C4SS Feed 44 presents Thomas L. Knapp‘s “Ferguson: Nixon Would Make a Solitude and Call it Peace” read Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford.

I lived near Ferguson for 12 years. I drove an ice cream truck up and down its streets for two summers. I seriously considered renting an apartment in Canfield Green, the complex Michael Brown lived in, in 2012. So I can say, on reasonable personal authority, that media portrayals of Ferguson as some kind of crime-plagued racial ghetto are baloney. Ferguson is, or at least was, an eminently peaceful community.

American “police forces” of today, on the other hand, are de facto military organizations, occupying the communities they claim to “protect and serve.” They are part and parcel of a political system which, by its very nature, evolves continuously toward complete control of everyone and everything – the exact opposite of anything having to do with “peace.”

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Il “No” scaturito dalle urne al referendum che chiedeva agli scozzesi “volete che la Scozia sia un paese indipendente?” è una vittoria di Pirro per il Regno Unito.

Con il suo 44,7%, il “Sì” rimette in discussione un consenso che durava da trecento anni. La devoluzione di una fetta sostanziale del potere politico alla Scozia è già una concessione. Questo quasi pareggio è più problematico per un sistema politico, come quello inglese, che si sforza di mantenere la sua legittimità, che per un sistema nuovo che cerca di affermarsi. Le preoccupazioni della vigilia rimangono intatte.

Con l’onere della prova a loro carico, chi giustificava l’esistenza degli stati sulla base di un presunto contratto sociale esce dall’ombra dei discorsi vacui e delle quasi dimenticate nozioni di educazione civica. Il culmine lo ha raggiunto il ministro degli esteri spagnolo José Manuel García Margallo, che ha contrastato le teorie indipendentiste dei catalani dicendo: “Ogni singolo spagnolo è proprietario di ogni singolo centimetro quadrato di questo paese.” Per sostenere la legittimità dell’unione anglo-scozzese è stato più volte ricordato l’accordo firmato con il parlamento scozzese tre secoli fa, facendo notare così come raramente i moderni territori politici siano unicamente il frutto di una conquista militare.

Molto dell’impeto dietro il “sì” veniva dal desiderio di liberare la Scozia dalle armi atomiche. Questo non risolveva il problema pratico di come operare una difesa militare convenzionale, ma ovviava in gran parte la solita domanda: “e la difesa?” Gli unionisti, poi, sono arrivati ad agitare l’immagine di una Scozia tramutata in una nuova Svizzera, come se questa fosse una brutta cosa.

Una parte molto più grande dei commenti è stata dedicata al problema dell’incertezza economica in caso di indipendenza. Critici come Paul Krugman hanno sostenuto validamente che, siccome l’economia scozzese attualmente dipende dal sistema finanziario globale con tutta la sua instabilità, l’indipendenza politica avrebbe ridotto le sue possibilità di assorbire i danni provocati da crisi economiche più ampie, verso le quali sarebbe rimasta vulnerabile.

La questione ha diviso l’élite economica, con la British Petroleum (BP) prevedibilmente dalla parte del “no” mentre i settori più globali erano a favore del “sì”. Il grosso delle terre scozzesi, intanto, resta nelle mani di una élite: il 50% è di proprietà di 432 famiglie appena. Le singole proprietà immobiliari stanno già passando dalle mani delle vecchie famiglie aristocratiche a quelle di un gruppetto di speculatori globali.

Con il calo dei proventi di petrolio e gas, l’economia scozzese è stata colpita particolarmente dalla deindustrializzazione. Ma man mano che la tecnologia post-industriale diventa la norma, una base economica diversa diventa sempre più percorribile. I servizi chiave possono essere liberati dalle costrizioni geografiche; il referendum ha ricevuto gran parte dell’impeto dal fatto che la Scozia avrebbe avuto una scelta limitatissima tra il Regno Unito e l’Unione Europea. Ma una concorrenza piena tra valute, per dirne una, non dovrebbe limitarsi all’alternativa tra l’euro e la sterlina. E un decentramento portato al livello dei singoli clan tradizionali non sarebbe più un ricordo romantico, ma una realtà di tutti i giorni.

Il sole sta tramontando sull’impero.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie defends the Hayekian “spontaneous order” idea from Damon Linker thusly:

An obvious example of spontaneous order from the contemporary moment isn’t Iraq or Libya but something like the way Uber operates vis a vis traditional taxi cartels.

I happen to be with Gillespie versus Linker, but I think the idea of Uber as “spontaneous order” is, well, off. In actuality, Uber is an attempt to capture/enclose an already existing spontaneous order that’s been around forever but is finally organizing itself in a capturable/encloseable way.

In the beginning (at least since there have been automobiles, and presumably since there have been coaches) were the jitneys and the gypsy cabs and the mutual acquaintance car pools. They operated beyond the regulatory pale for the most part, but they couldn’t really be done on much of a mass scale.

Then came the Internet and, more slowly than we might have expected but still pretty fast, up went the first primitive mutual discovery systems: Bulletin boards and other fora dedicated to, or with threads for, ride-sharing and car-pooling. These started mostly among students wanting to make it back and forth home for the holidays and so forth and looking for other students from the same area and going to school in the same distant area, and among workers in particular metros who maybe wanted to carpool from the suburbs to an urban edge where they could catch the train on in to work.

Then the more advanced stuff (cell phone apps, etc. to make mutual discovery quicker and easier) became feasible. Uber and Lyft saw that the big money was, in the short term, adapting those methods to the state-approved revenue model (patent the methods, trademark the brands, get government regulators to write a hall pass for you and lock down your potential competitors) as a way of enclosing them and charging rent on them.

Which, to be honest, seems like a natural impulse, just like a worker with some particular skill might decide that his bread is buttered on the side of putting on a tie and jacket and interviewing for a wage position doing Thing X rather than hanging out his shingle as a freelance provider of Thing X.

But that doesn’t make it a good thing. The real future of the spontaneous ride-sharing order isn’t with Uber et al. It’s with the open source apps that let people car-pool, ride-share and cab-hire without passing through some proprietary toll booth.

What governs price?

Does cost of production determine price or does price determine cost of production? In the world of economic caricatures, the classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, et al.) took the former position, the Austrians the latter. Specifically, the Austrian view supposedly is that that demand driven by marginal utility determines the price of consumer goods, which is then imputed backward to the factors of production.

But like all caricatures, the picture is an imperfect reflection of reality. Regarding the classicals, it will suffice to quote David Ricardo: “[C]orn is not high because a rent is paid [but] a rent is paid because corn is high.” So whatever else he might have written on the subject, he was aware (at least with respect to land) that the means ultimately get their value from final consumer goods. We value the means because we value the end, not vice versa.

And then there is this quotation: “A thing cannot have value, if it is not a useful article. If it is not useful, then the labor it contains is also useless, does not count as labor and hence does not create value.”

Karl Marx wrote that in Das Kapital, volume one. I found the quote in a footnote in Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s writings refuting Marx’s exploitation theory. It should put to rest the claim that according to Marxian economics, a mud pie requiring one hour’s labor should have the same price on the market as a cherry pie requiring the same amount of labor. Somebody has to find the darn thing useful first.

The question is: What forces govern value and price on the market (assuming a freed market without government privilege and monopoly)?

Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), one of the pioneers of Austrian economics, Ludwig von Mises’s teacher, and an unrivaled authority on the theory of subjective marginal utility, had an answer that has received surprisingly little attention since he first offered it. I draw on his paper “Value, Cost, and Marginal Utility” [1892; PDF]. (One economist who has given this matter a great deal of attention is George G. Reisman. See his commentaries here [PDF] and here. Reisman received his Ph.D. under Ludwig von Mises and is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, which, among other objectives, attempts the seemingly impossible task of integrating Misesian and Ricardian economics. See Israel M. Kirzner’s critical review of the book [PDF].)

“Costs Govern Value”

We learn from Böhm-Bawerk that it is misleading to say that marginal utility always or usually directly governs the price and value of consumer goods, which in turn governs the prices of the factors used to produce those goods. “One is in fact correct, when one says that costs govern value,” Böhm-Bawerk wrote (emphasis added).

That got my attention.

He elaborated in response to criticism that the marginal-utility school rejected the law of costs,

We too recognize the necessity of “supplementing” the universal law of marginal utility by means of special provisions that relate to the value of goods reproducible at will and that the substance of these is precisely the law of costs. And we have accomplished this “supplementing” in full detail, both for the field of subjective value and for that of objective value and prices. [Emphasis added.]

