Al Jazeera recently covered Chattanooga, Tennessee’s high-speed Internet service (“As Internet behemoths rise, Chattanooga highlights a different path,” June 6). The “Gig,” as it’s affectionately known, operates at one gigabyte per second — about fifty times the U.S. average — charging each customer about $70 a month. It uses a preexisting fiber-optic infrastructure originally built for the electrical power utility.

A couple of little-known facts regarding local Internet infrastructure:  Telecommunications companies were given billions in subsidies and phone service rate hikes back in the ’90s based on their promise to build local fiber-optic infrastructure for high-speed Internet access — then they simply pocketed the money and never built that infrastructure. The original promise was something like the kind of ultra-high-speed, low-price Internet service available in most of Western Europe.

You can get a lot of the facts at the website Teletruth.org. Today, telecommunications infrastructure construction by these companies is down by about 60%, while revenues are way up. Instead of near-instant page loads for $40 a month, it’s typical to get gouged for more than $100 and suffer slow speeds and wireless connections that constantly fade out. Believe me, I know — I get my wireless service from AT&T U-verse, and they suck more than a galactic-size black hole. This is a classic example of the oligopoly style Paul Goodman described of the companies in an industry carefully spooning out improvements over many years, while colluding to mark up prices. The telecoms, far from building out their infrastructure to increase capacity, are strip-mining their existing infrastructure and using it as a cash cow while using oligopoly pricing to guarantee enormous profits on shoddy service.

Hundreds of cities around the United States have high-capacity municipal fiber-optic networks just like Chattanooga’s, originally built to support local government communication functions, but they’re forbidden by law in most states (passed in response to telecom lobbying) from using those to offer Internet service to the general public. Not only that, the telecommunications industry raises hell in the state legislatures even when local school districts propose using their own fiber-optic infrastructure to provide Internet service to the public schools instead of paying Verizon, Cox or AT&T for their sorry producst. These telecom companies — which received billions on subsidies for a service they failed to deliver — have the nerve to whine that it’s unfair for them to have to compete with a service subsidized by the taxpayers.

So here’s my proposal: In any community like Chattanooga, with an existing fiber-optic infrastructure capable of providing better quality Internet service to a significant part of town, this infrastructure should immediately be put to use for this purpose, with rates set at actual cost of provision. But instead of being administered by the city government, it should be spun off as a consumer cooperative owned and governed by the users.

In Cory Doctorow’s novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, dumpster-diving hardware hackers in Toronto attempt to construct a free wireless meshwork using open-source routers built from discarded electronics, persuading neighborhood businesses to host the routers at the cost of electricity. In the real world, schools, public libraries and municipal buildings could host such routers and provide free wireless access to those in the areas covered.

In fact, why not take it a step further? Forty years ago, in “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle,” Murray Rothbard argued that government property should be treated as unowned, that it should be claimed (via homesteading) as the property of those actually occupying and using it, and that government services should accordingly be reorganized as consumer or worker cooperatives. Further, he argued that the property of “private” corporations that get most of their profits from state intervention should get the same treatment.

The way I see it, the telecom companies that pocketed those subsidies and rate increases back in the ’90s owe customers about $200-odd billion, plus all the profits they’ve subsequently collected via price-gouging. So when local communities with municipal fiber-optic infrastructure organize those Internet service cooperatives like I describe above, they might as well go ahead and void out the telecom companies’ property claims to the “private” infrastructure as well and incorporate that infrastructure into the consumer cooperatives.

Those who follow the “net neutrality” debate are rightly outraged that Internet service providers are threatening to gouge customers based entirely on their ability to pay, simply because they can. But the proper expression of this outrage is not hacking at the branches through regulatory legislation. It’s striking at the root: The ability of the telecom companies, thanks to government subsidies and privilege, to get away with such behavior.

It’s time to expropriate the expropriators.

Notícias recentes demonstram, mais uma vez — se é que era necessário — que o “consentimento dos governados” como legitimação da democracia representativa é impossível e absurdo.

Na Carolina do Norte, o governador Pat McRory assinou a Lei de Modernização da Energia, que inclui um artigo que proíbe (na versão final da lei, devido à repercussão negativa, a infração deixou de ser crime e passou a ser contravenção) a divulgação das substâncias químicas usadas na fraturação hidráulica (“fracking“).

Enquanto isso, a administração Obama recorreu à Suprema Corte para contestar uma interpretação da Lei de Proteção aos Delatores, que protege os funcionários estatais que liberam informações ao público.

A legislação da Carolina do Norte não é novidade. Ela segue o exemplo das legislações de outros estados americanos que tornam crime a filmagem de tratamentos cruéis aos animais e outras práticas antiéticas do agronegócio. Também se deve lembrar que a BP, depois da explosão da plataforma de petróleo Deepwater Horizon, se recusou a divulgar a composição dos agentes de dispersão que estava jogando no Golfo do México afirmando que eram “informações proprietárias”.

Primeiramente, o próprio conceito de “informação proprietária” é absurdo. E é triplamente absurdo quando uma empresa pode utilizá-lo como escudo legal para jogar toneladas de substâncias tóxicas no oceano e nos lençóis subterrâneos, podendo contaminar nossos aquíferos, sem dizer o que estão fazendo. Não só a liberação dessas informações não deveria ser crime, mas em uma sociedade livre, os habitantes locais poderiam — e deveriam — exigir divulgação imediata das substâncias jogadas no ar e na água pelas empresas de energia em um processo civil, podendo fechá-las imediatamente se elas se recusarem a obedecer.

A posição do Departamento de Justiça da administração Obama também é familiar. Obama tem um histórico pior que o de George W. Bush de perseguição de delatores e de sabotagem velada aos pedidos da Lei da Liberdade de Informação. O governo de Obama também condenou Chelsea Manning a 30 anos na Penitenciária de Leavenworth — por ter revelado ao povo americano os crimes de guerra e a desonestidade diplomática que caracteriza o “nosso” governo — e persegue Edward Snowden até os confins do mundo por ter feito revelações similares sobre a vigilância da NSA.

Um conceito importante na teoria organizacional, ao considerar o relacionamento de poder entre um diretor e um agente é o risco moral. Quanto menos informações os diretores têm a respeito das ações dos agentes, há mais espaço para o risco moral — isto é, para que o agente tire vantagem das informações limitadas de que o diretor dispõe e promova seus próprios interesses pretendendo servir ao diretor. Quanto menos o diretor sabe sobre o que o agente faz, menos importante é sua posição de gerência.

O problema do risco moral ocorre em todas as relações entre agentes e diretores e se torna mais severo com a diminuição do conhecimento dos diretores a respeito das atividades diárias dos agentes. O resultado em todas as instituições representativas é o que Robert Michels chamou de Lei de Ferro da Oligarquia: a tendência de o poder ser transferido dos delegadores aos delegados, dos diretores aos agentes, dos eleitores aos representantes. Não importa quem sejam os agentes em posições de liderança que uma instituição afirme representar — eleitores, acionistas ou qualquer outro grupo —, seu acesso a informações internas e seu controle sobre a execução dos planos efetivamente anula qualquer controle real que aqueles de fora afirmem ter.

Evidentemente, quando o “agente” tem autoridade para decidir o que o “diretor” tem ou não tem direito de saber sobre suas atividades e de punir seus subordinados por vazar informações, a ideia de que o agente deriva sua autoridade do diretor é uma farsa absoluta.

Essas notícias recentes demonstram amplamente esse fato. Como afirmou Marja Erwin em resposta a alegações de que Chelsea Manning fosse uma “traidora” por divulgar segredos governamentais ao público (para o qual o governo deve explicações, em tese), “consentimento requer igualdade. Enquanto o estado mantiver segredos e tiver poder sobre os governados, não há possibilidade de consentimento ou legitimidade”.

A não ser em uma democracia direta em que todas as decisões sejam tomadas diretamente pelos governados, é impossível conceber um governo ou instituição representativa que não controle as informações disponíveis aos “representados”. A maior expressão da democracia direta é uma sociedade sem estado e instituições hierárquicas, onde todas as decisões sejam tomadas pelos indivíduos ou por associações voluntárias dos afetados por elas.

Traduzido para o português por Erick Vasconcelos

George Orwell’s declaration of: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations,” not only might not be an Orwell quote, is a gross oversimplification of the relationship between journalism, PR and the public.

Plus, Orwell probably hadn’t heard of Wikipedia. This week, ten of the biggest public relations firms signed a pledge that condemned the practice of “sockpuppeting,” or padding clients’ Wikipedia pages to their benefit. This opened up a whole new avenue to question the legitimacy of the public relations industry, one that’s already scoffed at heartily. It’s easy to picture a public relations professional as a conscienceless brownnoser, but I find it hard to believe that they are any more susceptible to corruption of information than journalists who often answer to media corporations or state-owned outlets. If you promote your friend’s band or their blog post on Facebook, you’re doing public relations. It’s not inherently evil and it’s not all that glamorous.

