In mid-July, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew proposed that Congress prohibit US-based companies from moving offshore in search of more favorable tax climates, citing an ostensible need for a “new sense of economic patriotism.”

The resort to “patriotism” theater stands out as the most egregious aspect of legislation whose retroactive status would blatantly violate the Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws.

Underneath the veneer of common interest between the government, big business, and the general public provided by the legitimizing ideology of “patriotism,” there is and always has been a symbiotic corporate-state alliance parasitic on the latter. The state provides corporations such favors as liability shields, regulations keeping out new competitors, and labor laws preventing workers from holding out for higher wages. In return, the corporations — as Martin Short’s satirical lobbyist Nathan Thurm put it when pressed to defend the vast amounts of corporate welfare received by his clients from the government — “give a lot of that money back.”

Crucially, corporations collect such revenue for the state by passing their tax burdens on to the consumer via stealth de facto “taxes” hidden in the above-free-market-level shelf prices of their products. Thus, any tax on corporations initially favoring Washington eventually comes out of your pockets and mine.

The corporate-state symbiosis is so close that it’s difficult to keep track even of which members of the elite are part of which entity and when. Charles “what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa” Wilson went from heading GM to spearheading the interstate highway system as Secretary of Defense. Supposed muckraker Lew is himself a perfect example of that revolving-door phenomenon, his career alternating between various departments of the federal government and Citigroup — including (ahem) its subsidiaries in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong.

It is true that the corporate-state alliance has been strained by the panoply of neoliberal economic policies. But “globalization” requires doing away with borders only very selectively, when it suits corporate purposes. The American superstate and its international “trade partners” are more than willing to ignore borders when corporations benefit by moving goods from low-cost labor centers to high-profit sales centers. But that same state and those same partners consider borders of paramount importance when it comes to capturing the tax revenue that pays for all the perks their corporate symbiotes depend on for their continued existence.

Thus, corporate attempts to avoid paying taxes deserve little sympathy, since they amount to offloading the bill for the perks they still receive from the state, instead footed by the public directly. But the appropriate response is not to redouble efforts of the decaying nation-state to tax them, but for the public to refuse to be bamboozled into being the “patriotic” third leg propping up the corporate-state stool.

As the example of Wilson proves, corporate influence skews the implementation of even public services as seemingly neutral as roads in a direction that benefits corporations first and the public second. Thus, the means to fund essential public services is not “economic patriotism,” but consistent free markets and free trade.

Note: This article was written in collaboration with Thomas L. Knapp.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, “Patriottismo Economico”: L’Ultimo Rifugio di una Canaglia Fiscale.

No último dia 11 de julho, o governo federal revogou edital para leiloar linhas de transporte rodoviário interestadual para empresas selecionadas. O governo estava tentando escolher empresas para operar um conjunto de rotas, mas o procedimento, iniciado em agosto de 2013 com término previsto para janeiro de 2014, estava suspenso por liminares judiciais.

Parece um ato de pouca importância, mas que na verdade sinaliza uma nova postura do governo federal, disposto a ceder seus poderes pela pressão das circunstâncias.

Já no mês passado, a presidente da república havia sancionado a Lei nº 12.996/2014, que, em seu artigo 3º, modificou o modelo de autorização para empresas realizarem transporte rodoviário interestadual.

A diretora da Agência Nacional de Transportes Terrestres (ANTT), Ana Patriza Gonçalves Lira, explicou recentemente qual é o objetivo: “Se tiver 30 ou 40 empresas querendo fazer Rio-São Paulo, e elas se habilitarem, vamos autorizá-las. Depois, o mercado se ajusta.”

Ou seja, ao invés de tentar leiloar linhas para trechos predeterminados, que seriam obtidas por empresas específicas, o governo está anunciando que permitirá que empresas interessadas façam suas próprias rotas e as operem, desde que cumpram com requisitos mínimos de segurança e qualidade.

A revogação daquele edital no último dia 11, portanto, foi apenas o último suspiro de várias tentativas do governo, desde 2008, de realizar essas licitações de rotas interestaduais predeterminadas para empresas de transporte rodoviário.

A tendência natural do governo seria manter um sistema caracterizado pelo capitalismo de conchavo e por uma burocracia centralizadora, mas, pressionado por circunstâncias desfavoráveis e pela inviabilidade de manter um sistema deficitário de controle sobre o transporte coletivo interestadual, foi forçado a essa devolução de poder à sociedade.

Mas nem tudo são flores sob o novo modelo: as empresas ainda terão capacidade para manipular o sistema, ao influenciar esses requisitos mínimos de segurança e qualidade, além de que existirão tarifas máximas para as rotas durante 5 anos, após os quais as tarifas serão liberadas e punidos apenas eventuais abusos (possivelmente ligados ao Direito antitruste brasileiro).

O capitalismo de conchavo não foi completamente expurgado, mas houve um passo a mais em direção à mais liberdade.

E isso leva a uma reflexão: o Leviatã ameaçador não tem como se expandir infinitamente à custa da sociedade. Existem circunstâncias sobre as quais nada mais resta ao governo senão abrir mão da centralização burocrática e do conluio com empresas privadas específicas.

Alguns pensadores da filosofia política e da economia institucional já dedicaram observações importantes sobre este assunto.

Jeffrey Tucker escreveu sobre 50 novas tecnologias e práticas institucionais que nos permitem contornar o estado. A inovação seria fundamental para o estado ceder seu poder.

David Friedman comentou que seu caminho ideal para uma sociedade sem Estado seria um no qual instituições privadas gradualmente realocam as instituições do governo, de tal modo que ninguém nem notaria o desaparecimento de um Estado. Tendências rumo à cripto-anarquia digital e à expansão de arranjos legais privados de arbitragem e policiamento podem exercer um papel significativo nisso.

Kevin Carson já destacou que é preciso reverter o processo secular por intermédio do qual estados territoriais centralizados suprimiram supressão de alternativas auto-organizadas da sociedade civil. O caminho seria a construção de instituições sociais alternativas.

Compare agora o cenário traçado por estes autores com os protestos de junho do ano passado, onde milhares de brasileiros saíram às ruas para reivindicar que não houvesse nenhum aumento nas tarifas do ônibus urbano, sendo que o grupo que deu início aos protestos chegava a demandar o “passe livre”.

Aqueles protestos foram menos efetivos para mudar o modelo do transporte urbano municipal do que a pressão das circunstâncias foram para fazer o governo federal espontaneamente mudar o modelo do transporte urbano interestadual.

Um dos motivos é que, à exceção de poucos ativistas libertários, os protestos exigiam mais controle do Estado sobre o transporte coletivo urbano. O resultado foi, em várias cidades, o congelamento do preço da passagem, temporariamente, mas a manutenção de um sistema corporativista que beneficia apenas algumas empresas e políticos em conluio nos municípios do país, sistema que não foi questionado pela maioria. Muitos dos manifestantes esqueceram que o transporte clandestino em várias grandes cidades tem oferecido serviços alternativos ao transporte público autorizado pelas prefeituras, atendendo a demanda.

Portanto, um ano após os protestos, constata-se que, para mudar o modelo de transporte coletivo em nosso país e devolvê-lo para as pessoas, é preciso reivindicar do estado o poder que ele roubou de todos nós, de livremente fornecer e comprar serviços de transporte por meio de associações voluntárias e trocas livres.

“Are you interested in individualist anarchism, or at least so frightened by it that you want to keep an eye on its progress? Are you frustrated by capitalism’s love for central planning and communism’s conservative view of human potential? Do you suspect that abolishing the institution responsible for war, police brutality, and mass incarceration might not be so dangerous after all?

Then The New Leveller is for you!”

The third issue of the Students for a Stateless Society‘s newsletter, The New Leveller is now online.

For a link to a PDF of the entire issue (recommended!), click here.
For links to an HTML version of each individual article, click here.

In this issue:
“A Matter of Life & Death” by Jason Lee Byas frames the vision of individualist anarchism as a battle of life against death. This is not only because governments murder, but also because both aggression and domination are at odds with the principle behind life itself.
“Anarchists United” by Uriel Alexis explores ways in which anarchists with divergent views about how a stateless society would (and should) look can still cooperate toward those goals that they share.
“Identity & Individuals” by Elizabeth Tate explains that libertarians and anarchists should embrace, not shun, identity politics.
“Prisons: The Case for Abolition” by Nathan Goodman details reasons that prisons are both an unnecessary and unjust institution, and also shows how attempts at piecemeal reform can actually make things worse. The solution, then, is abolition.
“All Wars Are Unjust” by Jason Lee Byas argues for the conclusion in its title. To support any war is to support murder, dehumanization, regimentation, and theft, all on a massive scale. Because of this, we must reject all war.

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “We’re All Illegalists Now!” read and edited by Nick Ford.

Being that the drug world is literally under siege by a domestic military operation, it is beyond anyone’s imagination how markets like the Silk Road could keep their doors open without a serious injection of class consciousness. All those involved in the drug community are criminals. Whether or not we are all revolutionaries is up for debate. We are criminals first and foremost. When you buy an ounce of pot from your friend, you are in no uncertain terms worthy of being pumped full of bullets in the view of most police and even many citizens.

Those employing the Silk Road must keep aware of this fact. Many imagine Silk Road to be something of a revolution, and I’d largely agree with that analysis. But the state does not see you as revolutionaries. To them, drug users are of the same class as rapists and killers. Those engaging in such activities ought to adjust their activities in accordance with this.