But he quickly pointed out that this is not the end of the story:

The law of costs is no fulcrum on the basis of which the rest of the explanation can be supported, without it itself needing a support. Rather, it stands in the middle of the course of explanation: it explains certain phenomena, but must itself be first further explained on the basis of certain other, more general phenomena. In order to provide the explanation with this necessary conclusion, we marginal-value theorists make an addition. Be it noted, not an addition which would run counter to or detract from the validity of the law of costs, but one which supports it and makes it intelligible. Namely, we supplement the theory of the value of products with a theory of the value of the means of production, or cost goods, whereby we reach the conclusion that this value itself is ultimately once again grounded in marginal utility. As far as we are concerned, therefore, costs apply not as an ultimate cause, but only as an intermediate cause of the value of products—though a very important and widespread one. [Emphasis added.]

So by a roundabout route, Böhm-Bawerk ends up where he started: at subjective marginal utility. Cost of production governs price. Marginal utility governs costs. How so?

What’s an iPod Worth without Earbuds?

An example will be helpful. Imagine the earbuds that came with your beloved iPod have broken. Now an iPod with no earbuds is useless (for private listening). Therefore, other things equal, you would be willing to pay almost as much for replacement buds as you would for a new iPod. In other words, if the price of replacement earbuds were governed by the marginal utility of the iPod, that price would have to be only as far below the price of a new iPod as necessary to attract you. So if a new iPod costs $300, those replacement buds might cost, say, $200.

But earbuds can be purchased for under $10. [Update: Under $4.] How can that be? Here’s the Böhm-Bawerkian explanation: In a competitive market for earbuds (even a hampered one), anyone who tried to charge $200 for (basic) buds would invite competitors who would charge less. The competitive process would drive the price further and further below the price that the marginal utility of iPods would set.

But how low could the price go? To answer that, imagine that you wanted to go into earbud manufacturing. You would need to buy inputs such as wire and plastic, and you would need to hire labor. To bid those inputs away from their current uses, you would only need to outbid the manufactures of the marginal products made from those inputs, that is, of consumers’ least-valued alternative products.

Thus the marginal utility of the marginal product governs the prices of those materials. And under competition, those prices – those costs of production – provide the lower limit toward which the price of above-marginal (supra-marginal) products will tend.

As Böhm-Bawerk wrote:

[T]he value of all production-related goods together is determined by the utility of the “last,” most easily dispensable product which is brought forth from the common production source, or, as we call it, by the marginal utility of the “marginal product.” This provides the measure both for the value of the common cost good as well as, via this last, the value of all other products produced by means of same.

In the market, everything is interrelated with everything else. It’s the original World Wide Web.

Marginal Utility Intact

Reisman emphasizes that Böhm-Bawerk’s theory in no way violates the theory of marginal utility: “[C]lassical economics mistakenly held cost of production to be the ultimate explanation of the value and price of goods, which it is not, being in fact, as Böhm-Bawerk shows, merely the vehicle for the transmission of marginal utility from the value of marginal products to that of supra-marginal products” (emphasis added).

Friedrich von Wieser, the other second-generation giant of Austrian economics, agreed: “Between cost and utility there is no fundamental opposition. Utility remains the sole source of value, and the law of cost is the most usual form of the general law of value” (Natural Value, 1889).

We’ve been talking about price, but what about value? Just as the cost of production governs price, so it governs value. This might seem un-Austrian, but remember the law of diminishing marginal utility: As the supply of a homogeneous good increases, other things equal, the value of any given unit falls and vice versa. Here’s Böhm-Bawerk:

[T]he less the material and labor that the production of a jacket costs, the more jackets, of course, can one produce with the means of production available. Thus the more completely can the need for clothing be satisfied. And thus, other things being equal, the lower will be the marginal utility of a jacket. The technical conditions of production are, therefore, to be sure a cause of the value of goods lying further back, a “more ultimate” cause, than marginal utility.

Thus marginal value varies with supply, which is governed by the cost of materials and labor, which is governed by the marginal utility of the marginal product of those inputs. (I realize I’ve left out the disutility of labor, or the value of leisure, another subjective element.)

Austrian economics never fails to fascinate.

Crowd-sourcing is a novel way of organizing our society these days. Whether we’re trying to fund projects through Kickstarter or GoFundMe or editing the next big Wikipedia article, crowd-sourcing is a big part of what makes the internet great and a potential source of freedom for everyone.

But just because something is largely peer-to-peer orientated doesn’t mean there isn’t a huge multinational corporation behind it.

Take Yelp, for example. Yelp is a corporation operating in many different countries around the world and just this year started to finally turn a profit. It mainly offers reviews for food service, but also for all sorts of things from subways and museums to almost anything you can imagine. The idea being that people come together and tell you all about the places to go and not to go to. It’s crowd-sourcing reviews for your community bike shop as well as your upscale hotel.

Unfortunately Yelp, not the reviewers, is in charge.

This was made clear when federal appeals court recently ruled that Yelp can legally manipulate business reviews for advertising revenue. For instance, giving a five-star review to a business for their advertising money  — or moving around negative reviews or even making them mysteriously disappear altogether.

Such claims about Yelp are nothing new  and there have been reports of strange calls to reviewed business from employees at Yelp saying that negative reviews can be shifted around, for a price. To make matters worse some business owners claim that when they didn’t pay up, some of their positive reviews vanished. One of the business owners compared Yelp, in these cases, to be something like the mafia.

To make things even more unreliable on Yelp’s side is the fact that fake reviews are a real problem. Yelp may have one of the more aggressive filters on the internet, but it’s still going to miss some fakes and get false-positives.

Market anarchists look at situations like this and realize that even if none of the stories about Yelp are true (there’s no hard evidence that Yelp manipulates reviews) and that its ethics are top-notch, there’s still no reason to put all of our trust in them.

While Yelp is largely powered by user-created content, the users themselves don’t own or help run Yelp. Instead a board of directors and a CEO do.  Sure, the terms and conditions  say that the user-generated content belongs to the user, but Yelp can remove it at any time for any (or no) reason. Yelp can use the information however it wants, and by posting there you agree to that use. Moreover, Yelp is the platform. You don’t own the space, you’re merely accessing it to spread information … but Yelp has the  ultimate control.

With all of that power, money and discretion at their fingertips over a massive project, abuse is more than likely to follow.

When you see Yelp as an economic reviewing mafia, it becomes obvious that this isn’t a process of competition in a freed market. Rather, it’s another outgrowth of the privilege and benefits corporations receive at the hands of governments.

The market solution, then, isn’t to rely on multinational corporations who are sanctioned through governments to be manipulative or who quickly become centralizers, rather than freers, of knowledge and discussion. Instead, we should be building user-created and owned organizations that are decentralized and cater to the needs of the users.

To do this we need to harness the potential of neighborhood power and create our own versions of Yelp that mutually empower users and business owners so they don’t have to fear monopolistic economic power.

So that when we crowd-source, we’re really sourcing from each other in both content and form.

Parsing Political Divides in the Mainstream and in Anarchism

CNBC describes the Corporate Perception Indicator as “a far-reaching survey of business executives and the general population from 25 markets,” “research firm Penn Schoen Berland survey[ing] 25,012 individuals and 1,816 business executives.” The results of the survey show quite unsurprisingly that the general public associates government with words like “corruption,” “lies,” “incompetence,” and “thieves.” As for big business, the words that came to the minds of those surveyed included, again, “corruption” and “thieves,” also “monopoly” and “power.” Interestingly, overall perceptions of both corporations and government appear to be largely negative. In American political discourse, the political right is characterized by a perceptible overpraise of business, devoted to a view of corporations that sees them as essentially free market actors, “creators” and “doers” that give us progress and innovation. Even if this is not true of everyone on the American right, certainly such sentiments are important to the right’s narrative on free markets. The right looks on government, in contrast, as the bungling and inept meddler attempting to hold back our industrious and our productive, the supporter of the lazy and parasitic who would rather live on the government dole than work for a living.

On the left, corporations are perceived as putting profits above people, as willing to do anything to suck more and more of the world’s natural wealth into the hands of a grasping, extravagant one percent. Government, on the other hand, is treated as the agent of “the greater good” or “the public good,” a kind of benevolent, altruistic mother to us all.