Anyway, here’s part of the pledge:

“On behalf of our firms, we recognize Wikipedia’s unique and important role as a public knowledge resource. We also acknowledge that the prior actions of some in our industry have led to a challenging relationship with the community of Wikipedia editors.”

Wikipedia already has a shaky reputation as a source of information because of the fact that anyone can go in and say whatever they want on a page. Your high school teachers and college professors probably weren’t too happy with you if you ever cited Wikipedia in a research paper. While the accuracy of Wikipedia is improving, anything positive or negative on a business’s Wiki page should probably be taken with a grain of salt. That said, a lot of people do use Wikipedia as a key source of information, and if your business has its own page, most people would take that as a signal that you’ve gained recognition.

In October 2013, the Wikipedia admins went on a wild goose chase after “suspicious” accounts, targeting an organization called Wiki-PR:

“Former Wiki-PR clients told the Daily Dot that they paid between $500 and $1,000 to the company for creation of a Wikipedia page, and $50 a month for monitoring any changes made to the page and resurrection of any material deleted during subsequent edits.

In other words, we’ll create the page you want and do everything we can to make sure it stays that way. It should go without saying that this practice seriously undermines the credibility of both the organization and the very forum it’s promoting. In an email, Wiki-PR’s CEO defended his company’s practices, writing that they simply “counsel our clients on how to adhere to Wikipedia’s rules” and that their services differ from those of most PR firms which “don’t know the rules as well because they do PR work, broadly, and try to promote.”

So what, though? If you’re operating under the assumption that everyone in public relations is a lying hack and that Wikipedia is a beacon of infallible knowledge, you’re wrong on both counts. Wikipedia is really trying to throw their ethical weight at these people – not unlike journalists who think they hold a sort of ethical superiority over PR folks – who are going to end up compromising their clients in the long run if their Wiki posts are inaccurate, anyway.

Here are the experts’ opinions on this. Most of them talk about open, honest and mutually beneficial communication, but this statement from Erik Deutsch, principal at ExcelPR  group and president of PRSA-LA caught my interest:

“It’s hard to argue with the principles adopted by the 10 large PR firms. That said, issuing such a statement could actually support the notion that PR pros somehow deserve to be singled out for their unique ability to wreak havoc on platforms like Wikipedia. Taken a step further, it could reinforce the view among critics that it’s inherently ‘dubious’ to get paid to write or edit a client’s Wikipedia page.”

This pretty much sums up the unfair assumption that people who want positive outcomes for their businesses should be shamed for promoting them online. Believing everything you read on the Internet is a dangerous game to begin with, and public relations firms’ bickering with Wikipedia over conflicts of interest in businesses detracts from what they should be worried about – enemies of net neutrality making life difficult for new businesses to flourish online to begin with.

Orwell would probably be most upset about the ethical policing on both ends.

Hi, all! My name is Juliana; I’m taking over Missing Comma for Trevor at the moment — big thank-you to Trevor for reading all of my agitated Facebook statuses about the media — but will most likely be sticking around when he’s back.

I’m a journalism student at Marist College, a staunch advocate of press freedom, member of the Society of Professional Journalists on the campus and national level, rising Campus Coordinator at Students for Liberty, disgruntled student activist, disciple of Glenn Greenwald, thrift store enthusiast and all-around news junkie. I’m from a suburb of NYC, and want to be an international news correspondent when I grow up. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals changed my life when I was 16, as did Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty my first year of college. My approach to anarchism and libertarianism tends to come from a place of current political events and media analysis, so forgive me if I confuse my philosophers, but not if I fudge dates and facts. I probably don’t need to tell you that the media is one of the most important tools used by the state to screw things up, and I see being a member of the media as having an incredibly powerful platform for advocacy and access to hard-hitting news.

So toss aside your AP Stylebook (but don’t throw it too far), make a fist to shake at the TV, follow me @JulianaTweets0 and stay tuned.

C4SS Feed 44 presents “The Freed Market” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by William Gillis, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford.

The Freed Market

One of the tactics I’ve taken up in the anarchist economics wars is to refer to our modern corporatist/mercantilist/lovecraftian mix of economic systems as “Kapitalism” and when referencing Ancaps go out of my way to use “Anarcho”-Capitalist and Anarcho-“Capitalist” as distinct labels.

These have proved decent if not pretty effective ways of kicking a wedge into their thinking and forcing a degree of nuance into the discussion. But they’re distinctions primarily aimed at the willfully ignorant bullying Reds who — while certainly annoying — are nowhere near as atrocious as the out-and-out Vulgar Libertarians. The corporate apologists who actually approve of the modern cesspit the Reds call “Capitalism.” You know the ones. The contrarian brats who consider Somalia a utopia. The ones that fit the Reds’ stereotypes so hardcore that all intelligence is immediately sucked into an event horizon of “poor people obviously deserve to starve to death, screw ’em” and “yeah, well after the Revolution we’ll put your family in death camps and expropriate all your stuff.”

Well, by blessed typo I’ve stumbled across a very effective counter to them. Instead of referring to the behavior and dynamics of the free market, I refer instead to “a freed market.”

You’d be surprised how much of a difference a change of tense can make.
“Free market” makes it sound like such a thing already exists and thus passively perpetuates the Red myth that Corporatism and wanton accumulation of Kapital are the natural consequences of free association and competition between individuals. (It is not.)

But “freed” has an element of distance and, whatsmore, a degree of action to it. It becomes so much easier to state things like: Freed markets don’t have corporations. A freed market naturally equalizes wealth. Social hierarchy is by definition inefficient and this is particularly evident in freed markets.

It moves us out of the present tense and into the theoretical realm of “after the revolution,” where like the Reds we can still use present day examples to back theory, but we’re not tied into implicitly defending every horror in today’s market. It’s easier to pick out separate mechanics in the market and make distinctions. Also, have I mentioned that it makes an implicit call to action?

I don’t know if anyone else has stumbled over this before, but it’s been useful and I felt I should share.

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A few days ago I read Christopher Dickey’s “What the D-Day Veteran Told Obama at the 70th Anniversary Commemoration” (The Daily Beast, June 6). In attendance along with Obama were French president Hollande and Russian president Putin. Most of the article discusses the leaders’ speeches of the day and the awkwardness of having both Obama and Putin in each others’ presence despite their little “showdown” over Ukraine.

Before the speeches, the article talks about Obama and Hollande walking together and shaking hands with the crowd. But one man in particular held Obama’s hand a little longer than others and whispered something in his ear. By the end of the article, it is revealed that this man is an American veteran of the D-Day invasion. Dickey asked him what he whispered and the man responded, “I thanked him for keeping us out of war.”

Except for: the continuous drone strikes killing innocents throughout the Middle East and Africa since Obama took office. The 30,000 troop build-up in Afghanistan (around the time of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance). The NATO actions taken in Libya to supposedly help the people get rid of a tyrant (while the U.S. government supported and continues to support tyrants of their own). The presence of U.S. military bases and troops around the globe to fight a force that only exists because of that presence to safeguard the manipulation and exploitation of economic resources for the corporate plutocracy. The near-invasion of Syria to, again, supposedly help the people get rid of a tyrant. With naval buildups in the Persian Gulf near Iran, a buildup of forces trying to surround China, and now a $1 billion pledge to strengthen NATO forces around Ukraine.

If anyone has truly been paying attention to the fervent militarism of the Obama administration, this comment made by the veteran seems quite confusing. Yet this type of ignorance is all around us, especially in regard to liberal Democrats (not that Republicans are excused). To many of them, Obama is a peace-loving president who is doing everything he can to end the wars and fix the economy, not the war-hungry deceiver whose policies favor greed-ridden, monopolistic elitists. There are some liberals, such as Michael Moore, who have criticized Obama, yet still voted for him in 2012 because he was the “better of two evils” – as if there is such a thing when it comes to the two-party tyranny.

Just because someone in power says they are doing this because it will help, does not mean it actually will. Those who believe everything a person says just because they voted for them fall victim to those narcissistic foes who will say anything in order to garner a large amount of support just to do the opposite of what they fooled their voters into believing they would.

As Hitler, the totalitarian mass murderer, once said, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.”

Translations for this article:

• Italian, L’Ignoranza Continua.

Com o início da Copa do Mundo, volta a discussão: como protestar contra os abusos cometidos pelo estado na realização desse megaevento?

Podemos nos remeter à tradição de Henry David Thoreau. Thoureau criticava a postura de que devemos esperar que a maioria mudasse uma lei ou uma atuação governamental injusta, porque um homem deve viver pela sua consciência, não pela vontade da maioria.

Por isso, “quando o próprio atrito [da injustiça] chega a construir a máquina e vemos a organização da tirania e do roubo, afirmo que devemos repudiar essa máquina”. Referia-se à escravidão e à guerra contra o México nos Estados Unidos de sua época, que o levaram a parar de pagar impostos.

