tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-316911102024-03-23T13:58:25.491-04:00The Individualist JournalA compilation of libertarian and individualist thoughtBrainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.comBlogger293125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-54576399524227064582007-08-23T21:14:00.000-04:002007-08-24T01:32:00.342-04:00Checks and Balances: Two KindsChecks and balances should be a fairly familiar concept to Americans. The standard definition of checks and balances is that the state must be broken up into multiple segments that function as checks against eachother's power and perform different functions, while these segments still remain within one central institution. Traditionally, the idea is that there must be three separate branches (executive, legislative and judicial) within one central government in order to prevent the accumulation of power into one group. At least superficially, this view slightly recognizes the principle of decentralization. Another somewhat more powerful conception of checks and balances is the idea that there must be multiple and separate levels of government, each with their own branches and jurisdictions, and that in order to combat the accumulation of power, individual states or parishes and cities should remain "independant" from the central state.<br /><br />This is the doctrine of <em>internal</em> checks and balances. Both separation between branches and levels of government are internal theories of checks and balances. But how well do these theories stand up in the face of logic and empirical evidence? Not very well. The fundamental flaw in the idea that separation between branches within one institution will stop power from being concentrated should be fairly obvious: it is still within one institution. There is theoretically no "third party" outside of that institution functioning on a check on it, which is to say that the overall institution is a judge in its own case. The supreme court is still part of the federal government. All historical evidence shows a great deal of collusion between branches, and when there is collusion between branches, there is centralization of powers into one expanding group. Clearly, merely having three branches under one institution will not stop power from accumulating in that institution. Much heftier criterion must be met.<br /><br />While the doctrine of state's rights is a step up from this, since it maintains at a minimum that there should be a multitude of jurisdictions within the overall territory bestowed to the central government, it nonetheless contains a similar flaw. The states are still ultimately subject to the territorial dominion of the federal government and there is once again collusion between the levels of government. If a central government still exists, it doesn't matter how many territorial jurisdictions that one tries to split the central state's control into, political power is still concentrated at a central point. Surely expanding the amount of people in the government or the number of sub-governments within a government's territorial monopoly is not necessarily a way to restrict political power. In order to at least be a "pure" advocate of "state's rights", one must support a more radical approach, with no federal government.<br /><br />Once one has made it to this point, the same problem keeps repeating itself at each level of government. The states in themselves would now be the central governments, only over smaller territories. The size of the dominion of power may have been reduced, but the essential feature of territorial monopoly is still maintained. Counties, parishes and cities would synergize with and the states. If the states were gotten rid of, the counties would be the territorial monopolies and the cities and towns would synergize with them. And even down to the city-state level, the problem of territorial monopoly would persist. The advantages of so-called "state's rights" or "city's rights" mostly only have to do with the size of the territorial monopoly, but they do almost nothing to address the problem of territorial monopoly itself. All such mechanisms are ultimately within the structure of the institution of the state itself. A monopoly cannot be broken up without competition from other institutions external to it.<br /><br />This is why <em>external</em> checks and balances are much stronger and more meaningful than internal ones. Checks and balances in which governmental institutions are held in check by non-governmental ones, which requires a separation between buisiness and state, constitutes an example of external checks and balances. An honest private institution that opens up a buisiness in competition with the state in a particular area, which inherently requires that the given buisiness not engage in any kind of patronage and protectionism with the state, is functioning as a check on state power by providing an alternative option for people and lowering dependance on the state. The improvement of technology and the availability of private alternatives to the state in a given field, and the long-term decrease in prices it often leads to, can function as an external "check and balance" on the state much better than any internal "check and balance" ever can.<br /><br />On the other hand, a private institution that colludes with the state is participating in the centralization and expansion of power. Indeed, the leaders of such institutions become part of the ruling class. When such synergy between industry and government takes place, various buisinesses start to become more centralized, modeled more similarly to the structure of the state than would otherwise have been possible. When buisiness starts to merge at the hip with the state, this presents an oppurtunity to obtain and expand political power for both select private interests and members of the government itself. The union of church and state is a perfect historical example of territorial monopolies further centralizing and expanding as a consequence of collusion between the state and external organizations. The ultimate end of such collusion is the merging of a more multi-centered order into one large central organization.<br /><br />In a sense, everyone who is outside of the ruling class of a given society is a potential check on political power, by the mere virtue of not being within or in control of it. There are many external methods of checking and resisting political power, which includes various types of civil disobedience and economic decisions. From the perspective of an individual as a consumer, withdrawing consumption from the state's "services" and merely patronizing a private alternative at a lower price and participating in peaceful black markets is an important haven from state power. On the other hand, actively and enthusiastically participating in the state's "services" transforms one into either a state of dependance on the state, or worse, part of the ruling class. Here too, collusion has a negative effect because it is internal to the institution. It's working within the system, which is precisely why it does not work.<br /><br />Economic incentives is a very important check and balance on state power. A defining feature of the state as an organization is that it is an externalizer of costs, which is to say that those who hold the political power in a society do not actually bear the costs of the laws and policies that they work with. Therefore, mechanisms that internalize costs provide a disincentive towards political power. Political power cannot be obtained or maintained without externalizing costs through mechanisms such as taxation and eminent domain. If the state is denied access to external resources then it will eventually crumble, as the state as an organization depends entirely on the production of those who are not in it. If it is either cut off from recieving that production then political power obviously cannot be maintained for very long.<br /><br />The ultimate check on political power is philosophy. In short, it is impossible to maintain or expand political power without the propagation of ideological ideas in favor of political power or encouraging resignation to it. What ideas people adhere to ultimately effects the course of history. All that is required to combat political power is the action of withdrawl of support to the best that one can manage. And in order for this to be done, it must be philosophically accepted that the only possible checks against the state that can possibly exist are external to the institution because the institution of the state is a compulsory territorial monopoly regaurdless of what one tries to do with it internally. It is logically inconsistant to maintain that one can reduce, restrict or abolish political power by using political power, and it is nonsensical to claim that one can provide checks and balances on an institution through mechanisms that are entirely within the framework of that very institution and when that institution has a territorial monopoly.<br /><br />What about so-called "competition" between nation-states? If there can be said to be anything resembling checks and balances between goverments, it would be the total lack of both collusion and offensive intervention between governments. When states engage in economic hegemony with eachother they begin a gradual trend towards international or global government, taking the centralization process to the extreme of there being virtually no territory immune from being within the jurisdiction of the government monopoly. International government possesses all of the problems previously mentioned about federal and state government. It just conglomerates power even more than nation-states and has a larger monopolistic jurisdiction.<br /><br />Modern state warfare essentially cannot be done without collusion and contracting with particular banking and buisiness interests through contracting. War is the most costly endeavor a government can possibly engage in and it can only be waged by externalizing the costs, particularly through the mechanism of monetary inflation and borrowing from from foreign governments and banking interests. War has historically been a means of maintaining and expanding political power. As such, it would be disingenous to use it as an example of checks on state power. It is, by definition, a flexing of state power. Even if a state is overthrown by another, the victor state usually has increased power when the smoke clears. War has been the main mechanism of expanding state power throughout history.<br /><br />In conclusion, it should be clear that true checks and balances lies within the domain of private and decentralized mechanisms that are external to and not in any kind of collusion with any political power. The more standard concept of checks and balances, while a well intended attempt to form a structural means for restricting political power, is incredibly mistaken in its premises as to how the state functions as an institution. It is rather niave about the nature of political power. In order to truly have checks and balances, the state as an organization must be questioned altogether and participitation in the activities of and consumption of the loot of such an organization must begin to be abandoned in favor of a multitude of alternatives.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-21618969751429310922007-08-21T19:16:00.000-04:002007-08-21T19:19:14.454-04:00Liberty SpaceComing Soon...<br /><br />New website at liberty-space.comBrainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-57587765676330420722007-08-14T14:55:00.000-04:002007-08-14T14:57:21.421-04:00Statism is CounterintuitiveGreat article by <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory144.html">Anthony Gregory</a>.<br /><br />Excerpt: "When most children are fairly young, just as they learn that the world operates according to some basic principles of physics, they are taught that humans ought to act according to some basic ethical guidelines. Most parents teach their kids not to steal, to keep their hands to themselves, to do their best to keep their word. Well, that’s really all libertarianism is: It’s the idea that people shouldn’t initiate force against other people’s bodies and property, and that people should honor contracts."Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-35270957710667613832007-08-13T14:22:00.000-04:002007-08-13T16:45:39.839-04:00Pragmatic Utilitarianism: A Road to TyrannyThe arguements given by people to justify unethical acts are usually utilitarian, which is to say that a given act is defended on the grounds that it is beneficial to someone. This is commonly manifested in the arguements given in defense of the alleged "need" for a whole host of economic policies, and government in general. For example, conservatives often argue that the tax-funded defense industry helps "stimulate the economy". It is often argued that the public sector is justified because it "creates jobs". So long as a measure can be shown to be beneficial to a specific group of people, the utilitarian is prone to be comfortable with it.<br /><br />On one hand, these kind of arguements are fallicious even in utilitarian terms in that they ignore the cost side of the equation. Government creates only government jobs, which inherently comes at the cost of private jobs. Governments cannot increase employment in one sector without withdrawing it from another. All government jobs represents a net loss to the tax-payer. Government cannot create wealth, it can only redistribute it, and in the process of redistribution it actually decreases overall utility by shifting production into consumption. The government itself does not produce, it consumes from private production. It is a leech on the producing classes, which includes both workers and genuine enterprenuers.<br /><br />On the other hand, even if it can be substantiated that a given measure is beneficial to people, this does not necessarily justify it in ethical terms. Afterall, one can try to argue that a thief is justified in their theft because they donated the stolen goods to charity, but that would not justify theft. Just because something may be beneficial to some people does not necessarily mean that it is justified, nor does it negate the fact that it may very well be at the expense of other people. Economic efficiency and metric benefit is not a proper measuring stick of justice. In short, the ends do not justify the means. One can very well show how a redistribution benefits certain people, but that would not justify confiscation of property.<br /><br />A common mistake made by many utilitarians is the broken window fallacy. The broken window fallacy refers to a situation where one argues that a destructive act is justified because it may lead to the gain of others in some way, usually by stimulating economic activity. Should we encourage children to break windows of baker's stores because this stimulates the economy by making the baker buy a new window? Or are destructive acts never justified, and this actually represents a loss to the baker? To take the former view ignores how those same resources would have been used otherwise. This fallacy is precisely what is going on when people claim that warfare benefits the economy, ignoring that there are immense costs that can only be delayed at best.<br /><br />While some utilitarians think more long-term than others, utilitarians may often take a short-term view, being concentrated on obtaining the maximum utility in the present, regaurdless of long-term consequences. A good example of this is manifested in monetary policy. The establishment view goes roughly as follows: "monetary inflation is a good thing because it stimulates the economy by raising wage rates, creating jobs and stimulating growth". But as Ludwig Von Mises demonstrated close to a century ago, in the long-term this is unsustainable, it must be reconciled in a downturn, malinvestments must be cleared and the debt it generates must be payed off. This is beside the fact that the inflation also reduces the value of each monetary unit, thereby raising some prices and diminishing the purchasing power of the wages. Viewed in ethical terms, all of this is irrelevant to the question as to wether or not the stealing of the value of people's money can be justified.<br /><br />Also, utilitarianism is all about maximizing "happiness". But the problem is that there is no concrete definition of happiness, which is to say that it varies from individual to individual. The question becomes "who's happiness"? It is not really possible to statistically measure "happiness" in the first place. In practise, therefore, it seems as if the utilitarian is stuck either arbitrarily trying to measure things in terms of their own definition of happiness (which makes way for authoritarianism), or playing the role of a value-free observer that accepts whatever a person's own definition of happiness is (which makes way for hedonism). Another route that may be taken is to define happiness by whatever a majority defines it as (which makes way for persecution of the minority).<br /><br />Furthermore, and this is very important to stress, happiness is not the criteria by which we measure right and wrong. The happiness of a murderer may come from murdering, but surely we do not condone murder simply because it brings happiness to the murderer. Pleasure may seem like a good goal to strive for, but some people may find pleasure at the expense of others. In some cases, commonly accepted morality may very well require that people abstain from acting out of primitive desire for pleasure. A man may find pleasure from sexual intercourse, but in order to be ethical they must abstain from simply forcibly mounting every woman they see. And if utility is defined more in terms of general economic well-being, a person may steal in order to stay alive, but in order to remain ethical even the most impoverished person must abstain from robbing banks.<br /><br />In short, it is impossible to consistantly apply any ethical principle using utilitarianism as a method of looking at things. Any ethical consideration can in theory be overturned using utilitarianism so long as it is percieved or can be sufficiently proven to be net beneficial or bring happiness. At best, utilitarianism can be used to show how certain actions will have negative or unintended consequences. It can have a limited use in this respect. But as an ethical system it is a nightmare. Pragmatism becomes more important than principle and even if a long-term view is held a utilitarian may find ways to attempt to justify just about anything. In particular, so long as something can be shown to benefit a larger amount of people, the individual or minority is fair game to be trampled upon in a utilitarian world. This is fundamentally determental to the cause of individualism.<br /><br />A fundamental requirement for justice is universality, which is to say a logically consistant application of principles to each individual. Utilitarianism cannot possibly consistantly apply a principle to each individual, for it seeks a numerical maximization of variables in which whoever has the most numbers wins. It turns everything into a numbers game, into a game theory of a sort. There is a fundamental clash between universal justice and bare consequentialism. Universal justice proclaims that certain things are wrong regaurdless of the consequences and regaurdless of the amount of people involved in or benefited by them; even if it's one individual against the world. Utilitarianism, on the other hand, essentially proclaims that anything is right provided that it has good consequences; even if the individual or minority must be forced to sacrifice for a "greater good" (whatever that means).