In the United States, people who identify themselves as free marketers or libertarians are much more likely to align with the former of these competing narratives, the right’s assertion that the corporation is the home of the movers and the shakers, the creative and energetic champions of free enterprise. This relationship between self-identified libertarians and the American right helps explain the broader anarchist movement’s pardonable reluctance to accept individualist or market anarchists as the genuine article. Further, hostility toward communism has a long history in individualist anarchism, typified by Benjamin Tucker’s frequent denunciations, yet certainly preceding them.[1]

We may observe at this juncture that both the right and the left share the historically and empirically ridiculous theory that government and corporate power are locked in an eternal war. But it is a great politico-economic myth that governments and large corporations operate at variance with one another, that one must align herself in her political commitments with one or the other, never both, never neither. For left wing individualists, surveys which demonstrate dissatisfaction with and negative attitudes toward both actually make perfect sense. That big business should be associated with greed and governments with corruption is hardly astonishing or remarkable. Further, these results underline the problem with seeing corporate power and government power as rivals, rather than seeing them much more accurately as codependent partners in crime, mutually reinforcing components parts of a larger phenomenon we might call a ruling class or power elite.

We needn’t risk the cognitive dissonance that comes with treating the State as the great restraint upon the socially destructive avarice of multinational corporations. For we find, whenever we bother to look, that elites in the business community regularly work with the public sector to create conditions accommodating to monopolism. The ideal of free and open competition, however championed in corporate press releases and political campaigning, is nowhere to be found and indeed never has been. Thus do market anarchists prosecute our laissez faire critique of capitalism. We come from an older tradition of American libertarians, radicals who contemned capitalism as much as any communist, but understood the importance of individual rights and mutually beneficial trade.

It is interesting to witness anarchist communists and syndicalists develop strict, exclusionary criteria for anarchism, particularly insofar as the arguable father of our doctrine, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was neither, his mutualism containing many market-friendly if not outright pro-market elements. No less important for anarchism as it developed in America is Josiah Warren, whose first forays into anarchist thought antedate Proudhon. If market or individualist anarchism represents a form of “pseudo-intellectualism,” then some of the anarchist tradition’s brightest lights must apparently be relegated to the dustbin of history. Granting that opposition to not only political but also economic authority is a necessary condition for the true anarchist, individualists like Warren (and his followers such as Benjamin Tucker) more than qualify.

Whether our communist and syndicalist comrades admit it or not, free market ideas figured prominently in fledgling anarchist thought, regarded as perfectly consistent with and a natural outgrowth of, to quote Warren, “the absolute right of supreme individuality.” Considering Warren as an example, many contemporary anarchists may not know that anarchist luminary Peter Kropotkin acknowledged Warren as an inspiration and, in the words of Crispin Sartwell, “a precursor of (and influence on?) Proudhon.” In discussing Warren’s legacy, Sartwell observes one of the major, continuing tensions between the individualist and communist strains of anarchism, the debate on “lifestyle anarchism.” Sartwell argues, quite correctly in the author’s view, that Warren “belongs squarely in what is called by its opponents ‘lifestyle anarchism’: that strain concerned with creating alternatives within the interstices in the existing system rather than arming to overthrow it.” “Peaceful Revolutionist” that he was, Warren emphasized experiments in the creation of practical alternatives to dominant economic and social modalities. To Warren, the whole of life was open to and the subject of reform. This holistic approach, the universality of his critique of the existing state of affairs, he likely inherited from Robert Owen, even while dispensing with other aspects of Owenite thinking. Indeed, Warren’s departure from Owen and his ideas offers us an illuminative proxy for the tensions and debates that still divide individualist from communist elements within anarchism. Warren worried about the overwhelming of the individual within combinations and, paraphrasing Sartwell, imposed a priori schemes. Communists often tend to see the undisciplined “lifestylism” of Warren-type experimentation as essentially bourgeois, outside of or ancillary to genuine class struggle.

Discussing early figures in anarchism such as Warren opens opportunities to reflect on the similarities that unite all anarchists. We can pause to wonder what someone with Warren’s breadth of interests and hopes for reform might think of twenty-first century problems and perceptions thereof.

As all anarchists understand, politics is at bottom conquest, spoliation and rape. Everything else, everything peaceful, voluntary and consensual is something different, throwing the distinction between the “politics means” and the “economic means” once again into sharp relief. The economic means to wealth is defined by the normal, even obvious standards we refer to in interactions with merchants, our friends, and family, the mutually beneficial guidelines we use to cooperate and trade with coequals. The political means, by contrast, is the acquisition of wealth by aggression, by forcible extraction through systematic privilege. The State, being the organization with a monopoly on the legal use of force, is the wellspring of such privilege. As Josiah Warren pointed out in Equitable Commerce:

Theorists have told us that laws and governments are made for the security of person and property; but it must be evident to most minds, that they never have, never will accomplish this professed object; although they have had the world at their control for thousands of years, they have brought it to a worse condition than that in which they found it, in spite of immense improvements in mechanism, division of labor, and other elements of civilization to aid them. On the contrary, under the plausible pretext of securing person and property, they have spread wholesale destruction, famine, and wretchedness in every frightful form over all parts of the earth, where peace and security might otherwise have prevailed. They have shed more blood, committed more murders, tortures, and other frightful crimes in the struggles against each other for the privilege of governing, than society ever would or could have suffered in the total absence of all government whatever.

A deep, principled loathing of both big business and government unites all anarchists. Confronted with the alarming realities of the present moment, its authoritarian repressions and economic maladies, anarchists ought to help one another in peaceful projects to build a freer, better world. Data such as those contained in the Corporate Perception Indicator survey show a world fully primed for our anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist critiques. It falls upon us to communicate our message, to do the constructive work of inaugurating a new order.

[1] Relatedly, in True Civilization, Josiah Warren wrote, “What is called conservatism has all the time been entirely right in its objections to communism, and in insisting on individual ownership and individual responsibilities both of which communism annihilates; conservatism has also shown wisdom in its aversion to sudden and great changes, for none have been devised that contained the elements of success.”

The Federal Reserve is responsible for implementing US monetary policy. As it directs the world’s largest economy, the Fed earns top rank among powerful institutions. Though the central bank guides state monetary policy, the Fed is largely a private institution. As such, bank operations move in secrecy, absent of oversight from the public arena. Thanks to Carmen Segarra, however, we now have some keen insight to the inner operations of the Federal Reserve System.

Segarra was recently employed at the New York Fed as a bank examiner, charged with ensuring the bank followed internal regulations and conducting “oversight” of the economic powerhouse. During her tenure, Segarra grew suspicious the Fed was rather lenient with powerful, well-connected investment banks — notably Goldman Sachs (a key player in the 2008 financial crisis). To document her concerns she recorded 46 hours of private meetings and conversations. Her recordings reveal the Fed is, in fact, rather cozy with the financial institutions it’s supposed to regulate. With evidence in hand, Segarra voiced her objections. She was soon fired.

Segarra joined the ranks of other whistle-blowers and leaked her recordings to Jake Bernstein, an investigative reporter from ProPublica, and to the public radio program, This American Life. In an interview with NPR, Bernstein notes: “These are people who work inside the banks. They see these people every day, and they need to obtain the information from these banks, and it’s easier to obtain the information if you’re friendly and if you have a good relationship, but sometimes that can slide to deference.” The tapes reveal much, such as back-room deals described as “shady” by Fed officials, but at their heart, the recordings tell the story of a corrupt culture within the central bank.

A “slide to deference” is not the proper description. Theft is more accurate. The theft of labor, property and security from the populace, in the form of bailouts and “too big to fail” economic policy, for the benefit of the state capitalist system.

Because of the leaks, US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is trumpeting the call for a corruption investigation into the Fed. She is joined by her Democratic colleague Sherrod Brown. Such calls are folly.

State-sanctioned economic privilege has long been granted to big business and the financial sector under the premise that these institutions are necessary for social organization. The financial sector is separate from, but intimately related with, the state. As such, the economy of the nation-state is directly linked to these institutions. This relationship forges a corporatist political economy where the state has direct interest in the success of these now “too big to fail” concentrations of capital — the state must keep capitalism stable for its own preservation..

Regulation is thus a waste of time, energy and taxpayer dollars.

Those of us on the market left, however, oppose the very concentrations of power and capital that allow “too big to fail” institutions to exist in the first place. We believe social power, liberated of state-capital symbiosis, should steer the market. We envision decentralized and participatory systems of governance and economics. There is no room for archism in a social order of liberty and free association.

