os títulos lastreados em hipotecas estratificadas que se tornaram o foco do desastre financeiro como, também, títulos do tesouro que patrocinam a dívida do governo federal. Mesmo essas participações gerando, agora, renda, a compra delas com dinheiro imaginário “impresso” eletronicamente significa que pessoas livres, financeiramente responsáveis, nunca tiveram a oportunidade de descobrir qual o preço de equilíbrio delas(*). (* clearing price – http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/clearingprice.asp)

Como o Fed não pode atribuir a um ativo valor que ele não tenha de fato, o preço de mercado finalmente prevalecerá, mas não sem antes nós pagarmos a conta. O furto pelo Fed é um processo discreto e impessoal por meio do qual o homem comum anônimo “contribuinte” é destituído “a fim de manter os fundos fluindo pela economia.” E esse objetivo  — a administração da economia — é o motivo pretenso do Fed para sua loucura, embora mal não faça todas as estruturas institucionais apoiarem o “Grande Demais para Falir.”

Não importa o modo pelo qual você guie nele, o processo político é uma avenida conducente a beco sem saída, com toda a atividade interna a tal processo representando, fundamentalmente, desperdício. E isso não se deve a qualquer ausência de pessoas bem intencionadas e moralmente sensíveis, nem a superabundância de maléficos cometedores do mal. Não; o resultado da política decorre, isso sim, do fato imutável de as leis dela não terem o poder de anular ou de alterar leis mais elevadas — situemos sua fonte em realidade natural, em Deus ou onde mais seja — que tornam impossível obter resultados positivos por meio da violência.

“A intervenção hegemônica,” escreveu Murray Rothbard, “substitui a ordem pelo … caos,” sendo essa ordem “o mecanismo de harmonia, ajustamento, e precisão” que ele situou na conduta consensual de indivíduos administradores de si próprios. O caos sintomático do “princípio hegemônico” é evidência não apenas da impraticabilidade de controlarem-se pessoas e a sociedade livre como, em verdade, daimpossibilidade de fazer-se isso; o estado — as pessoas e instituições que, por meio de agir agressivamente, o constituem — simplesmente não pode saber todas as coisas que teria de saber para “administrar” de modo bem sucedido as interações dentro da sociedade.

Consideremos o exemplo de uma família encarregada de administrar todos os outros lares de sua rua. Mesmo a família melhor organizada e metódica não terá comosaber todos os fatos indispensáveis para gerir todas as atividades de todas as outras casas, alocar eficazmente os recursos delas ou compreender os problemas específicos delas. Ainda assumindo-se que a família pudesse compilar os fatos relevantes, não seria capaz de interpretá-los de maneira que lhe permitisse empregar fundos e materiais adequadamente.

O controle político de nosso sistema econômico pela elite é mais tortuoso e menos direto do que aquele de nossa rua hipotética, mas o princípio fundamental e seus problemas concomitantes são os mesmos. Organizações hierárquicas como o Sistema da Reserva Federal, as enormes burocracias no timão de nossa sociedade, gozam de presunção a seu favor dentro de nossa estrutura conceptual. Se contudo escrutinarmos o que fazem, descobriremos que efetuam um conjunto de insanidades a que nunca nos permitiríamos em nossas vidas.

Artigo original afixado por David D’Amato em 10 de janeiro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

Monday’s Presidential debate on foreign policy, as one might have expected, supplied more than its share of howlers. Mittens, for example, referred to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as one of the “world’s worst actors.” In response to an early Obama administration statement to the effect that “the United States has dictated,” Romney said: “The United States does not dictate to other countries. It frees other countries from dictators.” And he referred to Iran as “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” and called for the prosecution of Ahmadinejad for genocide.

It’s hard to guess whether Mittens is really this abysmally ignorant or just pandering to his estimate of his audience’s stupidity.

Let’s start with Chavez. He’s certainly shown a dismaying tendency toward authoritarianism and caudillismo as president of Venezuela. But it’s a safe guess his “Bolivarian Socialism” is nowhere near as godawful as the regime the United States would have replaced him with — and still would — had its attempted coup in 2002 succeeded. At best it would reenact the corporate looting of state assets, rubber-stamping of fake “free trade” treaties, and union busting carried out by Paul Bremer’s Iraq Provisional Authority. At worst, it would resort to the same secret police and death squad murders of labor activists as other Latin American regimes installed by U.S.-backed coups in previous decades. Either way, you could count on massive transfer of peasant land back to landed oligarchs.

Apparently the U.S. state’s main criterion for a “bad actor” is someone who doesn’t take orders from Washington — and worse yet, manages to retain power when Washington decides to punish him for it.

As for that bit about “freeing countries from dictators” bit, my eyes hurt from rolling so much. Yeah, the U.S. freed the hell out of Guatemala, Iran and Indonesia. Mobutu built pyramids of the skulls of those he liberated. Starting with Goulart in Brazil and Allende in Chile, and proceeding through Operation Condor in the 1970s, the United States “freed” one country after another from left-leaning elected governments and replaced them with military dictatorships. In those days you could identify the “Free World” by all the dictatorships installed by the United States, rather than by the Soviet Union.

And any time you see a U.S. government ranking of “state sponsors of terrorism,” you should always remember to fill in the unspoken “except for the United States.” From the military regime that supplanted Arbenz in 1954 to the Contras in Nicaragua thirty years later, the systematic use of death squads to terrorize labor and landless peasant activists into docility has been a favorite weapon in the American arsenal.

Never mind the direct use of state military power as a terrorist weapon — deliberately blowing up electrical plants and water purification facilities. When it comes to the murder of hundreds of thousands through fire-bombing as an instrument of state terror, the U.S. has been the unchallenged heavyweight champion since 1945.

Not that Obama is any better. Liberal Democrats, just as much as Republicans, make foreign policy on the assumption stated by Chomsky as “America owns the world.” Obama, as much as Romney, believes the United States bears some sort of messianic obligation to maintain “global security” by determining the outcomes of international disputes, installing “responsible” governments, and deciding who’s allowed to have nukes. Obama, as much as Romney, believes America is the one country whose “defense” capability should be based, not on “legitimate defensive needs,” but on the capability of enforcing its will on the entire rest of the world combined. Obama believes, every bit as much as Madeline Albright did when she was raining death from the skies over Yugoslavia, that “America is the world’s indispensable nation.”

Obama may believe that America sometimes “makes mistakes” in carrying out this messianic destiny, but he doesn’t question the rightfulness of the destiny itself. Romney uses red meat rhetoric to appeal to the jingoist bigots in his base. But Obama’s more pacific rhetoric amounts to little more, in practice, than James T. Kirk’s attitude as expressed in the novelty song “Star Trekkin'”: “We come in peace — shoot to kill, shoot to kill …”

However the 2012 race comes out, the winner will believe America has a unique role in telling the other countries of the world what to do. He’ll murder people — including American citizens — by the thousands with drones with no oversight whatsoever. And he’ll treat the ability to defend against an American attack as a “threat.”

The foreign policy will be the same. But you get to choose whether you want it packaged in idealistic Kennedy liberal rhetoric, or troglodytic “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” rhetoric. So which is it? Coke or Pepsi?

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, El Debate de Política Exterior en Estados Unidos: ¿Coca-Cola o Pepsi?

The following article was written by Jeremy Weiland and published on the Social Memory Complex, June 2nd, 2008.

My shift from minarchism to anarchism was not completely, or even substantially, motivated by a distaste for government (I already had that). Rather, anarchism is a way of looking at the human condition that does not presuppose the power relationships we take for granted. I grew to view state politics as but one manifestation of these underlying relationships.

If the way in which we organize and think about ourselves precipitates certain outcomes, perhaps we can effect different, more desirable outcomes by choosing different organizing ethics. Such an examination leads one in an extremely open-ended – yet liberating – direction, where these ethics and their premises are finally considered on their own merits. To quote Einstein, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” So how do we start to talk about that next level of thinking?

The existence of this uncharted territory, outside the pragmatic confines of our regimented, conservative society, is not directly explored in Butler Shaffer’s Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival. Admirably, Shaffer wastes no time arguing for his – or any – particular solutions to mankind’s many crises and problems. Instead, he takes the revolutionary step of removing the veil of indifference and deference to the primary units through which we realize our agendas: institutions. The book is a cataloging of the myths we tell ourselves and each other to keep things comfortable and stable at the expense of our freedom.

Written almost a quarter century ago but still penetratingly relevant, Calculated Chaos tries to strip down our modern managerial society into its basic organizing ethics. Shaffer’s thesis may seem awkward at first, but through careful examination of society the weight of this argument is established throughout the book:

Briefly stated, the basic theme of this book is that institutions are the principal means by which conflict is produced and managed in society. Peace is incompatible with institutional activity. Stated another way, the success of institutions depends upon the creation of those conditions in which personal and social conflict will flourish. We experience so much conflict in our lives because we have permitted ourselves to be organized into self-perpetuating, self-justifying organizations with which we have identified our personalities and to whom we look for direction. We have allowed our lives to be taken over and monopolized by a variety of political, religious, educational, economic, and social agencies over which we have little, if any, influence. These entities have helped us construct the barriers that not only restrain us, but keep us separated from one another and serve as the boundary lines for the intergroup struggles of which we are part. Through these groupings, we have helped to institutionalize conflict, to make it a seemingly permanent and necessary feature of human society. Such conflict has not resulted from mere accident of inadvertence, nor has it been the product of vicious or depraved minds. Rather, for reasons to be developed herein, conflict is a condition upon which the health and well-being of institutions is absolutely dependent.

It is crucial for anarchists and libertarians to note that he is not confining this argument to the state, though he devotes a whole chapter to “the people pushers” of politics. In order to appreciate the weight of this book, you must understand that his argument applies just as much to the Catholic or Baptist churches, to the activist groups of the left and right, to the corporations, to the Kiwanis and Rotaries, and so on.

Not all groups are institutional, Shaffer argues. By institutions, he means:

any permanent social organization with purposes of its own, having formalized and structured machinery for pursuing those purposes, and making and enforcing rules of conduct in order to control those within it.

A key distinction for Shaffer between institutional and noninstitutional forms of organization lies in part in the formality of such groups. People coming together for a common purpose of their own is not institutional, because the group is merely a convenience for each individual pursuing their interests. The problem arises when the group becomes something more than that: an entity in its own right, with interests and purposes independent of its members’. Surprisingly (for a LewRockwell.com columnist) he even challenges some Austrian sacred cows:

What begins as a simple division of labor, a system of specialization designed to allow the work of the group to get done more efficiently, becomes a division of purpose, with group members segregated into a chain of command. When this takes place, the organization is no longer a tool serving its members: the members have become conscripts in service to the organization.

It should be clear by now that Shaffer plays no favorites in his critique of institutional society – everything is game for the thinking individual.

Yet individualism is not Shaffer’s bag, either. To him, that philosophy is just as reactionary as the collectivism of many institutions:

The search for human liberty is not one in which every individual is arrayed against the presumed collective of all others, or of one group struggling against another group, but is a pursuit that should serve to unite us on the basis of our common desire for the autonomy we require if we are to experience self-fulfilling transcendence of our continuing evolution.

If there is an individualistic theme to Shaffer’s argument, it is only because of his insistence on the personal part each of us play in the conflicts that make institutional society function. In contradistinction to the group identities of institutions, Shaffer discusses the spontaneity and intimacy of community, and the need to know and be yourself within it.

Self-analysis and self reflection end up being the lynchpins of this book. Much of our dilemma stems from personal values and assumptions we’ve accepted of our own free will without careful thinking – sometimes because of indoctrination, often out of laziness or a lack of self-esteem. Calculated Chaos is in many ways not a call for society to change, but for the reader to rediscover himself.

I must admit my surprise at how metaphysical Shaffer’s book becomes as it delves deeper and deeper into the personal nature of the organizational ethics and principles underlying our society. For instance, Shaffer proposes that institutions serve as surrogate identities that allow us to expand what he calls our “ego boundaries”. This imperative to seek outside ourselves for purpose and meaning arises, he posits, from failing to train our attention on the present moment and allowing narratives of reality to arise that are incomplete and simplistic. Institutions encapsulate a convenient myth that divorces us from the responsibility to know ourselves fully, providing contrived identities to which we can cling. These identities and allegiances drive the interpersonal and intergroup strife that establishes institutional primacy because we are acting out of a lack of understanding of ourselves.

Shaffer provides very few answers in his exploration of the conflicts we have established within and without ourselves, preferring to ask questions that challenge the hidden premises of our institutionalized society. This is uncomfortably deliberate: one of Shaffer’s theses is that institutions thrive in regimented, predictable environments where events conform to articulable principles and systems. To transcend the conflicts created by our institutional manners of thought, we must appreciate that our need formality certainty is largely artificial and unessential, serving the purposes of institutional perpetuation and organization more than our own. A dogmatic, rule-oriented approach to reality will always be necessarily limited, because it’s built on assumptions of stability and order based on past experience instead of present experience. By participating in these rigid, static systems of thought, we lose our awareness for the present, which is dynamic, mysterious, and able to be apprehended without inhibition or formula.

It is in this speculative, inquisitive, inward-directed manner that Shaffer explores “our well-organized conflicts”. Anarchists would find the idea that institutions create the conditions of strife and discord that give them their social functions quite unremarkable. But Shaffer goes deeper, locating the origin of institutions in our own minds and hearts. It is through sublimating our own selves to institutional identities, adopting the views that reinforce their purposes and interests, complying with and depending upon their expectations, direction, and mobilization, that we realize a world so chaotic and conflicted.

Calculated Chaos advances the unthinkable political concept that you and I are responsible for the institutional dysfunction of society. This seems hard to accept because radical politics is built on identifying enemies in things outside ourselves that compel and control us. Shaffer’s book is a new take on the philosophy of liberation: we have made the agendas of institutions our own agendas, but we can choose otherwise. To all left libertarians, anarchists, and advocates of a voluntary society, I give this book the very highest recommendation possible.

The following article is translated into Portuguese from the English original, written by Thomas L. Knapp.

“Filosofia ideológica e movimento político do qual se pensava constituir antiquada excentricidade, relíquia do final do século 19, voltou à ribalta,” escreve Abe Greenwald em Comentário. Pior ainda, opina Greenwald, esse retorno é prenhe da “consequência bastante de a Secretária de Estado Hillary Clinton ter recentemente denunciado o terrorismo ‘venha ele da direita, da esquerda, da al-Qaeda, dos anarquistas, de quem seja.’”

Do mesmo modo que aqueles boatos a respeito da morte de Mark Twain, asseverações recorrentes acerca da morte e da ressurreição do anarquismo são grandemente exageradas. Greenwald interpreta erroneamente suas próprias observações. O que ele está vendo não é ressurreição, é ressurgência: Fenômeno cíclico impulsionado precipuamente pelo fidedigno fracasso do estado moderno em cumprir suas mais básicas promessas de paz, prosperidade e respeito pelos direitos humanos.

Em seu menor nível de introspecção, o anarquismo parece-se a reação puramente visceral a esse fracasso. Quando alguém é confrontado com alguma manifestação particularmente repugnante de X, é apenas natural postular reflexamente Não-X como solução. O crescimento do estado — seu tamanho crescente, a sempre mais insistente inserção de si próprio em novas áreas de interação humana e sua abrangência em regularizar e em cooptar, em vez de sanar, doenças sociais — torna-o cada vez mais o suspeito usual do papel de X. Assim as cada vez mais frequentes renascenças do anarquismo como teatro populista de rua.

Para além dessa expressão visceral, o anarquismo — oposição fundamental, baseada em convicções firmes, à existência do estado — sobrevive na forma de numerosas tradições intelectuais inconsúteis (embora amiúde em evolução), esperando, ou melhor dizendo, implorando ser adotadas por aqueles atores de rua tanto como ferramenta explanatória quanto como plano para ação mais bem pensada.

À medida que o experimento hobbesiano que chamamos de “o estado” polariza-se ao longo das linhas de suas próprias contradições de autoritarismo de “esquerda” e “direita” (Hobbes, ao encontro de Hegel!), o anarquismo emerge não como antítese, mas síntese. Quando o estado esgota ficções convincentes (“constitucionalismo,” “ditadura do proletariado,” “fuhrerprinzip”) para mascarar essas contradições e se torna enfraquecido, perto de colapso na cova que ele próprio cavucou, é o anarquismo que invariavelmente vemos aproximar-se, pá na mão, pronto para enterrar o experimento fracassado e para voltar-se, com humanidade, para novos experimentos.

Por cerca de dois séculos os anarquistas — por vezes em ofegante expectativa, por vezes em espírito estoico de resignada pertinácia — vieram buscando inspiração na admoestação de Catão o Velho de que Cartago precisava ser destruída. O estado, dizemos, precisa ser destruído, quanto mais cedo melhor. Alguém pode passar o sal, por favor?

Artigo original afixado por Thomas L. Knapp em 28 de março de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

To the slanting wall above my desk is taped a large “Come Home America/ Vote McGovern Shriver ’72” poster. Designed by artist Leonard R. Fuller, the collage fills an outline of the United States with iconographic images, historic statuary, and photos of unprepossessing but individuated Americans. The message is peace and brotherhood and a return to the ideals of the Founders. The mood is civics-class hippie, antiwar wife-of-a-Rotarian, liberal community-college-professor-who-cries-at-“America the Beautiful.” Like George McGovern himself, the poster suggests that a hopeful and patriotic mild radicalism resides on Main Street America. Or as Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe once asked, what’s so funny ‘bout peace, love, and understanding?

Even now, 30 and three years after Sen. George McGovern of Mitchell, South Dakota was buried by Richard M. Nixon under an electoral-vote landslide of 520-17-1 (Virginia elector Roger MacBride, heir to the Little House on the Prairie goldmine, bolted Nixon for Libertarian John Hospers), “McGovernism” remains Beltway shorthand for a parodistic liberalism that is, at once, ineffectual, licentious, and wooly-headed. It stands for “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” as the Humphrey-Jackson Democrats put it.

But perhaps, as George McGovern ages gracefully while his country does not, it is time to stop looking at McGovern through the lenses of Scoop Jackson and those neoconservative publicists who so often trace their disenchantment with the Democratic Party to the 1972 campaign. What if we refocus the image and see the George McGovern who doesn’t fit the cartoon? Son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister who had played second base in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system, this other George McGovern revered Charles Lindbergh as “our greatest American” and counted among his happiest memories those “joyous experiences with my dad” hunting pheasants. He was voted “The Most Representative Senior Boy” in his high school and went to the college down the street, walking a mile each morning to Dakota Wesleyan and then coming home for lunch.

This other George McGovern was a bomber pilot who flew 35 B-24 missions in the Dakota Queen, named after his wife, Eleanor Stegeberg of Woonsocket, South Dakota, whom he had courted at the Mitchell Roller Rink. He grew up in and remains a congregant of the First United Methodist Church of Mitchell; he knows by heart the “old hymns” and sings them aloud “with the gusto of those devout congregations that shaped my life so many years ago.” This other George McGovern is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan and member in good standing of the Stan Musial Society. He lives most of the year in Mitchell, his hometown, and says, “There is a wholesomeness about life in a rural state that is a meaningful factor. It doesn’t guarantee you are going to be a good guy simply because you grow up in an agricultural area, but I think the chances of it are better, because of the sense of well-being, the confidence in the decency of life that comes with working not only with the land but also with the kinds of people who live on the land. Life tends to be more authentic and less artificial than in urban areas. You have a sense of belonging to a community. You’re closer to nature and you see the changing seasons.”

This George McGovern, dyed deeply in the American grain, is a hell of a lot more interesting than the burlesque that was framed by his neocon critics.

On a clement November morn, I chatted with Senator McGovern in his room at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington. He was in town for a memorial service for his friend, the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.), another casualty of 1980, when a pack of liberal Senate Democratic lions were defeated by New Right “family values” Republicans, many of them with rather more unconventional domestic lives than the liberals.

Targeted by Terry Dolan and NCPAC, McGovern was trounced 58-39 percent by the ineloquent James Abdnor. McGovern can laugh now about the perversity of the 1980 election. “It ticked me off, and it was also kind of laughable. A group called American Family Index rated us. I came out with a zero, Jim Abdnor got a perfect score. Here I am a guy who has been married to the same woman for 37 [now 62] years with five children and ten grandchildren and I’m running against Jim Abdnor, a 58-year-old bachelor who gets a 100 percent rating. I’m not against 58-year-old bachelors, not for one minute, but they’re hardly a symbol of what promotes the American family.”

McGovern is, as you might guess, an opponent of the Iraq War and the Bush administration, which he finds appallingly un-conservative. “I like conservatives,” he says, citing Bob Dole and Barry Goldwater. “Bob Taft I always admired.” He grins. “But I don’t like these neoconservatives worth a damn! They have this view that we are so much more powerful than any other country in the world that we need to run the world—none of this business of coexistence. I think that’s just terrible. It’s not conservatism, and it’s not liberalism, either. It’s a new doctrine that I find frightening. If Iraq hadn’t gone sour, there was a whole string of countries they were gonna knock off. That’s not conservatism to me.”

I ask if Iraq is yet in Vietnam’s class as a foreign-policy disaster. “The casualty rate isn’t nearly as high,” he responds, “but the assumptions are just as misguided. Vietnam was a logical expression of the Cold War ideology that we operated under for half a century. If you accepted the view that we had to confront communism wherever it raised its head, Vietnam became perfectly logical.” (McGovern quotes approvingly his pheasant-hunting friend, University of South Dakota history professor Herbert Schell, who told a reporter in 1972, “He is the only nominee of either major party since World War II who has not accepted the assumptions of the Cold War.” Bob Taft would have been on the list, too, had he been the GOP nominee in 1948 or ‘52.)