<br /><br />One's options are as clear as a bell: either ethics are definitive and universal, or they are prone to juxtoposition and subordination based on consequences and sheer pleasure.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-57409075480608274512007-08-11T22:40:00.000-04:002007-08-11T22:44:37.367-04:00State Interferance<a href="http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=345&layout=html#chapter_32122">State Interferance by William Gramn Sumner</a><br /><br />[Excerpted from "War and other Essays"]<br /><br />I desire, in this paper, to give an explanation and justification of extreme prejudice against State interference, and I wish to begin with a statement from history of the effect upon the individual of various forms of the State.<br /><a name="a_612091"></a><br />It appears, from the best evidence we possess, according to the most reasonable interpretation which has been given to it, that the internal organization of society owes its cohesion and intensity to the necessity of meeting pressure from without. A band of persons, bound by ties of neighborhood or kin, clung together in order to maintain their common interests against a similar band of their neighbors. The social bond and the common interest were at war with individual interests. They exerted coercive power to crush individualism, to produce uni-fortuity, to proscribe dissent, to make private judgment a social offense, and to exercise drill and discipline.<br /><a name="a_612092"></a><br />In the Roman State the internal discipline gave victory in contests with neighbors. Each member of the Roman community was carried up by the success of the body of which he was a member to the position of a world-conqueror. Then the Roman community split up into factions to quarrel for the spoils of the world, until the only escape from chronic civil war and anarchy was a one-man power, which, however, proved only a mode of disintegration and decay, not a cure for it. It has often been remarked with astonishment how lightly men and women of rank at Rome in the first century of our era held their lives. They seem to have been ready to open their veins at a moment's notice, and to quit life upon trivial occasion. If we can realize what life must have been in such a State we can, perhaps, understand this. The Emperor was the State. He was a mortal who had been freed from all care for the rights of others, and his own passions had all been set free. Any man or woman in the civilized world was at the mercy of his caprices. Anyone who was great enough to attract his attention, especially by the possession of anything which mortals covet, held his life at the utmost peril. Since the Empire was the world, there was no escape save to get out of the world. Many seemed to hold escape cheap at that price.<br /><a name="a_612093"></a><br />At first under the Empire the obscure people were safe. They probably had little to complain of, and found the Empire gay and beneficent; but it gradually and steadily absorbed every rank and interest into its pitiless organization. At last industry and commerce as well as all civil and social duties took the form of State functions. The ideal which some of our modern social philosophers are preaching was realized. The State was an ethical person, in the strictest sense of the word, when it was one man and when every duty and interest of life was construed towards him. All relations were regulated according to the ethics of the time, which is, of course, all that ethical regulation ever can amount to. Every duty of life took the form and name of an “obse-quium”; that is, of a function in the State organism.<br /><a name="a_612094"></a><br />Now the most important relation of the citizen to the State is that of a soldier, and the next is that of a taxpayer, and when the former loses importance the latter becomes the chief. Accordingly the obsequia of the citizens in the later centuries were regulated in such a way that the citizen might contribute most to the fiscus. He was not only made part of a machine, but it was a tax-paying machine, and all his hopes, rights, interests, and human capabilities were merged in this purpose of his existence. Slavery, as we ordinarily understand the term, died out, but it gave way to a servitude of each to all, when each was locked tight in an immense and artificial organization of society. Such must ever be the effect of merging industry in the State. Every attempt of the Roman handicraftsmen to better themselves was a breach of the peace; disobedience was rebellion; resistance was treason; running away was desertion.<br /><a name="a_612095"></a><br />Here, then, we have a long history, in which the State power first served the national interest in contest with outside powers, and then itself became a burden and drew all the life out of the subject population.<br /><a name="a_612096"></a><br />In the Middle Ages a society which had been resolved into its simple elements had to re-form. The feudal form was imposed upon it by the conditions and elements of the case. It was as impossible for a man to stand alone as it had been on the hunting or pastoral stage of life or on the lower organizations of civilization. There was once more necessity to yield personal liberty in order to get protection against plunder from others, and in order to obtain this protection it was necessary to get into a group and to conform to its organization. Here again the same difficulty soon presented itself. Protection against outside aggression was won, but the protecting power itself became a plunderer.<br /><a name="a_612097"></a><br />This oppression brought about guild and other organizations for mutual defense. Sometimes these organizations themselves won civil power; sometimes they were under some political sovereign, but possessed its sanction. The system which grew up was one of complete regulation and control. The guilds were regulated in every function and right. The masters, journeymen, and apprentices were regulated in their relations and in all their rights and duties. The work of supplying a certain community with any of the necessaries of life was regarded as a privilege and was monopolized by a certain number. The mediaeval system, however, did not allow this monopoly to be exploited at the expense of consumers, according to the good will of the holders of it. The sovereign interfered constantly, and at all points, wherever its intervention was asked for. It fixed prices, but it also fixed wages, regulated kinds and prices of raw materials, prescribed the relation of one trade to another, forbade touting, advertising, rivalry; regulated buying and selling by merchants; protected consumers by inspection; limited importations, but might force production and force sales.<br /><a name="a_612098"></a><br />Here was plainly a complete system, which had a rational motive and a logical method. The object was to keep all the organs of society in their accepted relations to each other and to preserve all in activity in the measure of the social needs. The plan failed entirely. It was an impossible undertaking, even on the narrow arena of a medimval city. The ordinances of an authority which stood ready to interfere at any time and in any way were necessarily inconsistent and contradictory. Its effect upon those who could not get into the system — that is, upon the vagabondage of the period — has never, so far as I know, been studied carefully, although that is the place to look for its most distinct social effect. The most interesting fact about it, however, ig that the privilege of one age became the bondage of the next and that the organization which had grown up for the mutual defense of the artisans lost its original purpose and became a barrier to the rise of the artisan class. The organization was a fetter on individual enterprise and success.<br /><a name="a_612099"></a><br />The fact should not be overlooked here that, if we are to have the mediaeval system of regulation revived, we want it altogether. That system was not, in intention, unjust. According to its light it aimed at the welfare of all. It was not its motive to give privileges, but a system of partial interference is sure to be a system of favoritism and injustice. It is a system of charters to some to plunder others. A mediaeval sovereign would never interfere with railroads on behalf of shippers and stop there. He would fix the interest on bonds and other fixed charges. He would, upon appeal, regulate the wages of employees. He would fix the price of coal and other supplies. He would never admit that he was the guardian of one interest more than another, and he would interfere over and over again as often as stockholders, bondholders, employees, shippers, etc., could persuade him that they had a grievance. He would do mischief over and Over again but he would not do intentional injustice.<br /><a name="a_612100"></a><br />After the mediaeval system broke up and the great modern States formed, the royal power became the representative and champion of national interests in modern Europe, and it established itself in approximately absolute power by; the fact that the interest of the nations to maintain themselves in the rivalry of States seemed the paramount interest. Within a few months we have seen modern Germany discard every other interest in order to respond to the supposed necessity of military defense. Not very long ago, in our Civil War, we refused to take account of anything else until the military task was accomplished.<br /><a name="a_612101"></a><br />In all these cases the fact appears that the interest of the individual and the social interest have been at war with each other, while, again, the interests of the individual in and through the society of which he is a member are inseparable from those of the society. Such are the two aspects of the relation of the unit and the whole which go to make the life of the race. The individual has an interest to develop all the personal elements there are in him. He wants to live himself out. He does not want to be planed down to a type or pattern. It is the interest of society that all the original powers it contains should be brought out to their full value. But the social movement is coercive and uniformitarian. Organization and discipline are essential to effective common action, and they crush out individual enterprise and personal variety. There is only one klud of cooperation which escapes this evil, and that is cooperation which is voluntary and automatic, under common impulses and natural laws. State control, however, is always necessary for national action in the family of nations and to prevent plunder by others, and men have never yet succeeded in getting it without falling under the necessity of submitting to plunder at home from those on whom they rely for defense abroad.<br /><a name="a_612102"></a><br />Now, at the height of our civilization and with the best light that we can bring to bear on our social relations, the problem is: Can we get from the State security for individuals to pursue happiness in and under it, and yet not have the State itself become a new burden and hindrance only a little better than the evil which it wards off?<br /><a name="a_612103"></a><br />It is only in the most recent times, and in such measure as the exigencies of external defense have been diminished by the partial abandonment of motives of plunder and conquest, that there has been a chance for individualism to grow. In the latest times the struggle for a relaxation of political bonds on behalf of individual liberty has taken the form of breaking the royal power and forcing the king to take his hands off. Liberty has hardly yet come to be popularly understood as anything else but republicanism or anti-royalty.<br /><a name="a_612104"></a><br />The United States, starting on a new continent, with full chance to select the old-world traditions which they would adopt, have become the representatives and champions in modern times of all the principles of individualism and personal liberty. We have had no neighbors to fear. We have had no necessity for stringent State discipline. Each one of us has been able to pursue happiness in his own way, unhindered by the demands of a State which would have worn out our energies by expenditure simply in order to maintain the State. The State has existed of itself. The one great exception, the Civil War, only illustrates the point more completely per contra. The old Jeffersonian party rose to power and held it, because it conformed to the genius of the country and bore along the true destinies of a nation situated as this one was. It is the glory of the United States, and its calling in history, that it shows what the power of personal liberty is — what self-reliance, energy, enterprise, hard sense men can develop when they have room and liberty and when they are emancipated from the burden of traditions and faiths which are nothing but the accumulated follies and blunders of a hundred generations of “statesmen.”<br /><a name="a_612105"></a><br />It is, therefore, the highest product of political institutions so far that they have come to a point where, under favorable circumstances, individualism is, under their protection, to some extent possible. If political institutions can give security for the pursuit of happiness by each individual, according to his own notion of it, in his own way, and by his own means, they have reached their perfection. This fact, however, has two aspects. If no man can be held to serve another man's happiness, it follows that no man can call on another to serve his happiness. The different views of individualism depend on which of these aspects is under observation. What seems to be desired now is a combination of liberty for all with an obligation of each to all. That is one of the forms in which we are seeking a social philosopher's stone.<br /><a name="a_612106"></a><br />The reflex influence which American institutions have had on European institutions is well known. We have had to take as well as give. When the United States put upon their necks the yoke of a navigation and colonial system which they had just revolted against, they showed how little possible it is, after all, for men to rise above the current notions of their time, even when geographical and economic circumstances favor their emancipation. We have been borrowing old-world fashions and traditions all through our history, instead of standing firmly by the political and social philosophy of which we are the standard-bearers.<br /><a name="a_612107"></a><br />So long as a nation has not lost faith in itself it is possible for it to remodel its institutions to any extent. If it gives way to sentimentalism, or sensibility, or political mysticism, or adopts an affectation of radicalism, or any other ism, or molds its institutions so as to round out to a more complete fulfillment somebody's theory of the universe, it may fall into an era of revolution and political insecurity which will break off the continuity of its national life and make orderly and secure progress impossible. Now that the royal power is limited, and that the old military and police States are in the way of transition to jural States, we are promised a new advance to democracy. What is the disposition of the new State as regards the scope of its power? It unquestionably manifests a disposition to keep and use the whole arsenal of its predecessors. The great engine of political abuse has always been political mysticism. Formerly we were told of the divine origin of the State and the divine authority of rulers. The mystical contents of “'sovereignty” have always provided an inexhaustible source of dogma and inference for any extension of State power. The new democracy having inherited the power so long used against it, now shows every disposition to use that power as ruthlessly as any other governing organ ever has used it.<br /><a name="a_612108"></a><br />We are told that the State is an ethical person. This is the latest form of political mysticism. Now, it is true that the State is an ethical person in just the same sense as a business firm, a joint stock corporation, or a debating society. It is not a physical person, but it may be a metaphysical or legal person, and as such it has an entity and is an independent subject of rights and duties. Like the other ethical persons, however, the State is just good for what it can do to serve the interests of man, and no more. Such is far from being the meaning and utility of the dogma that the State is an ethical person. The dogma is needed as a source from which can be spun out again contents of phrases and deductions previously stowed away in it. It is only the most modern form of dogmatism devised to sacrifice the man to the institution which is not good for anything except so far as it can serve the man.<br /><a name="a_612109"></a><br />One of the newest names for the coming power is the “omnicracy.” Mankind has been trying for some thousands of years to find the right ocracy. None of those which have yet been tried have proved satisfactory. We want a new name on which to pin new hopes, for mankind “never is, but always to be blessed.” Omnicracy has this much sense in it, that no one of the great dogmas of the modem political creed is true if it is affirmed of anything less than the whole population, man, woman, child, and baby. When the propositions are enunciated in this sense they are philosophically grand and true. For instance, all the propositions about the “people” are grand and true if we mean by the people every soul in the community, with all the interests and powers which give them an aggregate will and power, with capacity to suffer or to work; but then, also, the propositions remain grand abstractions beyond the realm of practical utility. On the other hand, those propositions cannot be made practically available unless they are affirmed of some limited section of the population, for instance, a majority of the males over twenty-one; but then they are no longer true in philosophy or in fact.<br /><a name="a_612110"></a><br />Consequently, when the old-fashioned theories of State interference are applied to the new democratic State, they turn out to be simply a device for setting separate interests in a struggle against each other inside the society. It is plain on the face of all the great questions which are offered to us as political questions today, that they are simply struggles of interests for larger shares of the product of industry. One mode of dealing with this distribution would be to leave it to free contract under the play of natural laws. If we do not do this, and if the State interferes with the distribution, how can we stop short of the mediaeval plan of reiterated and endless interference, with constant diminution of the total product to be divided?<br /><a name="a_612111"></a><br />We have seen above what the tyranny was in the decay of the Roman Empire, when each was in servitude to all; but there is one form of that tyranny which may be still worse. That tyranny will'be realized when the same system of servitudes is established in a democratic state; when a man's neighbors are his masters; when the “ethical power of public opinion” bears down upon him at all hours and as to all matters; when his place is assigned to him and he is held in it, not by an emperor or his satellites, who cannot be everywhere all the time, but by the other members of the “village community” who can.