Those that head the Fed, and other would-be regulators, imagine they can design economic systems. The problem is markets, like all human behavior, are not structured for the command and control mentality — markets are spontaneous. The desire for control of economic systems necessarily requires the restriction of human labor and innovation. The liberated market, in contrast, with power diffused to the public arena, requires liberty and the inclined labor of human-beings. It’s far past time we end the Fed and actualize the economics of liberty.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Chiudete la Fed: L’Economia della Libertà.

A brief update:

In September, I made 42,334 submissions of C4SS material to 2,597 publications worldwide.

For September I am currently aware of 44 media “pickups” of C4SS material … but that figure may be a little low.

For one thing, I’ve noticed some peculiarities in Google search results over the last couple of weeks. Pickups that I knew were there aren’t showing up; there may be pickups that I didn’t and don’t know are there missing as well.

Secondly, one day as I was searching for pickups I had a computer problem that ended with a shutdown between autosaves of my “pickup tracking file” and I still haven’t figured out what, if anything, got lost (partly because a piece may be published and/or picked up one month and detected/cataloged the following month … so I’m finding it hard to do an exacting audit).

The official count of pickups since we started tracking them back in 2010 is 1,938. Lately we’ve been averaging in the neighborhood of 50 per month. I am reasonably confident that we will make the 2,000 mark before the end of the year.

As always, thanks for your support for the Center!

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

Em seu clássico “A esquerda punitiva”, Maria Lúcia Karam critica a esquerda brasileira que, abandonando suas mais antigas concepções sobre mudança social, uniram suas forças com aqueles que desejam a intensificação do direito criminal como forma primária de resolver conflitos na sociedade e garantir a paz social.

Karam observa que esquerda se esqueceu de que o aparato repressor do estado brasileiro se volta primariamente contra os mais marginalizados, servindo muitas vezes como forma de higienização social, e que a mera proposta de criminalização e repressão pela esquerda (como o combate à criminalidade financeira) não resolve esta contradição estrutural do sistema.

Um exemplo paradigmático disso é o problema da segurança criado pelo tráfico de drogas: ao invés de apoiar uma maior repressão ao tráfico de drogas para reduzir a sensação de insegurança, a esquerda brasileira devia refletir sobre o fato de que é a criminalização das drogas que cria o ciclo de violência relacionado à droga atualmente em nosso país, e, portanto, é necessário lutar por esta redução do papel do direito criminal justamente como forma de reduzir a violência.

A conclusão de Karam é que o papel da esquerda deveria ser o de crítica ao sistema criminal vigente, não ao reforço de sua lógica.

Precisamos voltar à crítica à esquerda punitiva agora, durante as eleições.

No debate da última segunda-feira (29/09), o candidato Levi Fidélix fez declarações ofensivas e homofóbicas em rede nacional, após ter sido perguntado pela candidata Luciano Genro sobre sua posição a respeito do casamento igualitário. Fidélix demonstrou a típica repulsa heteronormativa – travestida de defesa da “família tradicional” – à homossexualidade, mas foi ainda mais longe, ao afirmar que “aparelho excretor não reproduz” para justificar sua rejeição ao casamento igualitário e que os não heterossexuais devem ser excluídos do convívio social de alguma maneira, ficando “bem longe” do resto da sociedade para tratar de seus supostos distúrbios afetivos e psíquicos.

Ato contínuo, muitas pessoas que se identificam à esquerda brasileira manifestaram-se em favor da criminalização da homofobia e utilizaram o exemplo da fala de Fidélix como exemplo daquilo que o direito criminal deve combater. A homofobia deveria ser crime tal como o racismo, argumenta este setor da esquerda brasileira. Mas na defesa dessa posição, incorrem no erro da esquerda punitiva.

A criminalização de uma conduta não pode ser a alternativa primária para compor conflitos sociais, porque se trata da forma mais coercitiva de fazê-lo e que deveria ser invocada apenas para atentados aos direitos individuais.

O entendimento da criminalização como uma solução para todos os problemas humanos só tem expandindo a fiscalização do estado sobre a vida em detrimento da liberdade humana. Sob esse ponto de vista, não há comportamento individual que não possa ser incluído nas nossas fichas criminais.

Criminalizar opiniões consideradas inaceitáveis foi um método comum de todo regime autoritário que já houve na história humana. Nunca foi uma ferramenta de transformação social, mas sim uma ferramenta reacionária. Não será purificada porque vamos finalmente criminalizar as opiniões que de fato mereceriam punição. Continua a ser um método autoritário para calar o dissenso social.

Criminalizar opiniões é um reacionarismo porque, como bem ilustra Steven Pinker em Os Anjos Bons da Nossa Natureza, as grandes mudanças humanitárias na história moderna não advieram da “criminalização das opiniões conservadoras” (o que sequer era possível à época), mas de um processo histórico mais complexo que incluiu a conquista da descriminalização das opiniões, com a garantia da liberdade de expressão ao indivíduo. Para garantir a paz social, a grande descoberta liberal é a de que não precisamos concordar sobre tudo, mas concordar sobre quem tem o direito de decidir para si: o indivíduo.

A criminalização atual da homofobia e do racismo pode ser futuramente problemática: muitas pessoas acusam as feministas de “misândricas” e o movimento LGBT de “heterofóbico”. São acusações absurdas, mas não é difícil pensar na defesa da supressão desses discursos, já que seus opostos podem (machismo e homofobia) podem se tornar crimes. Não há nenhuma garantia de que estes discursos também não venham a ser criminalizados como opiniões preconceituosas em algum momento futuro, em prejuízo da discussão livre dos movimentos sociais e da emancipação das minorias.

Portanto, a melhor forma de combater o racismo, a homofobia e outras culturas preconceituosas não advém da sua criminalização. Como Mano Ferreira escreveu no texto “Por um princípio da não opressão”:

“A construção de um princípio liberal da não opressão, como toda a boa tradição do liberalismo, deve ter como norte o aumento da liberdade humana. Desse modo, creio que será através das redes de cooperação voluntária e do empoderamento social do oprimido que construiremos as bases mais legítimas e eficientes de combate à opressão. Nesse processo, é necessário um aprofundamento sobre os mecanismos da opressão e suas possibilidades de desmonte – missão na qual devemos reconhecer a importância de autores com outras perspectivas epistemológicas, compreendê-los e ressignificá-los.”

A ação direta e o boicote social podem ser instrumentos muito úteis neste sentido, como já destaquei que ativistas feministas podem usar para combater a cultura do estupro.

O paradigma da criminalização da opinião deve ser superado nas lutas por causas progressistas, uma vez que a emancipação das minorias está sendo e será obtida por meio de um processo histórico de consolidação, ampliação e esclarecimento das redes de cooperação social voluntária, no qual a criminalidade estatal e a opressão social vão sendo postas em cheque e rejeitadas em favor da liberdade humana.

Some people have a hard time seeing how a libertarian could call himself or herself a socialist. I understand the confusion. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was far less a mystery. In market anarchist Benjamin Tucker’s day, socialism was more an umbrella term than it is today. It essentially included anyone who thought the reigning political economy — which they called capitalism (and saw as a system of state privilege for the employer class) — denied workers the full product they would have been earning in some alternative system. The Tuckerite socialists’ alternative was full laissez faire — without patents, tariffs, government-backed money/banking, government land control, etc. The collectivist socialists had some nonmarket system in mind. The point is that socialism was more a negative statement — against capitalism — than a unified positive agenda on behalf of a specific alternative system.

Some might say that the common element for all these variants of socialism was a belief in the labor theory of value. But it may be more precise to say that the comment element was more general: namely, that workers were cheated by the reigning system. That need not commit one to the labor theory. (On the relationship between cost of production and price in Austrian economics, see my “Value, Cost, Marginal Utility, and Böhm-Bawerk.“) In fact, Austrian economics contains an implicit exploitation theory, which was made explicit by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. As I wrote in “Austrian Exploitation Theory“:

Böhm-Bawerk was merely applying the more general exploitation theory held by free-market thinkers at least back to Adam Smith: Monopolies and oligopolies (suppressed competition) harm consumers and workers through higher prices and lower wages. For Smith monopoly was essentially the result of government privilege. This largely has been the view of later Austrians, also.

This should be uncontroversial. In the corporate state, government privilege restricts competition among employers in a variety of ways and — just as important, if not more so — forecloses or raises the cost of self-employment and other alternatives to traditional wage labor. So worker bargaining power is reduced. The difference between what workers would have made in a freed market and what they actually make represents systemic exploitation.