What advice does McGovern, one of the first Democrats to dissent from a Democratic war in the 1960s, have for antiwar Republicans? “Make a little more noise,” he says. He points to the House Republicans who voted against the Iraq War. “They’re the kind of Republicans I’ve always admired. They’re close to where my father would have been. He was a lifelong Republican. My dad was a big admirer of old Bob La Follette and voted for him when he ran for president. It’s an honorable tradition to be a dissenting Republican.” (One of McGovern’s early enthusiasms as a senator was a war-profits tax, which came straight out of the La Follette tradition.)

With the Oregon Republican and neo-Taftie Mark Hatfield, McGovern sponsored the 1970 McGovern-Hatfield “Amendment to End the War,” which called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam and “an end to all U.S. military operations in or over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos no later than December 31, 1971.”

Impatient with the chronically cautious, with the kind of eunuchs who tell you behind closed doors that they’re against a war but don’t want to risk their position by taking a public stand, McGovern told his colleagues, “Every Senator in this Chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This Chamber reeks of blood.”

It still does, senator. It still does.

Robert Sam Anson wrote in McGovern, his fine biography, “To the extent that his vision of life is bounded by certain, immutable values—the importance of family, the dependence on nature, the strength of community, the worth of living things—he is a conservative. He seeks not so much to change America as to restore it, to return it to the earliest days of the Republic, which he believes, naively or not, were fundamentally decent, humane, and just. Like the Populists, he is willing to gamble with radical means to accomplish his end. There remains in him, though, as it remained in the Populists, a lingering distrust of government, a suspicion of bigness in all its forms.”

I read that to McGovern. Was there a “conservative” side to him that somehow people missed?

“Absolutely,” he replies. “I remember that observation. I’m a confirmed liberal, but I think there’s a conservative aspect to liberalism at its best”: an awareness of limits, a respect for tradition, a love of the familiar. For instance, McGovern writes in his autobiography, “I prefer old houses or churches or public buildings that are built for the ages rather than modern-style structures that quickly deteriorate. I am uncomfortable with any translation of the Bible other than the magnificent King James version.” He traces this “sense of stability and permanence” to his thrifty family of Dakota Methodists.

“Throughout his congressional career, George McGovern won elections by conceptualizing his constituents as peaceful Christian agriculturalists,” wrote South Dakota State University political scientist Gary Aguiar. He spoke South Dakotan as fluently as he spoke liberalese, and when he asked, in 1972, “Who really appointed us to play God for people elsewhere around the globe?” he was grounded in plains soil as surely as Scoop Jackson was riding first class aboard Boeing.
For sharing his father’s skepticism about military crusades, McGovern, holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross, was mocked for being “weak on defense.” Stephen Ambrose, who wrote up McGovern’s military career in The Wild Blue, thought that he ought to have used his bomber pilot experience “to more effect in his 1972 presidential campaign.”

“I think it was a political error,” McGovern tells me, “but I always felt kind of foolish talking about my war record—what a hero I was. How do you do that?”

Well, you don’t if you’re a polite, decent fellow from Mitchell, South Dakota—even when you’re being pilloried as a Nervous Nellie by think-tank commanders who wouldn’t know an M-1 Garand from a grenade. LBJ had urged McGovern to sell himself as an avenging angel of the air, but McGovern demurred, saying that “it was not in my nature to turn the campaign into a constant exercise in self-congratulatory autobiography.”

McGovern lost not only because the bomber pilot was transmogrified into a cringing apostle of appeasement. His disastrous selection of the dishonest mental patient Thomas Eagleton as his first running mate derailed the campaign coming out of the convention. (Hunter S. Thompson is brilliantly savage on the phony martyr Eagleton in his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, the best book on the election.) The shooting and crippling of George Wallace prevented a probable third-party bid by Wallace that might have attracted 15-20 percent of the general election vote and tipped a number of states McGovernward.

I suppose no Democrat could have defeated Nixon in 1972. The incumbent’s popularity was buoyed by a fairly strong economy, détente with the USSR, the opening to China, and rumors of peace in Vietnam. But still, imagine George McGovern running not as an ultraliberal caricature but rather as the small-town Midwestern Methodist, a war hero too modest to boast of his bravery, a liberal with a sympathetic understanding of conservative rural America. That George McGovern might have given Nixon a run for Maurice Stans’s money.

In his autobiography Grassroots, McGovern wrote that “to this day I remain addicted to movies and those who act in them.” He was a bit starstruck, and the stars reciprocated: his 1972 campaign featured prominently Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Dennis Weaver, and other stellar eminences of varying magnitudes. Alas, their presence lent the McGovern campaign a taint of Hollywoodish decadence that partly erased the South Dakota Methodist McGovern who would have played so much better in Middle America. “I’ve wondered about that myself,” McGovern says. “I still treasure their endorsement, but it may have offset the South Dakota image.”

As for acid, amnesty, and abortion, McGovern’s positions now seem positively temperate: he favored decriminalizing marijuana; he argued against “the intrusion of the federal government” into abortion law, which should be left to the states; and, as he told me, “I could not favor amnesty as long as the war was in progress, but once it was over, I’d grant amnesty both to those who planned the war and those who refused to participate. I think that’s a somewhat conservative position.”

In the home stretch of the ’72 campaign, McGovern was groping toward truths that exist far beyond the cattle pens of Left and Right. “Government has become so vast and impersonal that its interests diverge more and more from the interests of ordinary citizens,” he said two days before the election. “For a generation and more, the government has sought to meet our needs by multiplying its bureaucracy. Washington has taken too much in taxes from Main Street, and Main Street has received too little in return. It is not necessary to centralize power in order to solve our problems.” Charging that Nixon “uncritically clings to bloated bureaucracies, both civilian and military,” McGovern promised to “decentralize our system.”

In the clutter and chaos of the campaign, one discerns themes that place McGovern on a whole other plane from that drab anteroom of Democratic losers, the Mondales and Dukakises and Humphreys and Kerrys. George McGovern had convictions; like Barry Goldwater in 1964, he stood for a set of ideals rooted in the American past. He spoke of open government, peace, the defense of the individual and the community against corporate power, a Congress that reasserts the power to declare war. After Eagleton’s petulant departure, McGovern chose as his veep the undervalued Sargent Shriver, founding member of the America First Committee, a pro-life Catholic who admired Dorothy Day.

Unlike the bilious Ed Muskie, who dismissed George Wallace’s Florida primary victory as a triumph of racism, McGovern credited Wallace’s appeal to “a sense of powerlessness in the face of big government, big corporations, and big labor unions.” He asked Wallace for his endorsement, though as he recalls with a smile, “He said, ‘Sena-tah, if I endorsed you I’d lose about half of my following and you’d lose half of yours.’” Well, maybe, guv-nah—but just think of the coalescent possibilities of the remaining halves.

“It is not prejudice to fear for your family’s safety or to resent tax inequities. … It is time to recognize this and to stop labeling people ‘racist’ or ‘militant,’ to stop putting people in different camps, to stop inciting one American against another,” said McGovern, who called the Wallace vote “an angry cry from the guts of ordinary Americans against a system which doesn’t seem to give a damn about what is really bothering people in this country today.” Yet McGovern defended busing, in which children were uprooted, sent away from neighborhoods, and a pitiless war was waged upon working-class urban Catholics.

Look: George McGovern was a liberal Democrat. He voted for social-welfare programs of every shape and size; his philosophy then and now was a product, he says, of the Social Gospel movement, which translates Christianity into an interventionist welfare state.

But at its not-frequent-enough best, McGovernism combined New Left participatory democracy with the small-town populism of the Upper Midwest. In a couple of April 1972 speeches, he seemed to second Barry Goldwater’s 1968 remark to aide Karl Hess that “When the histories are written, I’ll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy.”

“[M]ost Americans see the establishment center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love,” McGovern asserted in one of the great unknown campaign speeches in American history. “It is the establishment center that has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation. … It was not the American worker who designed the Vietnam war or our military machine. It was the establishment wise men, the academicians of the center. As Walter Lippmann once observed, ‘There is nothing worse than a belligerent professor.’”

Try to imagine a Democratic backbencher, let alone a presidential candidate, saying as much today. No wonder the scriveners of the Suffocating Center have no more potent imprecation in their thesauri than “McGovernism.”

Candidate McGovern called for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and South Korea and a partial pullout of troops from Europe. In his acceptance speech, which with exquisitely bad planning was delivered at 3:00 a.m. eastern time, or primetime in Guam, McGovern declared, “This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to rebuilding our own nation.” Close your eyes and you can hear McGovern’s prairie drawl backing Merle Haggard’s latest release: “Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on the track/And let’s rebuild America first.”

“Come home, America,” McGovern pled in that 1972 campaign. “Come home from the wilderness of needless war and excessive militarism.”

“Come home, America,” the most moving, the most resonant, the truest political slogan in the history of our Republic, was suggested by Eleanor McGovern after she saw the phrase in a speech by Martin Luther King. Because it echoed the peaceful dreams of the old Middle American isolationists and because it drew a sharp contrast between the vision of the Founders and the condition of modern America, McGovern was roasted for the slogan by the Vital Centurions.

“Late in the campaign I was having a visit with Clark Clifford,” remembers McGovern, “and I said, ‘Clark, just out of curiosity, what do you think of my slogan, Come Home America?’ He said, ‘Well, George, to be honest with you, I don’t know what it means.’”

Of course he didn’t! No bumper sticker that Clark Clifford understood would have been worth the vinyl it was printed on.

“Food, farmers and his fellow man—those are the foundation stones upon which George McGovern has built his philosophy of life,” ran a flattering press account early in the senator’s career, and in his retirement he returned to that trinity.

Appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture by President Clinton, McGovern lobbied for a universal school-lunch program funded partly by a $1.2 billion annual U.S. contribution. As an isolationist skeptical of foreign aid, I am able to restrain my huzzahs, but I’d sure as hell rather spend a billion buying lunch for kids in Bangladesh than $300 billion occupying Iraq.

In his latest book, The Essential America, McGovern keeps the faith of ’72. “Let’s support our troops by keeping them safely at home with their families rather than dispatching them abroad under the cockeyed notion of what our president has called ‘preemptive war,’” he advises. The petty tyrannies and indignities of the war on terror infuriate him: “I have no fear of doing battle with some character threatening me with a box cutter. What sets my teeth on edge is seeing a frail little aging woman trying to get her shoes off to be searched, lest she slip by with some trinket that could endanger the republic.” He quotes Dwight Eisenhower at greater length than any another political figure in The Essential America. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex is virtual samizdat in the age of Homeland Security; while McGovern remains fond of Adlai Stevenson, he admits that in the postwar era, Ike “was the best president at recognizing the dangers of excessive military outlays. And he showed great courage in stopping the Israeli move against Egypt over the Suez Canal.”

He calls the Patriot Act “completely unnecessary … a contradiction of the Bill of Rights” and counsels resistance if and when the federal police come for our library cards: “I’ll go to jail rather than accept such an invasion of my freedom as an American.”
At 83, George McGovern remains a voice for peace and freedom in a party that looks ready to nominate the militaristic schoolmarm Hillary Clinton as its next standard-bearer. Oh, how the Democrats could use a bracing shot of McGovernism.

Libertarian Anarchism: Transcription of a talk by Roderick T. Long

I want to talk about some of the main objections that have been given to libertarian anarchism and my attempts to answer them. But before I start giving objections and trying to answer them, there is no point in trying to answer objections to a view unless you have given some positive reason to hold the view in the first place. So, I just want to say briefly what I think the positive case is for it before going on to defend it against objections.

THE CASE FOR LIBERTARIAN ANARCHISM

Problems with Forced Monopoly

Think about it this way. What’s wrong with a shoe monopoly? Suppose that I and my gang are the only ones that are legally allowed to manufacture and sell shoes — my gang and anyone else that I authorize, but nobody else. What’s wrong with it? Well, first of all, from a moral point of view, the question is: why us? What’s so special about us? Now in this case, because I’ve chosen me, it is more plausible that I ought to have that kind of monopoly, so maybe I should pick a different example! But still, you might wonder, where do I and my gang get off claiming this right to make and sell something that no one else has the right to make and sell, to provide a good or service no one else has the right to provide. At least as far as you know, I’m just another mortal, another human like unto yourselves (more or less). So, from a moral standpoint I have no more right to do it than anyone else.

Then, of course, from a pragmatic, consequentialist standpoint — well, first of all, what is the likely result of my and my gang having a monopoly on shoes? Well, first of all, there are incentive problems. If I’m the only person who has the right to make and sell shoes, you’re probably not going to get the shoes from me very cheaply. I can charge as much as I want, as long as I don’t charge so much that you just can’t afford them at all or you decide you’re happier just not having the shoes. But as long as you’re willing and able, I’ll charge the highest price that I can get out of you — because you’ve got no competition, nowhere else to go. You also probably shouldn’t expect the shoes to be of particularly high quality, because, after all, as long as they’re barely serviceable, and you still prefer them to going barefoot — then you have to buy them from me.

In addition to the likelihood that the shoes are going to be expensive and not very good, there’s also the fact that my ability to be the only person who makes and sells shoes gives me a certain leverage over you. Suppose that I don’t like you. Suppose you’ve offended me in some way. Well, maybe you just don’t get shoes for a while. So, there’s also abuse-of-power issues.

But, it’s just not the incentive problem, because, after all, suppose that I’m a perfect saint and I will make the best shoes I possibly can for you, and I’ll charge the lowest price I possibly can charge, and I won’t abuse my power at all. Suppose I’m utterly trustworthy. I’m a prince among men (not in Machiavelli’s sense). There is still a problem, which is: how do I know exactly that I’m doing the best job I can with these shoes? After all, there’s no competition. I guess I could poll people to try to find out what kind of shoes they seem to want. But there are lots of different ways I could make shoes. Some of them are more expensive ways of making them, and some are less expensive. How do I know, given that there’s no market, and there’s really not much I can do in the way of profit and loss accounting? I just have to make guesses. So even if I’m doing my best, the quantity I make, the quality I make may not be best suited to satisfy people’s preferences, and I have a hard time finding these things out.

Government is a Forced Monopoly

So those are all reasons not to have a monopoly on the making and selling of shoes. Now, prima facie at least, it seems as though those are all good reasons for anyone not to have a monopoly in the provision of services of adjudicating disputes, and protecting rights, and all the things that are involved in what you might broadly call the enterprise of law. First of all there’s the moral question: why does one gang of people get the right to be the only ones in a given territory who can offer certain kinds of legal services or enforce certain kinds of things? And then there are these economic questions: what are the incentives going to be? Once again, it’s a monopoly. It seems likely that with a captive customer base they’re going to charge higher prices than they otherwise would and offer lower quality. There might even be the occasional abuse of power. And then, even if you manage to avoid all those problems, and you get all the saintly types into the government, there’s still the problem of how do they know that the particular way that they’re providing legal services, the particular mix of legal services they’re offering, the particular ways they do it are really the best ones? They just try to figure out what will work. Since there’s no competition, they don’t have much way of knowing whether what they’re doing is the most successful thing they could be doing.

So, the purpose of those considerations is to put the burden of proof on the opponent. So this is the point, then, when the opponent of competition in legal services has to raise some objections.

TEN OBJECTIONS TO LIBERTARIAN ANARCHISM

(1) Government is Not a Coercive Monopoly

Now, one objection that’s sometimes raised isn’t so much an objection to anarchism as an objection to the moral argument for anarchism: well, look, it’s not really a coercive monopoly. It’s not as though people haven’t consented to this because there’s a certain sense in which people have consented to the existing system — by living within the borders of a particular territory, by accepting the benefits the government offers, and so forth, they have, in effect, consented. Just as if you walk into a restaurant and sit down and say, “I’ll have a steak,” you don’t have to explicitly mention that you are agreeing to pay for it; it’s just sort of understood. By sitting down in the restaurant and asking for the steak, you are agreeing to pay for it. Likewise, the argument goes, if you sit down in the territory of this given state, and you accept benefits of police protection or something, then you’ve implicitly agreed to abide by its requirements. Now, notice that even if this argument works, it doesn’t settle the pragmatic question of whether this is the best working system.

But I think there is something dubious about this argument. It’s certainly true that if I go onto someone else’s property, then it seems like there’s an expectation that as long as I’m on their property I have to do as they say. I have to follow their rules. If I don’t want to follow their rules, then I’ve got to leave. So, I invite you over to my house, and when you come in I say, “You have to wear the funny hat.” And you say, “What’s this?” And I say, “Well, that’s the way it works in my house. Everyone has to wear the funny hat. Those are my rules.” Well, you can’t say, “I won’t wear the hat but I’m staying anyway.” These are my rules — they may be dumb rules, but I can do it.

Now suppose that you’re at home having dinner, and I’m your next-door-neighbor, and I come and knock on your door. You open the door, and I come in and I say, “You have to wear the funny hat.” And you say, “Why is this?” And I say, “Well, you moved in next door to me, didn’t you? By doing that, you sort of agreed.” And you say, “Well, wait a second! When did I agree to this?”

I think that the person who makes this argument is already assuming that the government has some legitimate jurisdiction over this territory. And then they say, well, now, anyone who is in the territory is therefore agreeing to the prevailing rules. But they’re assuming the very thing they’re trying to prove — namely that this jurisdiction over the territory is legitimate. If it’s not, then the government is just one more group of people living in this broad general geographical territory. But I’ve got my property, and exactly what their arrangements are I don’t know, but here I am in my property and they don’t own it — at least they haven’t given me any argument that they do — and so, the fact that I am living in “this country” means I am living in a certain geographical region that they have certain pretensions over — but the question is whether those pretensions are legitimate. You can’t assume it as a means to proving it.

Another thing is, one of the problems with these implicit social contract arguments is that it’s not clear what the contract is. In the case of ordering food in a restaurant, everyone pretty much knows what the contract is. So you could run an implicit consent argument there. But no one would suggest that you could buy a house the same way.

There are all these rules and things like that. When it’s something complicated no one says, “You just sort of agreed by nodding your head at some point,” or something. You have to find out what it is that’s actually in the contract; what are you agreeing to? It’s not clear if no one knows what exactly the details of the contract are. It’s not that persuasive.

Okay, well, most of the arguments I’m going to talk about are pragmatic, or a mixture of moral and pragmatic.

(2) Hobbes: Government is Necessary for Cooperation

Probably the most famous argument against anarchy is Hobbes. Hobbes’ argument is: well, look, human cooperation, social cooperation, requires a structure of law in the background. The reason we can trust each other to cooperate is because we know that there are legal forces that will punish us if we violate each other’s rights. I know that they’ll punish me if I violate your rights, but they’ll also punish you if you violate my rights. And so I can trust you because I don’t have to rely on your own personal character. I just have to rely on the fact that you’ll be intimidated by the law. So, social cooperation requires this legal framework backed up by force of the state.

Well, Hobbes is assuming several things at once here. First he’s assuming that there can’t be any social cooperation without law. Second, he’s assuming that there can’t be any law unless it’s enforced by physical force. And third, he’s assuming you can’t have law enforced by physical force unless it’s done by a monopoly state.

But all those assumptions are false. It’s certainly true that cooperation can and does emerge, maybe not as efficiently as it would with law, but without law. There’s Robert Ellickson’s book Order Without Law where he talks about how neighbors manage to resolve disputes. He offers all these examples about what happens if one farmer’s cow wanders onto another farmer’s territory and they solve it through some mutual customary agreements and so forth, and there’s no legal framework for resolving it. Maybe that’s not enough for a complex economy, but it certainly shows that you can have some kind of cooperation without an actual legal framework.

Second, you can have a legal framework that isn’t backed up by force. An example would be the Law Merchant in the late Middle Ages: a system of commercial law that was backed up by threats of boycott. Boycott isn’t an act of force. But still, you’ve got merchants making all these contracts, and if you don’t abide by the contract, then the court just publicizes to everyone: “this person didn’t abide by the contract; take that into account if you’re going to make another contract with them.”

And third, you can have formal legal systems that do use force that are not monopolistic. Since Hobbes doesn’t even consider that possibility, he doesn’t really give any argument against it. But you can certainly see examples in history. The history of medieval Iceland, for example, where there was no one center of enforcement. Although there was something that you might perhaps call a government, it had no executive arm at all. It had no police, no soldiers, no nothing. It had a sort of a competitive court system. But then enforcement was just up to whoever. And there were systems that evolved for taking care of that.

(3) Locke: Three “Inconveniences” of Anarchy

Okay, well, more interesting arguments are from Locke. Locke argues that anarchy involves three things he calls “inconveniences.” And “inconvenience” has a somewhat more weighty sound in 17th century English than it does in modern English, but still his point in calling it “inconveniences,” which still is a bit weaker, was that Locke thought that social cooperation could exist somewhat under anarchy. He was more optimistic than Hobbes was. He thought, on the basis of moral sympathies on the one hand and self-interest on the other, cooperation could emerge.

He thought there were three problems. One problem, he said, was that there wouldn’t be a general body of law that was generally known, and agreed on, and understood. People could grasp certain basic principles of the law of nature. But their applications and precise detail were always going to be controversial. Even libertarians don’t agree. They can agree on general things, but we’re always arguing with each other about various points of fine detail. So, even in a society of peaceful, cooperative libertarians, there are going to be disagreements about details. And so, unless there’s some general body of law that everyone knows about so that they can know what they can count on being able to do and what not, it’s not going to work. So that was Locke’s first argument. There has to be a generally known universal body of law that applies to everyone that everyone knows about ahead of time.

Second, there is a power-of-enforcement problem. He thought that without a government you don’t have sufficiently unified power to enforce. You just have individuals enforcing things on their own, and they’re just too weak, they’re not organized enough, they could be overrun by a gang of bandits or something.