<br /><a name="a_612112"></a><br />So long as the struggle for individual liberty took the form of a demand that the king or the privileged classes should take their hands off, it was popular and was believed to carry with it the cause of justice and civilization. Now that the governmental machine is brought within everyone's reach, the seduction of power is just as masterful over a democratic faction as ever it was over king or barons. No governing organ has yet abstained from any function because it acknowledged itself ignorant or incompetent. The new powers in the State show no disposition to do it. Nevertheless, the activity of the State, under the new democratic system, shows itself every year more at the mercy of clamorous factions, and legislators find themselves constantly under greater pressure to act, not by their deliberate judgment of what is expedient, but in such a way as to quell clamor, although against their judgment of public interests. It is rapidly becoming the chief art of the legislator to devise measures which shall sound as if they satisfied clamor while they only cheat it.<br /><a name="a_612113"></a><br />There are two things which are often treated as if they were identical, which are as far apart as any two things in the field of political philosophy can be: (1) That everyone should be left to do as he likes, so far as possible, without any other social restraints than such as are unavoidable for the peace and order of society. (2) That “the people” should be allowed to carry out their will without any restraint from constitutional institutions. The former means that each should have his own way with his own interests; the latter, that any faction which for the time is uppermost should have its own way with all the rest.<br /><a name="a_612114"></a><br />One result of all the new State interference is that the State is being superseded in vast domains of its proper work. While it is reaching out on one side to fields of socialistic enterprise, interfering in the interests of parties in the industrial organism, assuming knowledge of economic laws which nobody possesses, taking ground as to dogmatic notions of justice which are absurd, and acting because it does not know what to do, it is losing its power to give peace, order, and security. The extra-legal power and authority of leaders over voluntary orgenizations of men throughout a community who are banded together in order to press their interests at the expense of other interests, and who go to the utmost verge of the criminal law, if they do not claim immunity from it, while obeying an authority which acts in secret and without responsibility, is a phenomenon which shows the inadequacy of the existing State to guarantee rights and give security. The boycott and the plan of campaign are certainly not industrial instrumentalities, and it is not yet quite certain whether they am violent and criminal instrumentalities, by which some men coerce other men in matters of material interests. If we turn our minds to the victims of these devices, we see that they do not find in the modern State that security for their interests under the competition of life which it is the first and unquestioned duty of the State to provide. The boycotted man is deprived of the peaceful enjoyment of rights which the laws and institutions of his country allow him, and he has no redress. The State has forbidden all private war on the ground that it will give a remedy for wrongs, and that private redress would disturb the peaceful prosecution of their own interests by other members of the community who are not parties to the quarrel; but we have seen an industrial war paralyze a whole section for weeks, and it was treated almost as a right of the parties that they might fight it out, no matter at what cost to bystanders. We have seen representative bodies of various voluntary associations meet and organize by the side of the regular constitutional organs of the State, in order to deliberate on proposed measures and to transmit to the authorized representatives of the people their approval or disapproval of the propositions, and it scarcely caused a comment. The plutocracy invented the lobby, but the democracy here also seems determined to better the instruction. There are various opinions as to what the revolution is which is upon us, and as to what it is which is about to perish. I do not see anything else which is in as great peril as representative institutions or the constitutional State.<br /><a name="a_612115"></a><br />I therefore maintain that it is at the present time a matter of patriotism and civic duty to resist the extension of State interference. It is one of the proudest results of political growth that we have reached the point where individualism is possible. Nothing could better show the merit and value of the institutions which we have inherited than the fact that we can afford to play with all these socialistic and semi-socialistic absurdities. They have no great importance until the question arises: Will a generation which can be led away into this sort of frivolity be able to transmit intact institutions which were made only by men of sterling thought and power, and which can be maintained only by men of the same type? I am familiar with the irritation and impatience with which remonstrances on this matter are received. Those who know just how the world ought to be reconstructed are, of course, angry when they are pushed aside as busybodies. A group of people who assail the legislature with a plan for regulating their neighbor's mode of living are enraged at the “dogma” of non-interference. The publicist who has been struck by some of the superficial roughnesses in the collision of interests which must occur in any time of great industrial activity, and who has therefore determined to waive the objections to State interference, if he can see it brought to bear on his pet reform, will object to absolute principles.<br /><br />For my part, I have never seen that public or private principles were good for anything except when there seemed to be a motive for breaking them. Anyone who has studied a question as to which the solution is yet wanting may despair of the power of free contract to solve it. I have examined a great many cases of proposed interference with free contract, and the only alternative to free contract which I can find is “heads I win, tails you lose” in favor of one party or the other. I am familiar with the criticisms which some writers claim to make upon individualism, but the worst individualism I can find in history is that of the Jacobins, and I believe that it is logically sound that the anti-social vices should be most developed whenever the attempt is made to put socialistic theories in practice. The only question at this point is: Which may we better trust, the play of free social forces or legislative and administrative interferenceP This question is as pertinent for those who expect to win by interference as for others, for whenever we try to get paternalized we only succeed in getting policed.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-2535459699176162882007-08-11T14:25:00.000-04:002007-08-11T14:26:16.470-04:00Frank Chodorov on Class Struggles and Systematic Inequalities"...the real struggle that disturbs the enjoyment of life is not between economic classes but between Society as a whole and the political power which imposes itself on Society. The class-struggle theory is a blind alley. True, people of like economic interests will gang up for the purpose of taking advantage of others. But within these classes there is as much rivalry as there is between the classes.When, however, you examine the advantage which one class obtains over another you find that the basis of it is political power. It is impossible for one person to exploit another, for one class to exploit another, without the aid of law and the force to back up the law. Examine any monopoly and you will find it resting on the State. So that the economic and social injustices we complain of are not due to economic inequalities, but to the political means that bring about these inequalities.If peace is to be brought into the social order it is not by accentuating a class struggle, but by restraining the basic cause of it; that is, the political power." -- Frank ChodorovBrainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-58474129887708148452007-08-10T23:21:00.000-04:002007-08-10T23:22:15.840-04:00Agorist Class Theory<a href="http://agorism.info/docs/AgoristClassTheory.pdf">http://agorism.info/docs/AgoristClassTheory.pdf</a>Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-34928838453228255262007-08-08T13:38:00.000-04:002007-08-08T20:34:03.742-04:00Tensional ValuesAn interesting topic is which cultural values are compatible or incompatible with libertarianism. On one hand, some Libertarians such as Walter Block maintain that libertarianism does not require any particular cultural values, that cultural questions are irrelevant to libertarianism. On the other hand, other libertarians believe that libertarianism will require some rather specific cultural values in order to be sucessful. Perhaps a position somewhere in between the two is the most sensible.<br /><br />Libertarianism is, in a sense, profoundly cosmopolitan, which is to say that people of all sorts of cultural and religious backgrounds can co-exist under libertarian principles and accept them. It is possible for libertarians to disagree sharply with eachother in their cultural world-views while remaining entirely consistant with libertarian principles. A libertarian can be an atheist, a Christian, a racist, an anti-racist, an urbanite, ruralite/country-dweller and so on. So long as such groups persue their ends within the context of non-aggression, they are perfectly compatible with libertarianism.<br /><br />On the other hand, it is undeniable that certain cultural values may be more or less conductive to libertarianism. Some cultural values, while in theory not violations of libertarianism, may produce tension. A cultural value that produces tension can theoretically co-exist with libertarian principles, but there is a danger of the cultural value in question overriding libertarian considerations. In other words, some particular cultural tenets may lead some people to abandon the libertarian means towards desired ends. On the other hand, perhaps certain cultural values more easily lead people to application of libertarian principles than others.<br /><br />So what particular values are tensional with libertarianism? And which may more easily lead to libertarian conclusions? Let's take a look at some cultural values and see how compatible or incompatible they are.<br /><br /><strong>Religion</strong><br /><br />There are many religious libertarians, if anything simply because of the fact that most people are adherants of a particular religion. There is nothing inherently contradictary about being a religious libertarian so long as one persues their religious beliefs and advocacy within a voluntary context. Since religion is a highly interpretive thing, some people interpret their religions in a manner that sanctions a voluntary ethic, and may even interpret it as a sanction for anarchism (I've seen some rather intrigueing intepretations of Jesus as an anarchist).<br /><br />On the other hand, religions clearly have an authoritarian history. Religions may be prone to encourage absolute obedience to religious authorities, which has the potential to produce tension with libertarianism as it may manifest itself in politics as well. In many ways, religious institutions can be viewed as political institutions, and historically they have by the very least engaged in patronage with states. Religious zealotry may very well lead some people to support coercive measures against non-believers or wars, and hence abandonment of libertarianism.<br /><br />Psychologically speaking, a belief in a god is in many ways comparable to belief in a state. Religious fatalism, which is the idea that a diety controls all of our fates in a deterministic manner, can easily lead to political fatalism, which is the idea that the state controls our fates in a deterministic manner. Furthermore, people's religious beliefs are easily exploited by political figures in order to obtain obedience and participitation. In many ways, religions can be viewed as the spawn of states, for historically states have both created and relied upon religious beliefs in order to maintain their power, even to the extreme of regaurding the prime political leader as literally being a god.<br /><br />While religion can exist within a libertarian paradime, a libertarian society quite likely would experience a gradual diminishing in religious belief, or at least religious institutionalism, and given enough time it may even lead to the end of organized religion as we know it in a considerably long-term context. Already in our modern world, people have become more secularized, to the extent that medieval-style religious traditionalism isn't too popular even among many religious people. At least in the western world, while it has some proponents to be sure, religious traditionalism, absolutism and literalism is on its way out.<br /><br /><strong>Communalism</strong><br /><br />While many right-wing libertarians may protest the idea, there is nothing contradictary per se between certain types of communalism and libertarianism. It is true that libertarianism is generally an individualist phenomenon, but there are people who have some rather socialistic economic values that are willing to work within a voluntarist context. If someone genuinely wants to go form a hippie commune or an entirely worker owned firm in a libertarian society, so long as it is done voluntarily there is nothing we can do to stop them outside of persuasion. In this sense, it is possible to have "libertarian socialism", although the term does seem quite contradictary taken at face value.<br /><br />On the other hand, these collectivistic values may very well tend to produce some tension with libertarian principles. Very few socialists, even of the anarchistic variety, are actual voluntarists. On the contrary, most of such people actively advocate expropriation of the means of production by workers and the deliberate use of violence. Since they have adopted Karl Marx's fallicious class analysis, anyone who is identified as being within the capitalist class is apparently subject to having their property taken from them by the masses at large, if not murdered. Thus, all sorts of aggressions are condoned by such people.<br /><br />Afterall, how can a universal ban on the initiation of aggression be mantained when who exactly is the aggressor cannot be properly ascertained? If all people of relative wealth and success are considered as being aggressors, then aggression against them suddenly becomes "justified" as a defensive or retaliatory action. If one genuinely believes that the factory equipment is the rightful property of all the workers of a factory, and it currently is in the control of a buisiness owner, then the initiation of force against the current owner of the factory becomes condoned. The violent methods by which communists tend to persue the end of their "worker's revolution" are clearly incompatible with libertarianism.<br /><br /><strong>Territorialism</strong><br /><br />Territorialism is a person's identification with a particular territory of land beyond that which they actually control. That is to say, people's identification with their town, their state and their nation is territorialism, for the individual is identifying themself with a territory that is external to them. Territorialism does not refer to, for example, one's sense of ownership of one's own home, for one's own home actually is an extension of oneself in a sense. The term territorialism refers to a sense of an extension of oneself over areas that clearly are not. At face value, this may seem innocent enough, but a closer look reveals some potential problems that can arise from this way of thinking.<br /><br />This way of thinking may lead people into thinking of themselves primarily as members of groups as opposed to independant individuals, and thus it tends towards groupism. It leads people to speak of an entire territory as if it actually were theirs, or as if it actually were collectively owned by everyone. For example, the simple statement "my country" taken literally implies that you actually own the entire territory of the country. And if one acts as if they own the entire territory, they will be prone to try to exercise control over that which is not really theirs to exlude people from entering or making use of their "country" or "community".<br /><br />Consequentially, territorialism may lead people to condone aggressions against others in the name of the "nation" or "community". This can most clearly be seen in some people's attitudes towards immigration, as well as the ideology that leads some people into support their government's wars, under the notion that the state is protecting their "country" against a bad-guy "country". But this becomes mighty anthropromorphic, treating territories of land as if they were individuals, while simultaneously ignoring the diversity of traits between the people within a given territory of land. This way of thinking has lead many well-intended people down an unlibertarian path.<br /><br /><strong>Racism</strong><br /><br />It may come as a surprise to some, but it is theoretically possible to be a libertarian racist. They aren't the majority, but they exist. Technically so long as they persue their racism within a voluntary context, it is completely compatible with libertarianism. They can refuse to invite or allow racial minorities onto their property all they want under a libertarian order. What they cannot do is use the law towards these ends or control what other people can do with their own property with regaurds to racial interrelations.<br /><br />Unfortunately, especially for their victims, the vast majority of racists are not willing to work within a voluntary context. The history of racism is filled with the use of the government to enforce a separatist policy onto society, lynchings and the general use of force against racial minorities. Much in the same way that many communists cannot resist condoning violence against "capitalists", for the most part racist groups are all about institutionally engaging in coercion or force against the racial groups that they do not like.<br /><br />In a libertarian order, a racist policy from a buisiness standpoint is suicidal. Consequentially, racial separatism, to the extent that it may exist at all, would be highly disincentivized and unpopular. In a Spencerian sense, people have fortunately developed more and more "moral sense" with respect to racial relations, and in a libertarian order there is no reason why this trend will not continue until racism is little more than a thing of the past. People have nothing to gain by isolating themselves from eachother in the way that racists desire.