I’m not saying that libertarians should call themselves socialists today. That would not communicate well. But this semantic history has its value.

Durante agosto y septiembre traduje al español “Por qué el Papa está menos equivocado que Keith Farrell” y “El rol de los bienes comunales en un mercado libre“, ambos de Kevin Carson, y “El anarquismo individualista y la jerarquía” de Cory Massimino. También publiqué un artículo propio en español, “Los fondos buitre vs. Argentina“, y reproduje la traducción al español de Javier Villate de “‘Economía verde’: demasiado verde para ser buena“, de Kevin Carson.

Por último, pero no menos importante, traduje por primera vez al inglés un artículo originalmente escrito en español: “La situación del trabajador en Argentina” de Horacio Langlois.

En C4SS dependemos exclusivamente de las contribuciones de nuestros lectores para mantener el trabajo por nuestra causa, por lo que tu contribución es sumamente valiosa para nosotros. Si crees que C4SS es un proyecto importante para promover una noción de genuina libertad económica y social, te invitamos a apoyarnos con una donación.

¡Salud y libertad!

Carlos Clemente

Spanish Media Coordinator Report, August-September 2014

During August and September I translated into Spanish “Why the Pope is Less Wrong Than Keith Farrell” and “The Role of Commons in a Free Market,” both by Kevin Carson, and “Individualist Anarchism and Hierarchy” by Cory Massimino. I published an original op-ed in Spanish, “Vulture Funds vs. Argentina,” and I reproduced Javier Villate’s translation of Kevin Carson’s “‘Green Economy?’ We’re Not Green Enough to Buy It.”

Last but not least, I translated into English an article originally written in Spanish for the first time: “The Situation of the Argentine Worker,” by Horacio Langlois.

At C4SS we depend exclusively on the contributions of our readers for supporting our cause, so your contribution is extremely valuable for us. If you believe that C4SS is an important endeavor for promoting genuine ideas about economic and social freedom, please consider making a donation today.

¡Salud y libertad!

Carlos Clemente

Marx had no monopoly.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), the second-generation giant of Austrian economics, famously refuted the theory, most commonly associated with Marx, that the employer-employee relationship is intrinsically exploitative. Less well known is that Böhm-Bawerk had an exploitation theory of his own, which he expressed in his 1889 masterpiece, Positive Theory of Interest, volume two of his three-part Capital and Interest.

To recap his critique, which is found in History and Critique of Interest Theories (volume one of Capital and Interest, 1884): Marx (and pre-Marxian thinkers) believed workers are routinely exploited by being paid less than what their products fetch in the market. That’s because, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, for Marx labor is priced “in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power required to produce it,” that is, the products necessary just to keep the worker alive. (Marx derived this from the labor theory of value he inherited from Adam Smith and David Ricardo.) Yet a worker may produce more than that bare amount in a day. In that case the “surplus value” goes to the employer, or capitalist. Capitalists get away with this because they control the means of production. Workers, having been deprived of those means, have no choice but to offer themselves as laborers and take whatever they can get. The alternative is starvation. Thus they are ripe for exploitation.

“Distribution” Taken for Granted

In focusing on the exploitation question, Böhm-Bawerk took the legitimacy of the “distribution” of the means of production for granted, and of course he rejected the labor theory of value, or of price formation. (I can’t discuss here the legitimate objection that historically governments arranged for the few to control the means of the production at the expense of the many, forcing them onto the labor market. To the extent that is true, the wage system isexploitative, but the culprit is the State, not the market.)

Böhm-Bawerk responded to the exploitation theorists that the difference between what a worker is paid and the market price of his product can be explained without resort to exploitation theory. One component of the employer’s profit is interest on the money he advances workers as wages while the product is being readied for sale. Making and marketing products take time. Typically, Böhm-Bawerk said, workers cannot afford to wait until the product is sold before they are paid. They want a check every week. But how can they be paid before their products have been sold? Their employers pay them out of money accumulated previously. Thus wages are in effect a loan, which like all loans is repaid with interest. This is so because of time preference: We value present goods more highly than future goods, meaning present goods are discounted from their future value. Other things equal, X future dollars are worth less than X dollars today. Or to look at it from the other direction, if you want to use my X dollars today, requiring me to abstain from using them, I’ll want to be paid more than X dollars when the loan comes due. The interest payment is my reward for abstention.

As Böhm-Bawerk wrote, “We have traced all kinds and methods of acquiring interest to one identical source — the increasing value of future goods as they ripen into present goods.”

If Böhm-Bawerk is right, and wages are in effect a loan to be “repaid” when the product sells, then we shouldn’t be surprised if the revenue from the sale is greater than wages paid (and other input costs). No exploitation need have occurred. (“Profit” has other components as well, including pure entrepreneurial profit from arbitrage, that is, from actualizing the hitherto overlooked potential value of undervalued resources.)

Pure Theory

Böhm-Bawerk was writing pure theory, as if he were saying, “In a free market here is what would happen.” He was not implying that the theory would describe a particular time and place where the market was less than free “[T]he essence of an institution is one thing, and the circumstances which may accidentally accompany it in its practical working out are another,” he wrote.

In fact, Böhm-Bawerk noted, exploitation can occur when competition among employers is suppressed, raising the employer’s rate of interest to a level higher than it would have been under free competition and thus lowering wages. That, he said, was usury.

He writes, “It is undeniable that, in this exchange of present commodities against future, the circumstances are of such a nature as to threaten the poor with exploitation of monopolists.”

Böhm-Bawerk was merely applying the more general exploitation theory held by free-market thinkers at least back to Adam Smith: Monopolies and oligopolies (suppressed competition) harm consumers and workers through higher prices and lower wages. For Smith monopoly was essentially the result of government privilege. This largely has been the view of later Austrians, also. (Mises allowed for the theoretical possibility of a resource monopoly without government privilege.) However, Böhm-Bawerk did not explicitly attribute monopolistic exploitation to the State in this discussion.

Competition Suspended

“[E]very now and then,” he wrote,“ something will suspend the capitalists’ competition, and then those unfortunates, whom fate has thrown on a local market ruled by monopoly, are delivered over to the discretion of the adversary…. [H]ence the low wages forcibly exploited from the workers — sometimes the workers of individual factories, sometimes of individual branches of production, sometimes — though happily not often, and only under peculiarly unfavourable circumstances — of whole nations” (emphasis added).

Böhm-Bawerk doesn’t say what that “something” might be. Maybe he means private collusion; maybe he means government protection from competition. He gives only this clue: “[L]ike every other human institution, interest is exposed to the danger of exaggeration, degeneration, abuse; and, perhaps, to a greater extent than most institutions.” (Alas, thanks to government-corporate collusion, what he thought was rare has actually been the rule in so-called “capitalist” countries.)

He cautions that “what we might stigmatise as ‘usury’ does not consist in the obtaining of a gain out of the loan, or out of the buying of labour, but in the immoderate extent of that gain…. Some gain or profit on capital there would be if there were no compulsion on the poor, and no monopolising of property…. It is only the height of this gain where, in particular cases, it reaches an excess, that is open to criticism, and, of course, the very unequal conditions of wealth in our modern communities bring us unpleasantly near the danger of exploitation and of usurious rates of interest.”

The Essence of Interest

Böhm-Bawerk takes pains to emphasize that he is not condemning interest per se: “But what is the conclusion from all this? Surely that, owing to accessory circumstances, interest may be associated with a usurious exploitation and with bad social conditions; not that, in its innermost essence, it is rotten.”

Yet he asks, “[W]hat if these abuses are so inseparably connected with interest that they cannot be eradicated, or cannot be quite eradicated?” His response:

Even then it is by no means certain that the institution should be abolished…. Arrangements absolutely free from drawback are never allotted to us in human affairs….

Instead of the absolute good, which is beyond reach, we must choose what, on the whole, is the relative best, where the balance, between attainable advantage and the drawbacks that must be taken into the bargain, is the most favourable possible for us.

In the end he doesn’t believe abuse is inseparably connected to interest: “There is no inherent blot in the essential nature of interest. Those, then, who demand its abolition may base their demand on certain considerations of expediency, but not, as the Socialists do at present, on the assertion that this kind of income is essentially unjustifiable.”

There are unanswered questions about Böhm-Bawerk’s position, but we do know that the thinker who refuted Marx’s exploitation theory had one of his own.