Já Lysander Spooner ensina como resistir ao estado pacificamente, por meio do mercado. Como jurista, defendeu a inconstitucionalidade do monopólio dos correios pelo governo federal dos Estados Unidos. Mas, como Thoureau, não se resumiu apenas às palavras e a esperar que a maioria fizesse algo.

Spooner, em 1844, abriu uma empresa de correspondência, a American Letter Mail Company, muito mais eficiente e com menores preços do que o monopólio governamental, o U. S. Postal System! Apesar da determinação do governo em fechá-la, o que conseguiu fazer em 1851 com a aprovação de uma lei mais rigorosa, que afastava as “brechas” que permitiram que Spooner obtivesse vitórias judiciais temporárias, a ação rendeu frutos: o governo foi forçado a baixar os preços de seu sistema de correio pela pressão da concorrência de um resistente civil!

Como fazer algo parecido em protesto durante a Copa?

Transgredindo as zonas de exclusão comercial, criadas por lei em proveito da FIFA e das suas empresas parceiras, que dão a elas a exclusividade territorial de comércio e publicidade. Esses locais devem ser ocupados pelo comércio ambulante, por bazares e outros estabelecimentos não-filiados à FIFA, ignorando o estado brasileiro e seus monopólios legais.

Um recurso útil seria o “ativismo de projeção” – isto é, usar projetores com mensagens de denúncia ao abuso da copa e chamando atenção para todas as vítimas que tiveram seus direitos violados. Além disso, os inevitáveis abusos policiais e a opressão contra as manifestações livres durante a Copa podem e devem ser registrados pelas câmeras de celulares.

Como afirmou Augusto de Franco sobre a ocupação e construção de espaços públicos pelo comércio livre:

“[Tudo] isso é reconfiguração de um ambiente hierárquico regido por modos autocráticos no sentido de mais rede (mais distribuição, mais conectividade, mais interatividade) e mais liberdade. Não há outro caminho para fazer isso a não ser a desobediência civil e política.”

Se essa “desobediência civil empreendedora” acontecesse em larga escala, um importante passo rumo à liberdade das estruturas coercitivas do estado teria sido tomado. Porque a ocupação desses espaços públicos com comércio livre e trocas voluntárias, afrontando o monopólio territorial concedido à FIFA pelo estado, seria a inversão da mentalidade que, em primeiro lugar, permitiu a retirada de nossas liberdades e enfraqueceu o potencial libertador das redes de cooperação voluntária.

Para citar novamente Augusto de Franco, revolução social “não é a conquista de algum palácio de inverno e nem a vitória eleitoral contra ‘as elites’! Não é a troca dos ocupantes do Estado, mas algo que acontece na intimidade da sociedade, alterando os fluxos interativos da convivência social e mudando comportamentos”.

A liberdade individual e a libertação da pobreza e da exploração política só serão alcançadas por meio da ampliação e do esclarecimento das redes de cooperação social voluntária e de comércio livre. Parafraseando Thoureau, esse é o contra-atrito que impedirá o funcionamento da máquina e deterá sua injustiça.

Hi friends,

From now until mid-July, I’ll be taking a break from writing Missing Comma, as well as most of my other duties at the Center for a Stateless Society. I’ll be tweeting at @illicitpopsicle and writing on some other projects in the meantime.

Missing Comma won’t be on hiatus, though! I’m pleased to announce that Juliana Perciavalle will be taking over for me while I’m away, and we’ll be sharing the blog after that. She’s an excellent writer who has written for Define Liberty Magazine, and is currently a campus coordinator for Students For Liberty.

[Hear an in-depth discussion on this article and its topics in this episode of The Enragés]

Three stories illustrate my own political ignorance. First, I’m walking down what I think are secret hallways in the Capitol building, at least where normal tours aren’t allowed to go. I’m with a Republican aide, who’s leading me to a bitcoin ATM demonstration for members of Congress and telling me where I am and where we’re going. I understand very little of it, but am too embarrassed to ask for further clarification.

Later, I’m at dinner with a lobbyist for a major corporation and a woman who is damn near running a super PAC for a likely presidential nominee, despite not having graduated from Georgetown yet. I tell them, in a certain tone, that “corporations own the parties anyway.” And he tells me to wait a minute. His corporation, along with its competitors, all rallied very hard for three major policies and failed to get all three, thanks to grassroots opposition. I’m shocked. Oddly, on these issues I would have wanted the corporations to win. But I’m heartened at the thought that grassroots opposition to corporate interests could prevail.

Last, I edit op-eds written by young libertarians at my organization. Pretty regularly one will write a piece which betrays a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the ideas he or she is trying to take down. The latest was on egalitarianism, which seems to be on par with devil worship according to the piece.

I’ve been a libertarian for years. And for years I’ve approached learning the ins and outs of the political process kind of like an abolitionist might view learning the inner workings of a slave plantation. Which is to say that I find it repugnant, and to be avoided if at all possible. And it’s been kind of shockingly possible for me to establish myself as a kind of professional libertarian without ever learning how the monolith I’m trying desperately to destroy actually works. I’ve been in it, around it, I’ve talked to its operators, I’ve covered it for the national news media and I’ve been on television devoted to covering it. And yet, at the end of the day, I still don’t get it.

I write this because I don’t think I’m alone. And I think this collective knowledge gap hurts the cause of shrinking or eliminating government in three main ways. First, it may be that ignorance of the political process is keeping principled libertarians from involving themselves, if only to offer analysis and critique, in the day-to-day sausage-making. Second, not understanding how government works has led many libertarians to buy into complex conspiracy theories which distract them from fighting proven abuses of power while discrediting them in the eyes of unbelievers. Third, a failure to fully understand our opponents has led us to downplay or ignore problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of private bigotry, problems not obviously fixable through statelessness alone.

Before we go on, it’s helpful to differentiate two kinds of libertarians. Although, obviously there will be overlap and the categorization is imperfect and inexact. On the one hand, you have the conservatarians. These people are basically disaffected Republicans. Because libertarianism takes no official stance on so-called social issues like racism, sexism, and homophobia, Republicans who feel that Republicans aren’t low-taxes and limited government enough feel at home in libertarianism.

On the other hand, you have unqualified libertarians. They are neither right nor left, finding common ground with both equally. They don’t value low taxes any more than they value ending the police state or secret government spying. They are offended that sodomy laws are still on the books and by the existence of mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds. They favor both personal and economic freedom while defending everyone’s right to self-ownership.

It has been the case for me that the further down the rabbit hole of liberty I went, the more disgusting I found politics. Discovering the US involvement in deposing democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh in Iran, federal grants which incentivize police militarization and no-knock armed SWAT team raids in black and Latino neighborhoods, asset forfeiture, licensure laws, crony capitalism, all left me feeling that this is a system for which there is no reform. I couldn’t put it better than burn the fucking system to the ground.

On the flip side, the more I learned about Spontaneous Order and how private property and free exchange create innovation which creates prosperity, the more in love with the market I fell. What a beautiful system. I pursue my self interest, you pursue yours, and we’re both wealthier for it!

The issue is this. Many conservatarians vote Republican, campaign for Republicans, and write about politics. They’re involved. But they’re not fully bought into the ideology. Their defenses of free markets are weak. They’ll ignore a politician’s call to force women to report their miscarriages to police if it means lower taxes. Their conception of crony capitalism is underdeveloped. For them, bodily autonomy and civil liberties are lesser concerns than take home pay.

On the other hand, most true believers’ disdain for politics is intense. Their understandable wish to burn the fucking system to the ground leaves them less-than-motivated to understand that system soup-to-nuts. True believer libertarians can tell you the ins and outs of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, creative destruction, and the pernicious effects of currency inflation. They know whether their defense of property rights is utilitarian or natural-rights based. But their grasp of the processes behind bill writing, political primaries, and campaigning, for example, will be shaky at best.

So when it comes to actually making changes, let’s use the potential of a Rand Paul candidacy as an example, you have, for the most part, two extremes. You have rah-rah Republitarians cheering about how Paul’s going to end the NSA, who totally ignore his less-than-freedom policies. Then you have the downer libertarians, either ignoring Paul or crapping on him for not being an anarchist. And when the twain meet, it’s for rah-rahs to get super angry at libertarians for not getting on board the Paul train or messing up their game, while libertarians look down on rah-rahs for being unprincipled.

So what’s the libertarian strategy on mostly, but not totally, pro-liberty political candidates? Fight each other. How about policies like school choice, which insert some competition into the public education system, but leave it mostly intact? Fight each other. Gay marriage? Fight each other. Human trafficking? Ignore it for the most part, unless they want to fight each other. Are you seeing a pattern? Not that the Tea Partiers aren’t fighting mainstream Republicans and the communists aren’t fighting mainstream Democrats. But libertarians take infighting to the level that really nothing else gets accomplished. This is for better or worse, as we generally understand that the less that gets accomplished in the political world, the better.

Another problem with an incomplete understanding of politics is that, ironically, it’s given more weight and import than it probably deserves. We see this in libertarians’ belief in so-called conspiracy theories. One of the first Young Americans for Liberty meetings I attended ended up being a viewing of a documentary on the origins of the Federal Reserve which included an attempt to crash a Bilderberg meeting.