Feed 44:

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Any discussion of Israel’s war on Gaza that does not focus on 1) the Zionist military’s and Israel’s systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through roughly 1948 (that’s how Palestinian refugees ended up in the Gaza Strip); 2) the military conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967; 3) the Israeli/Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip since 2007, following the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 (yes, the occupation ended, but Gaza remains a prison camp — as though guards left a prison but maintained strict control over who and what — food, medicine, infrastructure supplies, etc. — could enter and leave); and 4) the exploitation of the kidnapping and murders of three young Israeli residents of an illegal West Bank settlement (one a 19-year-old soldier) to rout Hamas (which denied responsibility; it normally claims credit for his acts) in the West Bank (Israeli forces rearrested several hundred West Bank Palestinians, including some who had been released in an earlier prisoner exchange; political leaders stirred up revenge fever and one Palestinian youth was burned to death, while another was severely beaten by police) — any discussion that fails to take all these things into account is worse than worthless. It is crudely dishonest. (Compare the reaction to the murder of the three Israelis with the murder by Israeli soldiers of two Palestinian youth on May 15 while peacefully commemorating the 1948 destruction of Palestine, known as the Nakba.)

Hamas is wrong to fire rockets at civilians (though few hit their targets), even considering that the villages those civilians live in were once Palestinian villages that Zionist/Israeli forces seized during the 1947-48 ethnic cleansing. The rocketing, however, is a sign of weakness versus Israel, not strength, and must not permit us to overlook this background of brutality against Palestinians. This year Hamas agreed to join the Palestinian Authority’s coalition government (after the Israeli government, again, made a mockery of “peace talks”) signaling an endorsement of the PA’s agenda — including recognition of Israel. Was this a welcome step for the Israeli government? No. It immediately set out to punish the Palestinians for this new unity — it prefers a divided Palestinian community and a Hamas it can demonize. (Years ago, the Israeli government nurtured the emergence of Hamas precisely because it could serve as a religious rival to the popular secular Fatah.)

Hamas, it is true, maintains a charter that calls for the destruction of Israel, but that has not kept it from issuing statements over the years — joining the coalition is only the most recent — indicating a willingness to accept Israel as part of a two-state solution. It is Israel that has broken truces with Hamas. Its soldiers have often killed and injured Gazans minding their own business on their own side of the fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel, while Hamas leaders have been assassinated by the Israeli government following offers of a truce. It is clear that Israeli leaders do not want a Hamas they can make peace with, just as they don’t want an Iran with which they can have normal relations. They need the specter of an “existential threat” to maintain their iron rule. In particular, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must push this intransigent line especially hard to keep the members of his coalition government who are further to the right than he is (yes, further) on the reservation.

Israeli leaders and spokesmen continually say that their only goal in this war is “peace and quiet” for the people if Israel. Maybe a decent goal would include justice for the long-suffering Palestinians. This is not about Hamas, an organization that endangers the innocent people it claims to champion with futile yet criminal activities like the rocket fire. This does not let the Israelis and their brutal response — underwritten by American taxpayers and supporter by their rulers — off the hook, however. Ont the contrary, since Israel created and maintains the open-air prison, it is responsible for all the evils that go on inside. Its hard-line policies embolden the most extreme elements and undercut the moderate voices. Has the “peace process” even slowed the building of illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank?

No, it’s not about Hamas; it’s about the Palestinians, who do not deserve this punishment at the hands of the Israelis.

For further discussion of the larger context, see Ramzy Baroud’s “Ravaging Gaza: The War Netanyahu Cannot Possibly Win.” Also worthwhile are Nathan Thrall’s “How the West Chose War in Gaza” and Neve Gordon’s “On ‘Human Shielding’ in Gaza.”

A identidade de gênero de grande parte da população não causa nenhum espanto durante a interação social, uma vez que corresponde ao seu sexo biológico. Mas não devemos esquecer a batalha dos transexuais pelo direito de autodeterminação de sua identidade de gênero.

Nem sempre a identidade de gênero de uma pessoa corresponde ao sexo biológico. Isso significa, por exemplo, que a pessoa se percebe enquanto mulher, mas seu sexo biológico é o masculino, e vice-versa.

A Associação Brasileira de Gays, Lésbicas, Bissexuais, Travestis e Transexuais (ABGLT) define identidade de gênero da seguinte forma:

“[Uma] experiência interna e individual do gênero de cada pessoa, que pode ou não corresponder ao sexo atribuído no nascimento, incluindo o senso pessoal do corpo (que pode envolver, por livre escolha, modificação da aparência ou função corporal por meios médicos, cirúrgicos e outros) e outras expressões de gênero, inclusive vestimenta, modo de falar e maneirismos. Identidade de gênero é a percepção que uma pessoa tem de si como sendo do gênero masculino, feminino ou de alguma combinação dos dois, independente de sexo biológico.”

Essa falta de correspondência entre identidade de gênero e sexo biológico não deve ser vista como uma doença, para a qual certo paternalismo médico recomendaria uma necessária retificação: trata-se de mais uma dimensão da diversidade sexual humana. Nem a homossexualidade, nem a transexualidade devem ser eliminadas da experiência humana; são expressões importantes da liberdade individual e da vida íntima.

Apesar do caráter íntimo e privado da identidade de gênero, o estado insiste em tornar isso uma questão pública através da carteira de identidade e das regulamentações do nome civil.

O nome civil no Brasil é aquele usado na carteira de identidade, conforme a certidão de nascimento individual. Sua alteração depende de procedimentos burocráticos, com base em rol restrito de justificativas.

Isso cria um problema para transexuais: seu nome civil, registrado na carteira de identidade, não reflete sua identidade de gênero. A consequência é o constrangimento de não poder controlar a própria expressão individual de gênero em suas interações sociais, uma vez que o nome civil registrado induz às pessoas a tratá-los conforme uma concepção de gênero com a qual não se identificam.

Por isso, no Brasil, um caminho encontrado tem sido o da regulação estadual do chamado “nome social”, ou seja, o nome pelo qual a pessoa prefere ser denominada em suas interações com as outras, e que permite ter maior controle sobre sua própria expressão de gênero. Assim, emite-se outra carteira (estadual, não federal) para a pessoa, onde conste seu nome social. É uma forma de resolver parcialmente um problema criado pela legislação federal.

Mas é preciso questionar seriamente se o estado tem legitimidade para reivindicar conhecimento sobre o sexo das pessoas. Esse poder do estado tem sido uma forma de privar os transexuais seus direitos civis, ao negar reconhecimento legal à sua condição diferenciada ou só concedê-lo sob a condição da realização de “cirurgias de mudança de sexo”, como se toda pessoa trans fosse obrigada a mudar seu corpo para expressar seu gênero.

Essa privação de direitos civis também ocorre porque o estado se arroga do direito de registrar todos os seus cidadãos com documentos de identificação obrigatórios, que servem ao propósito de aumentar a vigilância e controle sobre todos.

Como Erick Vasconcelos já comentou, o Brasil chega mesmo a um “totalitarismo da identificação”, onde se empilham os pretextos para justificar mais cadastros com mais informações, sem nenhuma contrapartida de instituições públicas mais transparentes.

Assim, uma importante bandeira libertária contra esses desenvolvimentos de um estado cada vez maior e com mais informações sobre as pessoas (obtidas por meio da coerção) é a da proteção da privacidade individual, que inclui o controle sobre a expressão pública da identidade de gênero por transexuais.

Então, o que o Brasil deveria fazer? Um bom passo seria imitar a Argentina, com sua Lei de Identidade de Gênero, que garante aos transexuais o direito à autodeterminação de seu gênero, inclusive possibilitando a retificação dos registros governamentais.

O Projeto de Lei João W. Nery, em tramitação no Congresso, de fato é inspirado na lei argentina e sua aprovação seria um passo interessante rumo à liberdade.

Esse é apenas um pequeno passo, porém. Trata apenas um dos sintomas da injustiça com os transexuais, mas não sua causa, e, por isso, a luta por mais liberdade para as minorias deve prosseguir com a exigência de completa privacidade para toda pessoa. O estado não deve poder forçar as pessoas a possuírem identidades obrigatórias.

A identificação obrigatória, de fato, torna mais fácil para o estado perseguir pessoas específicas que não possuem documentos. Os imigrantes, tanto no Brasil quanto nos EUA, têm grande possibilidade de deportação – e isso é ainda mais verdadeiro no caso de grupos minoritários discriminados como os transgênero.

Há, assim, uma preocupação interseccional aqui: a identificação obrigatória coloca pessoas que já são discriminadas no centro das atenções e, por isso, tanto pela liberdade de movimento quanto pela autodeterminação de gênero, devemos acabar com ela.

Logo, precisamos devolver aos transexuais a capacidade de determinar seu próprio gênero, e de não serem prejudicados nisso por qualquer barreira legal, uma vez que sua privacidade, intimidade e sexualidade não pertencem ao Estado, mas apenas a si mesmos. A carteira de identidade não pode ser um obstáculo à identidade de gênero.

Prisons are the antithesis of all we stand for as anarchists. While we seek a society built around peace and bodily autonomy, prisons are violent institutions that trap inmates at gunpoint and make them vulnerable to rape and murder. Where we seek justice through restitution, reconciliation, and self-defense, prisons are based on punitive vengeance. While we seek a society free from oppression based on race, gender, class, national origin, disability, or sexual orientation, prisons systematically brutalize the most marginalized among us.

As anarchists, we admire those who resist oppression. The state, on the other hand, uses prisons to confine and brutalize those who resist. Heroic whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and John Kiriakou are locked up, while the war criminals and corrupt rulers they exposed keep their positions of power and privilege. The state locked up CeCe McDonald, the New Jersey 4, and other queer and trans people in a notoriously transphobic and homophobic prison system, simply as punishment for defending themselves from aggressors. Black liberation revolutionaries are confined in cages and often tortured in solitary confinement, while cops who murder people of color keep their jobs and their power.