<br /><br /><strong>Tolerance</strong><br /><br />In many ways, tolerance could be viewed as a prerequisite for libertarianism, for one must be able to tolerate voluntary relationships between people of all sorts of different religious beliefs, ethnicities and so on. A sense of tolerance most certainly can lead one to see why there is something wrong with forcing disagreeing groups to associate or disassociate with eachother. Indeed, in order to be a consistant libertarian, one must be able to tolerate a whole host of things that one may disagree with so long as they are voluntary. As the old Voltaire saying goes, "I disagree with what you say, but will fight for your right to say it".<br /><br />On the other hand, there is a sense in which tolerance can be taken too far. What if someone's cultural practises includes something that blatantly involves the initiation of aggression? What if the sacrifice of children is involved in a given group's cultural or religious practises, against the will of the children? Why should such a thing be tolerated? If the basic non-aggression principle is accepted, then logically one must oppose such things. It doesn't make sense to be tolerant just for the sake of it. There may come situations where tolerance breaks down as a value. Barring that, it does seem to be quite conductive to libertarianism though.<br /><br /><strong>Agrarianism and Environmentalism</strong><br /><br />Obviously, there is nothing contradictary between libertarianism and a rural lifestyle. One could choose to live a rural life as one pleases. There is also nothing contradictary between libertarianism and desiring an environmentally safe and naturalistic lifestyle. This too would be nothing but a voluntary choice. If one wants to live the life of a hermit, or cabin-life in the woods, or a teepee in the middle of the desert, one is perfectly free to go do just that in a libertarian order. And the developement of environmentally sound technology is perfectly compatible with libertarianism, and indeed can only genuinely arise as a consequence of the market.<br /><br />A potential problem that may arise from a rural world-view is opposition to the advancement of industry and technology, and urban growth, and thus one may be lead to become rather luddite. The term "burgeiosie" could be seen as coming from the term "burg", which means city. The rise of cities and industrialization was in some ways opposed by rural people historically, for it represents a move away from their traditional way of living. A luddite attitude may develope among those with a naturalistic or rural world-view, in which technology is viewed as corrupting. Consequentially, an urge arises to supress or destroy technology. Combine this attitude with the means of modern politics, and we have a potentially dangerous phenomenon indeed.<br /><br />The ideology of contemporary environmentalism is very troublesome because it seems, at base, to be opposed to industrial living and modern technology itself. Industrial civilization is portrayed as inherently destroying the planet itself and infinitely corrupting of the human soul. While it is theoretically possible to hold such irrational views and persue environmentalist goals within a libertarian context, contemporary environmentalists tend to wish to impose their ideals on everyone else. Most modern environmentalists clearly have a political agenda and are not willing to keep it personal and voluntary.<br /><br /><strong>Conclusion</strong><br /><br />So after overviewing the possible tensions that certain values may create, what particular values may be potential prerequisites for a libertarian social order? I would say the following: a healthly dose of cultural tolerance or cosmopolitanism, a sense of aterritorialism/non-territorialism, secularism (one can technically be a secular religious person), individualism and industrialism. These things may not necessarily be absolute requirements, but it seems to me that they are much more conductive to a libertarian order than ideologies such as racism, communalism and religious traditionalism. With the advancement of technology, a sense of modernity seems necessary. With the inevitable intermingling of ethnicities, a sense of racial tolerance seems necessary. With the process of secularization, liberation from the constraints of religion seems necessary. And with the increased decentralization of society, aterritorialism seems necessary.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-69628638211483835972007-08-07T06:48:00.000-04:002007-08-07T06:52:28.557-04:00The Effects of War on Libertyby <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory143.html">Anthony Gregory</a> over at LewRockwell.com<br /><br />Controversy on war and foreign policy still persists within some libertarian circles. The apparent difficulty seems to come with the assumption that the proper antiwar libertarian position is just too easy, just too simple – there has to be more to it than this. This assumption is implicit in such arguments for intervention as the ones seen in Randy Barnett’s <a href="http://blog.mises.org/archives/006901.asp">widely</a> <a href="http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2004">criticized</a> Wall Street Journal <a href="http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010344">article</a> from July.<br /><br />Libertarians are accustomed, when arguing against domestic policies, to point to the practical as well as the moral issues involved. While many libertarians see themselves as primarily "consequentialist," on the one hand, or "moralist," on the other hand, all libertarians enjoy the benefit of a political philosophy with very strong arguments both practical and ethical. It is a beauty not just of libertarianism, but of human nature and the world around us, that what is moral is so very often what works. If slavery were actually economically efficient for society as a whole – which it isn’t – it would make for a sadder world and a harder time for libertarians. If property rights were efficient but ran counter to any consistently applicable ethical theory, it would also pose problems.<br /><br />It is a wonder, then, that many who favor liberty, spontaneous order, voluntary human action, free trade and markets, and as little government as humanly and practically possible, do not see the full force of both the ethical and practical arguments against an interventionist foreign policy. In war, many friends of liberty have been tempted into siding with big government, with central planning, and with collectivist, rather than individualist, ethics. This exception to libertarian theory and ethics in the realm of foreign policy is a peculiar blind spot, and one that unfortunately has serious and negative implications for our work for liberty, since the warfare state has most likely been the biggest, most dangerous, most expansive and most disastrous government enterprise in modern American history.<br /><br />Libertarian Ethics, War and Foreign Policy<br /><br />Libertarians believe that individuals have a right to live their lives according to their own free will, so long as they do not initiate force on other individuals with the same right. From this moral first principle flows our entire social and legal theory – property rights; the right to self-defense; opposition to the modern leviathan state; and respect for civil liberties, due process and other checks on expansive government. Self-ownership and free self-determination form the ethical buttress of our case for free markets, free trade and personal liberty.<br /><br />Because of our stern support for private property, libertarians view expropriation and trespass to be violations of human rights. Most people accept the basic premise that you should not steal from or trespass against your neighbor, but libertarians apply this ethic to the state. Taxation, being a coerced extraction of wealth, ultimately at the point of a gun, is a form of theft, and thus morally wrong from a libertarian standpoint.<br /><br />Many government programs do not violate liberty in themselves – few people are forced, for example, to go to a public library or a government-funded university. However, even such relatively peaceful programs are funded coercively, through tax dollars. Libertarians oppose government spending on social programs, by virtue that it is government theft from individuals. We might even favor what a social program is attempting to achieve – a library is hardly objectionable to most people, in itself – but we must oppose the power of the state to forcibly seize the rightful property of some and give it to others. Even those of us who believe in a minimal government believe its taxing power should be shrunk as much as possible, with the ultimate ideal of eliminating it and replacing all taxation with voluntary financing.<br /><br />War is typically an expensive government program. Estimates for how much the Iraq war alone will come to cost the American people range from about $400 billion to a trillion or more. According to economist Robert Higgs, <a href="http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1253">the defense budget is even far larger than we might think</a>, since so much of the warfare state’s costs are hidden as expenditures in other department budgets or "off-budget" items. Furthermore, Americans are still paying the debt for past warfare state spending. We are looking at more than a trillion dollars a year spent on the warfare state – almost 10% of the economy’s yearly output. At other times, the warfare state has cost much, much more as a percentage of the economy. During World War II, it was at about 40%.<br /><br />By what moral principle can libertarians defend these enormous tax expenditures? More than $3,000 per American per year is being taken by force for the warfare state, no less than if that money were spent on libraries, food stamps or other public projects libertarians oppose. Every American taxpayer who opposes the war, for moral, religious, practical or whatever reasons, is being compelled to fund something against his conscience and judgment. This alone – the taxing side of the warfare state – presents huge problems for any libertarian who continues to attempt to reconcile his libertarian ethics and support for a large military establishment.<br /><br />But when it comes to foreign policy, the moral issues go far, far beyond those of tax dollars. People – many innocents included – <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory80.html">are killed in war</a>. The government bombs neighborhoods knowing that it will kill hundreds or thousands of innocents. Infrastructure, private and public but in no case owned by the attacking government, is destroyed. Homes are invaded and blown to bits. Children are slaughtered. This isn’t all just what happens when particularly criminal soldiers commit atrocious individual crimes of rape, violence and torture – which also predictably happens to a grotesque degree during war. Most of the killing is just part of the policy. Bombing Baghdad or Belgrade has what legal theorists might call a "substantial certainty" of killing innocent people. Modern war is in fact in practically every case an example of mass murder. It must be opposed by the libertarian first and foremost for this reason. For not just Americans have individual rights to life, liberty and property; so too do all foreign non-aggressors, and so killing them, which is a predictable outcome of today’s typical military tactics, is gravely immoral according to libertarian ethics.<br /><br />Some argue that when the fight is against a truly ghastly foreign regime, any innocents killed by the supposedly "good" government of the U.S. are "collateral damage." The true aggressor, according to this argument, is the enemy regime, not the U.S. government, which is acting in supposed defense of Americans.<br /><br />One response is that historically, in most of its wars, the U.S. government has invaded or attacked a country that never attacked or credibly threatened to attack Americans on U.S. soil. Even by a collectivist analysis, whereby we look at nations, rather than individuals, when assigning guilt, the U.S. has more often than not been an aggressor.<br /><br />However, to the libertarian, this is all of secondary importance. Libertarianism concerns individual rights and individual actions. States, nations, communities and so forth are abstractions and social constructs which do not act independently of the individuals they comprise. Only individuals act and only individuals have ethics or rights, and so it is a violation of an innocent person’s rights to bomb him, even if the government he lives under is aggressive and tyrannical. Certainly, the U.S. government was itself quite aggressive in the Middle East before 9/11, yet that in no way legitimized the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which killed innocent Americans for the crimes of their government. So, too, is it immoral to bomb a country with the substantial certainty that it will kill innocent foreigners, even if their government is aggressive.<br /><br />Central Planning and War<br /><br />Many will argue that these high moral principles are just impractical to the question of war, and that, furthermore, the U.S. government’s wars in particular have on balance protected more than violated the lives and liberty of a greater number of individuals, including foreigners "liberated" by U.S. wars. This is a collectivist ethical calculus and incompatible with libertarian ethics, but it also neglects the powerful practical libertarian arguments against government intervention and central planning. In fact, as experience and economic theory both show, the government is no more competent at centrally planning the protection of freedom and peace worldwide than it is at producing effective solutions to social problems in the domestic sphere.<br /><br />Socialism fundamentally doesn’t work, as Ludwig von Mises revealed, because the state, as owner of the means of production, cannot make rational economic calculations. Without private ownership and exchange, there are no prices, and without prices there is no effective means to determine how and where to divert resources to their most urgent use. Mises also pointed out that one intervention in the economy often causes distortions that are later addressed by further interventions, causing yet more problems, and so forth.<br /><br />The U.S. government’s attempts at collective security on the grand scale seen throughout the last century have amounted to a gigantic socialist experiment, and have revealed in foreign policy the failings of central planning that Mises identified as endemic in domestic intervention. The United States entered World War I and tilted the war toward the allies with great force, encouraging the harsh treatment of Germany after the war, leading to the backlash in Hitler’s rise to power and indeed the rise of fascism and communism – rather than a world safe for democracy – for the next decade. In World War II, the U.S. gave enormous support to its ally, the totalitarian Soviet Union, which ended up expanding and supposedly justifying the U.S. government’s horrifying actions in the Cold War. During the Cold War, the U.S. government supported anti-Communist strongmen regimes throughout the world, including dictators and future U.S. enemies, such as Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship, which became an enemy after the Cold War, and the Muhajadeen fighters in Afghanistan who became enemies after 9/11. The U.S. has found itself supporting Saddam against the Iranian theocrats, only later to oust Saddam to the benefit of the very same Iranian extremists. Now the U.S. is contemplating supporting Sunni thugs, once again, to counterbalance the Shiite threat. The madness goes on and on.<br /><br />To believe that the U.S. government can bring about liberty and peace worldwide is to have a faith in government planning – in socialism – more impenetrable to individualist reasoning and historical experience than we can find even at the most leftwing college campuses in America. It is fitting, then, if still ironic, that conservatives and even some self-identified libertarians have defended the Iraq war on the basis of how many schools, hospitals and other civil infrastructure the U.S. government has helped construct in Iraq – after it destroyed what was there before, of course. People who oppose government intervention in the U.S. economy somehow believe in government intervention in the Iraqi economy, trusting that what the Iraqis need is more U.S. socialism. This adds up, insofar as buying into the warfare state <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory98.html">leads one to inevitably have more faith in government planning per se</a>.<br /><br />Which raises another point. The advent of the warfare state means a reduction of economic liberty, an attack on free markets and a general move toward state power and away from freedom. With war come crushing taxes, business regulations, trade restrictions, new bureaucracies, myriad erosions of fundamental civil liberties, and even, at times, a nationalized, enslaved labor market in the form of the military draft.<br /><br />The Effects of War on Liberty<br /><br />The largest and most troubling expansions of government in America were mostly not the result of social programs. The Progressive Era and even the New Deal did not do as much as war to move America away from its relatively libertarian heritage of limited, checked and balanced government, free markets and individual liberty. The Civil War brought with it draconian censorship, a draft, inflation, the suspension of habeas corpus and a consolidated national government that signaled the end of true federalism. World War I introduced even wider censorship, conscription, deportations and spying. World War II gave us food rationing, conscription, citizen surveillance, censorship, and Japanese Internment. With the War on Terror, we have practically lost the Fourth Amendment and seen habeas corpus once again suspended. These are no light matters. The end of habeas corpus is itself a repudiation of a nearly millennium-long tradition in the Common Law. It was not terrorists who set the clock back to pre-Enlightenment times for American liberty – it was the warfare state.<br /><br />In the economic world alone, war has been a terrible disaster for American liberty. The so-called "American System" of corporate subsidies and economic nationalism, championed by Hamiltonians in the early years of the republic, finally became implemented during the Civil War. World War I saw the advent of thousands of new federal bureaus and regulatory agencies, some important ones of which were resurrected for the domestic New Deal. The national public university system is largely an outgrowth of the post–World War II military industrial complex. Price controls, medical socialism, income tax, central banking and so many other economic evils made their debut during, or came around to stay largely due to war.<br /><br />Aside from the violations of civil and economic liberties, war also brings about a moral debasement of the warring culture, which in turn weakens the people’s resistance to more government and more general incivility. As the moral standards become lowered as they usually do with war, utilitarianism takes hold and nearly anything is considered permissible so long as it is not as evil as the enemy, whose wickedness, for that matter, is often exaggerated.<br /><br />Imperialism and war have done more than anything to propel the collectivist ideologies characteristic of the 20th century. Once a people come to tolerate torture and chemical warfare against a country that has never even attacked them, they will generally be less vigilant when it comes to other government and private evils.