Now conspiracy theory is a broad category, spanning everything from lizard people to secret NSA spying.

“It doesn’t just refer to those Gothic tales where a single secret group runs the world; people use it to discuss smaller plots too, including a lot of stuff that falls under that public-choice heading,” Jesse Walker, who literally wrote the book on American conspiracies, explained.

“But there certainly have been covert decisions that did considerable harm,” Walker said. “A relatively recent example — which did not come out of the ‘conspiracy theory’ community but was exposed by regular reporters and human rights groups and confirmed by federal officials — would be the CIA’s network of secret prisons, or ‘black sites,’ where torture was conducted.”

Libertarians subscribe to public choice theory, which posits that politicians and bureaucrats aren’t saints, immune to the lure of acting in their own self-interest, but are normal people who make decisions at least in part based on what’s best for them.

But they take the reality of public choice and instances of secret (for a time) abuse and use it as evidence for ideas like that the Rothschild family or Bilderberg group is successfully plotting to take over the world, or that international banking is run by a small, secret group. Now, various small shadow groups may or may not be plotting. Who knows how profitable world domination really is? But while people in places of power certainly act in their own self-interest, the harm is limited by people’s general inability to either coordinate or actually keep things secret, both of which are required to actually pull off nefarious plots with any impact.

“It isn’t that conspiracies don’t exist so much as (a) the real ones tend to be smaller than the ones in those great big the-Rothschilds-run-everything stories, and (b) like other political and entrepreneurial ventures, conspiracies frequently fail,” Walker said. “Covert politics, like overt politics, is filled with fuckups.”

A close following of politics reveals how difficult and rare coordination and secrecy really are. Self-interest is also self-limiting, as it’s generally what gets in the way of both.

The last thing Republicans and Democrats get right by understanding the political process is that they offer potential solutions to the problems people think they have. Now, the solutions both parties offer to these problem are usually either impossible to implement, or implementable but ineffective. And we’ll leave aside whether people are right to care about the problems they care about. Libertarianism limits itself as a philosophy to just limiting or eliminating government. This solves some problems, of course. It makes everyone richer, though at different rates and to different degrees. It makes everyone freer from state control.

But what does it do about inequality? What does it do particularly about current and ongoing inequality created through theft, whether we’re talking about corporatism, redlining, or asset forfeiture? What does it do about inequality resulting from bigotry and discrimination in culture? Yes, of course, unprotected actors in a free market of perfect competition will suffer more for their bigotry and discrimination. But enough to end it? Racial discrimination isn’t rational. It’s always been punished to an extent. And yet it continues.

In the end, getting anything done, including shrinking the state, requires getting people to do things. Getting people to act requires getting them on board with your strategy. Getting people on board with your strategy requires that they believe that your strategy is aimed, and could be effective, at fixing the things they think are broken. Libertarians consistently miss the boat on appealing to people whose first and primary concern isn’t shrinking the state.

The state is, at its core, a monopoly on violence. Predictably, it features everything wrong with both. Everything it does, it does slowly and inefficiently, protected from competition which would otherwise spur innovation. Everything it gives has been taken from someone else, at threat of incarceration. Sure, it’s evil. To most, a necessary evil.

But to fight it effectively, libertarians, myself included, must come to understand it. Not the theory of it, how it actually works, how the sausage is made. I need to talk to the people who are operating in that world, without hostility or condescension. I need to follow bills and proposals and politicians longer and more closely. Otherwise, I and my libertarian friends will stay sidetracked by infighting, distracted by conspiracy theorizing and focused on problems most people don’t care about to the exclusion of those they do.

Last Sunday three people were killed in Las Vegas. Two were police officers on their break at Cici’s Pizza. Rather than being a day to celebrate the death of two agents of the state as a win in the fight for freedom, it is a day to reconsider the foundations of our beliefs and the tactics we employ. The strategy of cop killers will lead us down the path of more statism and more violence, not peace and liberty.

Cops are, generally speaking, the enemy. They are a terrorizing, occupying force who preserve the culture of statism and violence. However, individual police officers are also human beings. They are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. They have family and friends just like you and I. This is why the notion of violence against state agents puts anarchists in such a precarious situation. While we recognize the state is a monolithic, terrorist organization, it’s not obvious that every individual who works for the state is our enemy. I know a number of cops. I know their families and friends. I would never consider killing or even harming them.

Putting aside the awkward question of who is or isn’t our enemy, what is strategically effective? The problem with utilizing violence against the state is that the state won’t back down. Violence begets violence. The more cops are killed, the more cops are hired. The more funding they will get. The more and more powerful arms they will purchase. The more they will be trained to shoot first. Any significant campaign of violence against the police will be met with an even more violent and brutal campaign against civilians.

There will be no shortage of goons, thugs and guns for the state to use to achieve its goals. And if it is met with violence by liberty lovers, you can be sure the state will respond with violence of its own. This strategy is short-sighted and misguided. Coercion is almost always a bad way to solve problems — this is one reason why the state is undesirable in the first place. Trying to fight the state with its own tools and its own methods is doomed to fail. It will only escalate the problem and put civilians in more harm’s way than they are already in.

So what is an anarchist supposed to do? Just as violence won’t get us what we want, the opposite, peace, will. We don’t need to fall to the state’s level of using violence and terrorism. We can transcend what the state is doing. We must. The only way to a free society is through peaceful discussion. Our fight lies on the battlefield of ideas. And our battle plan is to win hearts and minds through engaging our fellow humans as conversation partners. Though building relationships predicated on peace and mutual aid, not violence. Our beliefs are fundamentally about peaceful cooperation and the rejection of the initiation of violence. Let’s act like it.

Are cops the enemy? Yes. But not in the traditional way of looking at things. They are not an enemy we must crush or destroy. It is the institutions we must do that to. Rather, they are an enemy we must convince and persuade. Agents of the state must be brought over to the side of liberty, not killed. They don’t deserve it and we certainly don’t deserve the trauma inherent in using that kind of tactic. Liberty is too important a project to be left to violence.

Today is a day to recognize that the death of these police officers was a detriment, not a triumph, in the fight for freedom: An example of sinking to the level of statism. We must be better than that. We are better than that. So instead of shooting a cop when he’s grabbing some pizza, join him. Pick up a slice and talk with him about why liberty is so important. Pizza and ideas: Those are the keys to freedom.

C4SS Feed 44 presents J. Edward Carp‘s “No, You Cannot Have My Dead” read by Stephen Ledger and edited by Nick Ford.

But the mattress sales and the barbeques are not why I hate Memorial Day. When my father called me the day Walter died, he wept with me. When the President solemnly intones his “gratitude” at Arlington National Cemetery, he does so while sending more Nicks and Marisols to their deaths. He does so while turning them from the kids they were into the heroes he needs them to be so that he can dupe another generation of kids the way we were duped.

But they were not heroes. Telling the truth does the dead no dishonor, and lying does them no honor. Like most soldiers in every war from every country, my dead were just kids who believed the things a sick culture told them about duty, honor, and country. They, like me, maybe even like you, were raised saying the Pledge and standing for the Star-Spangled Banner, playing with GI Joes and being taught to be grateful to the military for their “freedom.”

Feed 44:

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A couple of recent news items demonstrate once again — if such a demonstration is necessary — that “consent of the governed” as a source of legitimacy for representative democracy is absurd and impossible.

In North Carolina, governor Pat McRory signed the Energy Modernization Act, which includes a provision criminalizing (reduced in the final version, due to public outcry, from a felony to a misdemeanor) to publicly disclose the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has appealed to the Supreme Court to contest an interpretation of the Whistleblower Protection Act that protects government employees who leak information to the public.

If the North Carolina legislation sounds familiar, it should. It follows on the heels of legislation in other states that turns the filming of animal abuse and other unethical practices in the agribusiness industry into a criminal offense. You may also remember that BP, after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, refused to disclose the composition of dispersal agents it was dumping in the Gulf by the ton on  “proprietary information” grounds.

Now, first of all the very concept of “proprietary information” is nonsense. And it’s nonsense many times over when a company can use it as legal cover to pump tons of potentially toxic chemicals into the ocean or into bedrock that may (make that “will”) leach into our groundwater, without telling us what they’re doing. Not only should it not be a crime to reveal such information, but in a free society local residents could — and should — demand immediate disclosure of the chemicals that energy companies were pumping into their air and water in a civil discovery process, shutting them down forthwith if they failed to comply.

The Obama Justice Department’s position should also sound familiar. Obama has a worse record of persecuting whistleblowers and passive-aggressive sabotage of Freedom of Information requests than George W. Bush, if such a thing is imaginable. Obama’s government also sentenced Chelsea Manning to thirty years in Leavenworth for revealing to the American people the war crimes and diplomatic skullduggery “our” government engages in, and is hounding Edward Snowden to the ends of the earth for similar revelations about illegal NSA surveillance.