Third, Locke said the problem is that people can’t be trusted to be judges in their own case. If two people have a disagreement, and one of them says, “Well, I know what the law of nature is and I’m going to enforce it on you,” well, people tend to be biased, and they’re going to find most plausible the interpretation of the law of nature that favors their own case. So, he thought that you can’t trust people to be judges in their own case; therefore, they should be morally required to submit their disputes to an arbitrator. Maybe in cases of  emergency they can still defend themselves on-the-spot, but for other cases where it’s not a matter of immediate self-defense, they need to delegate this to an arbitrator, a third party — and that’s the state.

So Locke thinks that these are three problems you have under anarchy, and that you wouldn’t have them under government or at least under the right kind of government. But I think that it’s actually exactly the other way around. I think that anarchy can solve all three of those problems, and that the state, by its very nature, cannot possibly solve them.

So let’s first take the case of universality, or having a universally known body of law that people can know ahead of time and count on. Now, can that emerge in a non-state system? Well, in fact, it did emerge in the Law Merchant precisely because the states were not providing it. One of the things that helped to bring about the emergence of the Law Merchant is the individual states in Europe each had different sets of laws governing merchants. They were all different. And a court in France wouldn’t uphold a contract made in England under the laws of England, and vice versa. And so, the merchants’ ability to engage in international trade was hampered by the fact that there wasn’t any uniform system of commercial law for all of Europe. So the merchants got together and said, “Well, let’s just make some of our own. The courts are coming up with these crazy rules, and they’re all different, and they won’t respect each other’s decisions, so we’ll just ignore them and we’ll set up our own system.” So this is a case in which uniformity and predictability were produced by the market and not by the state. And you can see why that’s not surprising. It’s in the interest of those who are providing a private system to make it uniform and predictable if that’s what the customers need.

It’s for the same reason that you don’t find any triangular ATM cards. As far as I know, there’s no law saying that you can’t have a triangular ATM card, but if anyone tried to market them, they just wouldn’t be very popular because they wouldn’t fit into the existing machines. When what people need is diversity, when what people need is different systems for different people, the market provides that. But there are some things where uniformity is better. Your ATM card is more valuable to you if everyone else is using the same kind as well or a kind compatible with it so that you can all use the machines wherever you go; and therefore, the merchants, if they want to make a profit, they’re going to provide uniformity. So the market has an incentive to provide uniformity in a way that government doesn’t necessarily.

On the question of having sufficient power for organizing for defense — well, there’s no reason you can’t have organization under anarchy. Anarchy doesn’t mean that each person makes their own shoes. The alternative to government providing all the shoes is not that each person makes their own shoes. So, likewise, the alternative to government providing all the legal services is not that each person has to be their own independent policeman. There’s no reason that they can’t organize in various ways. In fact, if you’re worried about not having sufficient force to resist an aggressor, well, a monopoly government is a much more dangerous aggressor than just some gang of bandits or other because it’s unified all this power in just one point in the whole society.

But I think, most interestingly, the argument about being a judge in your own case really boomerangs against Locke’s argument here. Because first of all, it’s not a good argument for a monopoly because it’s a fallacy to argue from everyone should submit their disputes to a third party to there should be a third party that everyone submits their disputes to. That’s like arguing from everyone likes at least one TV show to there’s at least one TV show that everyone likes. It just doesn’t follow. You can have everyone submitting their disputes to third parties without there being some one third party that every one submits their disputes to. Suppose you’ve got three people on an island. A and B can submit their disputes to C, and A and C can submit their disputes to B, and B and C can submit their disputes to A. So you don’t need a monopoly in order to embody this principle that people should submit their disputes to a third party.

But moreover, not only do you not need a government, but a government is precisely what doesn’t satisfy that principle. Because if you have a dispute with the government, the government doesn’t submit that dispute to a third party. If you have a dispute with the government, it’ll be settled in a government court (if you’re lucky — if  you’re unlucky, if you live under one of the more rough-and-ready governments, you won’t ever even get as far as a court). Now, of course, it’s better if the government is itself divided, checks-and-balances and so forth. That’s a little bit better, that’s closer to there being third parties, but still they are all part of the same system; the judges are paid by tax money and so forth. So, it’s not as though you can’t have better and worse approximations to this principle among different kinds of governments. Still, as long as it’s a monopoly system, by its nature, it’s in a certain sense lawless. It never ultimately submits its disputes to a third party.

(4) Ayn Rand: Private Protection Agencies Will Battle

Probably the most popular argument against libertarian anarchy is: well, what happens if (and this is Ayn Rand’s famous argument) I think you’ve violated my rights and you think you haven’t, so I call up my protection agency, and you call up your protection agency — why won’t they just do battle? What guarantees that they won’t do battle? To which, of course, the answer is: well, nothing guarantees they won’t do battle. Human beings have free will. They can do all kinds of crazy things. They might go to battle. Likewise, George Bush might decide to push the nuclear button tomorrow. They might do all sorts of things.

The question is: what’s likely? Which is likelier to settle its disputes through violence: a government or a private protection agency? Well, the difference is that private protection agencies have to bear the costs of their own decisions to go to war. Going to war is expensive. If you have a choice between two protection agencies, and one solves its disputes through violence most of the time, and the other one solves its disputes through arbitration most of the time — now, you might think, “I want the one that solves its disputes through violence — that’s sounds really cool!” But then you look at your monthly premiums. And you think, well, how committed are you to this Viking mentality? Now, you might be so committed to the Viking mentality that you’re willing to pay for it; but still, it is more expensive. A lot of customers are going to say, “I want to go to one that doesn’t charge all this extra amount for the violence.” Whereas, governments — first of all, they’ve got captive customers, they can’t go anywhere else — but since they’re taxing the customers anyway, and so the customers don’t have the option to switch to a different agency. And so, governments can externalize the costs of their going to war much more effectively than private agencies can.

(5) Robert Bidinotto: No Final Arbiter of Disputes

One common objection — this is one you find, for example, in Robert Bidinotto, who’s a Randian who’s written a number of articles against anarchy (he and I have had sort of a running debate online about this) — his principal objection to anarchy is that under anarchy, there’s no final arbiter in disputes. Under government, some final arbiter at some point comes along and resolves the dispute one way or the other. Well, under anarchy, since there’s no one agency that has the right to settle things once and for all, there’s no final arbiter, and so disputes, in some sense, never end, they never get resolved, they always remain open-ended.

So what’s the answer to that? Well, I think that there’s an ambiguity to the concept here of a final arbiter. By “final arbiter,” you could mean the final arbiter in what I call the Platonic sense. That is to say, someone or something or some institution that somehow absolutely guarantees that the dispute is resolved forever; that absolutely guarantees the resolution. Or, instead, by “final arbiter” you could simply mean some person or process or institution or something-or-other that more or less reliably guarantees most of the time that these problems get resolved.

Now, it is true, that in the Platonic sense of an absolute guarantee of a final arbiter — in that sense, anarchy does not provide one. But neither does any other system. Take a minarchist constitutional republic of the sort that Bidinotto favors. Is there a final arbiter under that system, in the sense of something that absolutely guarantees ending the process of dispute forever? Well, I sue you, or I’ve been sued, or I am accused of something, whatever — I’m in some kind of court case. I lose. I appeal it. I appeal it to the Supreme Court. They go against me. I lobby the Congress to change the laws to favor me. They don’t do it. So then I try to get a movement for a Constitutional Amendment going. That fails, so I try and get people together to vote in new people in Congress who will vote for it. In some sense it can go on forever. The dispute isn’t over.

But, as a matter of fact, most of the time most legal disputes eventually end. Someone finds it too costly to continue fighting. Likewise, under anarchy — of course there’s no guarantee that the conflict won’t go on forever. There are very few guarantees of that iron-clad sort. But that’s no reason not to expect it to work.

(6) Property Law Cannot Emerge from the Market

Another popular argument, also used often by the Randians, is that market exchanges presuppose a background of property law. You and I can’t be making exchanges of goods for services, or money for services, or whatever, unless there’s already a stable background of property law that ensures us the property titles that we have. And because the market, in order to function, presupposes existing background property law, therefore, that property law cannot itself be the product of the market. The property law must emerge — they must really think it must emerge out of an infallible robot or something — but I don’t know exactly what it emerges from, but somehow it can’t emerge from the market.

But their thinking this is sort of like: first, there’s this property law, and it’s all put in place, and no market transactions are happening — everyone is just waiting for the whole legal structure to be put in place. And then it’s in place — and now we can finally start trading back and forth. It certainly is true that you can’t have functioning markets without a functioning legal system; that’s true. But it’s not as though first the legal system is in place, and then on the last day they finally finish putting the legal system together — then people begin their trading. These things arise together. Legal institutions and economic trade arise together in one and the same place, at one and the same time. The legal system is not something independent of the activity it constrains. After all, a legal system again is not a robot or a god or something separate from us. The existence of a legal system consists in people obeying it. If everyone ignored the legal system, it would have no power at all. So it’s only because people generally go along with it that it survives. The legal system, too, depends on voluntary support.

I think that a lot of people — one reason that they’re scared of anarchy is they think that under government it’s as though there’s some kind of guarantee that’s taken away under anarchy. That somehow there’s this firm background we can always fall back on that under anarchy is just gone. But the firm background is just the product of people interacting with the incentives that they have. Likewise, when anarchists say people under anarchy would probably have the incentive to do this or that, and people say, “Well, that’s not good enough! I don’t just want it to be likely that they’ll have the incentive to do this. I want the government to absolutely guarantee that they’ll do it!”

But the government is just people. And depending on what the constitutional structure of that government is, it’s likely that they’ll do this or that. You can’t design a constitution that will guarantee that the people in the government will behave in any particular way. You can structure it in such a way so that they’re more likely to do this or less likely to do this. And you can see anarchy as just an extension of checks-and-balances to a broader level.

For example, people say, “What guarantees that the different agencies will resolve things in any particular way?” Well, the U.S. Constitution says   nothing about what happens if different branches of the government disagree about how to resolve things. It doesn’t say what happens if the Supreme Court thinks something is unconstitutional but Congress thinks it doesn’t, and wants to go ahead and do it anyway. Famously, it doesn’t say what happens if there’s a dispute between the states and the federal government. The current system where once the Supreme Court declares something unconstitutional, then the Congress and the President don’t try to do it anymore (or at least not quite so much) — that didn’t always exist. Remember when the Court declared what Andrew Jackson was doing unconstitutional, when he was President, he just said, “Well, they’ve made their decision, let them enforce it.” The Constitution doesn’t say whether the way Jackson did it was the right way. The way we do it now is the way that’s emerged through custom. Maybe you’re for it, maybe you’re against it — whatever it is, it was never codified in law.

(7) Organized Crime Will Take Over

One objection is that under anarchy organized crime will take over. Well, it might. But is it likely? Organized crime gets its power because it specializes in things that are illegal — things like drugs and prostitution and so forth. During the years when alcohol was prohibited, organized crime specialized in the alcohol trade. Nowadays, they’re not so big in the alcohol trade. So the power of organized crime to a large extent depends on the power of government. It’s sort of a parasite on government’s activities. Governments by banning things create black markets. Black markets are dangerous things to be in because you have to worry both about the government and about other dodgy people who are going into the black market field. Organized crime specializes in that. So, organized crime I think would be weaker, not stronger, in a libertarian system.

(8) The Rich Will Rule

Another worry is that the rich would rule. After all, won’t justice just go to the highest bidder in that case, if you turn legal services into an economic good? That’s a common objection. Interestingly, it’s a particularly common objection among Randians, who suddenly become very concerned about the poor impoverished masses. But under which system are the rich more powerful? Under the current system or under anarchy? Certainly, you’ve always got some sort of advantage if you’re rich. It’s good to be rich. You’re always in a better position to bribe people if you’re rich than if you’re not; that’s true. But, under the current system, the power of the rich is magnified. Suppose that I’m an evil rich person, and I want to get the government to do something-or-other that costs a million dollars. Do I have to bribe some bureaucrat a million dollars to get it done? No, because I’m not asking him to do it with his own money. Obviously, if I were asking him to do it with his own money, I couldn’t get him to spend a million dollars by bribing him any less than a million. It would have to be at least a million dollars and one cent. But people who control tax money that they don’t themselves personally own, and therefore can’t do whatever they want with, the bureaucrat can’t just pocket the million and go home (although it can get surprisingly close to that). All I have to do is bribe him a few thousand, and he can direct this million dollars in tax money to my favorite project or whatever, and thus the power of my bribe money is multiplied.

Whereas, if you were the head of some private protection agency and I’m trying to get you to do something that costs a million dollars, I’d have to bribe you more than a million. So, the power of the rich is actually less under this system. And, of course, any court that got the reputation of discriminating in favor of millionaires against poor people would also presumably have the reputation of discriminating for billionaires against millionaires. So, the millionaires would not want to deal with it all of the time. They’d only want to deal with it when they’re dealing with people poorer, not people richer. The reputation effects — I don’t think this would be too popular an outfit.

Worries about poor victims who can’t afford legal services, or victims who die without heirs (again, the Randians are very worried about victims dying without heirs) — in the case of poor victims, you can do what they did in Medieval Iceland. You’re too poor to purchase legal services, but still, if someone has harmed you, you have a claim to compensation from that person. You can sell that claim, part of the claim or all of the claim, to someone else. Actually, it’s kind of like hiring a lawyer on a contingency fee basis. You can sell to someone who is in a position to enforce your claim. Or, if you die without heirs, in a sense, one of the goods you left behind was your claim to compensation, and that can be homesteaded.

(9) Robert Bidinotto: The Masses Will Demand Bad Laws

Another worry that Bidinotto has — and this is sort of the opposite of the worry that the rich will rule — is: well, look, isn’t Mises right, that the market is like a big democracy, where there is consumer sovereignty, and the masses get whatever they want? That’s great when it’s refrigerators and cars and so forth. But surely that’s not a good thing when it’s laws. Because, after all, the masses are a bunch of ignorant, intolerant fools, and if they just get whatever laws they want, who knows what horrible things they will make.

Of course, the difference between economic democracy of the Mises sort and political democracy is: well, yeah, they get whatever they want, but they’re going to have to pay for it. Now, it’s perfectly true that if you have people who are fanatical enough about wanting to impose some wretched thing on other people, if you’ve got a large enough group of people who are fanatical enough about this, then anarchy might not lead to libertarian results.

If you live in California, you’ve got enough people who are absolutely fanatical about banning smoking, or maybe if you’re in Alabama, and it’s homosexuality instead of smoking they want to ban (neither one would ban the other, I think) — in that case, it might happen that they’re so fanatical about it that they would ban it. But remember that they are going to have to be paying for this. So when you get your monthly premium, you see: well, here’s your basic service — protecting you against aggression; oh, and then here’s also your extended service, and the extra fee for that — peering in your neighbors’ windows to make sure that they’re not — either the tobacco or the homosexuality or whatever it is you’re worried about. Now the really fanatical people will say, “Yes, I’m going to shell out the extra money for this.” (Of course, if they’re that fanatical, they’re probably going to be trouble under minarchy, too.) But if they’re not that fanatical, they’ll say, “Well, if all I have to do is go into a voting booth and vote for these laws restricting other people’s freedom, well, heck, I’d go in, it’s pretty easy to go in and vote for it.” But if they actually have to pay for it — “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe I can reconcile myself to this.”

(10) Robert Nozick and Tyler Cowen: Private Protection Agencies Will Become a de facto Government

Okay, one last consideration I want to talk about. This is a question that originally was raised by Robert Nozick and has since been pushed farther by Tyler Cowen. Nozick said: Suppose you have anarchy. One of three things will happen. Either the agencies will fight — and he gives two different scenarios of what will happen if they fight. But I’ve already talked about what happens if they fight, so I’ll talk about the third option. What if they don’t fight? Then he says, if instead they agree to these mutual arbitration contracts and so forth, then basically this whole thing just turns into a government. And then Tyler Cowen has pushed this argument farther. He said what happens is that basically this forms into a cartel, and it’s going to be in the interest of this cartel to sort of turn itself into a government. And any new agency that comes along, they can just boycott it.

Just as it’s in your interest if you come along with a new ATM card that it be compatible with everyone else’s machines, so if you come along with a brand new protection agency, it is in your interest that you get to be part of this system of contracts and arbitration and so forth that the existing ones have. Consumers aren’t going to come to you if they find out that you don’t have any agreements as to what happens if you’re in a conflict with these other agencies. And so, this cartel will be able to freeze everyone out.

Well, could that happen? Sure. All kinds of things could happen. Half the country could commit suicide tomorrow. But, is it likely? Is this cartel likely to be able to abuse its power in this way? The problem is cartels are unstable for all the usual reasons. That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible that a cartel succeed. After all, people have free will. But it’s unlikely because the very incentives that lead you to form the cartel also lead you to cheat on it — because it’s always in the interest of anyone to make agreements outside the cartel once they are in it.

Bryan Caplan makes a distinction between self-enforcing boycotts and non-self-enforcing boycotts. Self-enforcing boycotts are ones where the boycott is pretty stable because it’s a boycott against, for example, doing business with people who cheat their business partners. Now, you don’t have to have some iron resolve of moral commitment in order to avoid doing business with people who cheat their business partners. You have a perfectly self-interested reason not to do business with those people.

But think instead of a commitment not to do business with someone because you don’t like their religion or something like that, or they’re a member of the wrong protection agency, one that your fellow protection agencies told you not to deal with — well, the boycott might work. Maybe enough people (and maybe everyone) in the cartel is so committed to upholding the cartel that they just won’t deal with the person. Is that possible? Yes. But, if we assume that they formed the cartel out of their own economic self-interest, then the economic self-interest is precisely what leads to the undermining because it’s in their interest to deal with the person, just as it’s always in your interest to engage in mutually beneficial trade.

QUESTION PERIOD

Anyway, those are some of the objections and some of my replies, and I’ll open it up.

Q1: My chief concern about anarchism is: why can’t you say that government is just another division of labor? Because it could be that some people are better or possess natural capabilities that are more suited to ruling over others. I’m not saying anarchy cannot work, but solely from empirical evidence, the fact that none of the industrialized regions in the world are in a state of anarchy, nor have they ever been for long in a state of anarchy says something about perhaps the stability or viability of complex human societies in the present state. And also, going back to what I said earlier, you can conceive of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled as just another common division of labor. Some people possess leadership abilities that are better able to organize people than others. Some people lack that.

RL: On the division-of-labor point, to the extent the division of labor is voluntary — if you’re better at something-or-other than I am, and so you do it, and then I buy the services from you — as long as it’s voluntary, that’s fine. But when we’re talking about division of labor and some people are better at ruling than other people — well, if I consent to your ruling me — maybe I’m hiring you as my advisor because I think you’re better at making decisions than I am, so I make one last decision which is to hire you as my advisor, and from then on I do what you say — that’s not government; you’re my employee, you’re an employee that I follow very religiously. But, ruling implies ruling people without their consent. That the division of labor is beneficial to everyone involved doesn’t seem to apply in cases where one group is forcing the other to accept its services.

And on the question of why we don’t see any industrialized country that has anarchy — of course, we also don’t see any industrialized county that has monarchy. But then industrialized countries haven’t been around all that long. There was a time when people said every civilized country (or just about every civilized country) is a monarchy. You find people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saying: look, all the civilized countries are monarchies; democracy would never work. And by saying democracy would never work, they meant not just that it would have these various bad results in the long run; they just thought it would completely fall apart into chaos in a matter of months. Whatever you may think of democracy, it was more viable than they predicted. It could last longer, at any rate, than they predicted. So, things are in flux. There was a time when it was all monarchies. Now it’s all semi-oligarchical democracies. The night is young.

Q2: Roderick, surely we all appreciate the wonderful work that you do here at the Mises Institute, but Ludwig von Mises wasn’t an anarchist. So, I was wondering if you could tell us more about your institute and the Molinari Institute.

RL: Mises wasn’t really a Misesian! [laughter] Well, I have my own think tank. It is somewhat smaller than this one. I’m not sure whether it has a physical size. It does consist of more than one person. The board of directors is three people. So, it’s three people plus a website. Someday it will rule the Earth — in an anarchic way. Right now mostly what it does is put up various libertarian and anarchist classics on the website. There’s an offshoot of it — the Molinari Society, which is the same three people plus one more. Insofar as, as Hayek said, social facts consist in people’s attitudes toward them, the more people who think that it exists, the more it exists. The whole thing exists a little bit more because we got affiliated with the American Philosophical Association. The Molinari Society is hosting a session at the American Philosophical Association meetings in December. So t is actually going to be a Molinari event in December involving the three-people-plus-another-one. So that’s the grand and glorious progress. Its mission is to overthrow the government. We’ve applied for tax-exempt status from the government. (We’ll see just how dumb they are! We worded the description somewhat differently when we sent in the forms.)

Q3: I was going to bolster the point you made about the Randian objection that market transactions require some sort of legal background to them. The fact that there are black markets belies this. If you’re a cocaine dealer and you get ripped off by your middleman, you certainly can’t go to a court and say “Go arrest him, he didn’t give me the cocaine he was supposed to”…

RL: I’m sure someone’s tried it…

Q3: …Now, of course, this very easily can lead to violence, but don’t forget that there are people actively trying to stop you, not just that they’re not letting you arbitrate, they’re actively stopping you from doing it.

RL: David Friedman makes the argument that one of the main functions of the Mafia is to serve as something like a court system for criminals. That’s not all it does, but the Mafia takes an interest in what sorts of criminal goings-on are going on in its territory — because it wants its cut, but it also doesn’t want gangs having shoot-outs with each other in its territory. If you’ve got a conflict, you agreed to some kind of criminal deal with someone and they cheated you, and it happened in the jurisdiction of some particular Mafia group, they’ll take an interest in that as long as you’re providing your cut. If they’re not cooperating, the Mafia will act as something kind of court-like and police-like. They’re sort of cops for criminals.

Q4: What will prevent protection companies from becoming a protection racket?