<br /><br />In practice, U.S. war has been a plague on the lives, liberty and property of millions upon millions of Americans and foreigners. The inability of the state to centrally manage human affairs is no less prevalent in global crusades against evil or humanitarian nation-building adventures than it is in run-of-the-mill domestic matters. The failure of the Iraq war is not a consequence of bad management or unique incompetence in the Bush administration; it is representative of the expected failings of military socialism.<br /><br />This all should make sense to the libertarian. The moral principles of individual liberty that are so obviously compromised by the vociferous taxing, regulating and mass killing of the warfare state are complemented by libertarian economic and practical arguments against war. Not only is war a violation of the rights of the individual – which we must always oppose on moral grounds – but on balance, it has failed to produce security, much less peace and liberty, for most people it has touched.<br /><br />The libertarian bias, therefore, should always be against the next government war. History reveals a pattern of lies, deceit, abuse and tyranny surrounding virtually every U.S. war, yet many friends of liberty, who generally don’t trust politicians’ words or their power to do good in domestic affairs, for some reason trust them when it comes to war, the biggest and most corrupting of all government programs. Free-market theory explains why government projects usually fail to achieve their advertised goals, even when undertaken with good intentions. Libertarian morality tells us it is wrong to aggress against individuals, to trespass against their property rights or do them bodily harm if those individuals are not attacking us. The libertarian case against foreign intervention, the warfare state, and global governmental crusades for democracy or against evil is not, as some would have it, weaker than the libertarian argument against drug laws, the minimum wage or Social Security. Indeed, the libertarian case against war is clear, multifaceted and harmonious, internally consistent and reinforced by history. It is also the best case against war there is, which is why we must keep making it, <a href="http://www.anthonygregory.com/prowarlibertarians.html">in the name of peace and liberty</a>.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-16291149561208561732007-08-06T17:23:00.000-04:002007-08-06T17:30:59.377-04:00The New Toryismby <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer">Herbert Spencer</a><br />[Exerpted from "<a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Spencer/spnMvS1.html#The">Man Versus the State</a>" by Herbert Spencer, written in 1884]<br /><br />Most of those who now pass as Liberals, are Tories of a new type. This is a paradox which I propose to justify. That I may justify it, I must first point out what the two political parties originally were; and I must then ask the reader to bear with me while I remind him of facts he is familiar with, that I may impress on him the intrinsic natures of Toryism and Liberalism properly so called.<br /><br />Dating back to an earlier period than their names, the two political parties at first stood respectively for two opposed types of social organization, broadly distinguishable as the militant and the industrial—types which are characterized, the one by the régime of status, almost universal in ancient days, and the other by the régime of contract, which has become general in modern days, chiefly among the Western nations, and especially among ourselves and the Americans. If, instead of using the word "cooperation" in a limited sense, we use it in its widest sense, as signifying the combined activities of citizens under whatever system of regulation; then these two are definable as the system of compulsory cooperation and the system of voluntary cooperation. The typical structure of the one we see in an army formed of conscripts, in which the units in their several grades have to fulfil commands under pain of death, and receive food and clothing and pay, arbitrarily apportioned; while the typical structure of the other we see in a body of producers or distributors, who severally agree to specified payments in return for specified services, and may at will, after due notice, leave the organization if they do not like it.<br /><br />During social evolution in England, the distinction between these two fundamentally-opposed forms of cooperation, made its appearance gradually; but long before the names Tory and Whig came into use, the parties were becoming traceable, and their connexions with militancy and industrialism respectively, were vaguely shown. The truth is familiar that, here as elsewhere, it was habitually by town-populations, formed of workers and traders accustomed to cooperate under contract, that resistances were made to that coercive rule which characterizes cooperation under status. While, conversely, cooperation under status, arising from, and adjusted to, chronic warfare, was supported in rural districts, originally peopled by military chiefs and their dependents, where the primitive ideas and traditions survived. Moreover, this contrast in political leanings, shown before Whig and Tory principles became clearly distinguished, continued to be shown afterwards. At the period of the Revolution, "while the villages and smaller towns were monopolized by Tories, the larger cities, the manufacturing districts, and the ports of commerce, formed the strongholds of the Whigs." And that, spite of exceptions, the like general relation still exists, needs no proving.<br /><br />Such were the natures of the two parties as indicated by their origins. Observe, now, how their natures were indicated by their early doctrines and deeds. Whiggism began with resistance to Charles II and his cabal, in their efforts to re-establish unchecked monarchical power. The Whigs "regarded the monarchy as a civil institution, established by the nation for the benefit of all its members"; while with the Tories "the monarch was the delegate of heaven." And these doctrines involved the beliefs, the one that subjection of citizen to ruler was conditional, and the other that it was unconditional. Describing Whig and Tory as conceived at the end of the seventeenth century, some fifty years before he wrote his Dissertation on Parties, Bolingbroke says:<br /><br />The power and majesty of the people, and original contract, the authority and independency of Parliaments, liberty, resistance, exclusion, abdication, deposition; these were ideas associated, at that time, to the idea of a Whig, and supposed by every Whig to be incommunicable, and inconsistent with the idea of a Tory.<br /><br />Divine, hereditary, indefeasible right, lineal succession, passive obedience, prerogative, non-resistance, slavery, nay, and sometimes popery too, were associated in many minds to the idea of a Tory, and deemed incommunicable and inconsistent, in the same manner, with the idea of Whig.—Dissertation on Parties, p. 5.<br /><br />And if we compare these descriptions, we see that in the one party there was a desire to resist and decrease the coercive power of the ruler over the subject, and in the other party to maintain or increase his coercive power. This distinction in their aims—a distinction which transcends in meaning and importance all other political distinctions—was displayed in their early doings. Whig principles were exemplified in the Habeas Corpus Act, and in the measure by which judges were made independent of the Crown; in defeat of the Non-Resisting Test Bill, which proposed for legislators and officials a compulsory oath that they would in no case resist the king by arms; and, later, they were exemplified in the Bill of Rights, framed to secure subjects against monarchical aggressions. These Acts had the same intrinsic nature. The principle of compulsory cooperation throughout social life was weakened by them, and the principle of voluntary cooperation strengthened. That at a subsequent period the policy of the party had the same general tendency, is well shown by a remark of Mr. Green concerning the period of Whig power after the death of Anne:<br /><br />Before the fifty years of their rule had passed, Englishmen had forgotten that it was possible to persecute for differences of religion or to put down the liberty of the press, or to tamper with the administration of justice, or to rule without a Parliament.—Short History, p. 705.<br /><br />And now, passing over the war-period which closed the last century and began this, during which that extension of individual freedom previously gained was lost, and the retrograde movement towards the social type proper to militancy was shown by all kinds of coercive measures, from those which took by force the persons and property of citizens for war-purposes to those which suppressed public meetings and sought to gag the press, let us recall the general characters of those changes effected by Whigs or Liberals after the re-establishment of peace permitted revival of the industrial régime and return to its appropriate type of structure. Under growing Whig influence there came repeal of the laws forbidding combinations among artisans as well as of those which interfered with their freedom of travelling. There was the measure by which, under Whig pressure, Dissenters were allowed to believe as they pleased without suffering certain civil penalties; and there was the Whig measure, carried by Tories under compulsion, which enabled Catholics to profess their religion without losing part of their freedom. The area of liberty was extended by Acts which forbade the buying of negroes and the holding of them in bondage. The East India Company's monopoly was abolished, and trade with the East made open to all. The political serfdom of the unrepresented was narrowed in areas, both by the Reform Bill and the Municipal Reform Bill; so that alike generally and locally, the many were less under the coercion of the few. Dissenters, no longer obliged to submit to the ecclesiastical form of marriage, were made free to wed by a purely civil rite. Later came diminution and removal of restraints on the buying of foreign commodities and the employment of foreign vessels and foreign sailors; and later still the removal of those burdens on the press, which were originally imposed to hinder the diffusion of opinion. And of all these changes it is unquestionable that, whether made or not by Liberals themselves, they were made in conformity with principles professed and urged by Liberals.<br /><br />But why do I enumerate facts so well known to all? Simply because, as intimated at the outset, it seems needful to remind everybody what Liberalism was in the past, that they may perceive its unlikeness to the so-called Liberalism of the present. It would be inexcusable to name these various measures for the purpose of pointing out the character common to them, were it not that in our day men have forgotten their common character. They do not remember that, in one or other way, all these truly Liberal changes diminished compulsory cooperation throughout social life and increased voluntary cooperation. They have forgotten that, in one direction or other, they diminished the range of governmental authority, and increased the area within which each citizen may act unchecked. They have lost sight of the truth that in past times Liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus State-coercion.<br /><br />And now comes the inquiry—How is it that Liberals have lost sight of this? How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more into power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation? How is it that, either directly through its own majorities or indirectly through aid given in such cases to the majorities of its opponents, Liberalism has to an increasing extent adopted the policy of dictating the actions of citizens, and, by consequence, diminishing the range throughout which their actions remain free? How are we to explain this spreading confusion of thought which has led it, in pursuit of what appears to be public good, to invert the method by which in earlier days it achieved public good?<br /><br />Unaccountable as at first sight this unconscious change of policy seems, we shall find that it has arisen quite naturally. Given the unanalytical thought ordinarily brought to bear on political matters, and, under existing conditions, nothing else was to be expected. To make this clear some parenthetic explanations are needful.<br /><br />From the lowest to the highest creatures, intelligence progresses by acts of discrimination; and it continues so to progress among men, from the most ignorant to the most cultured. To class rightly—to put in the same group things which are of essentially the same natures, and in other groups things of natures essentially different—is the fundamental condition to right guidance of actions. Beginning with rudimentary vision, which gives warning that some large opaque body is passing near (just as closed eyes turned to the window, perceiving the shade caused by a hand put before them, tell us of something moving in front), the advance is to developed vision, which, by exactly-appreciated combinations of forms, colours, and motions, identifies objects at great distances as prey or enemies, and so makes it possible to improve the adjustments of conduct for securing food or evading death. That progressing perception of differences and consequent greater correctness of classing, constitutes, under one of its chief aspects, the growth of intelligence, is equally seen when we pass from the relatively simple physical vision to the relatively complex intellectual vision—the vision through the agency of which, things previously grouped by certain external resemblances or by certain extrinsic circumstances, come to be more truly grouped in conformity with their intrinsic structures or natures. Undeveloped intellectual vision is just as indiscriminating and erroneous in its classings as undeveloped physical vision. Instance the early arrangement of plants into the groups, trees, shrubs, and herbs: size, the most conspicuous trait, being the ground of distinction; and the assemblages formed being such as united many plants extremely unlike in their natures, and separated others that are near akin. Or still better, take the popular classification which puts together under the same general name, fish and shell-fish, and under the sub-name, shell-fish, puts together crustaceans and molluscs; nay, which goes further, and regards as fish the cetacean mammals. Partly because of the likeness in their modes of life as inhabiting the water, and partly because of some general resemblance in their flavours, creatures that are in their essential natures far more widely separated than a fish is from a bird, are associated in the same class and in the same sub-class.<br /><br />Now the general truth thus exemplified, holds throughout those higher ranges of intellectual vision concerned with things not presentable to the senses, and, among others, such things as political institutions and political measures. For when thinking of these, too, the results of inadequate intellectual faculty, or inadequate culture of it, or both, are erroneous classings and consequent erroneous conclusions. Indeed, the liability to error is here much greater; since the things with which the intellect is concerned do not admit of examination in the same easy way. You cannot touch or see a political institution: it can be known only by an effort of constructive imagination. Neither can you apprehend by physical perception a political measure: this no less requires a process of mental representation by which its elements are put together in thought, and the essential nature of the combination conceived. Here, therefore, still more than in the cases above named, defective intellectual vision is shown in grouping by external characters, or extrinsic circumstances. How institutions are wrongly classed from this cause, we see in the common notion that the Roman Republic was a popular form of government. Look into the early ideas of the French revolutionists who aimed at an ideal state of freedom, and you find that the political forms and deeds of the Romans were their models; and even now a historian might be named who instances the corruptions of the Roman Republic as showing us what popular government leads to. Yet the resemblance between the institutions of the Romans and free institutions properly so-called, was less than that between a shark and a porpoise—a resemblance of general external form accompanying widely different internal structures. For the Roman Government was that of a small oligarchy within a larger oligarchy: the members of each being unchecked autocrats. A society in which the relatively few men who had political power, and were in a qualified sense free, were so many petty despots, holding not only slaves and dependents but even children in a bondage no less absolute than that in which they held their cattle, was, by its intrinsic nature, more nearly allied to an ordinary despotism than to a society of citizens politically equal.<br /><br />Passing now to our special question, we may understand the kind of confusion in which Liberalism has lost itself: and the origin of those mistaken classings of political measures which have misled it—classings, as we shall see, by conspicuous external traits instead of by internal natures. For what, in the popular apprehension and in the apprehension of those who effected them, were the changes made by Liberals in the past? They were abolitions of grievances suffered by the people, or by portions of them: this was the common trait they had which most impressed itself on men's minds. They were mitigations of evils which had directly or indirectly been felt by large classes of citizens, as causes to misery or as hindrances to happiness. And since, in the minds of most, a rectified evil is equivalent to an achieved good, these measures came to be thought of as so many positive benefits; and the welfare of the many came to be conceived alike by Liberal statesmen and Liberal voters as the aim of Liberalism. Hence the confusion. The gaining of a popular good, being the external conspicuous trait common to Liberal measures in earlier days (then in each case gained by a relaxation of restraints), it has happened that popular good has come to be sought by Liberals, not as an end to be indirectly gained by relaxations of restraints, but as the end to be directly gained. And seeking to gain it directly, they have used methods intrinsically opposed to those originally used.<br /><br />And now, having seen how this reversal of policy has arisen (or partial reversal, I should say, for the recent Burials Act and the efforts to remove all remaining religious inequalities, show continuance of the original policy in certain directions), let us proceed to contemplate the extent to which it has been carried during recent times, and the still greater extent to which the future will see it carried if current ideas and feelings continue to predominate.