One way to mitigate the violence and harm inflicted by the prison state is to support its most immediate victims: prisoners themselves. Since the early 20th century, the Anarchist Black Cross has been doing just that. Their members write letters to political prisoners and prisoners of war. This builds social relationships and community across the divides the state seeks to maintain, it lets prisoners know they’re not alone, and it helps undermine the dehumanization that is core to imprisonment. Anarchist Black Cross groups also raise money for political prisoners and their legal defense funds.

Rather than requesting reforms from the state, Anarchist Black Cross members directly make the world a better place for those the state has brutalized. Their approach is fundamentally entrepreneurial, as it involves using the resources at one’s disposal to directly serve people’s needs. Yet it is fundamentally revolutionary, using this entrepreneurship to support those who have lost their liberty in the struggle against capitalist domination. It’s thus quite fitting that the Center for a Stateless Society’s Entrepreneurial Anti-Capitalism Project has sent funds to two active chapters of the Anarchist Black Cross: the Denver Anarchist Black Cross and the Mexico City Anarchist Black Cross.

We urge you to support their work too. You can donate to the Denver ABC here and you can contact the Mexico City ABC here to find out how to help. You can also help support prisoners by writing to some of the various prisoners these organizations support. Around the world, the Anarchist Black Cross is engaging in vital work to support prisoners, resist violent repression of social movements, and build up mutual aid. Until all are free from the state’s brutal prison system, the work of these Anarchist Black Cross groups and others like them will remain a vital part of the anarchist movement.

There is going to be a time of repression in this country. It may be quite harsh. For many, including libertarians, it may be frightening and discouraging. For the only vaguely committed it will be too much to bear and they will move back to safe positions in liberal-land or conservative-country, those establishment enclaves whose philosophically peripatetic borders seem now to overlap lovingly and lastingly on the American political landscape.

The facts of the repression are clear even if not overt. The Deputy Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, an old friend who, I can assure you, is more than capable of matching rhetoric to action, has been quoted in the Atlantic as saying that student dissenters would be “rounded up” and placed in “detention camps”. His subsequent denial of the quotation was not categorial but only complained that he had been, as politicians apparently always are, misquoted and that, ah hah, even if he had said something like that he hadn’t meant anything like that.

Mr. Kleindienst, as with every one of his political associates with whom I have worked, is sensitive first and foremost to national mood. Although they may sometimes seem to buck it’s ordinary ebb and flow, they all turn and run in the face of it’s occasional floods. Such a flood is now evident, with more than 80 percent of persons answering recent polls saying that they approve of stringent crack-downs on student dissent. It is my notion that buried in these responses, and not by too much racist dirt at that, is an implicit desire also for a crackdown on black militants.

The Administration, with some of the most attentive political antennae we have ever seen–look at the power wielded in it by publicists!–is surely going to play the repressive mood for all it is worth. And how much it is worth is, in turn, clearly evident in the fact that Super Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa has become Puissant Politician merely and solely because he has bumbled himself, like the British at Balaclava, into a bloody, dumb, eventually disastrous position of pig-headed glory. The fact that merely cracking a few student skulls has been enough to propel this second-rate social democrat into a first rank of right-wing respect, equal to and possibly even in advance of that other pillar of West Coast educationism, Max Rafferty, must be lesson enough to Richard Nixon and his court that there are political riches in the blood of repression.

There is, however, a growing interpretation, even among some who call themselves libertarians but who probably would be more comfortable as conservatives, that the New Left has brought it all on themselves and, consequently, upon the rest of us and that, in a convenient application of what the Christians might call the Agnus Dei shift, it is the New left into whom all the daggers of recrimination may be thrust.

No.

It is the libertarian instinct and interpretation that tells us that it is the state, and not those who attack or resist it, that is the guilty or most guilty party in the development of any repression and that to call repression merely reaction is to overlook or even deny the dynamics of state development.

In that dynamic development, the state, any state, always becomes more repressive over the long run rather then less. There are no exceptions to this in the development of any state where the power has been delegated by the people to the politicians, no matter how benign those politicians may seem at any particular point of the development.

Thus, the actions by the New Left, or even the Crazies, that have goaded the state into its current quiet frenzy, are hastened by but not created by those actions. The state must, sooner or later, become more rather then less coercive and repressive. That movement may be accelerated by people’s resistance but it is not created by that resistance. Has not, in fact, the structure of government, state, local, and national, actually become more repressive year by year in this country whether in times of peace, war, languor or riot? The answer is that it has and the very political party which now occupies (and occupies is just the word) the positions of power today is also the very political party which in past campaigns has documented and dealt with that onward course of repression in greatest detail. They are silent now, of course, because what it once called oppressive under Democrats becomes orderliness under Republicans.

Libertarians, who, throughout modern political history, have presented the only clear and consistent analysis of state power, know that the difference between the natural or spontaneous order of a free society, and the enforced order of a state system, is the very difference between the day of human liberation and the night of state coerciveness.

(Some details of that night as it now unfolds in Washington, appear to include the systematic arrest, on a vide variety of unrelated charges and as often as possible by local police, of student leaders and, subsequently, and perhaps depending upon the reaction to that, of non-student militants and radicals. The Black Panthers, of course, face a repression far more harsh and the key to it’s success very likely is simply to what extent local police forces, now frothing with a really rabid zeal, can execute Panthers without publicity. They will be helped, probably, by all of those liberal and conservative editors who feel that Panther revolutionary rhetoric is a threat to the orderly development of their own political programs.)

Libertarians, have a rather clear-cut choice in facing the repression. They tacitly or otherwise support the state or they can remain with the Resistance. There is no convenient middle course such as simply opting out of the struggle. There may be an appearance of such an option but it is illusory. For instance, even if one is able to retreat to a position in which one has no contact with either the state or the Resistance, a reaction in regard to the state-resistence question is inevitable. For one thing there will be many times when a friend who has not retreated could use your help. By not helping him, and if he is resisting, the state itself has been helped. This is not to call for selfless heroics, but only for principled recognition of the fact that there are two sides in this struggle and libertarians, whose analysis is the most pertinent of all, should not contemplate being able to avoid taking one of those sides. Nor should they avoid the possibility–and I say it is inevitability–that a choice which does not support the Resistance, even if with grave reservations regarding some of its character or characters, actually opposes it and that any choice which does not oppose the state, actually supports it.

Not every libertarian should or could be found at the barricades resisting or in the tunnels undermining state power. None, of course, want to end up in jail. And now they will see the power of the state, awesome and even frightening, and they will see the jails eagerly eating the revolution.

Tactics may have to change. That is only wisdom. But direction? Never! The course is to liberty. The state is the enemy.

Last month, in a tone which might best be called unlikely insistence, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reassured the public that “we” — the UK and United States — “have to liberate ourselves from the notion that we caused” the destabilization of Iraq by the ISIS insurgency. Well, actually you did.

Let’s go back to the Versailles peace conference at the end of WWI, when Britain — with the agreement of the other Western powers — carved the mandate of Iraq out of three former Ottoman provinces. These provinces — Sunni Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shia marsh Arab — were about as unwieldy as any other artificial country the imperial powers of Europe cobbled together around the world and displayed high potential for instability from the beginning.

In the 1930s the United States supported unification of the Arabian peninsula under the House of Saud, whose official religion was an ultra-fundamentalist Sunni sect known as Wahhabism (coincidentally shared by the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the US on 9/11).

In 1953, the United States gave powerful impetus to Islamic political fundamentalism by overthrowing Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, a secular democratic socialist, restoring the Shah to power. This created a state of affairs in which fundamentalist clerics constituted the primary opposition to the Shah’s autocracy, leading eventually to the overthrow of the monarchy and establishment of a theocratic regime.

Meanwhile, the Eisenhower administration quietly backed still another fundamentalist movement, the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, as an alternative to Nasser’s secular socialist model of nationalism.

In the 1960s the United States helped engineer the Baathist military coup in Iraq, thus bringing to power the same regime it eventually went to war with twice.

In the late 1970s the US created the conditions which eventually gave rise to al Qaeda, deliberately destabilizing a stable, secular Soviet client regime in Afghanistan by providing aid to fundamentalist insurgents and provoking a Soviet invasion and decade of bloody civil war. Al Qaeda emerged from among the Islamic fundamentalists fighting a guerrilla war against Soviet occupation in the ’80s, an insurgency the United States armed and trained heavily. The Carter administration destabilized Afghanistan; Reagan poured gasoline on the fire, because giving the Russians their own Vietnam was just too delicious an opportunity to pass up.

In 1990 the United States — perhaps eager for a “splendid little war” to demonstrate the continuing need for a large “defense” establishment in the post-Cold War Era — basically instigated Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. US Ambassador April Glaspie reassured Saddam that the US took little interest in minor affairs like one Arab country invading another. Meanwhile, with US encouragement, Kuwait engaged in practices like slanted oil drilling on the Iraqi border that inevitably goaded Iraq to invade.

But despite the devastation of Iraq by massive US air attacks and an ensuing decade of sanctions, Saddam’s dictatorship remained a secular regime where most people paid little attention to sectarian differences. Marriages between Sunnis and Shia were about as unremarkable as marriages between Baptists and Methodists in this country. The one force in the Middle East that most objected to this secularism and sectarian peace was al Qaeda — America’s baby. And by overthrowing Saddam and creating a power vacuum, the United States did the one thing guaranteed to give al Qaeda an opening in Iraq. After defeating and dissolving the Baathist regime, the Coalition Provisional Authority established a puppet government organized along sectarian lines, with religious sects rather than ideologically oriented parties as the main axis of political division. That kind of divide-and-rule strategy made it a lot easier to auction off the country to Halliburton, see.

And ISIS itself? Well, as resistance to Assad in Syria turned into an all-out civil war, the United States and American proxies like the Saudis (you know, that country whose Wahhabi oil aristocracy included Osama Bin Laden) armed anti-Assad rebels — some of which went on to become ISIS, a Sunni fundamentalist group so extreme even al Qaeda disavowed them.