RL: Well, other protection companies. If it succeeds in doing it, then it’s become a government. But during the time it’s trying to do it, it hasn’t yet become a government, so we assume there are still other agencies around, and it’s in those other agencies’ interest to make sure that this doesn’t happen. Could it become a protection racket? In principle, could protection agencies evolve into government? Some could. I think probably historically some have. But the question is: is that a likely or inevitable result? I don’t think so because there is a check-and-balance against it. Checks-and-balances can fail in anarchy just like they can fail under constitutions. But there is a check-and-balance against it which is the possibility of calling in other protection agencies or someone starting another protection agency before this thing has yet had a chance to acquire that kind of power.

Q5: Who best explains the origin of the state?

RL: Well, there’s a popular nineteenth-century theory of the origin of the state that you find in a number of different forms. It’s in Herbert Spencer, it’s in Oppenheimer, and you find it in some of the French liberals like Comte and Dunoyer, and Molinari — who wasn’t really French, he was Belgian (“I am not a Frenchie, I’m a Belgie!”). This theory — they had different versions of it, but it’s all pretty similar — was that what happens is that one group conquers another group. Often the theory was that a sort of hunter-marauder group conquers an agricultural group.

In Molinari’s version of it what happens is: first, they just go and kill people and grab their stuff. And then gradually they figure out: well, maybe we should wait and not kill them because we want them to grow more stuff next time we come back. So instead, we’ll just come and grab their stuff and not kill them, and then they’ll grow some more stuff, and next year we’ll be back. And then they think, well, if we take all their stuff, then they won’t have enough seed corn to grow it, or they won’t have any incentive to grow it — they’ll just run away or something — so we won’t take everything. And finally, they think: we don’t have to keep going away and coming back. We can just move in. And then gradually, over time, you get a ruling class and a ruled class. At first, the ruling class and the ruled class may be ethnically different because they were these different tribes. But even if, over time, the tribes intermarry and there’s no longer any difference in the compositions, they still have got the same structure of a ruling group and a ruled group.

So that was one popular theory of the origin of the state, or at least the origin of many states.

I think another origin you can see of some states or state-like things is in the same sort of situation but in cases where they succeed in fending off the invaders. Some local group within the invaded group says: we’re going to specialize in defense — we’re going to specialize in defending the rest of you guys against these invaders. And they succeed. If you look at the history of England, I think this is what happens with the English monarchy. Before the Norman conquest, the earliest English monarchs were war leaders whose main job was national defense. They had very little to do within the country. They were primarily directed against foreign invaders. But it was a monopoly. (Now, the question is how they got that monopoly. I’m not so sure.) But once they got it, they gradually started getting involved more and more in domestic control as well.

Q6: Hector, Murray’s story about Hector? It’s very much similar to this story and its on the web, and it’s just a beautiful story.

RL: Which story about Hector is this?

Q6: The first one about why do we have to leave, let’s just stay there…

RL: Oh, yeah.

Q6: Murray did a beautiful job on that, and I would recommend it.

RL: What’s that in?

Q6: It’s on LewRockwell.com.

RL: It’s one of the Rothbard articles on there? Okay.

Q6: I wanted to buttress your thesis in several ways. One, another argument in favor of anarchy is that if you really favor the government, you have to favor world government because right now there’s anarchy between governments, and we can’t have that if you want government. Very few people favor world government, and it’s incompatible with the case against anarchy.

RL: There has to be a final final arbiter.

Q6: Another buttress is the issue about negotiations. The way that the time zones came up and the way that the standard gauge for railroads came up was through negotiations between railroad companies.

RL: And the internet. Some of that is legal, but other aspects are just customary.

Q6: And another support is this thing about the cartel. At one time the National Basketball Association had eight teams and they wouldn’t allow any other people to come in, so they started the ABA (the American Basketball Association, with the red-white-and-blue ball). So if you had this cartel that wouldn’t let other people in, they could start another cartel.

RL: What happened to them?

Q6: They eventually merged. Now there are like thirty teams in the NBA. And if that’s too few, yet another league can come up.

RL: The crucial point is that in the Austrian definition of competition it’s not number of competing firms, it’s the free entry. As long as it’s possible to start another one, that can have the same effect as actually doing it.

Q6: In addition to the dissolution of a cartel, you can have other cartels competing against the first cartel.

RL: Did the XFL have any good effect? [laughter]

Q6: I wanted to ask a question. In your answer to the first question, where you said you were appointing him as your guide – does this mean you take my side –

RL: No.

Q6: — on alienability?

RL: No, no. That’s why I said he was the employee rather than the owner. I believe in inalienable rights.

Q6: He’s an employee, yet you can’t fire him…

RL: No, I can fire him. He’s my advisor, I always will follow him — but I haven’t given up my right to fire him.

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Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Anarquismo Libertário: Respostas a Dez Objeções.

The following article is translated into Portuguese from the English original, written by Roderick T. Long.

Desejo falar acerca de algumas das principais objeções que têm sido feitas ao anarquismo libertário e de minhas tentativas de responder a elas. Antes, porém, de começar a apresentar as objeções e tentar responder a elas, só faz sentido tentar responder a objeções a um ponto de vista se, antes de tudo, houver alguma razão concreta para a adoção de tal ponto de vista. Assim, desejo apenas dizer brevemente qual é, no meu entender, a argumentação concreta em favor dele, antes de defendê-lo contra objeções.

A ARGUMENTAÇÃO EM FAVOR DO ANARQUISMO LIBERTÁRIO

Problemas do Monopólio Forçado

Pensem do seguinte modo. O que há de errado com um monopólio de calçados? Suponhamos que eu e minha turma sejamos as únicas pessoas com permissão para, legalmente, fabricar e vender calçados – minha turma e qualquer outra pessoa que eu autorize, mas ninguém mais. O que haveria de errado? Bem, antes de tudo, de um ponto de vista moral, a pergunta é: por que nós? O que há de tão especial em nós? Pois bem, neste caso, por eu ter escolhido para exemplo eu próprio, é mais plausível que eu deva ter esse tipo de filosofia, e talvez pois eu devesse escolher um exemplo diferente! Ainda assim, porém, vocês poderão perguntar como eu e minha turma ousamos arrogar-nos o direito de fabricar e vender algo que ninguém mais tem o direito de fabricar e vender, de oferecer um bem ou serviço que ninguém mais tem o direito de oferecer. Pelo menos até onde vocês sabem, sou apenas mais um mortal, outro ser humano igual a vocês (mais ou menos). Assim, de um ponto de vista moral, eu não tenho mais direito de fazê-lo do que qualquer outra pessoa.

Em seguida, obviamente, de um ponto de vista pragmático e consequencialista – bem, antes de tudo, qual será o resultado provável de eu e minha turma termos o monopólio dos calçados? Bem, primeiro de tudo, haverá problemas de incentivo. Se eu for a única pessoa com o direito de fabricar e vender calçados, vocês provavelmente não irão obter de mim calçados muito baratos. Poderei cobrar o quanto quiser, desde que não cobre tanto que vocês simplesmente não possam comprá-los em absoluto ou cheguem à conclusão de que são mais felizes sem possuir tais calçados. Na medida entretanto em que vocês os desejem e possam comprá-los, eu cobrarei o preço mais alto que conseguir fazer vocês pagarem  – porque vocês não podem contar com a competição, vocês não têm nenhum outro lugar para ir. Vocês também provavelmente não deverão esperar que os calçados sejam de qualidade particularmente alta porque, afinal de contas, desde que eles sejam minimamente úteis, e vocês prefiram usá-los do que andar descalços – terão de comprá-los de mim.

Além da probabilidade de os calçados virem a ser caros e não muito bons, o fato de eu ser a única pessoa que os fabrica e vende dá-me ademais certo poder sobre vocês. Suponham que eu não goste de vocês. Suponham que vocês me tenham ofendido de algum modo. Bem, talvez vocês, por algum tempo, simplesmente não possam conseguir calçados. Assim, há também questões relacionadas com abuso de poder.

Contudo, não há apenas o problema de incentivo porque, afinal, suponham que eu seja um santo perfeito e faça os melhores calçados  que consiga fazer para vocês, e cobre o menor preço que consiga cobrar, e não abuse em absoluto de meu poder. Suponham que eu seja completamente digno de confiança. Sou um príncipe entre os homens (não no sentido de Maquiavel). Ainda assim haverá um problema, que é: como poderei saber com precisão se estou fazendo o melhor trabalho de que sou capaz no tocante àqueles calçados? Afinal, não há competição. Imagino que possa sondar as pessoas para tentar descobrir que tipo de calçados elas parecem querer. Há, porém, muitas maneiras diferentes de fazer calçados. Alguns modos de fabricá-los são mais dispendiosos, outros menos. Como saberei,  dado não existir mercado, e dado não haver em realidade muito que eu possa fazer em termos de contabilidade de lucros e perdas? Só posso fazer conjecturas. Assim, mesmo se eu estiver fazendo o melhor que possa, a quantidade que fabrico, a qualidade do que fabrico podem não ser as mais adequadas para atender às preferências das pessoas, e ser-me-á extremamente difícil descobrir essas coisas.

O Governo é um Monopólio Forçado

Assim, essas são todas razões que não tornam recomdendável ter-se um monopólio de fabricação e venda de calçados. Ora, pelo menos prima facie, parece que essas são todas boas razões para que ninguém tenha monopólio de proporcionar serviços de adjudicar disputas, e proteger direitos, e todas as coisas envolvidas naquilo que vocês poderiam chamar, de maneira ampla, de a empresa da lei. Primeiro de tudo há a pergunta moral: por que um grupo de pessoas tem o direito de ser o único em dado território com o poder de oferecer certos tipos de serviços legais ou de impor certos tipos de coisas? E em seguida há aquelas perguntas econômicas: quais serão os incentivos? Mais uma vez, é um monopólio. Parece provável que, com uma base de clientes cativos, praticará preços mais altos do que praticaria não fosse assim, e oferecerá qualidade inferior. Poderia até ocorrer ocasional abuso de poder. E então, mesmo caso se encontre uma forma de evitar todos esses problemas, e se todas as pessoas santas forem colocadas dentro do governo, ainda assim haverá o problema de como saberão elas se o modo específico pelo qual estejam praticando os serviços legais, a mescla específica de serviços legais que estejam oferecendo, os modos específicos de prestar esses serviços, serão realmente os melhores? Elas apenas tentarão conceber o que funcionará. Visto não haver competição, elas não terão muito como saber se o que estejam fazendo será a coisa mais bem-sucedida que poderiam estar fazendo.

Portanto, o propósito dessas considerações é colocar o ônus da prova no opositor. Neste ponto, portanto, o opositor da existência de competição em serviços legais [isto é, jurídicos, N.do T.] será forçado a suscitar algumas objeções.

DEZ OBJEÇÕES AO ANARQUISMO LIBERTÁRIO

(1) O Governo Não é um Monopólio Coercitivo

Pois bem, uma das objeções por vezes suscitadas não é tanto uma objeção ao anarquismo quanto uma objeção ao argumento moral do anarquismo: bem, veja, não se trata de um monopólio realmente coercitivo. As coisas não se passam como se as pessoas não houvessem consentido com isso, porque há um certo sentido no qual as pessoas consentiram com o sistema hoje existente – ao viverem dentro das fronteiras de um território específico, ao aceitarem os benefícios que o governo oferece, e assim por diante, elas, de fato, consentiram. É como se você entrasse num restaurante e se sentasse e dissesse “Quero um filé,” você não tem de mencionar explicitamente estar concordando em pagá-lo; é algo como que subentendido. Ao sentar-se no restaurante e pedir o filé, você estará concordando em pagá-lo. Do mesmo modo, continua a argumentação, se você se situar no território deste estado específico, e aceitar os benefícios de proteção da polícia ou o que seja,   você terá implicitamente concordado em pautar-se por suas exigências. Ora bem, notem que mesmo se esse argumento funcionar, ele não resolverá a questão pragmática de se esse é o melhor sistema em termos de funcionamento.

Creio, porém, haver algo questionável nesse argumento. Por certo é verdade que, se eu entrar na propriedade de alguém, parece haver   certa espécie de expectativa de que, enquanto eu estiver naquela propriedade, eu tenha de fazer as coisas como o proprietário estipular. Terei de obedecer às regras dele. Se eu não quiser obedecer a tais regras, terei de sair de lá. Assim, convido vocês a irem a minha casa e quando vocês entram eu digo: “Vocês têm de usar o chapéu engraçado.” E vocês perguntam: “O que é isso?” E eu digo: “Bem, é como as coisas funcionam em minha casa. Todo mundo tem de usar o chapéu engraçado. Essas são minhas regras.” Bem, vocês não podem retrucar “Não vou usar o chapéu mas vou continuar aqui de qualquer modo.” Aquelas são minhas regras – podem ser regras idiotas, mas eu tenho o poder de fazer isso.

Agora suponha que você esteja em casa jantando e eu seja o vizinho ao lado, e eu venha e bata à porta. Você abre a porta, eu entro e digo “Você tem de usar o chapéu engraçado.” E você diz: “Por quê?” E eu digo, “Bem, você se mudou para a residência ao lado da minha, não é? Ao fazer isso, você como que concordou.” E você diz, “Bem, espere um segundo! Quando é que eu concordei com isso?”

Acredito que a pessoa que tece essa argumentação está já assumindo que o governo tem alguma jurisdição legítima sobre esse território. E então diz: bem, vejam, qualquer indivíduo que esteja neste território está, por isso mesmo, concordando com as regras vigentes. Quem argumenta assim, contudo, está   tomando como premissa exatamente aquilo que está tentando provar – isto é, que esta jurisdição em relação ao território é legítima. Se não é, então o governo é apenas mais um grupo de indivíduos vivendo nesse amplo território geográfico geral. Entretanto, eu estou em minha propriedade, e qual é exatamente a deles eu não sei, mas estou aqui em minha propriedade e eles não são donos dela – pelo menos não me ofereceram nenhum argumento mostrando que são – e portanto o fato de eu estar vivendo “neste país” significa que estou vivendo em certa região geográfica em relação à qual eles alimentam certas pretensões – mas a questão é se essas pretensões são legítimas. Não se pode assumir isso como meio de provar isso.

Outra coisa é, um dos problemas desses argumentos de contrato social implícito é não ficar claro de que contrato se trata. No caso de pedir comida num restaurante, todo mundo sabe bastante bem qual é o contrato. Em tal caso, pois, vocês poderiam utilizar o argumento do consentimento implícito. Ninguém sugeriria, porém, que vocês pudessem comprar uma casa do mesmo modo.

Há todas aquelas regras e coisas da espécie. Quando se trate de algo complicado ninguém diz “Você simplesmente como que assentiu ao balançar a cabeça em determinado momento,” ou coisa da espécie. Você tem de examinar o que efetivamente está no contrato; com o que você está concordando? Nada está claro caso ninguém saiba exatamente quais sejam os detalhes do contrato. Esse argumento não é lá muito persuasivo.

Certo, bem, a maioria dos argumentos acerca dos quais falarei são pragmáticos, ou uma mescla de morais e pragmáticos.

(2) Hobbes: O Governo é Indispensável para Cooperação

Provavelmente a mais famosa argumentação contra a anarquia é a de Hobbes. A argumentação de Hobbes é: bem, vejam, a cooperação humana, a cooperação social, requer uma estrutura de lei no plano de fundo. O motivo pelo qual podemos confiar uns nos outros a fim de cooperarmos é sabermos haver forças legais que nos punirão se violarmos os direitos uns dos outros. Sei que eles me punirão se eu violar os seus direitos, mas eles também punirão você se você violar os meus direitos. E pois eu posso confiar em você, porque não preciso depender do seu caráter pessoal. Só tenho de confiar no fato de que você será intimidado pela lei. Portanto, a cooperação social requer esse arcabouço legal respaldado na força do estado.

Bem, Hobbes está, no caso, assumindo diversas coisas. Primeiro está assumindo não haver qualquer cooperação social sem lei. Segundo, ele está assumindo só poder haver lei se esta for imposta pela força física. E, terceiro, está assumindo a lei só poder ser feita cumprir pela força caso quem faça isso seja um estado monopolista.

Ocorre que todas essas assunções são falsas. Certamente é verdade que cooperação genuína pode surgir e surge sem a lei, embora talvez de maneira não tão eficiente quanto com a lei. Há o livro de Robert Ellickson Ordem Sem Lei onde ele fala acerca de como os vizinhos fazem para   resolver disputas. Ele oferece todos aqueles exemplos acerca do que acontece se a vaca de um fazendeiro perambula pelo território de outro fazendeiro e eles resolvem o problema por meio de alguns acordos consuetudinários mútuos e assim por diante, e não há arcabouço legal para tal resolução. Talvez isso não seja o bastante para uma economia complexa, mas certamente mostra existir algum tipo de cooperação sem um arcabouço legal concreto.

Segundo, pode existir um arcabouço legal não respaldado na força. Um exemplo seria a Lex Mercatoria no final da Idade Média: um sistema de lei comercial respaldado em ameaças de boicote. O boicote não é um ato de força. Ainda assim, os mercadores faziam todos aqueles contratos, e se alguém não honrasse o contrato o tribunal simplesmente divulgaria para todo mundo: “esta pessoa não honrou o contrato; levem isso em conta se vocês forem firmar outro contrato com ela.”

E terceiro, pode haver sistemas legais que usam a força sem ser monopolistas. Visto que Hobbes sequer considera essa possibilidade, ele em realidade não desenvolve nenhuma argumentação em contrário. Vocês, porém, certamente poderão ver exemplos na história. A história da Islândia medieval, por exemplo, onde não havia um centro impositor. Embora houvesse algo que talvez pudesse ser chamado de governo, era algo que absolutamente não tinha um braço executivo. Não tinha polícia, nem soldados, nada. Era uma espécie de sistema competitivo de tribunais. Mas então a aplicação de sanções ficava a cargo de quem quer que fosse. E houve sistemas que evolveram para cuidar disso.

(3) Locke: Três “Inconveniências” da Anarquia

Bem, argumentação mais interessante vem de Locke. Locke argumenta que a anarquia envolve três coisas que ele chama de “inconveniências”. E “inconveniência” é um termo que soa de certo modo mais pesado no inglês do século 17 do que no inglês moderno, mas ainda assim o motivo de ele referir-se a “inconveniências,” o que ainda assim é um pouco mais suave, era Locke achar que a cooperação social podia existir de algum modo na anarquia. Ele era mais otimista do que Hobbes. Ele achava que, com base em simpatias morais de um lado e interesse próprio do outro, a cooperação podia surgir.

Ele achava haver três problemas. Um problema, disse ele, era que não haveria um conjunto geral de leis conhecido, entendido e acordado de maneira generalizada. As pessoas poderiam apreender certos princípios básicos da lei natural. As respectivas aplicações e detalhes precisos, porém, permaneceriam controversos. Até os libertários não concordam uns com os outros. Podem concordar quanto a coisas gerais, mas estamos sempre argumentando uns contra os outros acerca de diversos pontos de detalhe fino. Portanto, mesmo numa sociedade de libertários pacíficos e cooperativos haverá desacordos acerca de detalhes. E pois, a menos que haja algum conjunto geral de leis que todo mundo conheça de tal modo que possa saber com o que contar, no tocante ao que pode fazer e o que não pode, a coisa não funcionará. Esse pois foi o primeiro argumento de Locke. Tem de haver um conjunto universal de leis, conhecido de todos, que se aplique a todo mundo e que todo mundo conheça de antemão.

Segundo, há um problema de poder de impor. Ele achava que, sem governo, inexistiria poder unificado suficiente para impor. Só haveria indivíduos impondo coisas por conta própria, e eles seriam simplesmente fracos demais, não suficientemente organizados, podendo ser desbancados por uma quadrilha de bandoleiros ou algo da espécie.

Terceiro, Locke disse que o problema é não se poder confiar nas pessoas para que sejam juízas de seus próprios processos. Se duas pessoas tiverem uma desavença e uma delas disser “Bem, sei qual é a lei natural e vou impô-la a você,” bem, as pessoas tenderão a ser tendenciosas, e acharão mais plausível a interpretação da lei natural que favoreça sua própria causa. Assim, ele achava que não se pode confiar em as pessoas serem juízas de sua própria causa; portanto, deveria exigir-se delas que submetessem suas disputas a um árbitro. Talvez em casos de emergência elas ainda pudessem defender-se imediatamente mas, em outros casos, quando não se tratasse de autodefesa imediata, elas teriam que delegar suas causas a um árbitro, um terceiro – e esse era o estado.

Portanto Locke acha serem esses os três problemas que existem na anarquia, e eles não existiriam sob um governo, ou pelo menos sob o tipo certo de governo. Eu, porém, acredito que acontece exatamente o contrário. Acho que a anarquia pode resolver todos esses três problemas, e que o estado, por causa de sua própria natureza, não tem como resolvê-los.

Assim, tomemos primeiro a argumentação relativa à universalidade, ou o ter-se um conjunto universalmente conhecido de leis que as pessoas possam conhecer antecipadamente e com o qual possam contar. Ora bem, poderá essa universalidade surgir num sistema sem estado? Bem, na verdade, já surgiu na Lex Mercatoria, precisamente por os estados não a  estarem provendo. Uma das coisas que ajudaram a causar o surgimento da Lex Mercatoria foi o fato de os estados individuais da Europa terem, cada um, conjuntos diferentes de leis a respeito de mercadores. Esses conjuntos eram todos diferentes. E um tribunal na França não manteria um contrato feito na Inglaterra sob as leis da Inglaterra, e vice-versa. E pois a capacidade dos mercadores de praticar comércio internacional era tolhida pelo fato de não haver nenhum sistema uniforme de   lei comercial para toda a Europa. Assim, os mercadores se juntaram e disseram: “Bem, vamos simplesmente fazer alguma lei nós próprios. Os tribunais estão vindo com essas regras malucas, e uns não respeitam as decisões dos outros, portanto nós simplesmente os ignoraremos e estabeleceremos nosso próprio sistema.” Portanto esse é um caso no qual a uniformidade e a previsibilidade foram produzidas pelo mercado e não pelo estado. E vocês podem ver por que isso não é de admirar. É do interesse daqueles que oferecem um sistema privado torná-lo uniforme e previsível, se for isso aquilo de que os cliente precisam.