Sergio Malbergier writes (“E a estupidez, estupido!,” Folha de S. Paulo, September 11) about what marks, according to him, the current Brazilian presidential campaign: The utter ignorance of the voters. Malbergier believes that candidates and their marketers are so convinced of the electorate’s stupidity (Malbergier does not seem willing to differentiate between stupidity and ignorance) that they will always and without fail bet on hollow proposals that ignore elementary economic principles.

Malbergier is right, of course. Candidates, not only in the Brazilian campaign but in any other at any place on the planet, are fully convinced that the people are but a mass of brain-dead idiots ready to be molded and manipulated according to the politicians’ caprices. But Malgerbier goes further than only how politicians see the situation; to him the people are indeed stupid. The unpopularity of proposals centered around “austerity” measures are proof of that.

There is a certain inferiority complex in that diagnosis, since in Europe the population showed strong opposition to welfare spending cuts. Leaving aside questions of the relevance of austerity programs (after all, corporate subsidies are overwhelmingly larger than welfare projects), I intend to focus on the more basic question: Are the people stupid?

Some economists like to use the concept of rational ignorance to describe the behavior of the voters. It is simply not worth it for the average individual to worry about political questions over which he will not have any palpable influence. According to this theory, the people are bad at voting because the incentives to pursue knowledge about relevant social issues are insufficient. Costs are too big in comparison to possible benefits in elections that involve hundreds of thousands or millions of other individuals.

Of course, that doesn’t happen by chance: Representative democracy is designed to mitigate the power of opinions that come from below. The system is set up in a way that perpetuates the influence of the political elite and minimizes significant changes. Representative democracy guarantees at most that there should be some degree of rotation between the power elites that control the state with no violence; before western democracy took over, changes in the elite in control of the state required too much bloodshed. This does not mean that the people exert no influence over the government, but it does entail that this influence is much smaller than is conventionally assumed. The very definition of what is subject to public discussion or what the social issues are is guided by the elite’s opinion.

However valid, rational ignorance seems to be limited. The population, as a whole has uninformed opinions about political and economic themes not because they are stupid or don’t see the benefits in getting informed, but because these questions never present themselves clearly to the public.

The intelligentsia believes that the people are incapable of thinking for themselves and that any social changes will be resisted by that ignorant public. Candidates count on the reactive conservatism of a large sector of the populace to get elected. None of the candidates that lead the presidential polls intend to push any relevant change in frequently debated issues. For instance, changes to abortion, gay marriage and drug legislations are themes that are simply not present in their “proposals.” But that happens only because these questions are never subjected to public debates.

Evidently, the people are going to be against drug legalization; that is the status quo. Public opinion polls that are supposed to reflect the average opinion on a given matter only reflect the status quo. Current institutions exist because they are supported by the population. If the people generally did not agree with them, it would be hard for them to resist for long. Stating that the people are against drug legalization says absolutely nothing: Drug liberation has not been subject of public debate. Only if it was would the people be forced to develop a more or less coherent set of beliefs on the matter.

It is convenient for the intellectual and political elite to assume that the people are stupid or invariably ignorant, because then those elites get carte blanche to act on behalf of everyone.

But to have the people stop being ignorant about issues that affect their lives, it is not enough to bemoan it. Their opinion has to be heard.

Intellectuals and politicians will probably not buy this argument. Maybe they are the stupid ones.

Do we want cops and politicians to go to prison? Is that a demand that individualist anarchists, radical libertarians, and other enemies of the state should get behind?

Intuitively, it seems like we should. We’re instinctively outraged that cops can outright murder people and almost never get locked up for it. We’re understandably incensed that politicians from Richard Nixon to Ted Kennedy can commit heinous crimes and stay free, just because of their high social standing.

More fundamentally, even when cops and politicians are operating strictly within the limits of the law, they commit acts that would otherwise be seen as high crimes. As long as they follow all the right rituals of law, cops can threaten and kidnap completely peaceful people, and batter them if they resist. By waging war, politicians commit mass murder, and by expanding the prison state for campaign contributions, they literally sell people into slavery.

Ordinary people would certainly at least go to prison if caught doing any of those things. Anarchism is in part defined by a rejection of political authority, which means that we do not morally distinguish between the actions of a cop or politician and the actions of any other individual. So, one might think that the straightforward conclusion here is to one day set up libertarian tribunals to dish out punishments against agents of the state.

This view is understandable, but gravely mistaken.

Before law enters into the situation, we tend to hold to a pretty strict standard of self-defense. Which is to say: in any interpersonal conflict, we reject the initiation of force and only accept violence to the extent that it’s both proportional and genuinely necessary to protect the person being harmed or threatened. When someone goes beyond that minimally necessary amount of force, then they also become an aggressor, and their actions must also be condemned. After the fact, we demand that aggressors make restitution to their victims, but never counsel revenge.

There are very, very rare instances in which forced confinement may be justified, but this is only the case when someone is proven to actually be an ongoing threat to everyone in the community. Even then, this justification doesn’t apply for even the vast majority of violent criminals, and a justification for forced confinement does not justify forced confinement in any particular place. Nor does it justify the near total control that prisons have over prisoners. Hence why prisons are still inherently unjust.

A response might be offered that cops and politicians are indeed ongoing threats to the community at large. That much is true.

Yet the reason cops and politicians are ongoing threats to the community is not because of some psychological condition shared by all cops and politicians. Nor is it about any other quality shared by the particular individuals who occupy those positions of power. Rather, the individuals in those positions of power are ongoing threats to the community precisely because of their positions of power.

In other words, the minimal amount of force necessary to subdue them is just to get them fired or out of office, with the long-run goal of eliminating their jobs entirely. As for getting justice, what should be demanded is restitution – either in the form of hefty monetary compensation, or making amends through some other restorative process. Unlike punishment, that restitution can actually work toward giving back some of what’s been taken from their victims.

Which brings us to what may be the most important point: putting cops and politicians in prison does absolutely nothing to actually solve anything. When some on the left called for the trial and incarceration of George W. Bush (and others in his administration), prison abolitionist Dean Spade dissented, writing:

[T]he call to imprison Bush Administration officials is unsatisfying to me.  Imprisoning them would do nothing for those who have been killed in the wars, and making the call, to me, suggests that we believe the criminal punishment system is an apparatus for dealing with dangerous people and seeking justice, which is not true.  I would rather we put our energies into fighting for things we actually think can ameliorate the harm that has been done and prevent it from continuing.

Even if Bush had gone to prison, the United States government would still be bombing Iraq again in 2014. Even if Darren Wilson goes to prison, the police will continue to arrest black youth at wildly disproportionate rates. To the extent that their sentences would count as victories, they would only be symbolic victories. Those symbolic victories would lead many of us to believe everything was finally under control, numbing our passions for justice, and distracting us from the root causes of their aggression. Just like any other case of punishment.

The desire to fill prisons with those who are most truly dangerous in our society – namely, agents of the state – is a hard one to shake. Even still, it must be seen as a lingering form of retributivism felt by radicals brought up in a culture of criminal law, and like all forms of retributivism, it must be rejected. Especially given that its rationale is the same that empowers the very people it’s trying to fight against.

At the Liberty Political Action Conference in Alexandria, Virginia, Ron Paul had a few words about libertarianism, the non-aggression principle and tolerance. He pointed out the two basic principles of liberty are non-aggression and tolerance, “we have to become quite tolerant of the way people use their liberty.” Much to the lament of self-identified “thin libertarians,” (not that that is even a valid concept) Paul is acknowledging there are values, which are complementary to, or even required by, a belief in liberty.

Paul went on to point out that many want to embrace liberty up to the point of allowing something they disapprove of. But this obviously isn’t the libertarian attitude that affirms liberty is a fundamental human right not up to debate. Each person deserves the freedom to choose – just because you disapprove of their practices, be it doing drugs or practicing a different religion, doesn’t give you the right to use force against them.

However this doesn’t imply some sort of cultural or moral relativism. “Just because you allow somebody to have a lifestyle you disapprove of doesn’t mean you have to endorse it,” Paul explains. So while I may not agree with your choice to do heroin everyday, I should let you be. I can’t let my moral preferences morph into rights violations. If everyone understood this and didn’t let their own opinions and biases lead to creating systems of coercion, the world would be a much freer place.

And what is underlying this respect for human rights? Paul rightfully says it’s tolerance, “…liberty is liberty and it’s your life and you have a right to use it as you see fit.” In other words, the driving factor of a belief in non-aggression is being tolerant of others’ choices.