So yeah, Tony. You, Bush and Obama — and all the other swine who’ve used the world as their chessboard for the past century — did cause this. All this bloodshed is yours. You own it.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Sì, Mr. Blair, ISIS È Roba Sua.

“Joseph Miller” discusses the drone memos.

James Bovard discusses Custer’s massacre.

Ramzy Baroud discusses the Muslim Ummah.

Lucy Steigerwald discusses the ACLU report on police militarization.

Kelly Vlahos discusses how the Iraq crisis is bringing a swift rebuke to Iraq war architects.

Laurence M. Vance discusses how Republicans don’t really support limited government.

Patrick Cockburn discusses the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

David S. D’Amato discusses how the regulatory state or government helps corporate power.

Daniel J. Bier discusses the use of curious logic to argue in favor of the drug war.

Andrew Levine discusses how Israel thrives on existential threat.

The Mises institute interviews Walter Block.

Alexandra Early discusses the desperation of choices behind child migration.

David McDonald discusses the anti-war movement.

Sheldon Richman discusses the view that war is a racket.

Steve Chapman discusses ‘the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq.

Renee Parsons discusses the quagmire of U.S. foreign policy.

Cesar Chelala discusses the force feeding of Palestinian prisoners.

Joe Scarry discusses the recently released memo on targeted killing.

Robert Parry discusses Obama’s true weakness.

Robert Parry discusses the blaming of Obama for Iraq’s current chaos.

David Stockman discusses the newly proposed aid to the Syrian opposition to Assad.

Joshua Holland discusses the lies that sold the first Gulf War.

Benjmain H. Friedman discusses how drones will put the U.S. on a perpetual war footing.

Jonathan Blank discusses liberty, black people, and the state.

Joseph Grosso discusses the drug war in Honduras.

Eric Margolis discusses the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905.

William Norman Grigg discusses the plunder of the War on Drugs.

Robert Parry discusses the changing of the New York Time’s tune on the Ukraine.

Joel Benjamin beats H. Carter.

Joel Benjamin beats Nelson Gamboa.

I’m not, in any way, a Noam Chomsky fan. However, I couldn’t help be struck by his description of anarchism in a recent interview.

Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified.

First of all, yes, exactly, brilliant.

But second, “patriarchal families” is something I’d generally skip over. The pithiness of the entire statement, plus me going through and deciding where and when to cut off the part I wanted to quote, had me pass over it again, and notice it.

Anarchy asks whether patriarchal families are justified.

After years of thought, beginning while I was still embroiled in Evangelical Christianity, on through self-identifying as a non-practicing deist Christian anarcho-capitalist, is, essentially, sometimes.

First we’ve got to decide what we mean by justified. I don’t know Chomsky’s moral system, but from the fact that he’s an anarcho-syndicalist I’d guess that maximizing human prosperity isn’t the aim of his ethics.

It is mine.

And what I have decided, after looking at the evidence, is that patriarchal families are not conducive to maximizing human prosperity. So to me, they are not justified.

Part of why I broke up with the Evangelical church is that I lost faith in its moral system. I overgeneralize and hyperbolize here, I realize, but, for the sake of clarity, I’ll summarize the Evangelical moral philosophy as,

We think Jesus or Paul said this activity is right or wrong, so that makes it right or wrong.

The idea that it is morally wrong for women to teach men, or that premarital sex is wrong, is justified on the exact same grounds that one could use to justify requiring that women must cover their heads in church in order to be right with God. That they don’t cover their heads is clearly a matter of practicality, but pointing that out made my fellow churchgoers hella uncomfortable.

Similarly, I overgeneralize and hyperbolize when I describe the moral system of social conservatism to be,

This activity is different than the activity I’m comfortable with and that has a long track record so it’s wrong.

Though my social conservatism was inextricably linked with Evangelical Christianity, and fell away as I dumped it, I similarly reject its premise. Accepting or rejecting an activity as moral requires more, for me, than approval by a person or persons or a long track record. Cab companies have a long track record. Uber is better.

I get, intellectually, the idea that humans are incomplete and fallible in our intellect, information and understanding. The idea is that because we are not omniscient, we need a supernatural power to tell us how to act. How interesting that faith in the supernatural (but not church membership or attendance) negatively correlates with education and intelligence. It’s almost like the more faith one has in one’s own intellect, information and understanding, the less able one is to buy into this particular moral system.

Because when you look at it, the Evangelical moral system is actually opposed to intellect, information and understanding. God loves us, right? So surely he’d set up a moral system which would maximize our self-interest. Surely being a devout Christian would make us wealthier, happier, more fulfilled and living longer, healthier lives. But, no, it says in the New Testament pretty clearly that following Jesus will lead to alienation, persecution and suffering.

I don’t know, man. I’m just not sure I’m into that. I really mean that. I don’t know. Maybe I should be proclaiming the Gospel and being shunned and sacrificing my worldly happiness for eternal glory. But I do know that the moral code I preached when I was Evangelical, a path to heaven which consisted of renouncing homosexuality and saving yourself for marriage and eschewing drugs, was wrong. And worse, incredibly alienating and hurtful. So since following that moral code brought me to a place I shudder to remember, hurting people and making their lives more difficult, I’ve rejected and replaced it.

As well, I intellectually understand the socially conservative idea that because institutions like marriage and monogamy have “worked” over millennia, they should be protected and enshrined, and that deviation from them threatens the entire working system, and should be punished accordingly. But worked for whom? Yes, marriage and monogamy and insisting women maintain modesty and sexual purity has in the past helped establish and maintain stable, two-parent households in which children could grow up relatively unscathed. However, at what cost to the women involved? And, are we mistaking cause and effect here? Stable marriages, marriage at all, really, has always been most easily and readily available to the wealthiest, the most educated, the most intelligent and the most emotionally strong among us. Is it possible that it’s all those factors which make for the best parenting among the married, and not the marriage itself?

Furthermore, is it possible that what we’re actually seeing is a vicious cycle, in which our ideas about a woman’s proper place help keep her from being able to be economically independent, which then makes her solo parenting marred by grinding poverty, which helps bolster support for the idea that she should be parenting within a marriage?

And even beyond that, is it possible that a man as head of the household, which is what I believe Chomsky was referring to when he said “patriarchal families” only makes sense when women are poorly educated? Now that women are earning more degrees than are men, why relegate decision making to the less-informed of the two?

Another data point which challenges the justification for “patriarchal families” is whether it makes sense for men to head households when their wives outearn them. Since single, childless women in cities outearn their male counterparts, insisting that a family be headed by a man will lead to women eschewing marriage entirely, for lack of a suitable partner.

No, I find both moral systems irredeemably flawed. That’s not to say either get everything wrong. It’s to say that I reject the foundations upon which they are built. No, it’s not enough for me to accept something as moral that Jesus or Paul reportedly said it is. I’ll wear my head fully uncovered should I go to church, thankyouverymuch. And no, that people have always done it and it’s worked okay is not reason enough for me to accept that in the here and now, it’s something worth doing. You can take your admonition for me to submit to my husband and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

My moral system is essentially this: Something is moral if the empirical evidence indicates it makes people happier, more connected or wealthier. Is this arbitrary? Arbitrary as hell. I could have as easily said that something is moral if it increases equality. And I do enjoy equality, but I justify it by the evidence that equality of opportunity, and equality before the law is generally conducive to happiness, connectedness and prosperity.

So, basically, all that is part of why I’m an anarcha-feminist.

In the city of Amargosa in Brazil, citizens took to the streets after a stray bullet fire by a local police officer struck and killed a one-year-old girl. But they didn’t stay in the streets. They quickly took the police station, freeing prisoners, jacking state-owned weaponry and burning the station and police vehicles to the ground.

In the end, no one was seriously harmed and the message was sent: We won’t accept your institution’s “collateral damage” any longer. We are taking it, we are burning it, we are taking the weapons of the police for ourselves. Eventually, this “riot” was quelled by neighboring police forces, but in the Battle of Amargosa 16th of July 2014, the victors were the citizens. And what of the state officials most likely to face the wrath of these fierce, enraged individuals? Like the cowards they are, they held up inside a local hotel. Take note,

The very next day, in a very different city, in a very different country, Eric Garner gasped out his last breaths as gang members repping the New York Police Department colors piled on and choked him after he broke up a scuffle the NYPD were slow in responding to.

His crime? Garner was a known holder of contraband, which you might know as loose cigarettes. Despite no evidence that he was selling or even had said contraband on his person, after a brief verbal quarrel between Garner and the police, he was put into a chokehold, held on the ground and pounced on by several more NYPD gang members. His last words, the words of an innocent family man to these “peace officers?” “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

No riots occurred that day. Passersby did thought of their self-preservation and looked the other way. No agitators, no dissent . Just another dead black man on the New York City streets … only this time with a video. With the power of these images, of Garner’s last cries for mercy, the proud American people who value independence so highly were capable of summoning an Internet outrage. I even hear that Al Sharpton is involved. As of now Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who initiated the chokehold, has been relieved of his gun and sentenced to the harsh world of desk work. Meanwhile a few miles away, a mother and six children deal with the sadness, the horror and confusion of having their husband and father taken from them.

Eric Garner is dead and nothing will change because of that. At most, we will see a policy shift discouraging chokeholds (will of course not be abided by). Tomorrow or next week, there will be another Eric Garner. There will be another Eric Garner because there is still an NYPD precinct that wasn’t razed.

One might object to a comparison between these situations. The Amargosa police department has four patrolling officers, the NYPD thousands. The weaponry of the Amargosa police department is meager, that of NYPD military-grade. Surely the best way to remember Garner is the slow burn of policy change, of educating a mass movement which is uncooperative with the police, of anything but immediate and direct response.