É pelo mesmo motivo que não encontramos nenhum cartão de caixa automático (ATM) triangular. Tanto quanto eu saiba, não existe lei   dizendo não se possa ter um cartão ATM triangular, mas se alguém tentasse comercializá-lo, ele simplesmente não se tornaria muito popular, porque não se encaixaria nas máquinas existentes. Quando o de que as pessoas precisam é diversidade, quando o de que as pessoas precisam é diferentes sistemas para diferentes pessoas, o mercado proporciona isso. Há porém algumas coisas para as quais a uniformidade é melhor. Seu cartão ATM será mais útil para você se todo mundo mais estiver usando o mesmo tipo também ou algum tipo compatível com ele, de tal modo que todos vocês possam usar as máquinas onde forem; e portanto, os negociantes, se desejarem ter lucro, proporcionarão uniformidade. Então o mercado tem incentivo para oferecer uniformidade de uma forma tal que o governo não necessariamente tem.

Quanto à questão de haver poder suficiente para organizar a defesa – bem, não há motivo para não haver organização numa anarquia. Anarquia não significa cada pessoa fabricar seus próprios calçados. A alternativa a o governo fabricar todos os calçados não é cada pessoa fabricar seus próprios calçados. Assim, analogamente, a alternativa a o governo fornecer todos os serviços legais não é cada pessoa ter de ser sua própria policial independente. Não há motivo para as pessoas não poderem organizar-se de diversas maneiras. Na verdade, se vocês estiverem preocupados com não terem força suficiente para resistir a um agressor, bem, um governo monopolista é agressor muito mais perigoso do que apenas alguma quadrilha de bandoleiros ou outra, porque unificou todo o seu poder em um ponto apenas de toda a sociedade.

Acredito, porém, que, de maneira extremamente interessante, a argumentação acerca de ser juiz de sua própria causa tem, aqui, efeito de bumerangue contra a argumentação de Locke. Porque, antes de tudo, essa argumentação não é boa para um monopólio, porque é uma falácia argumentar partindo da premissa de que todo mundo deveria submeter suas disputas a um terceiro e chegar à conclusão de que deveria haver um terceito a quem todo mundo submetesse suas disputas. Isso é como argumentar partindo da premissa de que todo mundo gosta de pelo menos um programa de TV e chegar à conclusão de que há pelo menos um programa de TV do qual todo mundo gosta. Uma coisa simplesmente não decorre da outra. É possível todo mundo submeter suas disputas a terceiros sem haver apenas um terceiro a quem todo mundo submeta suas disputas. Suponhamos que haja três pessoas numa ilha. A e B podem submeter suas disputas a C, e A e C podem submeter suas disputas a B, e B e C podem submeter suas disputas a A. Portanto não há necessidade de um monopólio para encarnar esse princípio de que as pessoas deveriam submeter suas disputas a um terceiro.

Ademais, porém, não apenas não é indispensável um governo como, ademais, um governo é precisamente o que não satisfaz esse princípio. Porque se vocês tiverem uma disputa com o governo, o governo não submeterá essa disputa a um terceiro. Se vocês tiverem uma disputa com o governo, ela será resolvida num tribunal do governo (se vocês tiverem sorte – se não tiverem, se vocês viverem sob um dos governos do tipo mais curto e grosso, vocês sequer terão julgamento em tribunal). Agora, naturalmente, é melhor se o governo for ele próprio dividido, com os poderes cada um controlando os demais e assim por diante. Isso é um pouquinho melhor, está mais próximo da existência de terceiros, mas estes ainda assim são parte do mesmo sistema; os juízes são pagos por dinheiro do contribuinte e assim por diante. Portanto, existem aproximações melhores e piores em relação a esse princípio, em diferentes tipos de governo. Ainda assim, na medida em que se trata de um sistema de monopólio, por sua própria natureza trata-se de algo, em certo sentido, sem lei. Ele nunca, em última análise, submeterá suas disputas a um terceiro.

(4) Ayn Rand: Os Órgãos de Proteção Privada Combaterão Uns Contra os Outros

Provavelmente o argumento mais popular contra a anarquia libertária é: bem, o que aconteceria se (e esse é o famoso argumento de Ayn Rand) eu achar que você violou meus direitos e você achar que não, e assim eu telefono para meu órgão de proteção, e você telefona para o seu – por que eles simplesmente não se engalfinhariam? O que garantiria que eles não se atracariam? Para o que, obviamente, a resposta é: bem, nada garante que eles não se atraquem. Os seres humanos têm livre arbítrio. Eles podem fazer toda sorte de coisas malucas. Podem entrar em confronto. Do mesmo modo, George Bush poderia resolver apertar o botão nuclear amanhã. Podem fazer toda sorte de coisas.

A questão é: com que probabilidade? Quem exibe maior probabilidade de resolver suas disputas pela violência: um governo ou um órgão privado de proteção? Bem, a diferença é que os órgãos privados de proteção têm de arcar com os custos de suas próprias decisões de entrar em confronto. Entrar em confronto é caro. Havendo escolha entre dois órgãos de proteção, um dos quais resolve suas disputas por meio da violência a maior parte do tempo, e outro que resolve suas disputas por meio de arbitragem a maior parte do tempo – bem, você poderia pensar, “Prefiro o que resolve suas disputas por meio da violência – parece um ótimo caminho!” Mas então você examina os prêmios mensais. E pensa: o quanto você está comprometido com essa mentalidade de Viking? Pois bem, você poderá ser adepto dessa mentalidade de Viking o suficiente para dispor-se a pagar o preço; ainda assim, será mais caro. Muitos clientes dirão: “Prefiro um órgão que não cobre todo esse montante adicional por conta da violência.” Em contraste, os governos – primeiro de tudo, eles têm clientes cativos, que não têm outra alternativa – tributam os clientes de qualquer maneira, e portanto os clientes não têm a opção de mudar para um órgão diferente. E, assim, os governos podem externalizar os custos de ir à guerra muito mais eficazmente do que os órgãos privados.

(5) Robert Bidinotto: Não Existe Árbitro Final das Disputas

Uma objeção comum – é a que encontramos, por exemplo, em Robert Bidinotto, randiano que escreveu diversos artigos contra a anarquia (ele e eu temos tido uma espécie de debate online em andamento a respeito do assunto) – a principal objeção dele à anarquia é a de que, na anarquia, não há árbitro final nas disputas. Sob o governo aparece, em algum momento, algum árbritro final o qual resolve a disputa de um modo ou de outro. Bem, na anarquia, como não há órgão único com o direito de resolver as coisas de uma vez por todas, não há árbitro final e pois as disputas, em certo sentido, nunca acabam, nunca são resolvidas, sempre permanecem em aberto.

Qual é pois a resposta a isso? Bem, acho que o conceito de árbitro final, aqui, peca por certa ambiguidade. “Árbitro final” pode significar o árbitro final naquilo que chamo de sentido platônico. Isto é, alguém ou algo ou alguma instituição que de algum modo garanta de maneira absoluta que a disputa seja resolvida de uma vez por todas; que garanta, de maneira absoluta, a resolução. Ou, em vez disso, pode-se entender por “árbitro final” simplesmente alguma pessoa ou processo ou instituição ou algo da espécie que, de maneira mais ou menos fidedigna, garanta, na maior parte das vezes, que esses problemas sejam resolvidos.

Agora: é verdade que, no sentido platônico de garantia absoluta de um árbitro final – nesse sentido, a anarquia não oferece nenhum. Nem, porém, qualquer outro sistema. Tomemos uma república constitucional minarquista do tipo da que Bidinotto é a favor. Haverá um árbitro final naquele sistema, no sentido de algo que garanta de modo absoluto acabar com o processo de disputa para sempre? Ora bem, eu processo você, ou fui processado, ou sou acusado de algo, o que seja – estou envolvido em algum tipo de processo de tribunal. Perco. Apelo. Apelo para o Supremo Tribunal. Eles ficam contra mim. Faço lobby no Congresso para mudarem as leis a fim de elas me favorecerem. Eles não mudam. Então eu tento criar um movimento por uma Emenda à Constituição. Não dá certo, então tento aglutinar pessoas para elegerem novos membros do Congresso que votem pela emenda. Em certo sentido posso continuar para sempre. A disputa não está resolvida.

Na prática, porém, na maior parte das vezes a maioria das disputas legais por fim acabam. Alguém acaba considerando ser caro demais continuar lutando. Do mesmo modo, na anarquia – naturalmente, não há garantia de que o conflito não prossiga para sempre. Existem muito poucas garantias desse tipo inquestionável. Mas isso não é motivo para esperar que as coisas não funcionem.

(6) A Lei da Propriedade Não Tem Como Surgir do Mercado

Outro argumento popular, também usado pelos randianos, é o de que as trocas no mercado pressupõem um plano de fundo de lei da propriedade. Você e eu só podemos fazer trocas de bens por serviços, ou de dinheiro por serviços, ou o que seja, se já existir um plano de fundo estável de lei de propriedade que nos garanta os títulos de propriedade que temos. E como o mercado, para funcionar, pressupõe um plano de fundo de lei de propriedade já existente, essa lei da propriedade não pode, ela própria, ser produto do mercado. A lei de propriedade tem de surgir – eles só podem acreditar que ela surge a partir de algum robô infalível ou coisa da espécie – não sei exatamente de onde ela surge, mas de algum modo ela não pode surgir do mercado.

Porém o modo de pensar deles é mais ou menos o seguinte: primeiro, há a lei da propriedade, e tudo está estabelecido, e não há transações de mercado acontecendo – todo mundo fica esperando que a estrutura legal total fique pronta. E então ela está pronta – e agora podemos finalmente começar a fazer negócios uns com os outros. É certamente verdade não poder haver mercados em funcionamento sem um sistema legal funcionando; é verdade. Mas as coisas não se passam como se primeiro houvesse um sistema legal pronto e em seguida, no último dia em que o sistema acaba de ser composto e fica pronto – aí então as pessoas começam a negociar. Essas coisas surgem juntas. As instituições legais e as transações econômicas surgem juntas em um e mesmo lugar, ao mesmo tempo. O sistema legal não é algo independente da atividade que ele constrange. Afinal de contas, um sistema legal, repetindo, não é um robô ou um deus ou algo da espécie ou algo separado de nós. A existência de um sistema legal consiste em pessoas obedecendo-o. Se todo mundo ignorasse o sistema legal, ele não teria poder algum. Portanto, é só pelo fato de as pessoas generalizadamente aceitarem-no que ele sobrevive. O sistema legal, também ele, depende de apoio voluntário.

Acho que muitas pessoas – um dos motivos de elas terem medo da anarquia é acharem que sob o governo como que existiria algum tipo de garantia que deixaria de existir caso houvesse anarquia. Que de algum modo existe um firme plano de fundo ao qual podemos recorrer, o qual, na anarquia, simplesmente se esvairia. O firme plano de fundo, porém, é apenas o produto de pessoas interagindo com os incentivos que têm. Do mesmo modo, quando os anarquistas dizem que as pessoas, na anarquia, provavelmente teriam incentivo para fazer isto ou aquilo, e as pessoas dizem “Bem, não é bom o bastante! Eu simplesmente não quero que seja provável elas terem incentivo para fazer isso. Quero que o governo garanta de maneira absoluta que elas farão isso!”

O governo, porém, é apenas pessoas. E dependendo da estrutura constitucional do governo, é provável que elas façam isso ou aquilo. Não há como elaborar uma constituição que garanta que as pessoas no governo virão a se comportar de qualquer modo específico. É possível estruturá-la de modo a ser mais provável as pessoas fazerem isto ou menos provável elas fazerem isto. E vocês podem considerar a anarquia como apenas uma extensão do controle dos poderes uns pelos outros em nível mais amplo.

Por exemplo as pessoas dizem: “Que garantia há de os diferentes órgãos virem a resolver as coisas de qualquer maneira específica?” Bem, a Constituição dos Estados Unidos nada diz acerca do que acontecerá se diferentes poderes do governo discordarem acerca de como resolver as coisas. Ela não diz o que acontecerá se o Supremo Tribunal achar que algo é inconstitucional mas o Congresso achar que não é e desejar ir em frente e fazê-lo de qualquer forma. Notoriamente ela não diz o que acontecerá se houver disputa entre os estados e o governo federal. O sistema atual onde uma vez que o Supremo Tribunal declare algo institucional o Congresso e o Presidente não tentem mais fazê-lo (ou pelo menos não tanto) – isso nem sempre existiu. Lembrem-se de que, quando o Tribunal declarou ser inconstitucional o que Andrew Jackson estava fazendo, quando ele era Presidente, ele apenas disse: “Bem, eles tomaram a decisão deles, eles portanto que a imponham.” A Constituição não diz se o modo pelo qual Jackson fez as coisas era o modo correto. O modo pelo qual fazemo-lo hoje surgiu do costume. Talvez vocês sejam a favor, talvez contra – o que for, nunca foi codificado em lei.

(7) O Crime Organizado Tomará Conta

Uma objeção é a de que, na anarquia, o crime organizado tomará conta. Bem, poderia acontecer. Mas será provável? O crime organizado ganha poder por especializar-se em fazer coisas ilegais – coisas como drogas e prostituição e assim por diante. No decorrer dos anos quando o álcool era proibido o crime organizado especializou-se no comércio de álcool. Hoje, não é tão grande no comércio de álcool. Então o poder do crime organizado, em grande parte, depende do poder do governo. Ele é uma espécie de parasita das atividades do governo. Os governos, ao proibirem coisas, criam mercados paralelos. Os mercados paralelos são atividades perigosas de desempenhar porque você terá de preocupar-se tanto com o governo quanto com outras pessoas astuciosas que entram na área de mercado paralelo. O crime organizado especializa-se nisso. Acho, assim, que o crime organizado seria mais fraco, não mais forte, num sistema libertário.

(8) Os Ricos Governarão

Outra preocupação é a de que os ricos passem a governar. Afinal, a justiça simplesmente não irá para o lado de quem pagar mais nesse caso, se vocês tornarem os serviços legais num bem econômico? Essa é uma objeção comum. Interessante, é uma objeção particularmente comum entre os randianos, que subitamente se tornam muito preocupados com as pobres massas destituídas. Em que sistema, porém, os ricos são mais poderosos? No sistema atual ou na anarquia? Certamente, você levará sempre algum tipo de vantagem se for rico. É bom ser rico. Você estará sempre numa posição melhor para subornar pessoas se for rico do que se não for. Todavia, no sistema atual, o poder dos ricos é potencializado. Suponhamos que eu seja um rico malvado e deseje fazer o governo fazer algum tipo de coisa que custe um milhão de dólares. Terei eu de subornar algum burocrata com um milhão de dólares para conseguir isso? Não, porque não estou pedindo para ele fazer isso com o próprio dinheiro dele. Obviamente, se eu pedisse a ele para fazê-lo com o próprio dinheiro dele, não conseguiria que ele gastasse um milhão de dólares subornando-o por menos de um milhão. Teria de ser pelo menos um milhão de dólares e um centavo. Contudo, as pessoas que controlam o dinheiro de tributos não possuem esse dinheiro pessoalmente, e não podem fazer com ele o que quiserem, isto é, o burocrata não pode simplesmente embolsar o milhão e ir para casa (embora a coisa possa chegar surpreendentemente perto disso). Tudo o que tenho a fazer é suborná-lo pagando-lhe alguns milhares de dólares, e ele poderá  destinar aquele milhão de dólares para meu projeto favorito ou o que seja, e portanto o poder de minha verba de suborno é multiplicado.

Em contraste, se você fosse o chefe de algum órgão privado de proteção e eu tentasse fazer com que você fizesse algo que custasse um milhão de dólares, eu teria de subornar você pagando mais de um milhão. Portanto, o poder dos ricos num sistema assim é, em realidade, menor. E, naturalmente, qualquer tribunal que ganhasse a reputação de cometer discriminação em favor dos milionários contra os pobres também teria presumivelmente a reputação de cometer discriminação em favor dos bilionários em detrimento dos milionários. Assim, os milionários não desejariam recorrer a ele sempre. Só recorreriam a ele quando lidando com pessoas mais pobres, não com pessoas mais ricas. As repercussões da reputação – não creio que a pecha se popularizasse muito.

Preocupações acerca de vítimas pobres que não têm como pagar serviços legais, ou vítimas que morrem sem herdeiros (repetindo, os randianos estão muito preoupados com vítimas que morrem sem herdeiros) – no caso de vítimas pobres, vocês podem fazer o que se fazia na Islândia Medieval. Você é pobre demais para pagar serviços legais mas, ainda assim, se alguém prejudicou você, você tem o direito de requerer indenização daquela pessoa. Você poderá vender essa indenização, ou parte da indenização, ou toda a indenização, para outra pessoa. Na verdade, é algo do tipo de contratar advogado em base de honorários só pagáveis se houver ganho de causa. Você poderá vender sua indenização para alguém que tenha condições de fortalecer suas reivindicações. Ou, se você morrer sem herdeiros, em certo sentido um dos bens que você deixa é sua reivindicação de indenização, e ela poderá ser objeto de apropriação.

(9) Robert Bidinotto: As Massas Demandarão Más Leis

Outra preocupação de Bidinotto – e é uma espécie de preocupação oposta à de que os ricos dominem – é: bem, vejam, não está Mises certo quando diz que o mercado é como uma grande democracia, onde há soberania do consumidor, e as massas obtêm o que desejam? Isso é ótimo quando o assunto é geladeiras, carros e assim por diante. Seguramente, porém, não é boa coisa quando se trata de leis. Pois, afinal de contas, as massas são uma turba de parvos ignorantes e intolerantes, e se elas obtiverem as leis que desejam, quem sabe que coisas horríveis farão.

Obviamente, a diferença entre a democracia econômica tipo Mises e a democracia política é: bem, sim, elas obterão o que desejem, mas terão de pagar o preço. Agora, é perfeitamente verdade que se houver pessoas fanáticas o bastante quanto a desejarem impor alguma coisa ignóbil a outras pessoas, se houver um grupo de pessoas grande o suficiente fanático a respeito, então a anarquia poderá não levar a resultados libertários.

Se você morar na Califórnia, haverá suficiente número de pessoas absolutamente fanático acerca de proibir o fumo, ou talvez se você viver no Alabama, e se for o homossexualismo em vez do fumo que eles desejarem proibir (nenhum dos dois proibiria o outro, penso eu) – nesse caso, poderia acontecer que eles fossem tão fanáticos a respeito que partissem para a proibição. Mas lembrem-se de que pagarão por isso. Assim, quando você for ver seu prêmio mensal, verá: bem, aqui está seu serviço básico – proteger você contra agressão; oh, e depois há também seu serviço ampliado, e a taxa extra por ele – espiar pelas janelas dos seus vizinhos para garantir que eles não estejam – seja o fumo, seja o homossexualismo ou o que quer com o que você esteja preocupado. Agora: as pessoas realmente fanáticas dirão “Sim, vou desembolsar mais dinheiro para pagar isso.” (Naturalmente, se elas forem fanáticas a esse ponto, representarão problema na minarquia, também.) Se porém não forem tão fanáticas dirão: “Bem, se tudo o que eu precisar fazer for ir a uma cabine de votação e votar em favor dessas leis que restringem a liberdade das outras pessoas, ora essa, eu bem que irei, é muito fácil ir e votar.” Caso, entanto, elas tiverem que efetivamente pagar o preço – “Ah, não sei. Talvez eu possa me conformar, afinal.”

(10) Robert Nozick e Tyler Cowen: Órgãos Privados de Proteção Tornar-se-ão um Governo na prática

Muito bem, uma última consideração acerca da qual desejo falar. É uma questão suscitada originalmente por Robert Nozick e posteriormente desenvolvida por Tyler Cowen. Nozick disse: Suponhamos que haja anarquia. Uma dentre três coisas acontecerá. Ou os órgãos brigarão – e ele dá dois cenários diferentes do que acontecerá se eles brigarem. Eu porém já disse a respeito do que aconteceria se eles brigassem, e portanto falarei acerca da terceira opção. E se eles não brigarem? Então, diz ele, se eles, pelo contrário, concordarem com esses contratos de arbitragem mútua e assim por diante, então basicamente a coisa toda simplesmente se transformará num governo. E depois Tyler Cowen levou mais longe essa argumentação. Ele disse que o que acontece é basicamente isso vir a constituir-se num cartel e será de interesse desse cartel de certa forma transformar-se num governo. E qualquer novo órgão que surgir, ele simplesmente o boicotará.

Do mesmo modo que é de seu interesse ao você usar um novo cartão ATM que ele seja compatível com as máquinas de todo mundo mais, assim se você usar um novo tipo de órgão de proteção será de seu interesse ele ser parte desse sistema de contratos e arbitragem e assim por diante que os órgãos já existentes têm. Os consumidores não virão a você se descobrirem que você não tem quaisquer acordos acerca do que acontecerá se você entrar em conflito com os outros órgãos. E portanto o tal cartel terá como inviabilizar todo mundo mais.

Bem, isso poderia acontecer? Sem dúvida. Todo tipo de coisa pode acontecer. Metade do país poderia cometer suicídio amanhã. É, contudo, provável? Seria provável que o cartel abusasse de seu poder desse modo? O problema é que os cartéis são instáveis por todos os motivos usuais. Isso não significa ser impossível para um cartel ter sucesso. Afinal, as pessoas têm livre arbítrio. É porém algo improvável, porque exatamente os mesmos incentivos que levam você a formar um cartel levam você a passá-lo para trás – porque é sempre do interesse de qualquer pessoa fazer acordos fora do cartel uma vez estando dentro dele.