An important concept in organization theory, in considering the power relationship between a principal and agent, is “moral hazard.” The less information the principal has about the actions of the agent, the more room there is for moral hazard — that is, for the agent to take advantage of the principal’s limited information and promote her own interests under cover of serving the principal. The less the principal knows about what the agent is doing, the less meaningful her actual status as principal becomes.

This moral hazard is a problem in all principal-agent relationships, and becomes more severe as the principal’s knowledge of the agent’s day-to-day activities is diminished. The result, in all ostensibly representative institutions, is what Robert Michels called the Iron Law of Oligarchy: The tendency for power to shift upward from the delegator to the delegate, from the principal to the agent, and from the elector to the representative. No matter who the acting leadership of an institution ostensibly represents — voters, shareholders, whatever — their superior access to inside information and control over the agenda will effectively nullify any real control by those on the outside they claim to represent.

And of course when the “agent” has the authority to decide what the “principal” is or is not allowed to know about the agent’s activities, and punish the agent’s subordinates for leaking information to the principal, the claim that the agent derives her authority from the principal becomes a complete and utter farce.

These recent news items demonstrate this in spades. As Marja Erwin argued, in response to claims that Chelsea Manning was a “traitor” for divulging government secrets to the public the government allegedly answers to, “consent requires equality. As long as the government keeps secrets from the governed and has power over the governed, it does not have consent, and does not have legitimacy” (“The persecution of Breanna Manning and the incoherence of American Centrist ideology,” April 25, 2012).

Short of a direct democracy in which all decisions are made directly by the governed themselves, it’s impossible to conceive of a government or other representative institution that couldn’t control the information available to those it “represents.” And the ultimate in direct democracy is a stateless society without hierarchical institutions, in which all decisions are made by individuals or by voluntary associations of those affected by the decision.

Líderes da Igreja Católica, desde o cardeal Maradiaga até o próprio Papa Francisco, estamparam as manchetes ao longo do ano por criticarem supostas economias de livre mercado. De acordo com eles, trata-se de uma forma de idolatria que explora e exclui os pobres. A doutrina social católica enfatiza o compartilhamento e a ajuda aos menos afortunados e, por isso, clérigos como Oscar Maradiaga têm como alvo o que percebem como “causas estruturais da pobreza”.

Porém, ao identificar essas causas, os ataques do cardeal contra a liberdade de mercado se tornam problemáticos. Embora sejam compreensíveis as preocupações sobre o relacionamento entre ricos e pobres, sua fé nas intervenções positivas do estado é que são “enganosa”. Ironicamente, o “livre mercado” denunciado com tanto empenho por Maradiaga é produto de profunda e contínua coerção estatal, numa escala pouco reconhecida. Devemos, portanto, distinguir entre dois empregos da expressão “livre mercado”, para que não caiamos na armadilha que vitimou Maradiaga – a armadilha de se opor ao libertarianismo em princípio sem compreender de fato o sistema que ele prescreve.

Os mercados livres não precisam ser a encarnação da dominação corporativa mundial que testemunhamos atualmente. Para a tradição anarquista individualista, de fortes raízes nos Estados Unidos, o livre mercado era simplesmente a troca voluntária entre indivíduos soberanos, com direitos e liberdades iguais. Se aplicado de forma consistente, esse sistema levaria à distribuição da riqueza e das propriedades de forma mais igualitária, como alegavam os anarquistas, o que efetivamente acabaria com a exploração dos trabalhadores pobres.

Muitos defensores libertários atuais do livre mercado ainda incorporam essa tradição, argumentando que o libertarianismo não pode ser uma defesa do capitalismo corporativo ou de algum outro eufemismo retórico para descrevê-lo. Para nós, o livre mercado é um sistema em que os indivíduos podem fazer o que quiserem dentro das fronteiras estabelecidas pela igual liberdade dos outros – isto é, todos os indivíduos estão em pé de igualdade enquanto agentes que podem abrir seus próprios negócios, se apropriar de bens ou vender seu trabalho e seus produtos.

Sem os subsídios sistemáticos às grandes empresas, a profusão de novas oportunidades para a independência individual e o auto-emprego significariam uma mudança drástica no poder de barganha dos trabalhadores. As grandes corporações não teriam mais a prerrogativa de oferecer baixos salários para “pegar ou largar”, porque os indivíduos poderiam escolher sem tantas consequências negativas “largar”. Com os monopólios à terra garantidos pelo governo desintegrados, com a abolição das barreiras regulatórias e de licenciamento, com a emissão livre de moedas alternativas concorrentes, nenhuma empresa poderia crescer ou se tornar mais influente sem o serviço adequado a seus consumidores.

É isso que muitos libertários querem dizer quando falam sobre o livre mercado. Não somos apaixonados pelo poder corporativo e pela realidade do capitalismo global como supõem o cardeal Maradiaga ou aqueles da esquerda políticas – muitos de nós são muito mais críticos do sistema econômico vigente que qualquer pessoa na esquerda progressista mainstream. Se de fato houver algum problema nas narrativas libertárias contemporâneas, ele se encontra em sua defesa inconsistente dos princípios de livre mercado, não em sua devoção “férrea” e “radical” a elas.

Há poucas dúvidas de que o cardeal Maradiaga seja bem intencionado e que suas preocupações a respeito da desigualdade de renda e sua compaixão pelos necessitados sejam genuínas. Porém, a oposição libertária à agressão em todas as suas formas – inclusive a ações estatais “legítimas” – não é contrária a essas preocupações.

A pobreza e a exploração sistêmicas dependem da agressão. Os católicos devem ter cuidado com a caracterização de Maradiaga do libertarianismo como apologia à ganância e à destituição econômica. Se fosse isso, a maioria dos libertários que eu conheço o oporiam também.

Traduzido para o português por Erick Vasconcelos

Ex-libertarian and Facebook friend, Alex Strekal, recently penned a piece declaring left-libertarianism to be bunk. The part of his argument touched on here pertains to his take on our view of capitalism and alleged socially liberal capitalist nature.

Capitalism is best defined as separation of labor from ownership rather than private property or markets per se. After all, both of these things predate capitalism historically. Left-libertarian market anarchists preferably oppose the separation of labor from ownership or risk having their credentials questioned. The linked article above doesn’t specifically spell out whether private property or markets are inherently capitalist, but it does mention “the adoption of the capitalist ideology of the market”. This implies that market ideology is solely capitalistic.

There is a mention of the allegation that we left-libertarians don’t understand what capitalism is:

In other words, left-libertarians try to claim to be anti-capitalist without exactly understanding with capitalism is. They see some of the symptoms of the capitalism in the context of the state’s involvement in society, but they do not see how capitalism is a system of relations of power that simultaneously has functionality independent of the state and has an influence on culture in its own right. Their libertarian analysis leaves them stuck advancing a narrative focused on blaming the issues associated with capitalism on the state. As if, if only the state would get out of the way of the market, we could have a more egalitarian society. This shows a certain naiveté of the power dynamics and likely outcomes of the real world, the world in which markets function as a network of hierarchical systems designed around maximizing profit, growth, and social control.

Whether or not we’re guilty of the charges  leveled at us above; there is no reason why left-libertarians can’t expand their understanding of capitalism as a system of power existing unto itself apart from the state or government. There is evidence for the decentralizing power of even far from freed markets in the work of the late, New Leftist historian, Gabriel Kolko. As Roy Childs Jr. said:

As Gabriel Kolko demonstrates in his masterly The Triumph of Conservatism and in Railroads and Regulation, the dominant trend in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth was not towards increasing centralization, but rather, despite the growing number of mergers and the growth in the overall size of many corporations,

toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial leaders, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible trends under control. … As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could [control and stabilize] the economy. … Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly which caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.

The article accuses us of offering a narrative very similar to other so called “free market” think tanks of the right like CATO or Heritage. None of these institutions weave a tale of worker empowerment through freed markets or a more egalitarian society resulting from freed market forces. They don’t attack corporate power/privilege like we do nor the privileges/power of the established rich.

The article also asserts that our claims to be advancing socialism through self-employment, co-ops, and fraternal societies are bizarre. These are ways of returning economic power to laborers who fundamentally control and direct their own means of production. That’s an eminently socialist goal. In fact, that is far more socialist than the state or governmental socialist notions of state or government ownership and control. A scenario in which the new employer is the state or government. The author doesn’t advocate this, but it’s an important point to be made nevertheless.

The piece quoted above also makes an interesting point about the left-libertarian attitudes towards racism. It’s true that we oppose the use of aggressive violence to remedy the evils of racism, but we in no way intend to tolerate it ethically or socially.  One can tolerate something legally in the narrow sense of not using the coercive force of law to change it without sanctioning it morally. That admittedly means we don’t legitimate bigotry and irrational discrimination in any ethical or social sense. We just prefer to adhere to the non-aggression principle in combating it.

The author makes some good points, but he in no way proves left-libertarianism is bunk. Stay tuned for another blog post inspired by a recent posting of the same author.