I might have to forlornly agree with you, that any thought of a battle with the NYPD is doomed from the start. But make no mistake, to be radical on this matter is to encourage a spirit of rebellion like that of Amargosa. Violence and conflict is inevitable on the scale of the individual, the community, city and country. There will not be a true movement against police until we’re ready to assert the value of our loved ones’ lives over those the claims of cops, whose daily plots always involve harassing you and treating you as hostile until proven otherwise.

It’s time we treat the police with the same hostility they treat us with — and more! It is time to end them. It is always time to end your subjugation — by any means necessary. Amargosa’s people understood this. They may have been up against a less imposing department of uniformed killers, but they still faced death and imprisonment and chose to act rather to write angry letters. It took community, it took anger, it took a disregard for the safety or dignity of officers as equals. They are not equals. As is becoming ever more clear, modern police departments in America and around the world are occupiers, violating communities with every bullet, with every badge. It is time to burn them all to the ground, to take their arms and to free those they imprisoned. Don’t just do it for Eric Garner. Do it for yourself.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Dov’è la Amargosa di Eric Garner?

A past New York Times editorial by Thomas Ricks shamelessly advocates involuntary servitude. In the article he states:

A revived draft, including both males and females, should include three options for new conscripts coming out of high school. Some could choose 18 months of military service with low pay but excellent post-service benefits, including free college tuition. These conscripts would not be deployed but could perform tasks currently outsourced at great cost to the Pentagon: paperwork, painting barracks, mowing lawns, driving generals around, and generally doing lower-skills tasks so professional soldiers don’t have to. If they want to stay, they could move into the professional force and receive weapons training, higher pay and better benefits.

This is the blatant promotion of mandatory, menial and poorly paid labor for youth. This is a fiscally conservative proposal to exploit cheap labor to save the government money. No well paid workers! Just cheap conscripts who have no exit and ergo no ability to contest crappy wages and tasks through voting with their feet – will Ricks allow conscripts to unionize? One has to wonder. Unionization would mean the effective ability to challenge exploitative wages.

He goes on to say:

And libertarians who object to a draft could opt out. Those who declined to help Uncle Sam would in return pledge to ask nothing from him — no Medicare, no subsidized college loans and no mortgage guarantees. Those who want minimal government can have it.

What about libertarians or people generally who can’t afford to lose government aid in our present corporatist system? No answer from Thomas Ricks. They would presumably still be compelled to serve the aims of government. A good example of how government aid can come with awful strings attached.

Aside from the above, there is an additional ethical issue with Rick’s proposal. The fact that it relies on the initiation of force to even attempt to enact it – it may not end up working even then. The use of aggressive force is a major evil. Thomas Ricks shows no sign of understanding nor even recognizing this truth.

This absence of a concern with the aggressive use of force required leads him to make another dubious argument. Near the end, he says:

But most of all, having a draft might, as General McChrystal said, make Americans think more carefully before going to war. Imagine the savings — in blood, tears and national treasure — if we had thought twice about whether we really wanted to invade Iraq.

Whether or not he is correct in his argument; he ignores some salient points. Conscription makes it difficult for people to vote against the war by declining to volunteer to for it. Anthony Gregory points out that a better solution to dealing with the problem of unjust wars is to allow soldiers to quit their jobs. The more moral choice is to work to make this a reality. One way to go about attempting to do that is by encouraging mass non-violent revolt within the military. One could also take a more legalistic route by bringing a lawsuit against the Defense Department. One could invoke the no involuntary servitude part of the Constitution. Both of these options deserve further consideration!

Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), the English economics writer I discussed previously, is an enigma — until his philosophy is seen in its entirety. He was an editor at The Economist of London from 1846 to 1855, during the period author Scott Gordon called “the high tide of laissez faire, yet he is considered a Ricardian socialist, was quoted and deferred to by Marx [and] described by Sidney and Beatrice Webb as Marx’s master.” How could any libertarian claim Hodgskin as a mentor?

“The connection will be only be fully appreciated,” Gordon writes, “by those who have learned that the geometry of politics is non-Euclidean; straight lines, when extended, form complete circles, and parallels may meet and even cross.” (The quotes are from Gordon’s “The London Economist and the High Tide of Laissez Faire,” Journal of Political Economy, December 1955.)

The radical edge that Hodgskin gave his laissez-faire advocacy confuses people whose thoughts come in prefabricated boxes. Today if someone sympathizes with labor’s plight, he’s bound to be labeled a collectivist, although earlier radical individualists located the source of that plight not in the market but in the halls of government. This was better understood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the likes of Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, and Herbert Spencer held the libertarian vanguard.

Hodgskin, very simply, was a natural-law individualist who thought government should grant no privileges to anyone, particularly capitalists, landowners, and clergy, who in his time were the chief beneficiaries of state appropriation and other interference with peaceful market activity. He embraced the “natural right of property” and opposed the “artificial right of property,” which he attributed to the utilitarians’ belief that legislation, not natural law, was the source rights. In other words, land and other objects acquired through original appropriation and honest, voluntary means were legitimate property. All forced and fraudulent means of acquisition yielded illegitimate, artificial property that could only be sustained by government power. He called for the abolition of all forms of the artificial right of property and full flowering of the natural right.

Hodgskin was a passionately consistent adherent of the philosophy of John Locke and the laissez-faire, free-trade Manchester school of Cobden and Bright. His dubious ideas on the labor theory of value (held also by Adam Smith and David Ricardo) and the nature of capital would not withstand the later Austrian school of economics, and he criticized capitalists. But this was always in the context of systematic government intervention, most egregiously the prohibition of unions, or combinations. Laissez faire would eliminate “most of the misery which exists in the world,” he said. He fully appreciated that capitalists were laborers too — possessing the right to their full product like any other laborer. Unlike Marx, he did not believe that the exploitation of labor was inherent in market relations, but rather was the result of departures from the free market. (For an Austrian critique of the labor theory of value, see Robert Murphy’s excellent paper here. [PDF])

As for his alleged Ricardian socialism, Murray Rothbard writes in his history of economic thought, “There is no question that Hodgskin’s ultra labourism influenced Karl Marx, but his extreme labour theory of value does not make him a Ricardian, much less a socialist. In fact, Hodgskin was highly critical of Ricardo and the Ricardian system, denounced Ricardo’s abstract methodology and his theory of rent, and considered himself a Smithian rather than a Ricardian. Smith’s natural law and harmony-of-interest free market doctrine was also more congenial to Hodgskin. …Furthermore, even at his most labourist in the 1820s, Thomas Hodgskin … widened rather than narrowed the definition of ‘labour’. Mental activity is as much ‘labour,’ he pointed out, as muscular exertion…. Not only that: Hodgskin also pointed out cogently that the capitalist is also very often a manager, and therefore also a labourer.’”

This gives context to such Hodgskin statements as: “There is then, I conclude, a natural right of property, founded on the fact that labour is necessary to produce whatever bears the name of wealth.” If socialism means abolition or crippling of the market, Hodgskin was no socialist.

Hodgskin’s intellectual career was something remarkable. He wrote for a general public and even helped run an institute designed to teach free-market economics. His idea of natural economic harmony — absent government intervention — reminds one of his contemporary Frederic Bastiat, who called The Economist “a precious collection of facts, doctrine and experience mutually supporting each other.” Hodgskin’s “philosophical basis was natural law…,” Gordon writes. “He may appear to be an anachronism in the mid-nineteenth century until one reflects upon the fact that this is precisely what laissez faire and the economic harmony doctrine were. They were a reaction against utilitarianism and a return to natural law.”

Observe his independence of thought. When many thinkers of his day were under the sway of Thomas Malthus’s pessimism about the ability of a growing population to feed itself, Hodgskin was sounding like Adam Smith, Julian Simon, Peter Bauer, and Jane Jacobs rolled into one — although he had trouble finding a publisher for his views. “Hodgskin argued that an increase in population provides a larger market which permits a more extensive division of labor to be carried out. Also, large centers of population are a stimulus to the inventive and creative powers of men” (Gordon).

Natural and Artificial

Again in Bastiat-like fashion, Hodgskin finds the right of property in the very nature of man and the world. In his book The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), he states:

… I look on a right of property — on the right of individuals, to have and to own, for their own separate and selfish use and enjoyment, the produce of their own industry, with power freely to dispose of the whole of that in the manner most agreeable to themselves, as essential to the welfare and even to the continued existence of society. If, therefore, I did not suppose, with Mr. Locke, that nature establishes such a right — if I were not prepared to shew that she not merely establishes, but also protects and preserves it, so far as never to suffer it to be violated with impunity — I should at once take refuge in Mr. Bentham’s impious theory, and admit that the legislator who established and preserved a right of property, deserved little less adoration than the Divinity himself. Believing, however, that nature establishes such a right, I can neither join those who vituperate it as the source of all our social misery, nor those who claim for the legislator the high honour of being “the author of the finest triumph of humanity over itself.”

In Hodgskin’s view, this natural right is self-sufficient, needing no help from the legislator.

A savage, stronger than the labourer or more cunning, may undoubtedly take the fruit of his industry from him by force or fraud; but antecedently to the use of force or fraud, and antecedently to all legislation, nature bestows on every individual what his labour produces, just as she gives him his own body. She bestows the wish and the power to produce, she couples them with the expectation of enjoying that which is produced, and she confirms in the labourer’s possession, if no wrong be practised, as long as he wishes to possess, whatever he makes or produces. All these are natural circumstances — the existence of any other person than the labourer not being necessary to the full accomplishment of them. The enjoyment is secured by the individual’s own means. No contract, no legislation, is required. Whatever is made by human industry, is naturally appropriated as made, and belongs to the maker. In substance, I would feign hope, there is no difference between this statement and that of Mr. Locke; but I wish to mark, stronger than I think he has done, the fact, that, antecedently to all legislation, and to any possible interference by the legislator, nature establishes a law of appropriation by bestowing, as she creates individuality, the produce of labour on the labourer.