Bryan Caplan estabelece uma distinção entre boicotes que se reforçam a si próprios e boicotes que não se reforçam a si próprios. Os boicotes que se reforçam são aqueles nos quais o boicote é bastante estável por ser um boicote contra, por exemplo, fazer negócios com pessoas que enganam seus parceiros de negócios. Ora bem, você não tem de ter um compromisso moral dependente de determinação férrea para evitar fazer negócios com pessoas que enganam seus parceiros de negócios. Você tem um motivo de perfeito interesse próprio para não fazer negócio com tais pessoas.

Pense porém num compromisso de não fazer negócios com alguém porque você não gosta da religião da pessoa ou de algo da espécie, ou por essa pessoa ser membro do órgão de proteção errado, com o qual seus órgãos de proteção disseram a você para não se relacionar – bem, o boicote poderá funcionar. Talvez pessoas bastantes (e talvez todo mundo) no cartel estejam tão decididas a manter o cartel que simplesmente não se relacionarão com tal pessoa. Será isso possível? Sim. Se, porém, assumirmos que elas formaram o cartel com base no interesse econômico próprio delas, então o interesse próprio é precisamente o que leva ao solapamento, porque é do interesse delas lidar com a pessoa, do mesmo modo que é sempre do interesse de vocês envolverem-se em trocas mutuamente benéficas.

PERÍODO DE PERGUNTAS

De qualquer modo, essas são algumas das objeções e algumas de minhas respostas, e abro o tema.

P1: Minha preocupação principal a respeito do anarquismo é: por que não podemos dizer que o governo é simplesmente outra divisão do trabalho? Pois pode ser que algumas pessoas sejam melhores, ou possuam habilidades naturais mais adequadas para governar do que outras. Não estou dizendo que a anarquia não possa funcionar mas, unicamente a partir de evidência empírica, o fato de nenhuma das regiões industrializadas do mundo estar em estado de anarquia, nem ter ficado muito tempo em estado de anarquia diz algo acerca da estabilidade ou viabilidade de sociedades humanas complexas no estado presente. E também, voltando ao que eu disse antes, podemos conceber a relação entre o governante e o governado como apenas outra divisão comum do trabalho. Algumas pessoas possuem habilidades de liderança melhores para organizar as pessoas do que outras. Algumas pessoas não têm essas habilidades.

RL: Quanto ao ponto da divisão do trabalho, na medida em que a divisão do trabalho for voluntária – se você é melhor do que eu no tocante a algo, e você portanto o faz, e eu então compro os serviços de você – enquanto isso for voluntário, tudo bem. Quando, porém, estamos falando de divisão do trabalho e algumas pessoas são melhores em governar do que outras pessoas – bem, se eu consentir que você me governe – talvez eu esteja contratando você como meu consultor porque eu ache que você é melhor em tomar decisões do que eu, e portanto eu tomo uma decisão última que é contratar você como meu consultor, e a partir daí eu faço como você disser – isso não é governo; você é meu empregado, um empregado a quem eu sigo muito religiosamente. Governar, entretanto, implica em governar as pessoas sem o consentimento delas. A característica de a divisão do trabalho ser benéfica para todos os envolvidos não parece aplicar-se em casos onde um grupo força o outro a aceitar seus serviços.

E quanto à questão de por que não vemos nenhum país industrializado que tenha uma anarquia – obviamente, também não vemos nenhum país industrializado que tenha uma monarquia. Mas os países industrializados não existem há tanto tempo. Houve uma época na qual as pessoas diziam que todo país civilizado (ou quase todo país civilizado) era uma monarquia. Você encontra pessoas nos séculos dezessete e dezoito dizendo: vejam, todos os países civilizados são monarquias; a democracia nunca funcionará. E ao dizerem que a democracia nunca funcionaria elas queriam dizer não apenas que ela daria todos aqueles maus resultados no longo prazo; elas achavam que tudo cairia aos pedaços, entrando no caos, em questão de meses. O que quer que você pense da democracia, ela foi mais viável do que aquelas pessoas predisseram. Ela podia durar mais, de qualquer forma, do que predisseram. Assim, as coisas estão em fluxo. Houve uma época em que tudo era monarquia. Agora são democracias semioligárquicas. A noite é criança.

P2: Roderick, por certo apreciamos o belíssimo trabalho que você faz aqui no Instituto Mises, mas Ludwig von Mises não era anarquista. Assim, eu estava pensando se você não poderia dizer-nos mais acerca do seu instituto e do Instituto Molinari.

RL: Mises não era em realidade misesiano! [risadas] Bem, tenho meu próprio instituto de pesquisa interdisciplinar. É um tanto menor do que este. Não estou seguro quanto a ele ter tamanho físico. Consiste em mais de uma pessoa. A diretoria é composta de três pessoas. Portanto, são três pessoas mais um website. Algum dia ele governará a Terra – de maneira anárquica. No momento a maior parte do que ele faz é colocar diversos clássicos libertários e anarquistas no website. Há um rebento dele – a Sociedade Molinari, que é as mesmas três pessoas mais uma. Enquanto, como disse Hayek, os fatos sociais consistirem nas atitudes das pessoas em relação a eles, quanto mais pessoas acharem que ela existe, mais ela existirá. A coisa toda existe um pouquinho mais porque nos filiamos à Associação Filosófica Estadunidense. A Sociedade Molinari é anfitriã de uma sessão nas reuniões da Associação Filosófica Estadunidense em dezembro. Assim, haverá realmente um evento Molinari em dezembro envolvendo as três-pessoas-mais-uma. Portanto esse é o grandioso e glorioso progresso. Sua missão é derrubar o governo. Solicitamos condição de isenção de tributos do governo. (Verificaremos o quanto eles são estúpidos! Usamos na descrição palavreado um tanto diferente ao enviar os formulários.)

P3: Eu queria reforçar a argumentação que você apresentou acerca da objeção randiana de que as transações de mercado requerem algum tipo de plano de fundo legal para elas. O fato de haver mercados paralelos desmente isso. Se você for um traficante de cocaína e for enganado por seu intermediário, você certamente não poderá ir a um tribunal e dizer “Prendam-no, ele não me entregou a cocaína que devia ter-me entregue”…

RL: Tenho a certeza de que alguém deve ter tentado fazer isso…

P3: … Agora: obviamente, isso pode muito facilmente levar à violência, mas não nos esqueçamos de que há pessoas tentando ativamente impedir você, não é que apenas não estejam deixando você arbitrar, estão ativamente impedindo que você faça isso.

RL: David Friedman argumenta que uma das principais funções da Máfia é servir como algo semelhante a um sistema de tribunais para criminosos. Não é tudo o que ela faz, mas a Máfia tem interesse em que tipos de empreendimentos criminosos acontecem em seu território – porque quer a parte dela, mas também porque não quer tiroteios entre quadrilhas em seu território. Se houver conflito, se você tiver  concordado com algum tipo de acordo criminoso com alguém e ele tiver enganado você, e isso tiver acontecido na jurisdição de algum grupo mafioso específico, este terá interesse nisso, desde que você esteja contribuindo com sua parte. Se a outra parte não cooperar, a Máfia agirá como uma espécie de tribunal e policial. Ela é uma espécie de polícia para criminosos.

P4: O que impediria as empresas de proteção de se tornarem um esquema de venda de proteção?

RL: Bem, outras empresas de proteção. Se ela for bem-sucedida em fazer isso, tornar-se-á um governo. Durante, porém, o tempo em que estiver tentando fazer isso, não se terá ainda convertido num governo, e portanto presumimos haver outros órgãos existentes, e é do interesse desses outros órgãos assegurar que isso não aconteça. Poderá tornar-se um esquema de venda de proteção? Em princípio, poderão órgãos de proteção evolver tornando-se governo? Alguns sim. Acredito que historicamente alguns se tornaram. A questão, porém, é: tratar-se-á de um resultado provável ou inevitável? Penso que não, porque há controle cruzado contrário a isso. O controle cruzado pode falhar na anarquia do mesmo modo que pode falhar nas constituições. Há porém um controle cruzado contra isso que é a possibilidade de recorrer a outros órgãos de proteção ou a alguém que esteja começando outro órgão de proteção antes que essa coisa tenha tido a condição de adquirir aquele tipo de poder.

P5: Quem melhor explica a origem do estado?

RL: Bem, há uma teoria popular do século dezenove acerca da origem do estado que a gente encontra em diversas formas diferentes. Ela está em Herbert Spencer, em Oppenheimer, e a gente a encontra em alguns dos liberais franceses tais como Comte e Dunoyer, e em Molinari – que não era em realidade francês, e sim belga (“Não sou francês, dou belga!”). Essa teoria – eles tinham versões diferentes dela, mas todas bastante parecidas – era a de que o que acontece é um grupo conquistar outro grupo. Amiúde a teoria aventava que uma espécie de grupo caçador-saqueador teria conquistado um grupo agrícola.

Na versão de Molinari o que acontece é: primeiro, eles vão e matam pessoas e tomam o que é delas. E então gradualmente ponderam: bem, talvez devêssemos esperar e não matá-los, porque queremos que eles cultivem mais coisas da próxima vez em que voltarmos. Então em vez do que fizemos simplesmente viremos e tomaremos o que é deles e não os mataremos, e então eles cultivarão mais coisas, e no ano seguinte voltaremos. E então, pensam eles, bem, se tomarmos tudo o que é deles, eles não terão suficientes grãos de milho de boa qualidade para plantar, ou não terão nenhum incentivo para plantá-los – apenas ir-se-ão embora ou coisa da espécie – e assim não tomaremos tudo. E, finalmente, pensam: não temos de continuar a ir e voltar. Podemos simplesmente mudar-nos para cá. E então gradualmente, ao longo do tempo, criam-se uma classe governante e uma classe governada. De início a classe governante e a classe governada podem ser etnicamente diferentes por provirem de tribos diferentes. Entretanto, mesmo se, ao longo do tempo, as tribos se casarem entre si e não mais haja diferença nas composições, elas ainda terão a mesma estrutura de um grupo governante e um grupo governado.

Assim essa foi uma teoria popular acerca da origem do estado, ou pelo menos da origem de muitos estados.

Creio que outra origem que podemos encontrar de alguns estados ou de configurações tipo estado está no mesmo tipo de situação mas em casos nos quais eles foram bem-sucedidos em rechaçar os invasores. Algum grupo local dentro do grupo invadido diz: vamos especializar-nos em defesa – vamos especializar-nos em defender o resto de vocês contra esses invasores. E foram bem-sucedidos. Se vocês olharem a história da Inglaterra, creio que isso é o que aconteceu na a monarquia inglesa. Antes da conquista dos normandos, os primeiros monarcas ingleses eram líderes de guerra cujo trabalho principal era a defesa nacional. Eles tinham muito pouca coisa a fazer dentro do país. Estavam precipuamente dirigidos contra invasores externos. Mas era um monopólio. (Agora, a questão é como eles obtiveram tal monopólio. Não tenho certeza.) Uma vez, porém, tendo-o obtido, gradualmente começaram a tornar-se cada vez mais envolvidos também no controle interno do país.

P6: Heitor, a história de Murray acerca de Heitor? É muito parecida com essa história, e está na web, e é simplesmente uma linda história.

RL: Que história acerca de Heitor é essa?

P6: A primeira, acerca de por que temos de ir-nos, simplesmente fiquemos lá…

RL: Oh, sim.

P6: Murray fez esplêndido trabalho, e eu o recomendaria.

RL: Onde está?

P6: Em LewRockwell.com.

RL: É um dos artigos de Rothbard lá? Okay.

P6: Eu queria robustecer sua tese de diversas maneiras. Uma, outro argumento em favor da anarquia é que se você realmente for a favor do governo, terá de ser a favor do governo mundial, porque neste exato momento há anarquia entre os governos, e não podemos ter isso se quisermos governo. Muito poucas pessoas são a favor do governo mundial, e isso é incompatível com a argumentação contra a anarquia.

RL: Tem de haver um árbitro final.

P6: Outro reforço é a questão das negociações. Os modos como surgiram os diversos fusos horários e como surgiu a bitola padrão para ferrovias foi por meio de negociações entre empresas ferroviárias.

RL: E a internet. Alguma coisa é legal, mas outros aspectos apenas consuetudinários.

P6: E outro reforço é essa coisa acerca do cartel. A certa altura a Associação Nacional de Basquetebol tinha oito equipes e não permitia que ninguém mais entrasse, e assim começaram a ABA (Associação Estadunidense de Basquetebol, com a bola vermelha, branca e azul). Então, se havia aquele cartel que não admitia ninguém mais, começaram outro cartel.

RL: O que aconteceu com eles?

P6: Acabaram se fundindo. Agora há cerca de trinta equipes na NBA. E se for pouco, outra liga poderá surgir.

RL: O ponto crucial é que na definição austríaca de competição não se trata do número de firmas competidoras, e sim da livre entrada. Enquanto for possível começar outra, isso terá o mesmo efeito que realmente fazê-lo.

P6: Além da dissolução de um cartel, pode-se ter outros cartéis competindo com o primeiro cartel.

RL: A XFL teve qualquer bom efeito? [risos]

P6: Queria fazer uma pergunta. Na resposta à primeira pergunta, quando você disse que estava nomeando-o seu guia – significa isso que você está ficando do meu lado –

RL: Não.

P6: – na questão da alienabilidade?

RL: Não, não. Eis porque eu disse que ele era o empregado e não o dono. Acredito em direitos inalienáveis.

P6: Ele é um empregado, e no entanto você não pode demiti-lo…

RL: Nada disso, eu posso sim demiti-lo. Ele é meu consultor, eu sempre o sigo – mas não abri mão de meu direito de demiti-lo.

Artigo original afixado por Roderick T. Long, 2004.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy is back from Libertopia 2012 and we are glad to have a recording of her breakout session regarding modern concepts and approaches to Mutual Aid.

Be sure to follow along with her follow powerpoint presentation.

The Green Party carries some fond associations for me. It was originally the party of small-scale production and relocalized economies. I have an increasingly difficult time remembering that, in the face of things like Green Presidential nominee Jill Stein’s “Green New Deal” slogan and Vice Presidential nominee Cheri Honkala’s “Turn the Rust Belt into a Green Belt” tour. The Green Party, whose industrial vision once sounded a lot like that of Ralph Borsodi and Murray Bookchin, sounds Michael Mooreish.

The original New Deal, after all, was tailored to the terminal crises of mass-production capitalism. It presupposed an economy of gargantuan, enormously expensive, capital-intensive production facilities, requiring an authoritarian distribution system to guarantee they could dispose of their output at full speed. For me, that’s about the least libertarian form of economic organization imaginable — like something out of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

Like the first New Deal, Stein’s Green New Deal is essentially Hamiltonian, aimed at preventing deflation. Not only does she propose solving the problem of underutilized mass-production facilities with Michael Moore’s expedient of retooling underutilized GM factories to produce high-speed trains, but she calls for an official “full employment” policy based on direct government creation of jobs on a counter-cyclical basis. At present that would mean government creating 25 million public sector jobs, with hiring administered through local employment centers, to guarantee full employment at a living wage.

This Hamiltonian approach is just the kind of thing genuine greens used to object to. It works on exactly the same principles as planned obsolescence and the permanent war economy — that is, it generates enough waste production to guarantee the existing stock of labor and capital will be fully utilized at a target price.

Such proposals are just a greenwashed version of mid-20th century, mass-production capitalism.

Capitalism’s chronic tendency toward underutilized capital and underemployment has been made far worse in recent years by technologies of ephemeralization that reduce the amount of labor and capital required to produce a given standard of living. But that’s a problem of capitalism — a system based on imposing artificial scarcity and inefficiency, and erecting barriers against competition from more effficient alternatives, in order to extract rents — itself.

The proper approach is not to generate waste production or to make production inefficient enough to soak up all the labor and capital you’ve got lying around. It’s to reduce the average work week to reflect the amount of labor it takes to produce our current standard of living, and to make sure all the productivity gains from new technology are passed on to workers and consumers rather than enclosed as a source of rent.

As for those high-speed bullet trains, the way to deal with the age of Peak Oil is not to assume existing scales of production and market areas, and replace less efficient with more efficient forms of long-distance shipping. It’s not to assume the existing model of suburban monoculture and sprawl, and sell everyone electric cars. The proper approach, rather, is to reduce reliance on transportation inputs altogether.

High-speed bullet passenger trains may be a more economical way of doing what the airlines presently do in the case of travel for pleasure (the family that visits relatives across the country every year, or goes to Disneyland every few years). But for the vast majority of long-distance travel, the real solution is to replace the movement of people with the movement of information (e.g. video teleconferencing instead of business travel).

General Motors symbolizes everything most bureaucratic and pathological about the mid-20th century model of industrial capitalism. The Green Party, increasingly, seems to be adopting Michael Moore’s nostalgic vision in which it’s good for half the economy to be owned by GM — so long as everyone belongs to a UAW local.

Instead of a Rube Goldberg economy where the government hires enough people to run in hamster wheels or dig holes and fill them back in to keep everyone employed forty hours a week, how about eliminating the part of the price of goods and services that reflects embedded rents and waste (planned obsolescence, patents and copyrights, inefficient overly-centralized production methods, etc.) so that the average person can enjoy her current standard of living with a 15-hour week?

Instead of perpetuating the job culture and relying on inefficiency to keep us all employed, how about moving to a competitive market economy where all of us — instead of just a few rentier capitalists — share the gains from efficiency?

Available as a ready-to-print zine (PDF).

At first glance, the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) might strike you as an odd subject for a consideration by libertarians. Most self-described free market libertarians and market anarchists are more likely to condemn unions than to praise them.

But in a stateless society, or at least in a society where labor relations are unregulated by the state, the Wobblies’ model of labor struggle is likely to be the most viable alternative to the kinds of state-certified and state-regulated unions we’re familiar with.

And for those of us in the libertarian movement who don’t think “God” is spelled B-O-S-S, or instinctively identify with employers and gripe about how hard it is to get good help these days, the question of how labor might negotiate for better terms is probably of direct personal interest. Some of us, working for wages in the state capitalist economy, have seen precious little evidence of marginal productivity being reflected in our wages. Indeed, we’ve been more likely to see bosses using our increased productivity as an excuse to downsize the work force and appropriate our increased output for themselves as increased salaries and bonuses. And many of us who are employees at will aren’t entirely sanguine about the prospect that our bosses will be smart enough to have read Rothbard on the competitive penalties for capriciously and arbitrarily firing employees.

In fact, I have a hard time understanding why so many right-leaning free market libertarians are so hostile in principle to the idea of hard bargaining or contracts when it comes to labor, in particular.

It’s not in the rational interest of a landlord, competing with other landlords, to capriciously evict tenants at will for no good reason. But I still like to have a signed lease contract specifying under exactly what conditions I can be evicted, and enforceable against my landlord by a third party. It’s probably in the long-term competitive interest of banks not to raise interest rates without limit on existing balances, if they want to get new borrowers — but they seem to do it, anyway, and if you don’t consider it a comfort to have contractual limits on the interest they can charge you’ve got a lot more faith in human nature than I have.

Contracts are accepted with little question or thought by libertarians, in most areas of economic life, as a source of security and predictability — in all areas except labor, that is. When it comes to labor, Hazlitt or somebody has “proved” somewhere that the desire for contractual security is a sign of economic illiteracy.

Likewise, the labor market is apparently the one area of economic life where bargaining by the selling party is not considered a legitimate part of the price discovery process.Apparently the dictum that productivity determines wage levels means that you’re supposed to take the first offer or leave it — no haggling allowed.

I doubt many of us who actually work for wages find the right wingers’ labor exceptionalism very convincing. Most of us, in the real world, find that the credible threat to walk away from the table gets us higher wages than we would otherwise have had.Most of us, in the real world, would rather rely on a labor contract specifying just causes for termination than to rely on the pointy-haired boss having the sense to know his own best interests.

And most of use who have some common sense can see how ridiculous it is to assert, as do many right-wingers, that strikes are only effective because of the forcible exclusion of scabs. Such people, apparently, have never heard of turnover costs like those involved in training replacement workers, or the lost productivity of workers who have accumulated tacit, job-specific knowledge over a period of years that can’t be simply reduced to a verbal formula and transmitted to a new hire in a week or two.

And when mass strikes did take place before Wagner, the cost and disruption of employee turnover within a single workplace was greatly intensified by sympathy strikes at other stages of production. Before Taft-Hartley’s restrictions on sympathy and boycott strikes, a minority of workers walking out of a single factory could be reinforced by similar partial strikes at suppliers, outlets, and carriers. Even with only a minority walking out at each stage of production, the cumulative effect could be massive. The federal labor regime — both Wagner and Taft-Hartley — greatly reduced the effectiveness of strikes at individual plants by transforming them into declared wars fought by Queensbury rules, and likewise reduced their effectiveness by prohibiting the coordination of actions across multiple plants or industries. The Railway Labor Relations Act, together withTaft-Hartley’s cooling off periods, enabled the federal government to suppress sympathy strikes in the transportation industry and prevent local strikes from becoming regional or national general strikes. The cooling off period, in addition, gave employers time to prepare ahead of time for such disruptions by stockpiling parts and inventory, and greatly reduced the informational rents embodied in the training of the existing workforce. Were not such restrictions in place, today’s “just-in-time” economy would likely be even more vulnerable to such disruption than that of the 1930s.

Far from being a boon to workers, or making effective unions possible for the first time, Wagner suppressed the most effective tactics and in their place promoted the kind of union model that benefited employers.

Employers preferred a labor regime that relegated labor struggle entirely to strikes — and strikes of decidedly limited effectiveness at that — and coopted unions as the enforcers of management control on the job. The primary purpose of unions, under Wagner, was to provide stability on the job by enforcing contracts against their own rank and file and preventing wildcat strikes.