<br /><br />Before proceeding, it may be well to say that no reflections are intended on the motives which prompted one after another of these various restraints and dictations. These motives were doubtless in nearly all cases good. It must be admitted that the restrictions placed by an Act of 1870, on the employment of women and children in Turkey-red dyeing works, were, in intention, no less philanthropic than those of Edward VI, which prescribed the minimum time for which a journeyman should be retained. Without question, the Seed Supply (Ireland) Act of 1880, which empowered guardians to buy seed for poor tenants, and then to see it properly planted, was moved by a desire for public welfare no less great than that which in 1533 prescribed the number of sheep a tenant might keep, or that of 1597, which commanded that decayed houses of husbandry should be rebuilt. Nobody will dispute that the various measures of late years taken for restricting the sale of intoxicating liquors, have been taken as much with a view to public morals as were the measures taken of old for checking the evils of luxury; as, for instance, in the fourteenth century, when diet as well as dress was restricted. Everyone must see that the edicts issued by Henry VIII to prevent the lower classes from playing dice, cards, bowls, etc., were not more prompted by desire for popular welfare than were the acts passed of late to check gambling.<br /><br />Further, I do not intend here to question the wisdom of these modern interferences, which Conservatives and Liberals vie with one and other in multiplying, any more than to question the wisdom of those ancient ones which they in many cases resemble. We will not now consider whether the plans of late adopted for preserving the lives of sailors, are or are not more judicious than that sweeping Scotch measure which, in the middle of the fifteenth century, prohibited captains from leaving harbour during the winter. For the present, it shall remain undebated whether there is a better warrant for giving sanitary officers powers to search certain premises for unfit food, than there was for the law of Edward III, under which innkeepers at seaports were sworn to search their guests to prevent the exportation of money or plate. We will assume that there is no less sense in that clause of the Canal-boat Act, which forbids an owner to board gratuitously the children of the boatmen, than there was in the Spitalfields Acts, which, up to 1824, for the benefit of the artisans, forbade the manufacturers to fix their factories more than ten miles from the Royal Exchange.<br /><br />We exclude, then, these questions of philanthropic motive and wise judgment, taking both of them for granted; and have here to concern ourselves solely with the compulsory nature of the measures which, for good or evil as the case may be, have been put in force during periods of Liberal ascendency.<br /><br />To bring the illustrations within compass, let us commence with 1860, under the second administration of Lord Palmerston. In that year, the restrictions of the Factories Act were extended to bleaching and dyeing works; authority was given to provide analysts of food and drink, to be paid out of local rates; there was an Act providing for inspection of gas-works, as well as for fixing quality of gas and limiting price; there was the Act which, in addition to further mine-inspection, made it penal to employ boys under twelve not attending school and unable to read and write. In 1861 occurred an extension of the compulsory provisions of the Factories Act to lace-works; power was given to poor-law guardians, etc., to enforce vaccination; local boards were authorized to fix rates of hire for horses, ponies, mules, asses, and boats; and certain locally-formed bodies had given to them powers of taxing the locality for rural drainage and irrigation works, and for supplying water to cattle. In 1862 an Act was passed for restricting the employment of women and children in open-air bleaching; and an Act for making illegal a coal-mine with a single shaft, or with shafts separated by less than a specified space; as well as an Act giving the Council of Medical Education the exclusive right to publish a Pharmacopoeia, the price of which is to be fixed by the Treasury. In 1863 came the extension of compulsory vaccination to Scotland, and also to Ireland; there came the empowering of certain boards to borrow money repayable from the local rates, to employ and pay those out of work; there came the authorizing of town-authorities to take possession of neglected ornamental spaces, and rate the inhabitants for their support; there came the Bakehouses Regulation Act, which, besides specifying minimum age of employés occupied between certain hours, prescribed periodical lime-washing, three coats of paint when painted, and cleaning with hot water and soap at least once in six months; and there came also an Act giving a magistrate authority to decide on the wholesomeness or unwholesomeness of food brought before him by an inspector. Of compulsory legislation dating from 1864, may be named an extension of the Factories Act to various additional trades, including regulations for cleansing and ventilation, and specifying of certain employés in match-works, that they might not take meals on the premises except in the wood-cutting places. Also there were passed a Chimney-Sweepers Act, an Act for further regulating the sale of beer in Ireland, an Act for compulsory testing of cables and anchors, an Act extending the Public Works Act of 1863, and the Contagious Diseases Act: which last gave the police, in specified places, powers which, in respect of certain classes of women, abolished sundry of those safeguards to individual freedom established in past times. The year 1865 witnessed further provision for the reception and temporary relief of wanderers at the cost of ratepayers; another public-house closing Act; and an Act making compulsory regulations for extinguishing fires in London. Then, under the Ministry of Lord John Russell, in 1866, have to be named an Act to regulate cattle-sheds, etc., in Scotland, giving local authorities powers to inspect sanitary conditions and fix the numbers of cattle; an Act forcing hop-growers to label their bags with the year and place of growth and the true weight, and giving police powers of search; an Act to facilitate the building of lodging-houses in Ireland, and providing for regulation of the inmates; a Public Health Act, under which there is registration of lodging-houses and limitation of occupants, with inspection and directions for lime-washing, etc., and a Public Libraries Act, giving local powers by which a majority can tax a minority for their books.<br /><br />Passing now to the legislation under the first Ministry of Mr. Gladstone, we have, in 1869, the establishment of State-telegraphy, with the accompanying interdict on telegraphing through any other agency; we have the empowering a Secretary of State to regulate hired conveyances in London; we have further and more stringent regulations to prevent cattle-diseases from spreading, another Beerhouse Regulation Act, and a Sea-birds Preservation Act (ensuring greater mortality of fish). In 1870 we have a law authorizing the Board of Public Works to make advances for landlords' improvements and for purchase by tenants; we have the Act which enables the Education Department to form school-boards which shall purchase sites for schools, and may provide free schools supported by local rates, and enabling school-boards to pay a child's fees, to compel parents to send their children, etc.; we have a further Factories and Workshops Act, making, among other restrictions, some on the employment of women and children in fruit-preserving and fish-curing works. In 1871 we met with an amended Merchant Shipping Act, directing officers of the Board of Trade to record the draught of sea-going vessels leaving port; there is another Factory and Workshops Act, making further restrictions; there is a Pedlars Act, inflicting penalties for hawking without a certificate, and limiting the district within which the certificate holds as well as giving the police power to search pedlars' packs; and there are further measures for enforcing vaccination. The year 1872 had, among other Acts, one which makes it illegal to take for hire more than one child to nurse, unless in a house registered by the authorities, who prescribe the number of infants to be received; it had a Licensing Act, interdicting sale of spirits to those apparently under sixteen; and it had another Merchant Shipping Act, establishing an annual survey of passenger steamers. Then in 1873 was passed the Agricultural Children's Act, which makes it penal for a farmer to employ a child who has neither certificate of elementary education nor of certain prescribed school-attendances; and there was passed a Merchant Shipping Act, requiring on each vessel a scale showing draught and giving the Board of Trade power to fix the numbers of boats and life-saving appliances to be carried.<br /><br />Turn now to Liberal law-making under the present Ministry. We have, in 1880, a law which forbids conditional advance-notes in payment of sailors' wages; also a law which dictates certain arrangements for the safe carriage of grain-cargoes; also a law increasing local coercion over parents to send their children to school. In 1881 comes legislation to prevent trawling over clam-beds and bait-beds, and an interdict making it impossible to buy a glass of beer on Sunday in Wales. In 1882 the Board of Trade was authorized to grant licences to generate and sell electricity, and municipal bodies were enabled to levy rates for electric-lighting: further exactions from ratepayers were authorized for facilitating more accessible baths and washhouses; and local authorities were empowered to make bye-laws for securing the decent lodging of persons engaged in picking fruit and vegetables. Of such legislation during 1883 may be named the Cheap Trains Act, which, partly by taxing the nation to the extent of £400,000 a year (in the shape of relinquished passenger duty), and partly at the cost of railway-proprietors, still further cheapens travelling for workmen: the Board of Trade, through the Railway Commissioners, being empowered to ensure sufficiently good and frequent accommodation. Again, there is the Act which, under penalty of £10 for disobedience, forbids the payment of wages to workmen at or within public-houses; there is another Factory and Workshops Act, commanding inspection of white lead works (to see that there are provided overalls, respirators, baths, acidulated drinks, etc.) and of bakehouses, regulating times of employment in both, and prescribing in detail some constructions for the last, which are to be kept in a condition satisfactory to the inspectors.<br /><br />But we are far from forming an adequate conception if we look only at the compulsory legislation which has actually been established of late years. We must look also at that which is advocated, and which threatens to be far more sweeping in range and stringent in character. We have lately had a Cabinet Minister, one of the most advanced Liberals, so-called, who pooh-poohs the plans of the late Government for improving industrial dwellings as so much "tinkering"; and contends for effectual coercion to be exercised over owners of small houses, over land-owners, and over ratepayers. Here is another Cabinet Minister who, addressing his constituents, speaks slightingly of the doings of philanthropic societies and religious bodies to help the poor, and says that "the whole of the people of this country ought to look upon this work as being their own work": that is to say, some extensive Government measure is called for. Again, we have a Radical member of Parliament who leads a large and powerful body, aiming with annually-increasing promise of success, to enforce sobriety by giving to local majorities powers to prevent freedom of exchange in respect of certain commodities. Regulation of the hours of labour for certain classes, which has been made more and more general by successive extensions of the Factories Acts, is likely now to be made still more general: a measure is to be proposed bringing the employés in all shops under such regulation. There is a rising demand, too, that education shall be made gratis (i.e., tax-supported), for all. The payment of school-fees is beginning to be denounced as a wrong: the State must take the whole burden. Moreover, it is proposed by many that the State, regarded as an undoubtedly competent judge of what constitutes good education for the poor, shall undertake also to prescribe good education for the middle classes—shall stamp the children of these, too, after a State pattern, concerning the goodness of which they have no more doubt than the Chinese had when they fixed theirs. Then there is the "endowment of research," of late energetically urged. Already the Government gives every year the sum of £4,000 for this purpose, to be distributed through the Royal Society; and, in the absence of those who have strong motives for resisting the pressure of the interested, backed by those they easily persuade, it may by-and-by establish that paid "priesthood of science" long ago advocated by Sir David Brewster. Once more, plausible proposals are made that there should be organized a system of compulsory insurance, by which men during their early lives shall be forced to provide for the time when they will be incapacitated.<br /><br />Nor does enumeration of these further measures of coercive rule, looming on us near at hand or in the distance, complete the account. Nothing more than cursory allusion has yet been made to that accompanying compulsion which takes the form of increased taxation, general and local. Partly for defraying the costs of carrying out these ever-multiplying sets of regulations, each of which requires an additional staff of officers, and partly to meet the outlay for new public institutions, such as board-schools, free libraries, public museums, baths and washhouses, recreation grounds, etc., local rates are year after year increased; as the general taxation is increased by grants for education and to the departments of science and art, etc. Every one of these involves further coercion—restricts still more the freedom of the citizen. For the implied address accompanying every additional exaction is—"Hitherto you have been free to spend this portion of your earnings in any way which pleased you; hereafter you shall not be free so to spend it, but we will spend it for the general benefit." Thus, either directly or indirectly, and in most cases both at once, the citizen is at each further stage in the growth of this compulsory legislation, deprived of some liberty which he previously had.<br /><br />Such, then, are the doings of the party which claims the name of Liberal; and which calls itself Liberal as being the advocate of extended freedom!<br /><br />I doubt not that many a member of the party has read the preceding section with impatience: wanting, as he does, to point out an immense oversight which he thinks destroys the validity of the argument. "You forget," he wishes to say, "the fundamental difference between the power which, in the past, established those restraints that Liberalism abolished, and the power which, in the present, establishes the restraints you call anti-Liberal. You forget that the one was an irresponsible power, while the other is a responsible power. You forget that if by the recent legislation of Liberals, people are variously regulated, the body which regulates them is of their own creating, and has their warrant for its acts."<br /><br />My answer is, that I have not forgotten this difference, but am prepared to contend that the difference is in large measure irrelevant to the issue.<br /><br />In the first place, the real issue is whether the lives of citizens are more interfered with than they were; not the nature of the agency which interferes with them. Take a simpler case. A member of a trades' union has joined others in establishing an organization of a purely representative character. By it he is compelled to strike if a majority so decide; he is forbidden to accept work save under the conditions they dictate; he is prevented from profiting by his superior ability or energy to the extent he might do were it not for their interdict. He cannot disobey without abandoning those pecuniary benefits of the organization for which he has subscribed, and bringing on himself the persecution, and perhaps violence, of his fellows. Is he any the less coerced because the body coercing him is one which he had an equal voice with the rest in forming?<br /><br />In the second place, if it be objected that the analogy is faulty, since the governing body of a nation, to which, as protector of the national life and interests, all must submit under penalty of social disorganization, has a far higher authority over citizens than the government of any private organization can have over its members; then the reply is that granting the difference, the answer made continues valid. If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making? Are the coercive edicts issued by him to be regarded as legitimate because they are the ultimate outcome of their own votes? As well might it be argued that the East African, who breaks a spear in another's presence that he may so become bondsman to him, still retains his liberty because he freely chose his master.<br /><br />Finally if any, not without marks of irritation as I can imagine, repudiate this reasoning, and say that there is no true parallelism between the relation of people to government where an irresponsible single ruler has been permanently elected, and the relation where a responsible representative body is maintained, and from time to time re-elected; then there comes the ultimate reply—an altogether heterodox reply—by which most will be greatly astonished. This reply is, that these multitudinous restraining acts are not defensible on the ground that they proceed from a popularly-chosen body; for that the authority of a popularly-chosen body is no more to be regarded as an unlimited authority than the authority of a monarch; and that as true Liberalism in the past disputed the assumption of a monarch's unlimited authority, so true Liberalism in the present will dispute the assumption of unlimited parliamentary authority. Of this, however, more anon. Here I merely indicate it as an ultimate answer.<br /><br />Meanwhile it suffices to point out that until recently, just as of old, true Liberalism was shown by its acts to be moving towards the theory of a limited parliamentary authority. All these abolitions of restraints over religious beliefs and observances, over exchange and transit, over trade-combinations and the travelling of artisans, over the publication of opinions, theological or political, etc., were tacit assertions of the desirableness of limitation. In the same way that the abandonment of sumptuary laws, of laws forbidding this or that kind of amusement, of laws dictating modes of farming, and many others of like meddling nature, which took place in early days, was an implied admission that the State ought not to interfere in such matters: so those removals of hindrances to individual activities of one or other kind, which the Liberalism of the last generation effected, were practical confessions that in these directions, too, the sphere of governmental action should be narrowed. And this recognition of the propriety of restricting governmental action was a preparation for restricting it in theory. One of the most familiar political truths is that, in the course of social evolution, usage precedes law; and that when usage has been well established it becomes law by receiving authoritative endorsement and defined form. Manifestly then, Liberalism in the past, by its practice of limitation, was preparing the way for the principle of limitation.