He goes so far to say that the right of property is embedded in the very idea of individuality. The latter would be meaningless without the former.

Mr. Locke says, that every man has a property in his own person; in fact, individuality — which is signified by the word own — cannot be disjoined from the person. Each individual learns his own shape and form, and even the existence of his limbs and body, from seeing and feeling them. These constitute his notion of personal identity, both for himself and others; and it is impossible to conceive — it is in fact a contradiction to say — that a man’s limbs and body do not belong to himself: for the words him, self, and his body, signify the same material thing.

As we learn the existence of our own bodies from seeing and feeling them, and as we see and feel the bodies of others, we have precisely similar grounds for believing in the individuality or identity of other persons, as for believing in our own identity. The ideas expressed by the words mine and thine, as applied to the produce of labour, are simply then an extended form of the ideas of personal identity and individuality.

The idea of property occurs to us naturally and early on as we act in the world. We don’t need the legislator to instruct us in its nature or its intricacies. The individual’s reason is capable of grasping the concept.

As nature gives to labour whatever it produces — as we extend the idea of personal individuality to what is produced by every individual — not merely is a right of property established by nature, we see also that she takes means to make known the existence of that right. It is as impossible for men not to have a notion of a right of property, as it is for them to want [lack] the idea of personal identity…. Ideas of property are truly instinctive, and are acquired by children long before they ever hear of law. If they do not belong to the mind, as the legs and the tongue belong to the body, like the habit of walking or speaking, they are so early acquired, and so continually present to us that they appear innate.

Through production and commerce people would increasingly improve their material condition and the condition of those around them. The hitch is that some wish to prosper not through productive effort but through appropriation of the fruits of other people’s labor. The most efficient way is through the power of government, which has nothing it hasn’t first taken from some producer.

The first and chief violation of the right of property, which pervades and disturbs all the natural relations of ownership, confusing, and perplexing the ideas of all men as to the source of the right of property, and what is their own, of which so many actions stigmatized by the law as crimes, are the necessary consequences, and the natural corrections, — the parent theft from which flow all other thefts, is that of the legislator, who, not being a labourer, can make no disposition of any property whatever, without appropriating what does not naturally belong to him.

That is the source of the artificial right of property.

One of the first objects then of the law, subordinate to the great principle of preserving its unconstrained dominion over our minds and bodies, is to bestow a sufficient revenue on the government. Who can enumerate the statutes imposing and exacting taxes? Who can describe the disgusting servility with which all classes submit to be fleeced by the demands of the tax-gatherer, on all sorts of false pretences, when his demands cannot be fraudulently evaded? Who is acquainted with all the restrictions placed on honest and praiseworthy enterprise; the penalties inflicted on upright and honourable exertions; — what pen is equal to the task of accurately describing all the vexations, and the continual misery, heaped on all the industrious classes of the community, under the pretext that it is necessary to raise a revenue for the government?

This was written in 1832. Hodgskin never experienced the Congress, the Internal Revenue Service, or the U.S. income tax. Would he be surprised if he visited us today?

Nature may annihilate, but she never tortures…. Not so the legislator. He has inflicted on mankind for ages the miseries of revenue laws, — greater than those of pestilence and famine, and sometimes producing both these calamities, without our learning the lesson which nature seems to have intended to teach, viz. the means of avoiding this perpetual calamity. Revenue laws meet us at every turn. They embitter our meals, and disturb our sleep. They excite dishonesty, and check enterprise. They impede division of labour, and create division of interest. They sow strife and enmity amongst townsmen and brethren….

Locke’s commonwealth, says Hodgskin, has not lived up to its theory.

The natural right of property far from being protected, is systematically violated, and both government and law seem to exist chiefly or solely, in order to protect and organize the most efficacious means of protecting the violation….

The important and yet perhaps trite fact to which I wish by these remarks to direct your attention is, that law and governments are intended, and always have been intended, to establish and protect a right of property, different from that which, in common with Mr. Locke, I say is ordained by nature. The right of property created and protected by the law, is the artificial or legal right of property, as contra-distinguished from the natural right of property. It may be the theory that government ought to protect the natural right; in practice, government seems to exist only to violate it.

The more things change…

“Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects.” — Thomas Hodgskin

Is government the source of our rights? I fear that today many people would say yes. Not infrequently it is said that the government or the Constitution grants us freedom of speech or press or the right to own property. This offends the natural-law tradition that was essential to the genesis of classical liberalism (“liberalism”) and the vital institutions it spawned. While some prominent early liberals sought to overthrow natural law in favor of the seemingly more-scientific utilitarianism, the heart and soul of liberalism is — and remains — the natural law. The philosophy would be impoverished without it.

Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869) well understood this. He deserves to be better known than he is. Hodgskin was an early editor of The Economist and an important influence on Herbert Spencer, who also worked at that publication. Hodgskin is something of a puzzle for many people. He is often described as a Ricardian socialist, but in his case the label is misleading. Having lived before the marginal revolution, in which Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school, and other economists provided an alternative to the Adam Smith/David Ricardo labor theory of value, Hodgskin did regard labor, rather than utility, as the source of economic value. [UPDATE: There are indications in Hodgskin’s writings that he regarded utility as a fundamental economic phenomenon. He writes in Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital: “But it is quite plain that the sum the weaver will be disposed to give for the thread will depend on his view of its utility.” Nevertheless, he thought that what people found useful had to be created by labor.]

But calling him a socialist is bound to confuse. He was indeed a critic of “capitalism,” by which he and others back then meant government intervention on behalf of capital to the prejudice of labor. But he was no advocate of state control of the means of production. On the contrary, he was a influenced by the radical market economist J. B. Say and believed violations of laissez faire, such as tariffs, are what exploited workers by depriving them of their full, market-derived product. Only in a fully free and openly competitive environment void of privilege (“Middle English, from Old French, from Latin, a law affecting one person“) could laborers achieve justice. (Hodgskin developed his sympathy for labor while in the navy, where he observed the cruelty toward sailors. He himself was disciplined and eventually court-martialed and discharged.) As David Hart and Walter Grinder write, “The radical individualist Thomas Hodgskin … gives a clear example of the application of the libertarian nonaggression principle to the acquisition and exchange of property. He also implies that those who benefit from ‘artificial’ property rights, that is, by force and state privilege, comprise a class antagonistic to the producing class.”

How unfortunate that siding with workers against government intervention on behalf of business has come to considered anti-libertarian! There was a time when one could write a book, as Hodgskin did, titled Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital without being thought a communist. (A modern example is here.)

The work of Hodgskin that Hart and Grinder were referring to is The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted (1832), which he signed “A Labourer.” The book is a series of letters to Lord Brougham on the moral and legal status of property. This book will be worth revisiting in the future, so I will confine today’s report to the introductory letter. It is a good indication of Hodgskin’s natural-law approach to liberty and government, an approach that ought to be emphasized in the liberal expression. (This is not to slight the concern with consequences. But it is to reject the notion that only consequences in the narrow sense matter. For some pregnant thoughts on this subject, see Roderick Long’s blog post here.)

Natural Phenomenon

Hodgskin was alarmed that few among the general public or in Parliament understood that society is a natural phenomenon, rather than an artificial product of government. It was too commonly thought that without a constant stream of new legislation, society would run down and turn chaotic. (Have we heard anything like this lately?) He wanted to set Lord Brougham straight on this point.

With one or two exceptions, they [members of Parliament] are so ignorant that they have yet to learn the existence of any natural laws regulating society. They believe that it is held together by the statutes at large; and they know no other laws which influence its destiny than those decreed by themselves and interpreted by the judges.

But if no one understands the true nature of society, i.e., that it is essentially self-regulating, then how can a legislator know that he must keep from interfering with it? It’s a question we could put to almost any member of Congress.

Rapidly therefore as the gentlemen at Westminster work, making three or four hundred laws per year, repeating their tasks session after session–actively as they multiply restraints, or add patch after patch, they invariably find that the call for their labours is continually renewed. The more they botch and mend, the more numerous are the holes. Knowing nothing of natural principles, they seem to fancy that society–the most glorious part of creation, if individual man be the noblest of animals–derives its life and strength only from them. They regard it as a baby, whom they must dandle and foster into healthy existence; but while they are scheming how to breed and clothe their pretty foundling–lo! it has become a giant, whom they can only control as far as he consents to wear their fetters. [Emphasis added.]

How little basic attitudes have changed in 175 years.

Because we have continually altered our laws piecemeal, paying no regard to principles, or setting out from an erroneous one, that has never since been revised, we are now lost in a vast wilderness of fictions and absurdities. The law, instead of being [quoting Brougham himself] “the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence, is a two-edged sword of craft and oppression,” which, but for the large shield of the public press which the law has in vain endeavoured to break, would hack society asunder.

Then Hodgskin approaches the heart of the issue.

To remedy these monstrous evils, vitiating the whole social compact we must begin at first principles. To stop the flowing of the volcanic and sulphureous stream, which, though shining and sparkling with promise, like the fertilizing waters of the earth, withers the heart of the land, we must go to the fountain head. Convinced, by the every day practices of our legislators, that they never study first principles, though they continually and vainly try to modify results, and convinced by the present state of the law that they cannot begin the study too soon, I propose to call your attent on to one of those principles, THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY — some of the consequences of which are now undergoing investigation by two sets of commissioners.

He doesn’t show much confidence in members of Parliament. I note that Congress’s rating in public-opinion polls is at historically low levels, although I suspect that unlike Hodgskin, Americans probably think Congress is not doing enough. Hodgskin, on the other hand, operates from something like a Public Choice, as opposed to the textbook public-interest, perspective.