Far from being a labor charter that empowered unions for the first time, FDR’s labor regime had the same practical effect as telling the irregulars of Lexington and Concord “Look, you guys come out from behind those rocks, put on these bright red uniforms, and march in parade ground formation like the Brits, and in return we’ll set up a system of arbitration to guarantee you don’t lose all the time.”

Bargaining with the boss over the terms on which one enters into the employment relationship is only a small part of the bargaining process, and is arguably less important than the continual bargaining over terms that takes place within the employment relationship.

In fact the labor movement’s dependence on official, declared strikes as the primary method of labor struggle dates only from the establishment of the Wagner Act regime in the 1930s. Before that time, labor struggle relied at least as much on labor’s bargaining power over conditions on the job.

The labor contract is called an “incomplete contract” because, by the necessity of things, it is impossible to specify the terms ahead of time.As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis describe it,

The classical theory of contract implicit in most of neo-classical economics holds that the enforcement of claims is performed by the judicial system at negligible cost to the exchanging parties. We refer to this classical third-party enforcement assumption as exogenous enforcement. Where, by contrast, enforcement of claims arising from an exchange by third parties is infeasible or excessively costly, the exchanging agents must themselves seek to enforce their claims….

Exogenous enforcement is absent under a variety of quite common conditions: when there is no relevant third party…, when the contested attribute can be measured only imperfectly or at considerable cost (work effort, for example, or the degree of risk assumed by a firm’s management), when the relevant evidence is not admissible in a court of law… [,] when there is no possible means of redress…, or when the nature of the contingencies concerning future states of the world relevant to the exchange precludes writing a fully specified contract.

In such cases the ex post terms of exchange are determined by the structure of the interaction between A and B, and in particular on the strategies A is able to adopt to induce B to provide the desired level of the contested attribute, and the counter strategies available to B….

Consider agent A who purchases a good or service from agent B. We call the exchange contested when B’s good or service possesses an attribute which is valuable to A, is costly for B to provide, yet is not fully specified in an enforceable contract….

An employment relationship is established when, in return for a wage, the worker B agrees to submit to the authority of the employer A for a specified period of time in return for a wage w. While the employer’s promise to pay the wage is legally enforceable, the worker’s promise to bestow an adequate level of effort and care upon the tasks assigned, even if offered, is not. Work is subjectively costly for the worker to provide, valuable to the employer, and costly to measure. The manager-worker relationship is thus a contested exchange. [1]

In fact the very term “adequate effort” is meaningless, aside from whatever way its definition is worked out in practice based on the comparative bargaining power of worker and employer. It’s virtually impossible to design a contract that specifies ahead of time the exact levels of effort and standards of performance for a wage-laborer, and likewise impossible for employers to reliably monitor performance after the fact. Therefore, the workplace is contested terrain, and workers are justified entirely as much as employers in attempting to maximize their own interests within the leeway left by an incomplete contract. How much effort is “normal” to expend is determined by the informal outcome of the social contest within the workplace, given the de facto balance of power at any given time. And that includes slowdowns, “going canny,” and the like. The “normal” effort that an employer is entitled to, when he buys labor-power, is entirely a matter of convention. It’s directly analogous the local cultural standards that would determine the nature of “reasonable expectations,” in a libertarian common law of implied contract.

If libertarians like to think of “a fair day’s wage” as an open-ended concept, subject to the employer’s discretion and limited by what he can get away with, they should remember that “a fair day’s work” is equally open-ended. It’s just as much in the worker’s legitimate self-interest to minimize the expenditure of effort per dollar of income as it’s in the employer’s interest to maximize the extraction of effort in a given period of time.

For the authoritarian “libertarians” who believe “vox boss, vox dei,” this suggestion is scandalous. The boss is the only party who can unilaterally rewrite the contract as he goes along. And it’s self-evidently good for the owner or manager to maximize his self-interest in extracting whatever terms he can get away with. Oddly enough, though, these are usually the same people who are most fond of saying that employment is a free market bargain between equals.

For most of us who know what it’s like working under a boss, it’s a simple matter of fairness that we should be as free as the boss to try to shape the undefined terms of the labor contract in a way that maximizes our self-interests. And most of the Wobbly tactics grouped together under the term “direct action on the job” involve just such efforts within the contested space of the job relationship.

Further, these are the very methods a free market labor movement might use, in preference to playing by Wagner Act rules.

The various methods are described in the old Wobbly pamphlet “How to Fire Your Boss (PDF),” and discussed by the I.W.W.’s Alexis Buss in her articles on “minority unionism” for Industrial Worker. The old model, she wrote — ”a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained” — is increasingly untenable.

We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force….

Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition….

U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context[;] this is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees. [2]

How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing….

We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for it. [3]

And workers make bosses beg for cooperation through the methods described in “How to Fire Your Boss”: slowdowns, working to rule, “good work” strikes, whistleblowing and “open mouth” sabotage, sick-ins and unannounced one-day wildcats at random intervals, etc. The beauty of these methods is that, unlike regular strikes, they don’t give the boss an excuse for a lockout. They reduce the productivity of labor and raise costs on the job — rather than “going out on strike,” workers “stay in on strike.”

Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss’ profits while continuing to collect wages, you can cripple the boss without giving some scab the opportunity to take your job. Direct action, by definition, means those tactics workers can undertake themselves, without the help of government agencies, union bureaucrats, or high-priced lawyers.

Some of the forms of direct action described in the pamphlet, especially — e.g. working to rule — there’s no conceivable way of outlawing ex ante through a legally enforceable contract. How would such a clause read: “Workers must obey to the letter all lawful directives issued by management — unless they’re stupid”?

The old Wobbly practice of “open mouth sabotage,” better known these days as whistleblowing, is perhaps the single effective weapon in the Internet age. As described in the pamphlet:

Sometimes simply telling people the truth about what goes on at work can put a lot of pressure on the boss….

Whistle Blowing can be as simple as a face-to-face conversation with a customer, or it can be as dramatic as the P.G.&E. engineer who revealed that the blueprints to the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor had been reversed….

Waiters can tell their restaurant clients about the various shortcuts and substitutions that go into creating the faux-haute cuisine being served to them.

The Internet takes possibilities for such “open mouth sabotage” to a completely new level. In an age when unions have virtually disappeared from the private sector workforce, and downsizings and speedups have become a normal expectation of working life, the vulnerability of employer’s public image may be the one bit of real leverage the worker has over him — and it’s a doozy. If they go after that image relentlessly and systematically, they’ve got the boss by the short hairs. Given the ease of setting up anonymous blogs and websites (just think of any company and then look up the URL employernamesucks.com), systematically exposing the company’s dirt anonymously on comment threads and message boards, the possibility of anonymous saturation emailings of the company’s major suppliers and customers and advocacy groups concerned with that industry…. well, let’s just say that labor struggle becomes a form of asymmetric warfare.

And such campaigns of open mouth sabotage are virtually risk-free, and impossible to suppress. From the McLibel case to the legal fight over the Diebold memos, from the DeCSS uprising to Trafigura, attempts to suppress negative publicity are governed by the Streisand Effect (named after Barbra’s attempt to suppress online photos of her house generated publicity that caused a thousand times as many people to look at the photos than otherwise would have). It is simply impossible to suppress negative publicity on the Internet, thanks to things like encryption, proxies, and mirror sites. And the very attempt to do so will generate more publicity beyond the target’s worst nightmares. Consider, for example, the increasing practice of firing bloggers for negative comments about their employers. What’s the result?Rather than a few hundred or a few thousand readers of a marginal blog seeing a post on how bad it sucks to work at Employer X, tens of millions of mainstream newspaper readers see a wire service story: “Blogger fired for revealing how bad it sucks to work at Employer X.”

Some of the most effective labor actions, in hard to organize industries, have involved public information campaigns like those of the Imolakee Indian Workers’ boycott of Taco Bell and pickets by the Wal-Mart Workers’ Association.

Rather than negotiating on the bosses’ terms under the Wagner rules, in order to negotiate a contract, we should be using network resistance and asymmetric warfare techniques to make the bosses beg us for a contract.

Notes:

[1] “Is the Demand for Workplace Democracy Redundant in a Liberal Economy?” in Ugo Pagano and Robert Rowthorn, eds., Democracy and Effciency in the Economic Enterprise. A study prepared for the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) of the United Nations University (London and New York: Routledge, 1994, 1996), pp. 69-70.

[2] “Minority Report,” Industrial Worker, October 2002 <http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/AlexisBuss102002.shtml>

[3] “Minority Report,” Industrial Worker, December 2002 <http://www.iww.org/organize/strategy/AlexisBuss122002.shtml>

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

Há várias semanas Julian Sanchez anunciou sua intenção de deixar o Instituto Cato se a tentativa de aquisição pelos irmãos Koch for bem-sucedida. Corey Robin valeu-se da oportunidade para dar um puxão de orelhas nos libertários por nossa alegada incoerência no tocante à cultura do trabalho (“Quando os Libertários Vão para o Trabalho,” 7 de março.

Sanchez não questionou o direito dos Koch de adquirirem o Cato se puderem. Simplesmente criticou a aquisição pelos Koch considerando-a indesejável. Depois de tal aquisição, argumentou ele, ele provavelmente enfrentaria restrições a sua autonomia e integridade por parte dos novos donos, com sua liberdade de pesquisar e falar a verdade subordinada à agenda política daqueles.

Tudo bem, diz Robin. Por que, entretanto, libertários como Sanchez não levam tal análise a sua conclusão lógica? A Esquerda tem criticado sistematicamente não apenas a cultura da subordinação no local de trabalho, como também as estruturas de poder econômico nas quais ela se assenta.

Sanchez menciona ausência de compromissos de hipoteca ou família como fator em sua decisão. Ahá, diz Robin — é exatamente isso! A vasta maioria dos trabalhadores arca com esses compromissos econômicos, dados os diferenciais de riqueza e poder no qual se assenta o sistema de salários, e portanto não pode dar-se ao luxo de simplesmente abandonar o emprego autoritário. Assim Sanchez, libertário típico que é, deixa de atentar para as formas pelas quais os menos privilegiados são sujeitados a condições coercitivas de trabalho como resultado da estrutura econômica.

Corey, eu gostaria de apresentar a você os libertários de esquerda. Estou associado a excelente grupo deles no Centro por uma Sociedade sem Estado — um instituto de pesquisa interdisciplinar anarquista de mercado de esquerda onde sou associado de pesquia e comentador de notícias — e sobrepomo-nos em boa parte a outro grupo que integra a Aliança da Esquerda Libertária. Analisar as formas pelas quais o estado intervém no mercado para fortalecer o poder de barganha dos empregadores contra o dos trabalhadores é nosso — e meu — pão de cada dia.

Como libertários nós, tanto quanto Julian Sanchez, não queremos restringir a liberdade de contrato do emprego assalariado. Vemos, porém, subordinação e hierarquia como indesejáveis. E desejamos reduzir, tanto quanto possível, restrições materiais que promovem a entrada em tais relacionamentos autoritários.

No capitalismo — por oposição a no livre mercado — o estado torna os meios de produção artificalmente escassos e dispendiosos para os trabalhadores, e eleva o limiar da subsistência confortável, de tal maneira que os trabalhadores fiquem artificialmente dependentes do trabalho assalariado.

O estado impõe direitos artificiais de propriedade e formas de escassez artificiais, como a assim chamada “propriedade intelectual” (fonte do sobrepreço de $150 dólares nos tênis da Nike, que custam $5 dólares para serem produzidos) e títulos de proprietário fundiário ausente para terra vaga e não beneficiada. Organiza a economia em cartéis oligopolistas, com preços “inelásticos” (provavelmente sobrepreço de 20% na maioria das indústrias) e métodos de produção enormemente ineficientes e com despesas gerais [overhead] elevadas. Impõe barreiras à iniciativa de autoemprego, mediante inflar os dispêndios de capital requeridos para produção, por meio de coisas tais como códigos de “segurança” que criminam o uso de bens de capital domésticos ordinários, e leis de zoneamento que criminam empresas domésticas. Tolhe a subsistência confortável por meio do fomento de bolhas imobiliárias e crimina a competição de técnicas de construção vernáculas.

A exploração econômica só é possível quando a competição oriunda da possibilidade de autoemprego é impedida e o emprego assalariado se torna a única alternativa disponível. Do mesmo modo que o estado britânico acumpliciou-se com os empregadores no tocante aos Cercados [Enclosures] para obstruir acesso a oportunidades naturais, os empregadores modernos, no capitalismo corporativo, usam o estado para eliminar oportunidades naturais como fonte de renda. O efeito global é o aumento da fatia de necessidades, que para serem satisfeitas passam agora a depender do trabalho assalariado em vez de do autoemprego dos setores informal e doméstico, e o aumento do número de pessoas em busca de emprego em comparação com os empregos disponíveis. Portanto, os trabalhadores são forçados a competir por emprego num mercado comprador.

Num livre mercado, com todos esses direitos artificiais de propriedade e formas de escassez artificial removidos, a situação se inverteria. Muitas pessoas na margem deixariam totalmente o emprego assalariado, cada família requereria menos trabalhadores assalariados para trazer dinheiro para casa, os empregados assalariados teriam de trabalhar menos horas para suplementar seu sustento próprio na economia informal, e milhões de pessoas se aposentariam mais cedo. Os empregadores se veriam forçados a competir por trabalho, em vez do inverso, e os trabalhadores teriam os meios materiais para abandonar a mesa de negociações e viver de seus próprios recursos enquanto à espera de ofertas mais palatáveis.

Em suma, o estado é amigo dos empregadores e inimigo do trabalhador. Um mercado libertado significa libertação do sistema de salários.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 14 de abril de 2012.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

From the Markets Not Capitalism audiobook read by C4SS fellow Stephanie Murphy.

The following article was written by Dawie Coetzee and published on the Artisanal Cars, November 5th, 2011.

This has to be said sooner rather than later, especially in light of the inclusion among all the sound and salutary demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement of the demand for more regulation. The danger is that meeting this demand will leave the offending corporations even more powerful than they have hitherto been.

However fictitious the little gem doing the rounds, which places the EU regulations on the sale of cabbages at 26 911 words, a cursory search will reveal the general consensus that such a level of regulation, be it real or imaginary, is at best absurd and at worst draconian. Most people have a healthy abhorrence for petty bureaucratic interference in the form of all manner of regulations. My fear is that an undefined and unqualified demand for financial regulation might leave this abhorrence unarticulable. And it is my belief that articulating this abhorrence is more necessary than ever.

Corporations nest in regulation. Corporations cultivate regulation for their own purposes. The corporations that are responsible for our current problems are not the products of Industrial Revolution-era laissez-faire policies; they are very much the product of modern controlled capitalism. It is certainly not a case of a few maverick operators breaking the rules. Our current predicament has come about by the corporate majority obeying the rules.

It is not merely that they have adjusted to state regulation. It is not even that they have manipulated regulation to suit their own ends. They have actively sought regulation, have nurtured and nourished regulation by subtle and unsubtle means. They have done this to establish and maintain a state of oligopoly impregnable to unforeseen competition; to render their products indispensible to the consumer, and thus also themselves as exclusive providers of their products; to maintain a state of perpetual unsaturation in markets that by rights should by now be oversaturated many times over.

The corporate requirement for regulation is simple: that compliance – which includes the onerous processes of providing proof of compliance – should be relatively easy for themselves and highly troublesome for anyone else. It is the latter part that is often overlooked: corporations gladly inconvenience themselves if they thereby inconvenience actual or potential competitors more. That is how the corporations have come to be as powerful as they are: by causing sanely-scaled alternatives to be regulated out of existence.

Corporations use many means to cultivate regulation. Provocation is a favourite: corporations keep pushing governments’ buttons until they get the regulations they want. Conversely one thing they cannot do is overtly to demand the regulations they want, for negative public sentiment is too convenient – and safe – a tool to risk losing. Corporations need to maintain the myth that they do not want regulation. Regulation demanded by incorruptible paragons of virtue in the face of corporate opposition will not be questioned, even if it plays directly into corporate hands. Hence all the “free market” rhetoric. Hence, also, the misnomer “deregulation”, which is in fact an edifice of regulation no less exacting than any other which merely happens to favour the corporations. For what the world requires is real, literal deregulation: but the word by which to demand it has been stolen.

Likewise a market that is free in any intelligibly rational sense of the word is the one thing the corporations will not be able to survive.

I have no proof one way or the other, but I would not put it past certain corporations deliberately to err in order better to create a context in which they are unassailable. Did BP dump crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico on purpose to provoke a response from government that would be detrimental to some or other rival? It might well have been worth whatever cost BP might eventually have incurred in clean-up and compensation.

Some corporate acts are not explicable in any other way. Fixing the Ford Pinto exploding fuel tank thing in the early ’70s would not have hurt the profit margin on the Pinto materially. The very ease with which Ford could have made good is often cited as a case of “corporate callousness” and an argument for stricter regulation. But by leaving the thing alone Ford could provoke ever higher hurdles for European and Japanese competitors to jump if they were to compete against the Pinto in the US market, hurdles it turned out many found themselves unable to attempt. This was at a time when imports had been eating into the US market for a decade, but when a fresh fuel crisis gave smaller, better designed, imported cars a sudden advantage. By narrowing the import field through provoked regulation Ford ended up with a greater market share to itself.

Now, many will counter that the imported alternatives were eliminated by the regulations because they were “unsafe”. The truth is that their manufacturers could not afford the processes by which they were required to demonstrate compliance with, nor the extra component production facilities to make parts that are no safer but merely happen to meet, the specific requirements of the regulations.

And this does not even begin to address issues of personal responsibility expected from drivers, in the sense that any vehicle is safe in the hands of a driver who is adequately skilled, alert, and sensible. The regulatory scenario thus cultivated promotes the culture of the unskilled, inattentive, and indifferent driver, consistently with the corporate desire to sell to as broad a market as possible by maintaining dependence on motor vehicles in the vast majority who have no particular interest in using them properly. And the increase in vehicle traffic thus generated in turn increases the justification in demanding ever stricter levels of safety.

And thus regulation breeds the “need” for more regulation, and cui bono? Not ourselves, not even if we did not count creative liberty a spiritual prerequisite for all lives to be meaningful.

Would a sudden abolition of regulation put things right? Probably not: but the operative word is sudden. Slow haste is instead required to dismantle this edifice. At the very least it should not be built higher: and that needs to be understood when deciding exactly what to demand when things like the Wall Street protests provide the opportunity to make demands.

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

Se vocês ainda não assistiram aos “A História das Coisas,” de Annie Leonard, sugiro que o façam. Esses vídeos incluem exames detalhados da economia de desperdício, de ineficiência subsidiada e de obsolescência planejada.

Recente capítulo, “A História do Falido,” discrimina desperdício em gastos do governo em coisas tais como a instituição militar e enormes subsídios para escorar a apropriadamente denominada “economia dinossauro.” Isso, porém, é apenas um prefácio para a argumentação de Leonard de que o governo não está em realidade falido: Se parasse de desperdiçar dinheiro nessas coisas, teria dinheiro suficiente para “construir um futuro melhor.”

Sua longa lista de coisas boas nas quais o governo deveria gastar dinheiro inclui projetos de eficiência de energia, modernização de lares, subsídios para energia alternativa e tecnologia verde e milhões de bolsas universitárias. A visão dela de um “futuro melhor,” contudo, reflete as contradições internas do progressismo.

De um lado temos a visão liberal convencional de meado século 20 de intervenção do governo para construir projetos gigantescos arrasa-quarteirão de infraestrutura, incentivar a criação de novas indústrias e “criar empregos.”

De outro temos o modo de sentir verde, “o pequeno é bonito,” surgido na era hippie, de eliminar desperdício e consumismo de massa.

Os dois simplesmente não são compatíveis.

Quando Rachel Maddow posta-se diante de uma gigantesca represa hidroelétrica, ou fala do Sistema Interestadual de Rodovias, como exemplos de fazer “grandes coisas,” ela dá voz ao liberalismo gerencista de meado século 20 que fazia o coração de Galbraith bater compassado. Essa visão realmente não é compatível com a tal coisa “verde” e “o pequeno é bonito” acerca da qual os progressistas também falam.

Simplesmente não se pode ter uma economia capital-intensiva baseada em infraestruturas centralizadas de larga escala sem garantir um fluxo de renda para acorrer a todos os custos de overhead [despesas gerais]. O que nos leva ao lado sombrio de Galbraith: Criar mecanismos sociais para garantir que a produção da indústria venha a ser absorvida de tal maneira que as engrenagens da indústria não se entupam por causa de estoque não vendido. Foi precisamente esse imperativo, antes de tudo, que nos deu o desperdício subsidiado, crescimento desordenado, a cultura do automóvel e todo o resto.

O modelo de capitalismo “progressista” de Gates e Warren Buffett é uma versão com falsa fachada verde da economia dinossauro de Leonard. Há inerente contradição na desqualificação, por ela, daquela economia arcaica enquanto preconiza políticas de governo para oferecimento de “bons empregos.”

Atividade expansionista do governo para utilizar capacidade industrial e manter todo mundo trabalhando em tempo integral é o velho modelo do século 20. Este, porém, requer quantidade sempre cadente de capital e trabalho para gerar determinado padrão de vida. Se eliminarmos a porção de capacidade industrial e trabalho que vai para a produção de coisas inúteis, terminaremos com um monte de fábricas de produção em massa abandonadas, e multidões de pessoas trabalhando quinze semanas e comprando coisas oriundas de fábricas de garagens relocalizadas para perto de onde elas moram. E esse não é o tipo de coisa de que Gates e Buffett gostam, porque eles não podem ganhar dinheiro a partir dela.

Outro problema é a receita de Leonard: “Quem tem o poder real? Nós.”