<br /><br />But returning from these more general considerations to the special question, I emphasize the reply that the liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him; and that, whether this machinery is or is not one he shared in making, its actions are not of the kind proper to Liberalism if they increase such restraints beyond those which are needful for preventing him from directly or indirectly aggressing on his fellows—needful, that is, for maintaining the liberties of his fellows against his invasions of them: restraints which are, therefore, to be distinguished as negatively coercive, not positively coercive.<br /><br />Probably, however, the Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical, who more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able, will continue to protest. Knowing that his aim is popular benefit of some kind, to be achieved in some way, and believing that the Tory is, contrariwise, prompted by class-interest and the desire to maintain class-power, he will regard it as palpably absurd to group him as one of the same genus, and will scorn the reasoning used to prove that he belongs to it.<br /><br />Perhaps an analogy will help him to see its validity. If, away in the far East, where personal government is the only form of government known, he heard from the inhabitants an account of a struggle by which they had deposed a cruel and vicious despot, and put in his place one whose acts proved his desire for their welfare—if, after listening to their self-gratulations, he told them that they had not essentially changed the nature of their government, he would greatly astonish them; and probably he would have difficulty in making them understand that the substitution of a benevolent despot for a malevolent despot, still left the government a despotism. Similarly with Toryism as rightly conceived. Standing as it does for coercion by the State versus the freedom of the individual, Toryism remains Toryism, whether it extends this coercion for selfish or unselfish reasons. As certainly as the despot is still a despot, whether his motives for arbitrary rule are good or bad; so certainly is the Tory still a Tory, whether he has egoistic or altruistic motives for using State-power to restrict the liberty of the citizen, beyond the degree required for maintaining the liberties of other citizens. The altruistic Tory as well as the egoistic Tory belongs to the genus Tory; though he forms a new species of the genus. And both stand in distinct contrast with the Liberal as defined in the days when Liberals were rightly so called, and when the definition was—"one who advocates greater freedom from restraint, especially in political institutions."<br /><br />Thus, then, is justified the paradox I set out with. As we have seen, Toryism and Liberalism originally emerged, the one from militancy and the other from industrialism. The one stood for the régime of status and the other for the régime of contract—the one for that system of compulsory cooperation which accompanies the legal inequality of classes, and the other for that voluntary cooperation which accompanies their legal equality; and beyond all question the early acts of the two parties were respectively for the maintenance of agencies which effect this compulsory cooperation, and for the weakening or curbing of them. Manifestly the implication is that, in so far as it has been extending the system of compulsion, what is now called Liberalism is a new form of Toryism.<br /><br />How truly this is so, we shall see still more clearly on looking at the facts the other side upwards, which we will presently do.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-20263109414299949572007-08-05T10:01:00.000-04:002007-08-05T11:47:45.531-04:00The Origin of Property and StateThe political left, including the anarcho-socialists, are very confused about the nature and origin of both property and the state as an institution. According to many left-wing anarchists, property is entirely a state created thing that wouldn't exist without it. While the standard socialist position is usually collective ownership of property, the anarcho-socialists may tend more towards the idea of abolition of all property, which is quite an absurd notion.<br /><br />The individualist anarchists differ with the anarcho-socialists in that they aknowledge the fundamental principle of voluntary exchange of property and the application of labor to bring original ownership into being. However, many individualist anarchists tend to take a somewhat Georgist view on land ownership, and may also claim that profit and interest wouldn't exist without the state. This stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about economics. While the individualist anarchists were much more laizzes-faire than the collectivist and communist anarchists, they still lacked certain economic insights.<br /><br />In a sense, the arguements of both the socialist anarchists and some individualist anarchists throw the statists a great big bone. That is, it provides the very framework for those who favor the state to turn around and claim that we need a state because without it, property ownership and all that it entails would not exist. Both the left-anarchists and statists are accepting the same flawed premise, namely, the idea that the state is where all property comes from sociologically and historically. The premise is economically and historically inaccurate.<br /><br />While it is true that the state would not exist without property (which should be obvious, as the material resources that make it up constitute property), it is not true that property would not exist without the state. Any material resource or object that is in use by an individual is by definition property. To own something is by defacto to control it. Of course, this means that it is impossible to actually get rid of property altogether. At any given points in time, someone is quite likely in control of some sort of property.<br /><br />You are your own property to begin with (self-ownership). Without self-ownership, it is impossible to act in the first place. Existance itself makes it so that inherently we live in a world made up of material. In order to live in the world, individual people are made up of this matter and must interact with matter that is external to them. Without using one's self-ownership to obtain property over things external to you, such as a home, and food, and clothing, you simply die. This is simply an evolutionary, economic and sociological fact. <br /><br />Breaking this down more into the fundamentals: (1) first, you have the existance of the material world (2) secondly, you have the existance of individual human beings within this material world that possess conciousness and freedom of willpower (3) consequentially, you have self-control, and therefore "personal property" (4) consequentially, you have people exercising this self-control in conjunction with material resources that are external to them, from which derives "external property" (5) consequentially, you have people transforming this external property in a manner that increases output and persues new ends, and hence you have "capital" and "technology".<br /><br />Property is the natural result of people applying their self-ownership to previously unused resources through labor and homesteading, people exchanging goods and services that they already have obtained ownership of, and people making improvements upon the methods of production in the process. Both labor and capital engage in the transformation of resources into something new. A "market" is nothing but the cumulative result of all of the production and exchange between individuals. A "market" of some sort is inevitable as a consequence of human action and the necessary requirements for survival itself. A world without property and with no "market" at all is a world without human beings.<br /><br />Profit is not synonamous with theft, it is not the consequence of simply taking a chunk of a worker's labor. Profit is a consequence of time preferance. Profit is the result of a sucessful allocation of resources, in conjunction with supply and demand in an uncertain atmosphere. A voluntary employment contract is an agreement of exchange between an employer and employee. The employee gets paid a certain sum of money, in exchange for their production for a given period of time. The worker presumably would prefer recieving money in the present to keeping whatever it is that they produced (why would a worker in a factory that makes wood products want to keep all of the wood products they made? They are made to be sold, and the worker works for the money, not the wood products).<br /><br />Profit does not come into play until long after this. The worker is paid long before the product may be sold, and the profit results from the proper appeasing of demand. A worker may be paid and the product they produce may never be sold, but the worker still gets to keep that money while the buisiness owner loses out by taking losses for not having enough sales. If a buisiness over-supplies or under-supplies something, they may take considerable losses. Profit is not a gaurantee for a buisiness. A buisiness cannot profit by simply jacking its prices up into the sky, for it would be diminishing the amount of possible buyers.<br /><br />This being established, it is true that there is an alternate method of obtaining property that differs from this. This is the method of theft, extortion and fraud. Franz P. Oppenheimer expressed this by separating the means towards property and wealth into the economic means (production and exchange) and the political means (expropriation and coercive usury). The method of parasitism represents a violation of the property rights of the original producer (and yes, workers count as producers), homesteader or capitalist. It is important to note that the predatory means of obtaining property requires no real production or any improvement upon the methods of production. This is the method of both private crime and the state.<br /><br />In order for states to form, property that was previously aquired voluntarily had to be expropriated. The state did not invent property, as property pre-exists the state. The state feeds on property for its survival, like a leech. A state may very well start out as the equivolent of a small private gang; it becomes a state when such a gang obtains a coercive territorial monopoly. States do not form because of the methods of the market (I.E. peaceful exchange and production), they form because of a disruption of the methods of the market. They require land theft, systematic extortion and syndicate-baiting.<br /><br />Now it is true that states, once they have expropriated property, always dole them out to special interests. But this is not a condemnation of property itself, it's a condemnation of the state. It is the state that has corrupted and abused property. All that it doles out, wether it be to banking elites and rich buisinessmen or the poor, sick and elderly, is stolen property. A state redistributes property away from original ownership and towards either its own members or to special interest groups that it colludes with. Thus, the state also corrupts people within the marketplace by buying them out and presenting an unproductive means towards property that they would not possess without the state's help.<br /><br />Since a state confiscates and redistributes property by its nature as an institution, the only "market" that could be said to remain is a crippled and abused one at best. On the other hand, since there is no realistic way to stop all people from producing and exchanging property, people find ways to chug the economy along <em>in spite </em>of the barriers that the state may put in their way. This is the only thing that keeps the human race alive: the degree to which people engage in the economic means to wealth despite the existance of the state. It is frankly quite amazing how the American economy continues to produce <em>despite</em> all of the destructive regulations and redistribution that the state imposes on it.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-80669777989737539682007-08-03T11:06:00.000-04:002007-08-03T11:08:09.672-04:00The Goal is Freedom: No Substitute for History<a href="http://www.fee.org/in_brief/default.asp?id=1479">by Sheldon Richman</a><br /><br />The great economist <a href="http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=5080">Ludwig von Mises</a> showed that economics can be deduced from the axiom that human beings act: individuals consciously select ends and apply scarce means to achieve them. By examining the logical implications of that undeniable fact, one can come to understand the concepts value, cost, time preference, supply, demand, money, price, profit, interest, and so on.<br /><br />In light of this, it is noteworthy that Mises was also an accomplished historian. And more than that, he was an important historiographer; that is, he was interested in the why and how of history. This theorist who is so identified with the a priori method in economics (deduction from an axiom) is equally committed to the conviction that knowledge of history and its methods is indispensable to understanding the world.<br /><br />Mises expounded on both matters in his underappreciated book <a href="http://www.mises.org/th.asp">Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution</a>, first published in 1957. He was intent on showing that the method of economics had to be different from the method of the natural sciences because we have intimate knowledge of human action from the "inside." Molecules and planets have no motivation or discretion in how they move, so scientists can only observe, amass data from homogeneous events, look for regularities, test hypotheses, and formulate laws subject to the discovery of new evidence. But human beings do have motivation and discretion; they act on the basis of values, ideas, knowledge, and expectations -- none of which are rigidly determined the way a billiard ball's path is determined by its physical environment. Furthermore, social "scientists" know this -- because they are themselves acting individuals. So unlike in the natural sciences, anyone who studies economics has insider knowledge of the ultimate source of his subject: the acting individual. He brings to his discipline a familiarity no physicist can bring to his.<br /><br />Where does history come in? The science of human action -- which Mises called praxeology -- describes the formal, logical structure of action: the implications of choosing A over B -- no matter what those may be -- and the dedication of means and time to its achievement. Economics is not directly concerned with the specific ends chosen by particular individuals. That's a subject for history and what Mises called "thymology," or psychology in its non-experimental sense. Economics takes these as given and proceeds to analyze the unintended consequences of human action in the marketplace, the effects on prices, supply, and so on.<br /><br />But Mises acknowledged that there is much more to know about the world than abstract economic laws and the broad particulars of "the economy." We also need to understand certain details of our present social lives -- and to understand the present we must understand the past. Hence, the importance of studying history. Many people profess an interest in history, but they often make pronouncements about things, especially government activities, in a historical vacuum. When this is called to their attention, they may suddenly turn disdainful of history, as though it frustrates their wishful thinking. The best example of this occurred in 1979 during the Islamic revolution in Iran. You'll recall that the U.S. embassy was seized and the occupants were held hostage for a long while. When President Carter was asked if the event was related to the 1953 CIA-sponsored overthrow of Iran's elected secular prime minister in favor of the autocratic Shah, he scoffed, "That's ancient history."<br /><br />Methodological Individualism<br /><br />Mises's chapters on history in Theory and History are refreshing in their uncompromising methodological individualism. Much of what he says is self-evident once it's stated, but it needs saying because so much history looks like an account of disembodied actions performed by abstractions such as nations, societies, and governments. We all need reminding that only individuals act, and they act on the basis of (explicit or implicit) ideas. As philosopher Gilbert Ryle put it in The Concept of Mind, "Men are not machines, not even ghost-ridden machines. They are men -- a tautology which is sometimes worth remembering."<br /><br />While individuals are each born into a specific context historically, culturally, and otherwise, their ideas are not determined mechanistically. Mises rejected the approach to history marked by environmental determinism. "Many ideas are the response elicited by the stimulus of a man's physical environment," Mises wrote "But the content of these ideas is not determined by the environment. To the same physical environment various individuals and groups of individuals respond in a different way." Likewise, he rejected Marx's economic determinism.<br /><br />The ultimate reality for historians should be the acting individual. "The characteristics of individual men, their ideas and judgments of value as well as the actions guided by those ideas and judgments, cannot be traced back to something of which they would be derivatives. There is no answer to the question why Frederick II invaded Silesia except: because he was Frederick II. ...[T]he genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas engender social institutions, political changes, technological methods of product, and all that is called economic conditions. And in searching for their origin we inevitably come to a point at which all that can be asserted is that a man had an idea."<br /><br />In one fell swoop Mises debunked all philosophies of history, which presume arbitrarily that mankind's activities are destined achieve a preset goal. He also dismissed the view that history passes through predetermined stages. All approaches to history that dispense with the purposeful individual are fatally flawed. But this does not mean that history is consciously designed by individuals. Mises wrote:<br /><br /><em>History is made by men. The conscious intentional actions of individuals, great and small, determine the course of events insofar as it is the result of the interaction of all men. But the historical process is not designed by individuals. It is the composite outcome of the intentional actions of all individuals. No man can plan history. All he can plan and try to put into effect is his own actions which, jointly with the actions of other men, constitute the historical process. The Pilgrim Fathers did not plan to found the United States.</em><br /><br />There can be many reasons to study history, and one of them is to understand what's happening today. "There is no such thing as a nonhistorical analysis of the present state of affairs," Mises wrote. "The examination and description of the present are necessarily a historical account of the past ending with the instant just passed. The description of the present state of politics or of business is inevitably the narration of the events that have brought about the present state."