Writing in 1929, Mises understood this well, “…only tolerance can create and preserve the condition of social peace without which humanity must relapse into the barbarism and penury of centuries long past.”

Explaining why non-aggression necessarily involves other beliefs, Lew Rockwell writes, “…no political philosophy exists in a cultural vacuum, and for most people political identity is only an abstraction from a broader cultural view. The two are separate only at the theoretical level; in practice, they are inextricably linked.”

What Paul, Mises, and Rockwell understand is what Charles Johnson describes as “strategic thickness.” Strategic thickness is the view that certain ideas and values are useful for promoting, implementing, and maintaining the morality of non-aggression in the real world. After all, there are obviously going to be some ideas that are more complementary to non-aggression than others.

Sheldon Richman points out one of the values that complements non-aggression is anti-racism (Paul has done so as well), which is, after all, just a form of the tolerance that Paul and Mises refer to. I’ve gone even further and argued libertarians ought to be proponents of feminism, gay and trans liberation, and worker empowerment. Now even if these values, for one reason or another, turn out to not be complementary to non-aggression, the reason, if we are agreeing with Mises’ and Paul’s conception of liberty, it can’t be because the philosophy is only concerned with that single idea: for non-aggression is going to inevitably bring along other ideas with it.

For reasons that Paul, Mises, and Rockwell have shown, non-aggression can and does involve, even benefit from, complementary values. They have embraced “strategic thickness” and rightfully so.

In recent comments at the United Nations Climate Summit, US president Barack Obama espoused an urgent need for all the nations of Earth to work together and engage anthropogenic climate change. Obama ensured his peers in attendance that the “United States of America is stepping up to the plate” and that (the collective) we “embrace our responsibility” to combat climate change. Curiously, though, as the Nobel Peace Prize winner spoke, bombs bearing the USA’s insignia fell on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

War is incompatible with sustainability. Serious engagement of anthropogenic change demands peace.

The United States is a permanent wartime state. The Obama administration’s new military engagement with ISIS is yet another testament to the fact. This should be no surprise. Just over a year ago senior administration officials told the US Senate there exists a “broad consensus” that military operations in the Middle East are to be extended, in their “limitless form,” for at least another decade, possibly two, before adding the United States has reached only the midpoint in its global war on terror.  This was before ISIS became a topic of dinner table discussion.

This wartime state is responsible for the mass slaughter of innocents, exacerbation of global terror and property destruction — all while advancing anthropogenic climate change. Rest assured, the state will not be “going to bat” on climate.

The US Department of Defense is the nation’s single largest consumer of fossil fuels. From arms production to the grand machines of war, the military emits more greenhouse gas than any other state institution. War also wrecks natural ecosystems. Ongoing interventions have damaged forests and wetlands across the Middle East. According to CostOfWar.org, Afghanistan has lost 38% of total forested area to illegal logging. This deforestation is associated with warlords who rise to power from the ashes of military campaigns that continually destabilize the region. This plunder eliminates beneficial ecosystem services to surrounding populations and gives rise to further conflict and violence as people are left with depleted resources. Forest loss also reduces the amount of available habitat for a number of species, including avian communities, currently experiencing a precipitous population decline — a dangerous precedent in the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

The state organism is continually exalted by those in positions of power as the only legitimate mechanism of social organization. We are told only the state can ensure peace and sustainability in an increasingly complex and ever fragile world. But given the role of the nation-state in the world, as an economic and military power, it is time to acknowledge the organism is a global threat to peace, security, liberty and the environment.

States will not act on climate. Nation-states work as rational actors, advancing their own self interests. They seek the expansion their power, largely through the exploitation of natural resources. There is an inherent conflict of interest among states: The state with the most territory has the most resources for consumption. This is why war (be it military or economic) is the health of the state — it provides a monopoly over a territory and thus resources.

All of this, as 300 to 400 thousand people marched outside of the United Nations, and around the globe, to urge environmental protection. Progress starts in the streets, but true change requires everyday neighborhood environmentalism. Social power can render the state, and all of its illegitimate authority, useless. Don’t just step up to the plate. Stand on the ashes of power.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Azione sul Clima: Sulle Ceneri del Potere.

John Della Volpe, Diretor de Pesquisas Eleitorais do Instituto de Política da Universidade de Harvard, recentemente observou que “em vez de serem empoderados para permanecerem ativos na política (…) os eleitores mais jovens infelizmente se tornam mais desiludidos e desconfiados de todas as coisas advindas de Washington”. Volpe cita uma pesquisa do Instituto de Política que mostra que a confiança dos jovens em “quase todas as instituições testadas” está em níveis absurdamente baixos, o que deveria nos surpreender e entristecer.

Para Volpe, a desconfiança dos jovens na presidência, no Congresso e no governo é um problema infeliz, algo a que os políticos devem prestar atenção, encontrando alguma maneira de nos inspirar de volta ao civismo.

Como um dos jovens da geração do milênio, contudo, eu gostaria de sugerir, presumindo que a pesquisa de Volpe seja de fato representativa, que nosso cinismo em relação à política — nossa desconfiança e desgosto por políticos e pelo governo federal — é uma resposta natural e saudável ao meio em que vivemos.

Gente como Volpe, evangelizadores devotos do culto da política, não conseguem acreditar que possamos nos preocupar com o bem estar de nossas comunidades sem nos preocupar com a eleição de um candidato de direita ou esquerda para um cargo no governo. São pessoas que não aceitam que alguns veem a política como aquilo que ela é: o idioma da força coercitiva e o meio pelo qual algumas pessoas dominam as outras. Ao contrário do que afirmam as garantias de John Della Volpe e aqueles que acreditam no sistema, a política não é uma forma boa ou mesmo legítima de confrontar os “desafios fundamentais de nosso tempo”.

A política é simplesmente um grupo que impõe suas regras e preferências sobre outro através do uso da força física. Ela pode parecer mais ou menos democrática, mais ou menos liberal, mas sempre é apenas uma fachada que esconde a conquista e o uso da força.

Deve ser difícil ser um não-anarquista sincero, porque essas pessoas devem se guiar pelos seus impulsos e caprichos ao se depararem com qualquer questão, utilizando respostas e distinções arbitrárias. Ao invés de empregar o princípio da soberania individual, devem sempre recorrer à conveniência. Quando a conveniência não basta, o que sobra são seus sentimentos e onde eles os levarem.

Esse parece um meio indesejável de análise (se é que podemos chamar de análise) das questões sociais, particularmente para os vizinhos dos não-anarquistas, a quem esses padrões inconstantes e não-científicos devem ser aplicados. Ainda assim, os anarquistas não fingem que todas as questões sociais podem ser resolvidas por recurso mágico à soberania do indivíduo, mas apenas que ele deva ser nosso norte e ponto de partida.

Ao estabelecermos nossos princípios anarquistas, permanecem sem dúvida inúmeras questões, ao redor das quais os anarquistas assumem diversas posições. Por exemplo, o que é a autoridade ou a agressão? A propriedade privada é uma manifestação da liberdade da autoridade ou uma instância da autoridade? Os anarquistas apresentam respostas variadas a estas e outras questões.

Mas nossas respostas diferem daquelas dos estatistas porque, mesmo ao discordarmos, buscamos chegar a um objetivo — a maximização da liberdade para cada indivíduo, social e economicamente. O estatismo, em contraste, significa controle, dominação, agressão e exploração, mesmo em suas formas mais brandas e liberais.

Se a geração do milênio realmente rejeita o processo político, devemos encarar esse fato com a atitude oposta à de John Della Volpe. Ao invés de olharmos para nossos governantes e para os pesos mortos que escrevem leis para interesses escusos, nós devemos olhar uns para os outros. Quando trabalhamos, cooperamos e fazemos comércio, fora das regras do establishment, estamos agindo da maneira mais cívica possível.

A aversão aparente da minha geração pela política não é apatia, mas uma repulsa ativa e motivada. Estou feliz em rejeitar a política e as pesquisas e estimulo meus colegas a me acompanharem na criação de algo novo e melhor fora desse velho e frágil sistema.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

Libertarianism is growing slowly, but steadily in the Netherlands. The European Students for Liberty (ESFL) is currently at the forefront of spreading the free-market gospel to young people. Last Saturday I had the opportunity to attend ESFL’s Regional Conference in Europe’s libertine capital: Amsterdam. Through the busy streets I made my way to Oudemanhuispoort, passing a Soviet-themed “coffeeshop”, several gay bars and a shop specializing in 3D printing.