I am aware, indeed, that nothing is more irksome to legislators than to stop them short in their career, by any demands for previous investigation. — It is so much easier and shorter to decree than inquire, and so much more flattering to self-love to dictate than examine, that both indolence and vanity combine to make the law-giver act before he understands. He takes no comprehensive view of society; he grubs forward under the influence of his passions and animal instincts, like the mole, and is quite as blind. If any of those instincts had for their object the welfare of society, I should join the crowd and huzza him on. Unfortunately for his pretentions, his instincts, his passions, his desires — like those of all animals — have no other object than the preservation and welfare of the individual. Till, therefore, some incarnation of social instincts be made manifest, I, for one, must insist that the legislator is bound to inquire into the natural laws which regulate society, before he tries to bind society down to his own short-sighted views. Self-interest, too, should now dictate inquiry: for mankind are every where becoming the critics of his actions; and he will command their respect and obedience, no longer than he guides his conduct by the natural principles to which society owes its rise, progress, and continued existence.

The Knowledge Problem

Our author had a sense of the “knowledge problem” that F. A. Hayek did so much to call attention to. Unfortunately, our legislators haven’t yet caught up with either thinker. They still believe, for example, that they can construct a proper immigration policy that will let in only the right kind of people, i.e., those who fit the future needs of the economy — as though politicians could predict the future needs of an economy.

The progress of the past may cast its shadow before, so that you may have a rough notion that society is to go on increasing in people, in wealth, and in knowledge, as it has increased in past time; but what shape that increase is to take, how rapid is to be the progress, and what are to be the new relations, both among individuals and among nations, it will call into existence — what new trades, what new arts, may arise — what new habits, manners, customs, and opinions, will be formed — what is the precise outline society will assume, with all the fillings-in of the picture to the most minute touches; — all these things, to which laws ought to be adapted, cannot possibly be known: and inquiry into them, with a view of making laws to accord with them, must necessarily make the whole business of legislation appear in its true character to mankind — a mockery of their interests, and a fraud on their understandings. [Emphasis added.]

Hodgskin cuts to the chase now, raising the issue at the center of his attention: property rights. See if he sounds like a socialist, as we commonly apply that label.

Political organization depends very much on the mode in which property is distributed. Wherever the right of property is placed on a proper foundation, slavery, with all its hateful consequences, is unknown: — wherever this foundation is rotten, freedom cannot exist, nor justice be administered….

But though the Westminster philosophers, and you also, agree with Mr. Locke, in attributing to the right of property the utmost importance, making it the basis of the political edifice, they differ from him, fundamentally and totally, as to the origin of this right. Mr. Locke lays it down, that the preservation of property is the object for which men unite into a commonwealth. For this purpose, they put themselves under government. Property therefore, according to Mr. Locke, existed antecedently to government, and government was established for the protection of an antecedently existing right of property. [Emphasis added.]

But this conception of property as a natural right is not what holds sway, Hodgskin goes on:

On the contrary, both Mr. [John Stuart] Mill and M. [Etienne] Dumont, describe the right of property to be the offspring of law. Mr. Mill says, “the end of government is to make a distribution of wealth,” or create such a right. M. Dumont expressly says, that the right of property is altogether the work or creation of the legislator, or the law. This difference of opinion is pregnant with momentous consequences. If a right of property be a natural right, not created by legislation, if it be a principle of society, derived immediately and directly from the laws of the universe, all its results will be determined, at all times, by those laws; and the legislator ought to ascertain these results, before he dreams of making decrees, to enforce them. Before he takes any steps to protect the right of property, he must, on Mr. Locke’s principles, find out in what it consists.

That would seem to be mere common sense. Since natural law operates whether we acknowledge it or not, social engineering that contravenes natural law must come to grief.

If, on the other hand, a right of property be altogether the creature and work of laws, as the legislator seems to suppose, he may at all times determine all its consequences. He will have no occasion to inquire into any circumstances foreign to his own enactments; he will only have to frame his decrees with logical accuracy from the principles he lays down.

The two approaches are mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive. There’s no middle way.

One system looks on the legislator as an ally, in enforcing the laws of nature, to do which he must know them; the other denies that there are any such laws, which in fact its authors do in express terms, and they look on enactments as determining the welfare and destiny of mankind. A more important difference of opinion cannot exist. Either principle lies at the very foundation of the whole political edifice. Mr. Locke’s view is, in my opinion, more correct than Mr. [Jeremy] Bentham’s, though at present among legislators, and those who aspire to be legislators, the latter is by far the most prevalent. Practical men universally adopt it; for they always decree, and never inquire into the laws of nature. The prevalence of Mr. Bentham’s opinion, makes it necessary to illustrate and enforce that of Mr. Locke, in so far as it is limited to asserting that a right of property is not the offspring of legislation.

Natural-law liberals, such as Thomas Paine, saw government, at best, as a necessary evil. Not so the utilitarians, Hodgskin says.

…Messrs. Bentham and Mill, both being eager to exercise the power of legislation, represent it as a beneficent deity which curbs our naturally evil passions and desires (they adopting the doctrine of the priests, that the desires and passions of man are naturally evil) — which checks ambition, sees justice done, and encourages virtue. Delightful characteristics! which have the single fault of being contradicted by every page of history. Hitherto, it has been generally supposed that the whole world was given to the human race, with dominion over all other created things, for them to use and enjoy in every way, abstaining from nothing — restricted in nothing consistent with their own happiness — bound mutually to share the blessings provided for them, because mutual assistance begets mutual love — supplies physical wants easier and better, and promotes moral and intellectual improvement; — that the rights and duties of men grow out of the great scheme of creation, which is sometimes misinterpreted, and rarely understood, by human sagacity, — sometimes marred, and never mended, by human wisdom. But, now, in compliment to political power, and to Mr. Bentham’s theory, that we may find an apology for our own infirm and base submission, we must believe that men had naturally no right to pick up cockles on the beach or gather berries from the hedge — no right to cultivate the earth, to invent and make comfortable clothing, to use instruments to provide more easily for their enjoyments — no right to improve and adorn their habitations — nay, no right to have habitations — no right to buy or sell, or move from place to place — till the benevolent and wise law-giver conferred all these rights on them.

If this be the basis of the political system, Hodgkin wanted no part of it.

To me, this system appears as mischievous as it is absurd. The doctrines accord too well with the practice of law-givers, they cut too securely all the Gordian knots of legislation, not to be readily adopted by all those who, however discontented they may be with a distribution of power, in which no share falls to them, are anxious to become the tutelary guardians of the happiness of mankind. They lift legislation beyond our reach, and secure it from censure. Man, having naturally no rights, may be experimented on, imprisoned, expatriated or even exterminated, as the legislator pleases. Life and property being his gift, he may resume them at pleasure; and hence he never classes the executions and wholesale slaughters, he continually commands, with murder — nor the forcible appropriation of property he sanctions, under the name of taxes, tithes, amp;c., with larceny or high-way robbery. [Sir Robert] Filmer’s doctrine of the divine right of kings was rational benevolence, compared to the monstrous assertion that [quoting Mill] all right is factitious, and only exists by the will of the law-maker. But though this may be comfortable doctrine for legislators, it will not satisfy the people; and in spite of false theories and unreasonable practices, events are now teaching mankind to place a just value on law-making. Day does not follow day, without increasing our knowledge of the consequences of actions; and it is fast becoming apparent, that the wise men, such as Cicero and Seneca, as Bacon and Locke, and as Burke and Smith, who have advocated a totally different system from that of Messrs. Bentham and Mill and their arrogant disciples, have not cast the seeds of their faith in nature, on a barren and ungrateful soil.

Where are those such as Thomas Hodgskin when we really need them?

C4SS Feed 44 presents Ryan Calhoun‘s “The Libertarian Virtue Of Slack” read and edited by Nick Ford.

The common libertarian nowadays is of the same non-interventionist temperament as the Taoists. They endorse individual preference, spontaneity and self-interest. They loathe the State and central planners of all kinds. Most libertarians identify, also, as individualists — both methodologically and ethically.

However, much of libertarian culture is hostile to the idea of the slacker, of the non-contributor, of the lazy. Libertarians have very much embraced the protestant work ethic, that work in and of itself is valuable. It’s good to work, it’s good to be disciplined and rigorous. While all libertarians, in line with the non-aggression principle, must support the right to be lazy, most libertarians have taken to looking down upon those who simply don’t do much with their lives.

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The following article was written by Dyer Lum and published The Alarm, October 31, 1885.

Another election is at hand. Again the seductive voice of the politician is heard appealing to ignorance to establish justice. It is not new to our ears; we once trusted it. We have fully realized the emptyness of its professions. What do we gain? Setting aside what the ballot might do, have we any certainty that our ballots will be counted? New York last year settled the presidential question by giving its vote to Cleveland by a narrow margin. How many illegal votes were cast? How many were bought? How many were suppressed?

Take the late election in Ohio. Fraud is evident in Cincinnati. Would a fair vote have changed the result? No one knows. The old woman whose horse ran away trusted in providence till the britching broke. But one political britching is already terribly strained and cracking. We may safely lay down certain conclusions as evident.

1. Ballots are not always counted.
2. They may be fraudulently counted.
3. They may be outnumbered by “bunched” ballots, as in Ohio.
4. Even under the fairest conditions they cannot solve economic problems.
5. Successful politics is an art where honesty has as little chance as at a horse show thimble rig game.

But, it is alleged, that as both sides resort to fraud, the chances are equal. That is, politics is a game of cards, in which only the best trumps win. Like a game also “we the people” are needed to constitute the rest of the pack, so that the gamblers may be enabled to deal out stacked hands. Suppose we refuse to be longer shuffled for their amusement! The hollow pretense would collapse at once; the court cards couldn’t carry on the game alone. But if we stay away the less number will settle the election! “O, ye of little faith!” Abstention from the polls would also have other effects.