Realmente? Barack Obama é o Democrata mais progressista em pelo menos duas gerações. Obteve a maior maioria Democrática desde quando LBJ derrotou Goldwater, tomando posse com evidente voto de confiança oriundo do colapso financeiro. Os Democratas obtiveram uma supermaioria no Congresso. Se “nós” não tivemos o poder de fazer essas coisas com esse alinhamento das estrelas políticas que só acontece uma vez na vida, é seguro dizer que tal nunca acontecerá.

Um governo poderoso o suficiente para “construir um futuro melhor” quase certamente — dentro do princípio de que poder atrai poder — usará esse poder para beneficiar os poucos, os ricos e os poderosos. Um governo representativo de dimensões continentais, por sua natureza, não é passível de ser controlado por uma maioria de milhões de pessoas. Eis porque, antes de tudo, viemos a ter todos esses subsídios da “economia dinossauro.”

Se desejarmos construir um futuro melhor, o melhor modo de fazê-lo provavelmente não será contestar a oligarquia corporativa. Felizmente há milhões de pessoas que realmente estão construindo um futuro melhor, e estão fazendo isso mediante tratar tanto as grandes empresas quanto o governo hipertrofiado como obstáculos em relação aos quais passar ao largo.

Essas pessoas estão construindo uma nova sociedade dentro da decadente antiga sociedade de capitalismo dinossauro e seu querido governo, prontas para substituí-los por algo melhor quando a antiga estrutura desabar sob seu próprio peso.

Entre tais pessoas contam-se Wikileaks, os movimentos de partilha de arquivos e de cultura livre, e o Ocupem Wall Street.

Entre elas contam-se os desenvolvedores do Linux, microfabricantes em projetos tais como Ecologia de Fonte Aberta e Hackerespaços, permaculturistas, e agricultura apoiada pela comunidade.

Entre elas estão os construtores de moedas criptografadas, sistemas de escambo, roteadores criptografados e redes secretas [darknets].

E elas não ficam esperando por um governo que lhes dê permissão.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 27 de novembro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

From Leah’s tumblr leahxvx:

First and foremost, do not panic.

Leah wanted for us to express these points to you with this news:

• She is extremely traumatized and experienced a lot of very, very bad things,  but she is alive. The state of her mental health is also very bad.
• She asks that people do not jump to wild conclusions about her release because they do not apply.
• She spent her whole time in SHU / Administrative Detention (solitary confinement) and was told that that is where she would stay for the duration of her incarceration, up to 18 months. She was classified as “different” from Matt and Kteeo.
• She received probably near 200 pieces of mail, books, postcards in 4 days (mail was not delivered to her every day) and was glad for it, and knows probably a similar amount is being returned to sender right now. She urges people to step up support for Matt and Kteeo on all fronts. Books that didn’t get to her probably go into the prison library, which is still a good thing because from what we heard their selection is limited to romance novels and religious literature.
• More information is going to be released. At this time, Leah needs space from media. She is overwhelmed by all the publicity. Regardless of who you are, if you have her personal information,PLEASE do not call her, email her, or try to locate her in order to question her. Give her space until she asks otherwise.
• She was released the night of 10/17. She did not make it public immediately because she did not want the “media shitstorm” to jump down her throat yet.
• She is very moved by the amount of support and solidarity there has been for her, she expressed concern that Matt and Kteeo were not getting as much publicity. Please write them, support them, send them books. 

Again, to reiterate, more information is going to be released in a few days.

Thank you all for keeping an ear to the ground and for supporting these people.

-mod

As Thomas L. Knapp observes in a recent column (Election 2012: “Oil’s Well That End’s Welfarish,” October 17), Mitt Romney — famous for complaining about the 47% who expect to be taken care of — “whined that the Obama administration has been insufficiently charitable with ‘public’ land (and taxpayer money) toward the oil companies.”

He notes that “for every dollar a timber company paid in leasing fees, the US government spent $1.27 on road-building and other projects to enable the exploitation of those timber leases.” The same applies to oil drilling in places like the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve: “the next time a natural resources extraction company offers to cover the entire cost of its own operations on ‘public’ land, let alone deliver a net profit to the US government on the deal, will be the first time.”

Extractive industries are among the biggest welfare queens in human history. Much — probably most — of the oil and mineral wealth of the planet is still in the hands of transnational corporate beneficiaries of centuries of colonial looting. Oil and mineral companies routinely use their pet states to politically guarantee access to mineral resources. Just look at the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran — then read the Wikipedia article on BP. The politics of oil is the central factor in the slaughter of millions in the Congo, Zaire, and Angola since WWII. The same goes for the Suharto coup in Indonesia and the democide in East Timor. I think Shell actually has a Vice President for supervising death squad activity.

Most production of cash crops for corporate agribusiness, under the neoliberal “export-oriented development model” the Washington Consensus forces on the Third World, takes place on land from which peasants were either outright evicted, or reduced to at-will tenancy and then evicted, under colonialism or post-colonialism. The fastest way for a left-leaning regime to bring those “Washington Bullets” down on itself is to try putting that land back in the hands of its rightful owners — the peasants who originally cultivated it. Just ask Jacobo Arbenz.

It’s hilarious that self-described defenders of “free enterprise” like Mittens, who come down hardest on boondoggles like Solyndra, are also the biggest advocates of nuclear power and projects like the Keystone XL pipeline.

Nuclear power is the most extreme example of the phenomenon Tom Knapp described. Every step in the production chain, from the government building roads to the uranium mines on federal land to the disposal of nuclear waste at government expense — and the government indemnification against liability for meltdowns in between — is heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

As for Keystone, it’s just another example — although much smaller in scale and bloodshed — of the kind of corporate looting the fossil fuels industry carries out around the world. Never mind the fact that the extraction itself couldn’t take place in Alberta if government approval didn’t constitute a de facto indemnity, essentially preempting any potential tort action in the courts for harm from pollution.

The pipeline is being built on stolen land. From Montana to Oklahoma and Texas, TransCanada is using eminent domain to steal land — often falling afoul of treaty guarantees with Indian nations — and using local police and sheriffs as mercenaries in pitched battles against activists. Even when it crosses federal land, it amounts to a subsidy to the project. “Vacant” land — actually occupied by human beings with the legal liability of having brown skin — was originally preempted by the Spanish crown, passed into the hands of the Mexican Republic, and thence into the hands of the U.S. government via the Guadalupe-Hidalgo cession. The American state held all this land out of use, in blocs of tens and hundreds of millions of acres, so that it could eventually be handed over to favored timber, mining, oil and pipeline companies without the need to buy it up piecemeal from individual homesteaders, small forestry cooperatives and the like.

So now when you hear Mittens talk about “free enterprise,” you know what he means by it.

When it comes to the “outrageous” remarks of the week, it usually takes me a while to get a handle on what all the fuss is about. (Update–the best commentary I’ve yet seen on the media reaction comes from Matt Taibbi.)  When the commentariat had their knickers in a twist back in the ’90s over Wayne LaPierre’s statements on guns and government tyranny, my reaction was, “Yeah, so?” It seemed pretty tame (not to mention self-evident) to me. And now, listening to Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” sermon, my reaction is pretty much the same: “Yeah, so?”

I’d take issue with his tendency to conflate “America” with the American government, and to confuse the American host organism with the glorified tapeworms in Washington and Wall Street who make foreign policy and run the corporate economy. I’d quibble over his AIDS howler, when his completely factual reference to the Tuskegee experiment was plenty by itself. And frankly, I don’t think Bill Clinton has ever been an “intelligent friend” to anyone but Bill Clinton.

But on the whole, my reaction is pretty much the same as Mark Brady’s:

He’s good on government lies. And he’s good on the war question, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Afghanistan, Iraq. Yes, he does need to read Mises on the market economy. But, overall, he’s arguably better than Barack Obama. And certainly better than some who call themselves libertarian!

If anything, Wright’s Jeremiad (“Confusing God and Government“) would be a good corrective for the historical illiteracy of the Religious Right in America, who are unaware of just what a radical departure their “God’n’Country” religion is from the Judeo-Christian tradition. As fond as some of them are of quoting Romans Chapter 13, what Paul advocated there was basically the modern Quaker position of quietism toward the state: leave it alone so it will leave you alone. Somehow I doubt the first century Church held enthusiastic “God’n’Caesar” rallies every year to celebrate the Founding of the City, with waving SPQR banners and bas-reliefs of Romulus and the she-wolf, and mass loyalty oaths to Caesar (just what do you think the “Pledge of Allegiance” is, anyway?). And all the Focus on the Family schmucks have to do is crack open the Bible to the stories of Ahab and Jezebel, or Manasseh, to find prophets speaking truth to power and calling Israel/Judah to judgment in ways that make “God damn America” look tame indeed.

Predictably Pat Buchanan weighed in on the controversy, suggesting that Wright ought to stop his whining because the black community’s problems are mostly of its own making (via Orcinus):

Is it really white America’s fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

This has been a common theme on the Right since it was set forth by neoconservatives Marvin Olasky and Pat Moynihan. Newt Gingrich was a shill for it in the Nineties. It’s also an example of a recurring refrain in the vulgar libertarian hymnbook: poor people are that way because they deserve it.

But things aren’t quite that simple.

For starters, the social pathologies of the inner city don’t date (as the Gingrichoids claim) just to the Great Society. They actually got fully underway back in the 1950s. According to Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in Regulating the Poor, the immediate cause of urban black social disintegration was the mass influx of poor southern blacks, sharecroppers who were tractored off their land after WWII.

The logical question to ask is not only why these sharecroppers were evicted, but how they came to be working someone else’s land in the first place.

By any reasonable standard of justice, the plantations should have been broken up after the Civil War and the land given to the freed slaves. I believe “forty acres and a mule” is the expression commonly used. But in fact that very seldom occurred.

When it did, though, it made a huge difference: a difference still reflected today in the comparative social and economic statistics of blacks whose ancestors got, or didn’t get, land of their own. For example, according to Melinda Miller (hat tip to Tyler Cowen), the Cherokee Nation (which practiced slavery and joined the Confederacy) was forced during reconstruction to “to allow its former slaves to claim and improve any unused land in the Nation’s public domain.” Miller found “smaller racial wealth and income gaps in the Cherokee Nation than in the South,” and “higher absolute levels of wealth and higher levels of income than southern freedmen.” These differences, she said, were substantial: the racial wealth gap differed by 46-75% for livestock, and 20-56% for crop income.

Henry Louis Gates (another hat tip to Freedom Democrats) found a similar, positive deviation in the economic success of present-day blacks who managed to acquire land (some of them under the Southern Homestead Act):

I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans… And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property….

If there is a meaningful correlation between the success of accomplished African-Americans today and their ancestors’ property ownership, we can only imagine how different black-white relations would be had “40 acres and a mule” really been official government policy in the Reconstruction South.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction.

This is the same thing, almost to the word, that individualist anarchists like Lysander Spooner (in Natural Law) had to say about the “freeing” of the serfs, and other easings of the feudal yoke on the peasantry of Europe (which also entailed, at the same time, “freeing” them from their rights in the land):

In process of time, the robber, or slaveholding, class—who had seized all the lands, and held all the means of creating wealth—began to discover that the easiest mode of managing their slaves, and making them profitable, was not for each slaveholder to hold his specified number of slaves, as he had done before, and as he would hold so many cattle, but to give them so much liberty as would throw upon themselves (the slaves) the responsibility of their own subsistence, and yet compel them to sell their labor to the land-holding class—their former owners—for just what the latter might choose to give them. Of course, these liberated slaves, as some have erroneously called them, having no lands, or other property, and no means of obtaining an independent subsistence, had no alternative—to save themselves from starvation—but to sell their labor to the landholders, in exchange only for the coarsest necessaries of life; not always for so much even as that.

These liberated slaves, as they were called, were now scarcely less slaves than they were before. Their means of subsistence were perhaps even more precarious than when each had his own owner, who had an interest to preserve his life. They were liable, at the caprice or interest of the landholders, to be thrown out of home, employment, and the opportunity of even earning a subsistence by their labor. They were, therefore, in large numbers, driven to the necessity of begging, stealing, or starving; and became, of course, dangerous to the property and quiet of their late masters.

The consequence was, that these late owners found it necessary, for their own safety and the safety of their property, to organize themselves more perfectly as a government and make laws for keeping these dangerous people in subjection; that is, laws fixing the prices at which they should be compelled to labor, and also prescribing fearful punishments, even death itself, for such thefts and tresspasses as they were driven to commit, as their only means of saving themselves from starvation.

The peasants of Britain, through the nullification of copyhold tenure, the Highland clearances, and the Enclosures, were “freed” from feudalism (and from their land) and transformed from a nation of peasant smallholders into a nation of propertyless proletarians, and then driven into the factories like cattle. They were driven by the shipload, as indentured servants or transported convicts, to America and Australia, where most of them died in servitude (the corporal punishment was severe, and the term of service could be extended indefinitely for the most minor offenses). The African slaves of America, with even crueller taskmasters and lacking even the customary rights of a tenant in copyhold, were “freed” to the propertyless existence of sharecroppers and urban lumpenproles.

The great landed oligarchs and mercantile capitalists of the rising West did to the entire planet the same thing that J.L. and Barbara Hammond described in England, in the context of the breakup of the open field system and mass expropriation of land: the world was “taken to pieces … and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government.” Although the slaves had the worst of it, it was a pretty shitty “Four Hundred Years” for laboring people all around.

But the issue isn’t just limited to the acquisition of property after the Civil War; it’s still more complicated. Many of the freed slaves who did manage to acquire land of their own wound up getting it snatched out from under them. As Bitch, PhD writes:

At the turn of the century blacks owned between 12-15 million acres of land; by the 30s and 40s that number shrinks to just a little over a million. For many of these black families the land is a foundation to build their newly acquired identities as freed people that suddenly disappears, forcing their story to jump, only to be picked up further down the line. What happened? What happened in those intervening years? Did African Americans just suddenly decide, “Hm, you know, owning land sucks. Let’s pick up and go north”? Usually something else happened to make a family, or even a whole black town, disperse.

Tom Joyner’s family story is a good example; Gates finds his great grandmother but her paper trail ends somewhere in late 19th/turn of the century Carolinas, only to pick up again several years later in the north. Joyner has no idea why she left home or what the story of his family is but Gates and his team discover the reason: His family owned a substantial parcel of land but when his two great uncles are accused of murder and executed, the family sells their land to pay for legal fees and the remaining family flees the area. But Gates’ team also uncovers that the accusation was probably false, specifically targeted at the two great uncles because they were part of a black landowning family.

Chris Rock asks how his own ancestor could go from slave, to soldier, to legislator, to landowner, to sharecropper all in 10 short years; Gates simply answers, ‘Reconstruction ended.’….

In 2001, the AP ran a series called ‘Torn from the Land‘ that researched and confirmed claims of widespread land theft – claims that are crucial to the reparations movement.

Some of this stuff happened pretty recently. For example, much of the ethnic cleansing movement that created the so-called “sundown towns” (one of which is my own city of Springdale, Ark.) occurred in the 1920s, when many people now alive can still remember. As William Faulkner said, the past not only isn’t over, it really isn’t even past.

But as Bitch, PhD also points out, by no means all the land clearances resulted from extra-legal measures like lynching. They were also accomplished right up to the present day

through procedures that, are legal and that still disproportionately affect poor communities of color, i.e., partitioning, rezoning, ‘revitalization’/gentrification, and eminent domain.

So maybe it’s not Jeremiah Wright, but Pat Buchanan, who should stop whining and shut his damn piehole.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008.

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

Depois de, conforme se conta, ter alimentado uma multidão de cinco mil pessoas com cinco pães e dois peixes, Jesus Cristo de Nazaré foi recentemente formalmente notificado pelas associações comerciais do ramo, as quais exigem que ele cesse e desista do que elas acusam ser operação ilegal de compartilhamento de alimentos nos termos da Lei Anti-Réplica do Milênio do Milagre (MMAA).

Rabis fazedores de milagres como o Sr. Cristo, e suas alegadas infringências dos direitos de propriedade, têm sido centro de controvérsia em anos recentes. São objeto de campanha de educação do público pela Associação dos Produtores de Alimentos de Galileia e Judeia. Os produtores de pães e peixes argumentam que reprodução não autorizada de alimentos, visto privarem-nos de receita à qual têm direito, equivalem a furto. Rabis solidários, em sinagogas Palestina a fora, estão lendo anúncios do serviço público FPAGJ, visantes a contraporem-se a percepções do público de que “todo mundo faz” e “é coisa de somenos importância,” a seus rebanhos:  “Padeiros e pescadores não merecem ser pagos?”  Muitas escolas de Torá adotaram os cursos FPAGJ “contra o furto de comida.”

Em notícias relacionadas, a Associação da Indústria do Vinho da Palestina vem reclamando, em meio a notícias que vêm à tona, que Jesus, em outro ato alegadamente de compartilhamento ilegal, também reproduziu vinho numa festa de casamento em Caná da Galileia.

Juntas de licenciamento de médicos, analogamente, destacam alegadas descrições de testemunhas oculares segundo as quais Jesus andaria praticando medicina sem licença. Essa prática médica não autorizada, de acordo com disseminadas notícias, estendeu-se para alcançar leprosos, aleijados, mancos, cegos, um homem com a mão paralisada, uma mulher com fluxo de sangue, e vítimas diversas de possessão demoníaca. A área médica denuncia as ações de Jesus como competição desleal. De acordo com porta-voz da Associação Médica da Galileia, “não é justo esperar que um médico licenciado que despendeu anos como aluno e que tem de pagar as despesas gerais do espaço do consultório tenha de competir com um carpinteiro que simplesmente move as mãos e cura as pessoas gratuitamente.”

Embora a Guilda dos Embalsamadores também tenha reclamado de rumores de ressurreição dos mortos, especialistas legais dizem não haver lei vigente definindo essa atividade, especificamente, como ofensa criminal.

Por outro lado, pequeno mas crescente movimento de oposição à propriedade gustativa perfila-se contra a rotulação de “pirataria”. Argumenta que copiar alimentos, atividade intrinsecamente sem caráter de competitividade, não é furto; sendo o recente alimento novo reproduzido criado ex nihilo, não há diminuição do estoque de alimentos de ninguém. O pescador Simão Filho de Jonas da Galileia e seu irmão André concordam. “Em vez de tentar suprimir a competição, a indústria pesqueira deveria substituir seu modelo arcaico de negócios. Há oportunidades disponíveis para quem estiver disposto a inovar. Nós não perdemos um só denário por causa do compartilhamento de alimentos procedido por Jesus.”

As autoridades, porém, não vêm aceitando essa argumentação. Pôncio Pilatos, Procurador da Judeia, anunciou recentemente planos de repressão a piratas da propriedade gustativa tais como Jesus. “Se você acha que eu vou lavar as mãos em relação a esse tal de Jesus, pobre dele, pense de novo. Reproduzir pães, peixes e vinho é furtar, do mesmo modo que fazer arrastão na loja Macy’s de departamentos. Trata-se de assunto importantíssimo.”

Próxima semana:  Johann Gutenberg, compartilhador não autorizado de livros.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 6 de setembro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

One advantage of network culture is that self-organized networks are much smarter than authoritarian hierarchies. Horizontal networks circumvent censorship faster than vertically organized institutions can impose it.

Last year, as the U.S. House and Senate considered (respectively) SOPA and PIPA legislation that would authorize the federal government to shut down websites — entirely by administrative fiat and without judicial due process — for alleged copyright infringement, the Web quickly responded with countermeasures that preemptively rendered such laws ineffectual.

The MAFIAAfire and deSOPA extensions for the open source Firefox browser counter domain name takedowns by taking the user instead to a website’s numeric IP address.

That is, incidentally, how the Web responded in real time to ICANN’s takedown (in collusion with the U.S. national security state) of Wikileaks’s domain name: Thousands of sites all over the Web publicized links to Wikileaks’s numeric IP address, and thousands more mirrored the site at other URLs.

As cypherpunk John Gilmore says, “The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Most recently, it’s come out that The Pirate Bay has moved to the cloud, thus rendering itself invulnerable to website takedowns. TPB has already taken considerable countermeasures against government raids, backing its site up on several servers and concealing the location of some of them. Still, the move to the cloud not only renders it far less vulnerable, but also saves money:

“The worst case scenario is that The Pirate Bay loses both its transit router and its load balancer. All the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be re-installed at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world” (“Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof,” Torrent Freak, October 17).

Meanwhile Kim Dotcom of MegaUpload — a file-sharing network taken down by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation in January in a bungled international operation rapidly falling to pieces in the courts — is rolling out Mega, a new service duplicated on a network of servers in countries all around the world, and therefore far less vulnerable to takedowns by any national government:

“‘We’re creating a system where any host in the world …. can connect their own servers to this network,’ Dotcom says. ‘We can work with anybody, because the hosts themselves cannot see what’s on the servers.’

“One of the more unique wrinkles of the new service may come from Mega’s decision not to deploy so-called de-duplication on its servers, meaning that if a user decides to upload the same copyright-infringing file 100 times, it would result in 100 different files and 100 distinct decryption keys. Removing them would require 100 takedown notices of the type typically sent by rights holders like movie studios and record companies.”

All this illustrates a common theme. As Johann Soderberg has noted, the system of global corporate power in the age of “cognitive capitalism” depends on a totalitarian system of information control comparable to that on which the old USSR relied to uphold the power of the Party apparatus. Soderberg compares the Soviet Union’s restrictions on access to photocopiers and its war on Samizdat “pirates” to the totalitarian digital copyright regime on which an increasing share of profits depends under corporate capitalism.

But this draconian copyright regime is unenforceable. Going back to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the only thing this attempted information lockdown has actually accomplished has been to drive encryption and proxy servers into the mainstream. Eventually, if the upward creep of totalitarianism continues, the whole information economy will disappear into the Darknet, and websites seeking information freedom will relocate to servers in free information havens like Iceland.

The corporate state and its system of information control has already lost. It’s just too stupid to realize it.