The conference featured a wide range of topics. I learned about the importance of open borders, the history of (inter)national drug-prohibition, free-market feminism, piracy in the horn of Africa, and libertarian hacktivism. What was the highlight of the conference were not the lectures or official debates; the day offered the opportunity to talk to people all across the classical-liberal, libertarian and anarchist spectrum. It was surprising to see how many people recognized the C4SS badge pinned to my sport coat and the conversations it started allowed me to explain free-market socialism, left-libertarianism, feminism, and provide insight into thick vs. thin libertarianism.

I had an interesting conversation with an American anarcho-syndicalist turned anarchist without adjectives about technology. C4SS sounded familiar to him and I pointed towards Kevin Carson’s work on the subject. He talked excitedly about how the People’s Republic of China was planning to build futuristic self-sustaining cities to house its worker population. I remarked that it sounded like the pinnacle of central-planning and managerial socialism and that the real interesting thing about China is its underground economy and its ability to efficiently produce quality knock-offs and I shared with him a story from Kevin Carson’s Homebrew Industrial Revolution about the Chinese underground bicycle industry. He was quiet for a few seconds and said he’d never thought about it that way. A rebellious low-tech spontaneous order is indeed far more awe inspiring than any grand futuristic centrally planned project.

At dinner I took a seat near three young German speaking libertarians and one fellow Dutchman. The topic of conversation quickly turned to left-libertarianism and I talked about my leftist reasons for being a libertarian and how the free-market is the best solution to the problems faced by socialists in the 19th century. In reference to Caroline Devine’s talk on Free-Market Feminism earlier that day I received a few questions about feminism and I went on to explain rape-culture referencing Charles W. Johnson’s essay Women and the Invisible Fist. Although my conversation partners weren’t thoroughly convinced of feminism’s necessity at the end of dinner they did seem somewhat open to the idea. As we left, the Dutchman confessed that he was an anarcho-capitalist heavily influenced by Hoppe and that he nevertheless enjoyed my presence and willingness to calmly and clearly explain so many foreign concepts to him.

All in all the conference was a success. Many young people were introduced to libertarianism through a varied array of topics and the topics of the conference proved for great conversation starters during the social aspect of the conference including my many smoking breaks. C4SS has attained some level of notoriety amongst young European libertarians and people were very much interested in our viewpoint. At the end of the evening I made my way back to Amsterdam Central Station through a cloud of pot-smoke, passing several aging hippies, groups of mohawk sporting punks and a pair of flamboyant transvestites skilfully strutting their way across a cobblestone road in stiletto heels. If it wasn’t for Amsterdam’s big-government and corporate capitalist nature I would swear I was walking through liberty’s Eden.

C4SS Feed 44 presents Trevor Hultner‘s “No, a Soldier Cop on Every Corner Does Not Sound Great” read Christopher King and edited by Nick Ford.

The most obvious statement to make at the outset is that neither jaywalking nor suspicion of petty theft nor running away from cops are crimes punishable by death anywhere in the United States. The fact that Mike Brown was killed for one of those three things is outrageous, and people were rightfully angry about it. But that isn’t everything at work in Ferguson. The demography of the town is telling.

According to data taken from the US Census Bureau and a handful of news reports, roughly 64 percent of Ferguson’s population of 21,203 – 14,290 people – are black, yet its mayor, James Knowles, is white; five members of its six-person City Council are white; six of its seven school board officials are white; and out of the 53 sworn officers on the Ferguson Police Department, three – three! – are black.

There’s more. According to the Missouri Attorney General’s office, even though white people in Ferguson are statistically more likely to be found carrying “contraband” on their persons during police searches than black people, the latter are six times more likely to be stopped in their vehicles by local PD, 11 times more likely to be searched and 12 times more likely to be arrested.

Mike Brown’s murder served as a catalyst for an extensively racially profiled, harassed and disenfranchised population to attempt to fight back.

Feed 44:

• http://www.c4ss.org/
• http://www.youtube.com/user/c4ssvideos
• https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/c4ss-media/id872405202?mt=2
• http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/smash-walls-radio/c4ss-media?refid=stpr
• https://twitter.com/C4SSmedia

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Big is not beautiful when it comes to economics. This is the key message of Kevin Carson’s “Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles“. His essay makes compelling arguments in favour of an anarchist society based on small-scale community manufacturing, peer-to-peer production and decentralised production. Carson sets out the ways in which the state concentrates economic power in the hands of inefficient corporations, before providing real-world evidence that better alternatives to the current state-capitalist system exist.

These alternatives are – in part – enabled by recent innovations in disruptive technology. The most visible of these are online: open-source software, crowdsourced funding, cryptocurrencies, and torrenting to name a few examples. In the digital world, ‘intellectual property’ laws are becoming ever more unenforceable, meaning that economic power is slowly being siphoned away from those who would use state violence to charge extortionate rents in the virtual realm. Bitcoin’s potential for anonymity holds the promise of a user-friendly, stateless currency that will further galvanise the informal sectors of economies across the world. The growing popularity of crowdsourcing initiatives such as Kickstarter continues to hurt oligopolistic capital providers (e.g. commercial banks and venture capital funds). Eschewing traditional means of accruing capital, entrepreneurs can now enjoy lower costs and higher autonomy by aggregating dispersed capital. Quoting Eric Hunting, Carson highlights how conditions in the technology sector are creating pressures for “modularization around common architectural platforms in order to compartmentalize and distribute development cost risks”. We can already see this manifesting online with the rise of Ethereum, which provides the “common architectural platform” for developers to build and publish decentralised applications. There is a world of possibility in disruptive technology, with ideas for decentralisation waiting in the minds of an increasingly anti-state, tech-savvy generation.

This modularization is not confined to the digital realm. In fact, physical manufacturing is the main focus of Carson’s work. Citing the unsustainability of the Sloanist industrial model – which fetishizes “enormous market areas and costly, product-specific machinery” – he demonstrates the superiority of localised production. Emilia-Romanga (a prosperous region of Italy) is used as a case-study for community-based supply chains, small-scale general purpose machinery and a style of manufacturing that is far more responsive to local demand. The advantages of local production, especially in an anarchist society, are made clear. Less intermediary steps in the chain of production give regions more resilience to economic downturns, whilst workers’ bargaining power is improved as wage labour becomes an optional supplement to the income of self-sufficient households. Thanks to “the rapid growth of technologies for home production”, we stand in a far more powerful position when negotiating a fair wage for our labour:

The knowledge that you are debt-free and own your living space free and clear, and that you could keep a roof over your head and food on the table without wage labor indefinitely, if you had to, has an incalculable effect on your bargaining power here and now…

Carson addresses the objection that the downfall of big business would result in a less prosperous society. He berates the ineptitude of the corporate economy, which has only ballooned to such a degree with the assistance of government privileges. The state subsidises inefficiency on a grand scale, creating “a business model based on extensive additions of inputs” rather than more efficient use of existing resources. Community workshops are one example of moving from “ending” to “mending”, which reduce waste and disperse economic power through utilising the spare capacity of community capital. Letting the market determine distribution and marketing expenditure would also encourage a more localised industrial model; if transportation subsidises were scrapped, the resultant increase in distribution costs would shift production to cater for local markets, and consequently reduce the need for marketing. As unit costs fall, so do prices.

Of course, small-scale production is not always feasible. Though there are rare cases in which “economies of large-scale machine production exist”, Austrian competition theory tells us that such concentrations of economic power are dynamic. Without the state to entrench them, they are of benefit only so long as they benefit the consumer. In the end, “most of the economies of machine production are captured with the bare adoption of the machinery itself”. One hopes that in the future, this will take place with the 3D printer (a paradigmatic example of household production), and replication will take place at a small-scale or even household level.

The tone of Carson’s study is optimistic, and with justification. Disruptive technology and the rise of the informal sector is robbing the state of the funds needed to keep Big Energy, Big Transport and Big Business afloat. Intellectual property is dying a slow, painful death. But we cannot rest on our laurels. Making the mistake of the Marxists and confidently predicting the inevitable transition to anarchy would be a great folly. The market does not simply move towards the society that Carson envisions, and real decentralising technologies need to be invented by real people. Bitcoin, Airbnb and Uber did not just appear out of thin air! Subsidies, licencing laws and intellectual property require a concerted push into the dustbin of history. Reading Carson’s work, the most important insight I gained was that market anarchists must take concrete action to bring about a healthy stateless society.