1. It would show an increasing minority refusing to be hoodwinked. We can imagine a jackass following a wisp of hay fastened before him out of his reach, but not an illusory wisp visible only to the eye of faith.
2. It will prick the bubble of suffrage by showing that there are questions to be met beyond the province of the ballot. As long as we follow the political wisp it will continue to dangle before us. When we refuse to do so in numbers sufficient to make an appreciable minority, attention will be arrested.
3. A minority refusing to vote would force economic questions into consideration, and thus hasten the social revolution. Only when political methods are seen to be unavailing will they be abandoned. Balloting is a method under a political system which presupposes the continuance of existing economic conditions. Suffrage is already fast reaching its term. It is among the breakers of our present partial competition. Let the gamblers fight it out. Let us not delay the inevitable by trying to postpone its advent.

One word more. We are told “if you would only stick together you can win and carry any man in.” This is the Salvation Army argument: “Think as I do and you will be saved.” First, it is impossible; second, we don’t want to try to bring all men to peek through one magnifying glass; third, we have no candidates whom we desire to take the oath to the constitution of our Economic republic before they can begin to think of us. To vote is to continue existing methods and thus give our influence to postpone the day of emancipation. Isn’t it about time to “swear off?”

Last week, I talked about Sirius XM’s decision to fire shock jock Anthony Cumia.

Along with the other Sirius XM listeners who hadn’t cancelled their subscription over this, I anxiously waited for Monday’s O&A show, which featured a dejected-sounding Opie and Jim not only lamenting their co-host’s firing, but the predictable fan and media reaction.

According to Opie, the main issue with the tweets was timing; they came before a holiday weekend and an upcoming planned hiatus. “If we could’ve got back on the radio, me, Anthony and Jimmy, we would’ve figured our way out of this one. Easily. Because the jokes would’ve been there.”

They also criticized the Washington Post’s op-eds, along with other publications’ similar knee-jerk reactions.

Whenever a political correctness crisis like this happens, passages like this are standard:

“Some supporters cite First Amendment rights, as they always do in such cases, until someone helpfully points out that freedom of speech does not mean freedom of speech without consequences. You have the right to say or Tweet whatever you want and others have the right to object and be offended. Depending on what the contract says, your employer has the right to forgive or fire. I know few people who could insult colleagues or toss a string of vile invective at potential clients and come into work the next day as though nothing had happened.”

Embarrassing, isn’t it? Because judging by the way Opie, Anthony and Jim talk to their fans and people who call into the show, Sirius XM should have pulled the plug a long time ago if that’s how their contracts work; the same contracts that lock the remaining jocks into a show they barely want to be part of anymore. It’s astounding how so much of the media response reflects an outright misunderstanding of not only Anthony’s motives in the infamous tweets, but O&A’s entire brand.

Was the “black friend” tweet all part of Anthony’s “shock” routine? Probably. This writer’s reasoning is so skewed that the comments on the article make more sense.

Commenter Mcaff has a more articulate (read: less expletive-ridden; “debating” free speech often seems akin to banging your head against a wall) response than I would’ve come up with on the fly:

“I have listened to Opie and Anthony and I strongly disagree with almost everything Anthony Cumia says. He’s usually wrong on a range of topics from gun control to race relations. His co-hosts are a bit to the left on most issues and the debate makes for lively, entertaining radio. I strongly disagree with Cumia, but I WANT TO HEAR EVERY WORD OF IT. In my opinion, Reverend Al Sharpton has made far more inflammatory remarks on his television program but I WANT TO HEAR HIM TOO. They both have the right to voice their opinion and I have the right to hear them.”

This type of response also underscores the points that Jeremy Weiland makes in his essay that I linked to last week.

If PC shills at the Washington Post really wanted to end racism, they wouldn’t waste netspace on articles like this, and would talk incessantly about prison demographics, poverty statistics and the drug war instead.

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Armies that Overlap” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Benjamin R. Tucker, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford.

Let us narrow it a little: Socialism is the belief that the next important step in progress is a change in man’s environment of an economic character that shall include the abolition of every privilege whereby the holder of wealth acquires an anti-social power to compel tribute.

I doubt not that this definition can be much improved, and suggestions looking to that end will be interesting; but it is at least an attempt to cover all the forms of protest against the existing usurious economic system. I have always considered myself a member of the great body of Socialists, and I object to being read out of it or defined out of it by General Walker, Mr. Pentecost, or anybody else, simply because I am not a follower of Karl Marx.

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What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man, ‘this land is yours,’ in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, ‘whatever your labor, or capital produces on this land shall be yours.’ Give a man security that he may reap, and he will sow; assure him of the possession of the house he wants to build, and he will build it. These are the natural rewards of labor. It is for the sake of the reaping that men sow; it is for the sake of possessing houses that men build. The ownership of land has nothing to do with it. –Henry George

Henry George (9/2/1839-10/29/1897) was born in Philadelphia, the second of ten children of a poor, pious, evangelical Protestant family. His formal education was cut short at 14 and went to sea as a foremast boy on the Hindoo, bound for Melbourne and Calcutta eventually making a complete voyage around the world. Three years later, he was halfway through a second voyage as an able seaman when he left the ship in San Francisco and worked at various occupations (including gold mining) and eventually went to work as a journeyman printer and occasional typesetter before turning to newspaper writing in San Francisco including four years (1871-1875) as editor of his own San Francisco Daily Evening Post. George’s experience in a number of trades, his poverty while supporting a family, and the examples of financial difficulties that came to his attention as wage earner and newspaperman gave impetus to his reformist tendencies. He was curious and attentive to everything around him.

“Little Harry George” (he was small of stature and slight of build, according to his son) was fortunate in San Francisco; he lived and worked in a rapidly developing society. George had the unique opportunity of studying the change of an encampment into a thriving metropolis. He saw a city of tents and mud change into a town of paved streets and decent housing, with tramways and buses. As he saw the beginning of wealth, he noted the appearance of pauperism. He saw a degradation forming with the advent of leisure and affluence, and felt compelled to discover why they arose concurrently. As he would continue to do as he struggled to support his family in San Francisco following the Panic of 1873.

Dabbling in local politics, he shifted loyalties from Lincoln Republicanism to the Democrats, and became a trenchant critic of railroad and mining interests, corrupt politicians, land speculators, and labor contractors. He failed as a Democratic candidate for the state legislature, but landed a patronage job of state inspector of gas meters (which allowed him time to write longer expositions).

As Alanna Hartzok has pointed out, Henry George’s famous epiphany occurred:

One day, while riding horseback in the Oakland hills, merchant seaman and journalist Henry George had a startling epiphany. He realized that speculation and private profiteering in the gifts of nature were the root causes of the unjust distribution of wealth.

His son, Henry George, Jr., said,

…Henry George perceived that land speculation locked up vast territories against labor. Everywhere he perceived an effort to “corner” land; an effort to get it and to hold it, not for use, but for a “rise.” Everywhere he perceived that this caused all who wished to use it to compete with each other for it; and he foresaw that as population grew the keener that competition would become. Those who had a monopoly of the land would practically own those who had to use the land.

…in 1871 [he] sat down and in the course of four months wrote a little book under title of “Our Land and Land Policy [PDF].” In that small volume of forty-eight pages he advocated the destruction of land monopoly by shifting all taxes from labor and the products of labor and concentrating them in one tax on the value of land, regardless of improvements. A thousand copies of this small book were printed, but the author quickly perceived that really to command attention, the work would have to be done more thoroughly.

Over the next several years, George devoted his time to the completion of his major work. In 1879, finding no publisher, he self-published Progress and Poverty (500 copies), and issued the following year in New York and London by Appleton’s after George transported the printing plates to them. The plates were then taken by Appleton’s and the book soon became a sensation, translated into many languages and assured George’s fame, selling over 3 million copies.

At the heart of his critique of Gilded Age capitalism was the conviction that rent and private land-ownership violated the hallowed principles of Jeffersonian democracy and poverty was an affront to the moral values of Judeo-Christian culture. Progress and Poverty was “an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth.” In the fact that rent tends to increase not only with increase of population but with all improvements that increase productive power, George finds the cause of the tendency to the increase of land values and decrease of the proportion of the produce of wealth which goes to labor and capital, while in the speculative holding of land thus engendered he traces the tendency to force wages to a minimum and the primary cause of paroxysms of industrial depression.

The remedy for these he declares to be the appropriation of rent by the community, thus making land community owned and giving the user secure possession and leaving to the producer the full advantage of his exertion and investment. This notion of the single tax [PDF] (the term which the successful attorney and free-trade advocate, Thomas G. Shearman (who, along with C.B. Fillebrown, led the more hard-core, pro-free market position within the single tax movement–although later to falter), gave to George’s solution.

George moved his family to New York in 1880 due to the demands as writer and lecturer. In 1881 he published The Irish Land Question, and in 1883-4 he made another trip at the invitation of the Scottish land restoration league, producing on both tours a strong international interest in his ideas. In 1886 he was the candidate for the United Labor Party for mayor of New York, and received 68,110 votes against 90,552 for Abram S. Hewitt (Democrat), and 60,435 for Theodore Roosevelt (Republican). In 1887, George founded the “Standard,” a weekly newspaper (1887-92). He also published Social Problems (1884), and Protection or Free-Trade(1886), a radical examination of the tariff question, An Open Letter to the Pope (1891), a reply to Leo XIII’s encyclical The Condition of Labor; A Perplexed Philosopher (1892), a critique of Herbert Spencer and, finally, his The Science of Political Economy (1897), begun in 1891 but uncompleted at his death, when he was running for Mayor of New York one final time.

George’s legacy has been long and vibrant over the last century, leading to utopian communities, legislators, economists and political activists of all sorts. This is a mixed legacy which one can argue both positive and negative influences. But it cannot be ignored.