C4SS Feed 44 presents “Markets Not Capitalism: Intro” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford.

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“Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain” was written by Brett Scott and published with E-International Relations. We are honored to have Brett Scott‘s permission to feature his article on C4SS. Feel free to connect with Scott through twitter: @Suitpossum and check out his blog: The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic 1993 sci-fi novel Red Mars, a pioneering group of scientists establish a colony on Mars. Some imagine it as a chance for a new life, run on entirely different principles from the chaotic Earth. Over time, though, the illusion is shattered as multinational corporations operating under the banner of governments move in, viewing Mars as nothing but an extension to business-as-usual.

It is a story that undoubtedly resonates with some members of the Bitcoin community. The vision of a free-floating digital cryptocurrency economy, divorced from the politics of colossal banks and aggressive governments, is under threat. Take, for example, the purists at Dark Wallet, accusing the Bitcoin Foundation of selling out to the regulators and the likes of the Winklevoss Twins.

Bitcoin sometimes appears akin to an illegal immigrant, trying to decide whether to seek out a rebellious existence in the black-market economy, or whether to don the slick clothes of the Silicon Valley establishment. The latter position – involving publicly accepting regulation and tax whilst privately lobbying against it – is obviously more acceptable and familiar to authorities.

Of course, any new scene is prone to developing internal echo chambers that amplify both commonalities and differences. While questions regarding Bitcoin’s regulatory status lead hyped-up cryptocurrency evangelists to engage in intense sectarian debates, to many onlookers Bitcoin is just a passing curiosity, a damp squib that will eventually suffer an ignoble death by media boredom. It is a mistake to believe that, though. The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency.

What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society, from a bank that records electronic transactions between me and my landlord, to patent officers that record the date of new innovations, to parliamentary registers noting the passing of new legislative acts.

The most visible use of this technical accomplishment is in the realm of currency, though, so it is worth briefly explaining the basics of Bitcoin in order to understand the political visions being unleashed as a result of it.

The technical vision 1.0

Banks are information intermediaries. Gone are the days of the merchant dumping a hoard of physical gold into the vaults for safekeeping. Nowadays, if you have ‘£350 in the bank’, it merely means the bank has recorded that for you in their data centre, on a database that has your account number and a corresponding entry saying ‘350’ next to it. If you want to pay someone electronically, you essentially send a message to your bank, identifying yourself via a pin or card number, asking them to change that entry in their database and to inform the recipient’s bank to do the same with the recipient’s account.

Thus, commercial banks collectively act as a cartel controlling the recording of transaction data, and it is via this process that they keep score of ‘how much money’ we have. To create a secure electronic currency system that does not rely on these banks thus requires three interacting elements. Firstly, one needs to replace the private databases that are controlled by them. Secondly, one needs to provide a way for people to change the information on that database (‘move money around’). Thirdly, one needs to convince people that the units being moved around are worth something.

To solve the first element, Bitcoin provides a public database, or ledger, that is referred to reverently as the blockchain. There is a way for people to submit information for recording in the ledger, but once it gets recorded, it cannot be edited in hindsight. If you’ve heard about bitcoin ‘mining’ (using ‘hashing algorithms’), that is what that is all about. A scattered collective of mercenary clerks essentially hire their computers out to collectively maintain the ledger, baking (or weaving) transaction records into it.

Secondly, Bitcoin has a process for individuals to identify themselves in order to submit transactions to those clerks to be recorded on that ledger. That is where public-key cryptography comes in. I have a public Bitcoin address (somewhat akin to my account number at a bank) and I then control that public address with a private key (a bit like I use my private pin number to associate myself with my bank account). This is what provides anonymity.

The result of these two elements, when put together, is the ability for anonymous individuals to record transactions between their bitcoin accounts on a database that is held and secured by a decentralised network of techno-clerks (‘miners’). As for the third element – convincing people that the units being transacted are worth something – that is a more subtle question entirely that I will not address here.

The political vision 1.0

Note the immediate political implications. Within the Bitcoin system, a set of powerful central intermediaries (the cartel of commercial banks, connected together via the central bank, underwritten by government), gets replaced with a more diffuse network intermediary, apparently controlled by no-one in particular.

This generally appeals to people who wish to devolve power away from banks by introducing more diversity into the monetary system. Those with a left-wing anarchist bent, who perceive the state and banking sector as representing the same elite interests, may recognise in it the potential for collective direct democratic governance of currency. It has really appealed, though, to conservative libertarians who perceive it as a commodity-like currency, free from the evils of the central bank and regulation.

The corresponding political reaction from policy-makers and establishment types takes three immediate forms. Firstly, there are concerns about it being used for money laundering and crime (‘Bitcoin is the dark side’). Secondly, there are concerns about consumer protection (‘Bitcoin is full of cowboy operators’). Thirdly, there are concerns about tax (‘this allows people to evade tax’).

The general status quo bias of regulators, who fixate on the negative potentials of Bitcoin whilst remaining blind to negatives in the current system, sets the stage for a political battle. Bitcoin enthusiasts, passionate about protecting the niche they have carved out, become prone to imagining conspiratorial scenes of threatened banks fretfully lobbying the government to ban Bitcoin, or of paranoid politicians panicking about the integrity of the national currency.

The technical vision 2.0

Outside the media hype around these Bitcoin dramas, though, a deeper movement is developing. It focuses not only on Bitcoin’s potential to disrupt commercial banks, but also on the more general potential for decentralised blockchains to disrupt other types of centralised information intermediaries.

Copyright authorities, for example, record people’s claims to having produced a unique work at a unique date and authoritatively stamp it for them. Such centralised ‘timestamping’ more generally is called ‘notarisation’. One non-monetary function for a Bitcoin-style blockchain could thus be to replace the privately controlled ledger of the notary with a public ledger that people can record claims on. This is precisely what Proof of Existence and Originstamp are working on.

And what about domain name system (DNS) registries that record web addresses? When you type in a URL like www.e-ir.info, the browser first steers you to a DNS registry like Afilias, which maintains a private database of URLs alongside information on which IP address to send you to. One can, however, use a blockchain to create a decentralised registry of domain name ownership, which is what Namecoin is doing. Theoretically, this process could be used to record share ownership, land ownership, or ownership in general (see, for example, Mastercoin’s projects).

The biggest information intermediaries, though, are often hidden in plain sight. What is Facebook? Isn’t it just a company that you send information to, which is then stored in their database and subsequently displayed to you and your friends? You log in with your password (proving your identity), and then can alter that database by sending them further messages (‘I’d like to delete that photo’). Likewise with Twitter, Dropbox, and countless other web services.

Unlike the original internet, which was largely used for transmission of static content, we experience sites like Facebook as interactive playgrounds where we can use programmes installed in some far away computer. In the process of such interactivity, we give groups like Facebook huge amounts of information. Indeed, they set themselves up as information honeytraps in order to create a profit-making platform where advertisers can sell you things based on the information. This simultaneously creates a large information repository for authorities like the NSA to browse. This interaction of corporate power and state power is inextricably tied to the profitable nature of centrally held data.

But what if you could create interactive web services that did not revolve around single information intermediaries like Facebook? That is precisely what groups like Ethereum are working towards. Where Bitcoin is a way to record simple transaction information on a decentralised ledger, Ethereum wants to create a ‘decentralised computational engine’. This is a system for running programmes, or executing contracts, on a blockchain held in play via a distributed network of computers rather than Mark Zuckerberg’s data centres.

It all starts to sounds quite sci-fi, but organisations like Ethereum are leading the charge on building ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisations’, hardcoded entities that people can interact with, but that nobody in particular controls. I send information to this entity, triggering the code and setting in motion further actions. As Bitshares describes it, such an organisation “has a business plan encoded in open source software that executes automatically in an entirely transparent and trustworthy manner.”

The political vision 2.0

By removing a central point of control, decentralised systems based on code – whether they exist to move Bitcoin tokens around, store files, or build contracts – resemble self-contained robots. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase are human faces behind the digital interface of the services they run. They can overtly manipulate, or bow in to pressure to censor. A decentralised currency or a decentralised version of Twitter seems immune from such manipulation.

It is this that gives rise to a narrative of empowerment and, indeed, at first sight this offers an exhilarating vision of self-contained outposts of freedom within a world otherwise dominated by large corruptible institutions. At many cryptocurrency meet-ups, there is an excitable mix of techno-babble infused with social claims. The blockchain can record contracts between free individuals, and if enforcement mechanisms can be coded in to create self-enforcing ‘smart contracts’, we have a system for building encoded law that bypasses states.

Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies, though, are empowering right now precisely because they are underdogs. They introduce diversity into the existing system and thereby expand our range of tools. In the minds of hardcore proponents, though, blockchain technologies are more than this. They are a replacement system, superior to existing institutions in every possible way. When amplified to this extreme, though, the apparently utopian project can begin to take on a dystopian, conservative hue.

Binary politics

When asked about why Bitcoin is superior to other currencies, proponents often point to its ‘trustless‘ nature. No trust needs be placed in fallible ‘governments and corporations’. Rather, a self-sustaining system can be created by individuals following a set of rules that are set apart from human frailties or intervention. Such a system is assumed to be fairer by allowing people to win out against those powers who can abuse rules.

The vision thus is not one of bands of people getting together into mutualistic self-help groups. Rather, it is one of individuals acting as autonomous agents, operating via the hardcoded rules with other autonomous agents, thereby avoiding those who seek to harm their interests.

Note the underlying dim view of human nature. While anarchist philosophers often imagine alternative governance systems based on mutualistic community foundations, the ‘empowerment’ here does not stem from building community ties. Rather it is imagined to come from retreating from trust and taking refuge in a defensive individualism mediated via mathematical contractual law.

It carries a certain disdain for human imperfection, particularly the imperfection of those in power, but by implication the imperfection of everyone in society. We need to be protected from ourselves by vesting power in lines of code that execute automatically. If only we can lift currency away from manipulation from the Federal Reserve. If only we can lift Wikipedia away from the corruptible Wikimedia Foundation.

Activists traditionally revel in hot-blooded asymmetric battles of interest (such as that between StrikeDebt! and the banks), implicitly holding an underlying faith in the redeemability of human-run institutions. The Bitcoin community, on the other hand, often seems attracted to a detached anti-politics, one in which action is reduced to the binary options of Buy In or Buy Out of the coded alternative. It echoes consumer notions of the world, where one ‘expresses’ oneself not via debate or negotiation, but by choosing one product over another. We’re leaving Earth for Mars. Join if you want.

It all forms an odd, tense amalgam between visions of exuberant risk-taking freedom and visions of risk-averse anti-social paranoia. This ambiguity is not unique to cryptocurrency (see, for example, this excellent parody of the trustless society), but in the case of Bitcoin, it is perhaps best exemplified by the narrative offered by Cody Wilson in Dark Wallet’s crowdfunding video. “Bitcoin is what they fear it is, a way to leave… to make a choice. There’s a system approaching perfection, just in time for our disappearance, so, let there be dark”.

The myth of political ‘exit’

But where exactly is this perfect system Wilson is disappearing to?

Back in the days of roving bands of nomadic people, the political option of ‘exit’ was a reality. If a ruler was oppressive, you could actually pack up and take to the desert in a caravan. The bizarre thing about the concept of ‘exit to the internet’ is that the internet is a technology premised on massive state and corporate investment in physical infrastructure, fibre optic cables laid under seabeds, mass production of computers from low-wage workers in the East, and mass affluence in Western nations. If you are in the position to be having dreams of technological escape, you are probably not in a position to be exiting mainstream society. You are mainstream society.

Don’t get me wrong. Wilson is a subtle and interesting thinker, and it is undoubtedly unfair to suggest that he really believes that one can escape the power dynamics of the messy real world by finding salvation in a kind of internet Matrix. What he is really trying to do is to invoke one side of the crypto-anarchist mantra of ‘privacy for the weak, but transparency for the powerful’.

That is a healthy radical impulse, but the conservative element kicks in when the assumption is made that somehow privacy alone is what enables social empowerment. That is when it turns into an individualistic ‘just leave me alone’ impulse fixated with negative liberty. Despite the rugged frontier appeal of the concept, the presumption that empowerment simply means being left alone to pursue your individual interests is essentially an ideology of the already-empowered, not the vulnerable.

This is the same tension you find in the closely related cypherpunk movement. It is often pitched as a radical empowerment movement, but as Richard Boase notes, it is “a world full of acronyms and codes, impenetrable to all but the most cynical, distrustful, and political of minds.” Indeed, crypto-geekery offers nothing like an escape from power dynamics. One merely escapes to a different set of rules, not one controlled by ‘politicians’, but one in the hands of programmers and those in control of computing power.

It is only when we think in these terms that we start to see Bitcoin not as a realm ‘lacking the rules imposed by the state’, but as a realm imposing its own rules. It offers a form of protection, but guarantees nothing like ‘empowerment’ or ‘escape’.

Techno-Leviathan

Technology often seems silent and inert, a world of ‘apolitical’ objects. We are thus prone to being blind to the power dynamics built into our use of it. For example, isn’t email just a useful tool? Actually, it is highly questionable whether one can ‘choose’ whether to use email or not. Sure, I can choose between Gmail or Hotmail, but email’s widespread uptake creates network effects that mean opting out becomes less of an option over time. This is where the concept of becoming ‘enslaved to technology’ emerges from. If you do not buy into it, you will be marginalised, and that is political.

This is important. While individual instances of blockchain technology can clearly be useful, as a class of technologies designed to mediate human affairs, they contain a latent potential for encouraging technocracy. When disassociated from the programmers who design them, trustless blockchains floating above human affairs contains the specter of rule by algorithms. It is a vision (probably accidently) captured by Ethereum’s Joseph Lubin when he says “There will be ways to manipulate people to make bad decisions, but there won’t be ways to manipulate the system itself”.

Interestingly, it is a similar abstraction to that made by Hobbes. In his Leviathan, self-regarding people realise that it is in their interests to exchange part of their freedom for security of self and property, and thereby enter into a contract with a Sovereign, a deified personage that sets out societal rules of engagement. The definition of this Sovereign has been softened over time – along with the fiction that you actually contract to it – but it underpins modern expectations that the government should guarantee property rights.

Conservative libertarians hold tight to the belief that, if only hard property rights and clear contracting rules are put in place, optimal systems spontaneously emerge. They are not actually that far from Hobbes in this regard, but their irritation with Hobbes’ vision is that it relies on politicians who, being actual people, do not act like a detached contractual Sovereign should, but rather attempt to meddle, make things better, or steal. Don’t decentralised blockchains offer the ultimate prospect of protected property rights with clear rules, but without the political interference?

This is essentially the vision of the internet techno-leviathan, a deified crypto-sovereign whose rules we can contract to. The rules being contracted to are a series of algorithms, step by step procedures for calculations which can only be overridden with great difficulty. Perhaps, at the outset, this represents, à la Rousseau, the general will of those who take part in the contractual network, but the key point is that if you get locked into a contract on that system, there is no breaking out of it.

This, of course, appeals to those who believe that powerful institutions operate primarily by breaching property rights and contracts. Who really believes that though? For much of modern history, the key issue with powerful institutions has not been their willingness to break contracts. It has been their willingness to use seemingly unbreakable contracts to exert power. Contracts, in essence, resemble algorithms, coded expressions of what outcomes should happen under different circumstances. On average, they are written by technocrats and, on average, they reflect the interests of elite classes.

That is why liberation movements always seek to break contracts set in place by old regimes, whether it be peasant movements refusing to honour debt contracts to landlords, or the DRC challenging legacy mining concessions held by multinational companies, or SMEs contesting the terms of swap contracts written by Barclays lawyers. Political liberation is as much about contesting contracts as it is about enforcing them.

Building the techno-political vision 3.0

The point I am trying to make is that you do not escape the world of big corporates and big government by wishing for a trustless set of technologies that collectively resemble a technocratic crypto-sovereign. Rather, you use technology as a tool within ongoing political battles, and you maintain an ongoing critical outlook towards it. The concept of the decentralised blockchain is powerful. The cold, distrustful edge of cypherpunk, though, is only empowering when it is firmly in the service of creative warm-blooded human communities situated in the physical world of dirt and grime.

Perhaps this means de-emphasising the focus on how blockchains can be used to store digital assets or property, and focusing rather on those without assets. For example, think of the potential of blockchain voting systems that groups like Restart Democracy are experimenting with. Centralised vote-counting authorities are notorious sources of political anxiety in fragile countries. What if the ledger recording the votes cast was held by a decentralised network of citizens, with voters having a means to anonymously transmit votes to be stored on a publicly viewable database?

We do not want a future society free from people we have to trust, or one in which the most we can hope for is privacy. Rather, we want a world in which technology is used to dilute the power of those systems that cause us to doubt trust relationships. Screw escaping to Mars.

Roman Catholic leaders from Cardinal Maradiaga to Pope Francis himself have made news this year in their criticisms of supposed free market economies, likening them to a form of idolatry that exploits and denies access to the poor. Because Catholic social teachings emphasize stewardship and aid to the less fortunate, clergymen such as Maradiaga have taken aim at perceived “structural causes for poverty.”

It is in identifying these causes that the Cardinal’s fulminations against free markets become problematic. While he can hardly be blamed for supposing that something in relations between rich and poor is amiss, it is his faith in the positive interventions of the state that is the “deception.” Ironically, the “free market” that Maradiaga so sincerely denounces is itself a product of deep and sustained state coercion on a scale not often recognized for what it is. We must therefore distinguish between two ways of employing the phrase “free market,” lest we fall into the trap that caught Maradiaga – the trap of opposing libertarianism in principle without actually understanding the economic system it prescribes.

Free markets don’t have to mean the particular incarnation of corporate world dominance we see all around us today. For an entire tradition, an individualist anarchism that once blossomed in the United States, free markets meant simply voluntary exchange between sovereign individuals with equal rights and liberties. If consistently adhered to, such a system would, these anarchists argued, distribute wealth and property more evenly and equitably, effectively ending the exploitation of the working poor.

Many of today’s free market libertarians continue in this tradition, arguing that libertarianism shouldn’t be either a defense of corporate capitalism or its euphemistic rhetorical substitute. For us, free markets are a system whereby individuals are left free to do whatever they might within the boundaries set by equal freedom – that is, all individuals stand on equal footing as free agents who might start their own businesses, homestead property or sell their work or wares.

Taken together with an absence of subsidies to big business under such a system, the profuseness of open opportunities for self-reliance and self-employment would mean a striking shift in bargaining power. No longer would corporate powerhouses enjoy the prerogative of offering scanty pay on a “take it or leave it” basis, for free individuals would summarily choose to “leave it.” With government land monopolies disintegrated, with regulatory and licensure barriers abolished, with the free and open issue of alternative currencies, no business entity could grow to any notable size or influence without faithfully serving its patrons.

That’s what a great many libertarians mean when we talk about free markets. We are no more enamored of corporate power and the realities of global capitalism than Cardinal Maradiaga or Americans on the political left – indeed, many of us are far more critical of our existing economic system than anyone on the mainstream, progressive left. If in fact there is a problem with contemporary libertarian narratives, it lies in their departures from free market principles, not in any “hardline” or “cutthroat” devotion to them.

There can be little doubt that Cardinal Maradiaga’s heart is in the right place, that his concerns about wealth inequality and compassion for those in need are genuine. But the libertarian opposition to aggression in all its forms, including ostensibly legitimate state action, is not at all antithetical to those concerns.

Systematic poverty and exploitation in fact depend on aggression. Catholics should be chary of relying on Maradiaga’s characterization of libertarianism as an apologia for greed and widespread economic destitution. If that’s really what it was, most libertarians I know would oppose it too.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, La Dottrina Sociale tra Cattolici e Libertari.

Uma característica que torna o futebol um esporte genuinamente brasileiro é que sua predileção transcende classes sociais e estratos econômicos. Crianças e adolescentes de todas as classes podem jogá-lo. A bola pode ser improvisada e a diversão ainda estará garantida.

O futebol também é um dos fundamentos do patriotismo no Brasil, que se reaviva na época da Copa do Mundo. As cores da bandeira passam a ser valorizadas, a bandeira hasteada.

Mas, em 2014, o clima para a Copa no país está diferente. Temos a abundância de slogans como o “Não vai ter Copa”, protestos e uma opinião pública dividida em relação ao impacto do evento. Houve carta aberta dos atingidos pelos preparativos e, no último dia 15, o Dia de Luta contra a Copa, que levou pessoas às ruas em todo o país.

Foram resultados previsíveis da política adotada no país, que envolveu o uso extensivo de dinheiro público e da mão de ferro do Estado para remover pessoas de suas casas – em desapropriações questionáveis até para os parâmetros legais brasileiros – e construir obras que serão usadas por pouco tempo. Os maiores beneficiados serão a FIFA, empreiteiras, empresas parceiras e concessionárias do governo.

Para evitar a concorrência, de acordo com a Carta do 1º Encontro dos Atingidos pela Copa, “a Lei Geral da Copa estabelece zonas de exclusão de 2 quilômetros no entorno das áreas da Fifa, estádios e áreas oficiais de torcedores com telões, onde apenas os patrocinadores oficiais poderão comercializar”. O comércio ambulante, frequentemente reprimido, mas que movimenta bilhões de reais por ano, foi proibido de operar nestas zonas.

Pode-se alegar que estamos em um “estado de exceção esportivo”, mas é fato que os preparativos da Copa escancararam a disfuncionalidade e injustiça do Estado brasileiro. Os subsídios do BNDES para grandes empresas, a defesa intransigente da propriedade privada de grandes corporações combinada à persistente desproteção da posse das pessoas mais pobres e à ânsia em controlar seu acesso à terra, a repressão do trabalhador ambulante em um país cuja legislação e constituição pretendem ser a proteção da classe trabalhadora.

A distopia esportiva é realidade perene no país, que prejudica especialmente os mais pobres, visível agora por ter sido misturada a um dos eventos mais marcantes para os brasileiros. É o estado que sempre existiu, mas agora com um pretexto. O país do futebol aprendeu que copas não são só sobre o esporte. São também sobre dinheiro e influência, sobre o uso do poder político em vez da troca voluntária.

Não há ilustração melhor da diferença entre meios econômicos (trabalho, produção e troca) e meios políticos (apropriação forçada, uso de meios coercitivos), como definia Franz Openheimmer. Outra Copa era possível – sem desapropriações, sem repressão aos ambulantes, sem subsídios às grandes corporações. Teria que ser uma Copa sem o poder do estado, uma Copa de pessoas livres, sem o uso da força.

Em 2007, o governo afirmou que a Copa seria custeada inteiramente pela iniciativa privada. Mas isso nunca aconteceria com a estrutura de estado que temos. E nenhuma empresa assumiu o risco de uma Copa politizada como a brasileira. Neal Stephenson, em Nevasca, afirmava: “[É] como o governo é. Ele foi inventado para fazer coisas que as empresas privadas não querem fazer, o que significa que provavelmente não há motivo para isso”. O governo, porém, também faz coisas que permitem que algumas empresas manipulem o mercado em seu favor.

“Que um grito de gol não abafe nossa história”, afirma a Carta do 1º Encontro dos Atingidos pela Copa. Se a consciência há de vencer, a injustiça estatal em nome do esporte não pode ser esquecida.

One of the main functions the state serves in practice is to forcibly transfer wealth to politically connected interest groups. Prisons serve that function today, and they have served it historically. In The Enterprise of Law,  economist Bruce Benson documents the rise of state controlled law enforcement in England. Stateless customary tort law had previously prevailed, with communities facilitating restitution based justice, but gradually the king and his cronies took control in order to extract wealth through fines and other modes of punitive “justice.” The rise of prisons as a method of punishment happened somewhat late in this process, but it too served a wealth transfer function, Benson explains:

“Houses of correction” were first established under Elizabeth to punish and reform able-bodied poor who refused to work. A “widespread concern for the habits and behavior of the poor” is often cited as the reason for the poor laws regarding vagrancy and the establishment of facilities to “reform” the idle poor by confining them and forcing them to work at hard labor. But Chambliss reported that “there is little question but that these statutes were designed for one express purpose: to force laborers (whether personally free or unfree) to accept employment at a low wage in order to insure the landowner an adequate supply of labor at a price he could afford to pay.” Such laws clearly reflected the transfer function of government.

In this case, prisons were used as institutions of violent coercion meant to establish work discipline, enforce the work ethic, drive down wages, and thus transfer wealth from poor and working people to landowners.

Prisons served a similar function in the American South after the 13th Amendment was passed. The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, but it makes an exception for those convicted of a crime. This provided a loophole that Southern states quickly implemented in order to preserve slavery. They passed laws known as the Black Codes that criminalized a litany of harmless behaviors specifically for black individuals. Then they imprisoned blacks in large numbers and leased them to businesses and governments to perform slave labor, in what was known as the convict lease system. This was yet another use of prisons and the criminal law as a wealth transfer, this time from former slaves to the state and elite economic interests.

Prisons are still used for the profits of entrenched interest groups today. Sometimes that means transferring wealth from taxpayers to for-profit prison operators like Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation. Sometimes it means price gouging prisoners and their families through your state granted monopoly on phone calls to prisoners, as Global Tel*Link does. Medical contractors like Corizon profit by providing inadequate medical care after being granted a monopoly in a prison. The agribusiness industry protects their profits by sending activists to prison for calling attention to abusive conditions in their facilities, through ag-gag laws and the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

But it’s not just for-profit firms that extract wealth from prisoners and the public through the prison industrial complex. Prison guards at “public” prisons are just as much of a concentrated and selfish special interest group. The California prison guards union has pushed prison expansion and draconian “tough on crime” policies in order to ensure their members’ job security. Democrats Dick Durbin and Cheri Bustos praised federal funding for the maximum security Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois on the grounds that it would create jobs. They essentially treat prisons as a make work program for their constituents.

These are just a few of the ways prisons operate as statist wealth transfers to politically connected groups. Like all such transfers, they distort the market, create unseen opportunity costs, and encourage further rent seeking by privileged interests. But prisons are a particularly brutal institution to use for wealth extraction. The costs of prisons are not merely economic. Prisons rob people of their liberty, subject them to rape, bake them to death, scald their skin off, and institutionalize psychological torture. Prisons should be understood as another form of what Bastiat called legal plunder, and a particularly brutal one at that.

The youtube channel AnarchistCollective discuss three defintions of capitalism with many accolades for C4SS writers Kevin Carson and Gary Chartier.

http://youtu.be/Hpe1_OtHtLY