<br />History and Economics<br /><br />Do history and economics intersect? For Mises, one cannot understand history without understanding economics, or human action more generally.. Since studying actual human activity is not like studying the movement of molecules, one will end up in a hopeless morass if one tries to examine social phenomena without the theoretical lens provided by praxeology and economics. As Murray Rothbard wrote in his <a href="http://www.mises.org/th/thpreface.asp">preface</a> to Theory and History:<br /><br /><em>One example that Mises liked to use in his class to demonstrate the difference between two fundamental ways of approaching human behavior was in looking at Grand Central Station behavior during rush hour. The " objective" or "truly scientific" behaviorist, he pointed out, would observe the empirical events: e.g., people rushing back and forth, aimlessly at certain predictable times of day. And that is all he would know. But the true student of human action would start from the fact that all human behavior is purposive, and he would see the purpose is to get from home to the train to work in the morning, the opposite at night, etc. It is obvious which one would discover and know more about human behavior, and therefore which one would be the genuine “scientist.”</em><br /><br />Unfortunately, few historians understand economics. And that's a shame, because, as Mises pointed out, "Books on history, especially those on the history of one's own country, appeal more to the general reader than do tracts on economic policy. ... Actually they [the historians] have merely popularized the teachings of pseudo economists.... The neo-mercantilist doctrines of the balance of payments and of the dollar shortage give an image of present-day world conditions very different from that provided by an examination of the situation from the point of view of modern subjectivist economics."<br /><br />One cannot understand history without understanding economics, but one also cannot fully understand economic policy -- or government policy in general -- without understanding history. A proposal to set up a government bureau to, say, control the price of milk can be demolished by economic theory, but it can be demolished twice over by a historical perspective on the politician's and bureaucrat's penchant for expanding their power and for exploiting -- and even fabricating -- problems ("crises") to justify that expansion. (For details, see Robert Higgs's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Leviathan-Critical-Government-Institute/dp/019505900X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3/103-7720166-0391827?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186093557&sr=8-3">Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government</a>.) A superficially benign government mission will look malignant in the light of the state's historical record. Even libertarians can go badly astray relying on pure a priori reasoning in judging government policy. While the a priori -- in Rothbard's broadly and qualitatively empirical sense -- is essential to economic understanding, when it comes to vigilance toward the state, the a priori is no substitute for historical knowledge.<br /><br />As Mises wrote, "History looks backward into the past, but the lesson it teaches concerns things to come." One should avoid defending any government activity before consulting history.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-8502818913184812912007-08-01T22:16:00.000-04:002007-08-01T22:48:02.006-04:00Culture: The Missing LinkThe standard one-dimensional left-right spectrum is incredibly fallacious. It represents a false dichotomy, and therefore a two-dimensional spectrum has to be introduced in order to resolve the contradictions of the one-dimensional spectrum. What is meant by this is that the one-dimensional spectrum has no reasonable way of being able to categorize anarchists and a whole host of specific political positions, and that it generalizes the matter to the point where people who differ very much are placed close together on the “left or “right” and people who aren’t that different are placed on opposite ends. Hitler is placed on the “far right” and Stalin on the “far left”, but in reality there is hardly a dime’s worth of difference between their political positions.<br /><br />Thus, the two-dimensional spectrum corrects this problem by splitting things up into an economic and personal axis. Consequentially, it better distinguishes between different types of the political “left and right”. Two people can have similar economic views but differ on personal liberties issue, and two people can be identical about personal liberties issues while having very different economic views. For example, Ron Paul and Adolph Hitler are both on “the right” but differ considerably in both economic and personal liberties views. And Benjamin Tucker and Stalin are both on “the left” but differ radically in both economic and personal liberties views.<br /><br />But the two-dimensional spectrum is also flawed, for theoretically one can have a very low personal position and a very high economic position, and be put on the “far right”, yet the political “far right” doesn’t consistently favor economic freedom. And vice versa, the political “far left” doesn’t consistently favor personal freedom. Thus, a third dimension is needed to resolve this conflict as well. The addition of a third dimension seems to clear a lot of things up. The third dimension is culture. Consequentially, the revised political spectrum looks something like this:<br /><br />Axis A - Economic<br />Axis B – Personal<br />Axis C - Cultural<br /><br />The economic axis represents questions such as government ownership vs. private ownership of the means of production, government regulation of material property and government redistribution of wealth. The personal axis represents questions such as war vs. peace, personal privacy, free expression and in general one's ability to control one's own person free from force. The cultural axis represents questions such as one's views on subjects such as the family, religion, ethnicity, art and one's consumer preferences.<br /><br />Two people can be fairly identical on the economic and personal axises while differing radically between their cultural values. There can be two anarchists (Roderick Long vs. Hans Herman Hoppe, for example) or two totalitarians (Stalin vs. Hitler, for example) with virtually identical political positions, but different cultural values. At the same time, an anarchist can theoretically share a lot of cultural values with a totalitarian while simultaneously being at opposite ends of the political and economic axises.<br /><br />Hans Herman Hoppe's cultural values are "conservative": separatism, traditionalism, religiosity and opposition to multiculturalism. Roderick Long's cultural values are "liberal": cosmopolitanism, opposition to racism and sympathy with some feminist elements. Yet their political and economic positions are virtually identical: they both favor a free market anarchist society. There's not a dime's worth of difference between them on non-cultural criteria. Where they differ is mainly on their cultural preferences and ideas as to what cultural values are most conductive to reaching the goal. <br /><br />Culture is always the "zinger" that potentially produces tension with political and economic principles. It seems that left and right is just culture. It is not politics or economics so much. It is not easy to more or less maintain a "cultural centrist" position (I'm admitedly a wee bit to "the left" on such criteria, since I oppose racism and encourage voluntary multiculturalism). When culture is taken too far "left" or "right", a scenario arises in which one must choose between their cultural tenets and their political or economic principles. When the cultural tenets override the political or economic principles, then the individual has created tension or cognitive dissonance within a given movement.<br /><br />Culture also obviously produces tension between groups of people. This is manifested every day in politics, by a multitude of interest groups warring over what should be taught in schools, how marriage should be defined, what specific class/group of people should be privileged, and so on. In short, these things are personal preferences, and when mere whimsical preferances are superimposed into the political and economic domain, one has the choice between exercising restraint or advocating some kind of government intervention. It is very hard for people to separate their cultural views from their politics. Consequentially, they often end up using politics as a means to their cultural ends, rather then persueing their cultural ends within a voluntaristic framework.<br /><br />Two people can share cultural values while differing greatly over the means they persue to cultural ends. For example, I think that racial discrimination is a horrible thing and wish to combat it, but do not support political interventions such as affirmative action laws. Many modern liberals, however, think that such means are proper, and indeed that they are the only possible means to their end. For another example, many people on the "religious right" support government patronage with and subsidization of religious institutions, but the "voluntarist" religious person opposes such measures and quite likely views them as a corruption of their religion with the poison of politics.<br /><br />In many ways, politics depends entirely on culture. Career politicians try their best to appeal to people's cultural values in order to get their support. People's cultural identifications with the overall territory (territorialism), concern for the poor and disabled, particular religious creeds and concern for the state of health are exploited by political power (and many people representing such views in turn use political power for their own gain at the expense of others). In this sense culture is a poison that provides the rationales given to the masses for political power.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-90188781310545730282007-07-31T20:17:00.000-04:002007-08-01T20:28:25.683-04:00Objective and Subjective Value and the Nature of TruthThere has always been tension within the libertarian movement in terms of methodology and philosophical foundations. On one hand, we have the field of praxeology constituting Austrian economics, represented by Ludwig Von Mises, which adheres to a subjective theory of value. On the other hand, we have the field of objective ethics as represented by Ayn Rand, and in many ways in Murray Rothbard's natural law position. There has also been a conflict between a utilitarian and deontological approach to libertarianism.<br /><br />Ayn Rand, mistakenly in my view, rejected praxeology (or least some vital aspects of it) because of the subjective element within it. She also tried to expand objectivism into some areas that aren't really objective, more in the realm of preferance. On the other hand, Ludwig Von Mises's views, since they were rigidly restricted to the narrow confines of praxeology, could be said to over-emphasize subjectivism at the expense of other considerations. Mises was, in my view, too skeptical towards the idea of natural law and objective ethics.<br /><br />Praxeology need not be in conflict with natural law/natural rights and objectivist ethics. Properly understood, they can be considered complimentary to eachother. They are two component parts of a larger system. The fact that some things are indeed subjective does not necessarily entail a contradiction of objective ethics, and the fact that objective reality exists and can be discovered through reason does not necessarily erode the factors of interpretation and error. Praxeology does not have to lead one towards ethical subjectivism, and objectivism and natural law theories do not have to lead one towards authoritarian moralism.<br /><br />Precisely what is objective and what is subjective needs to be defined. Reality and existance are objective. Human judgement of reality and existance can be prone to error, but the existance of error does not mean that reality and existance are subjective or that it is impossible to discover truth about them. All attempts to argue against existance reaffirms existance by performative contradiction. Furthermore, the truth objectively exists no matter what people's judgements may be. Someone can be convinced that the sky is purple or that apples fall upwards, but that would not make it true, no matter how much they wish that it were so.<br /><br />Thus, the radical subjectivist idea that reality is determined by our perceptions, that our minds create the material world around us or that "life is just an illusion", must be rejected. All philosophy and science, which is by definition the quest for knowledge, must implictly accept that truth exists and is capable of being discovered through reason, and it must implictly accept that reality is determined by natural phenomen that may very well be beyond our control. A philosophy that rejects such things can hardly be considered a philosophy at all, since a quest for knowledge or love of wisdom becomes utterly pointless.<br /><br />On the other hand, the hard determinist position is troublesome. Hardcore determinists seem to think that nature, particularly psysiology, predetermines our actions in the absolute, and thus they conclude that there is no such thing as "free will". But people's deliberate and free choices do determine the course of reality, the future, in various ways. That is, the will does have an effect on reality to the extent that one chooses between means to a desired end. Since there are multiple possible means to any given end, the future is not pre-determined in terms of what means people will persue. Causality does not eliminate free choice. It merely means that choices have consequences.<br /><br />How is truth discovered? Truth is discovered when a conflict between one's ideas and hard facts are resolved in favor of the hard facts, when one's ideas are modified as such. Noone is born with any specific knowledge of truth because life has not been experienced yet. This is not to say that every human is born as an absolutely blank slate so much as that their capacity to discover truth is considerably hampered in the early stages of life and is restricted mostly to mere biological functions. While people's mental and physical abilities are predetermined biologically, their application of those faculties are not. Truth is discovered through experience and the application of logic.<br /><br />Since existance is an objective fact, it becomes necessary to define different things that exist. Different things have different properties. For example, a rock exists, and a rock has specific properties. Objective scientific truth is discovered when such properties are properly identified. Life entails specific properties that a rock does not possess (such as biological reproduction and conciousness). A human being is specific form of life, and thus also has specific properties. Each form of life shares some very basic properties, but they all also vary in their properties. In either case, truth about human nature is discoverable by properly identifying the properties that are common to all human beings.<br /><br />A doctrine that Ludwig Von Mises often wrote in opposition to is scientism. Scientism is not to be confused with science itself. Scientism the notion that the only way to reach truth is through empiricism and statistical testing such as is commonplace in the natural sciences. But this is not so in the social sciences. That is, there is no rational way to predict and plan human behavior with absolute accuracy because there are so many variables and so much diversity. And there are many areas outside of human behavior that are also not exactly predictable. In either case, statistics compiled with respect to human behavior can be very misleading, particularly because it is impossible for the compiler of the data to really know the intentions or preferances of all of the people involved. This is because preferance is subjective.<br /><br />More specifically, what is subjective is people's demand as consumers. Questions such as what brand of car or clothes to buy, which type of music is better, which industry to invest in, are utterly subjective to the individual. Happiness is subjective because different stimuli or economic ends happen to please some people while displeasing others. This does not mean that truth is subjective. It means that people's mere preferences and asthetics are diverse and subjective. Happiness and truth are two different concepts. It may bring you pleasure to do risky things. It would be preposterous to argue that the thing actually makes the person unhappy. It would be sensible, on the other hand, to argue that the risks are dangerous and may make you unhappy in the long-term, in the future.<br /><br />Some followers of the philosophy of objectivism have jumped head first into absurdity by trying to argue for an objectivist asthetics and literally swallow Ayn Rand's opinions on everything from art to music as if it were objective fact. But such matters are within the realm of what makes people happy, not truth statements. There is a huge difference between a truth statement and a statement of what makes one happy. "I like capitalism" in itself is not a truth statement, it is a statement of preferance. "Minimum wage laws lead to unemployment for reasons X, Y and Z" would be a truth statement, since it is trying to logically argue that something is true. What brand of cigarettes is better, or wether or not to smoke them, is not based on any objective truth so much as what one's taste buds prefer and what one's budget is like. Since this varies from individual to individual, it is subjective.<br /><br />This subjective aspect of human choice is an important thing to keep in mind. People should not be forced into making particular asthetic choices, let alone uniformly. When the preferences of the consumer have been replaced by the preferances of the central planner, then one particular asthetic judgement is being forced onto the masses at large at their own expense. It becomes impossible to calculate the preferances of the masses at large even if one wanted to try to emulate them. It is impossible to universalize consumer preference. The individual consumer is the person who can determine best what their preferences are. Attempts to statistically measure and control demand through central planning are in vein.<br /><br />Ethical subjectivism is a separate thing from asthetic subjectivism. Ethical subjectivism should be rejected and asthetic subjectivism accepted. Objective ethics refers more to questions of the just and unjust use of force (the means), while mere preference has to do with desired ends. One can reject the means that someone chooses on the grounds of objective ethics, while maintaining that the person's desired ends are subjective and/or irrelevant to wether or not the means are justified, or maintaining that one agrees that the ends are good. On the other hand, one can support the means that someone chooses on the grounds of objective ethics, while maintaining that you disagree with their desired ends on asthetic grounds.<br /><br />The problem with ethical subjectivism is that it inevitably leads in the direction of hedonism and narcissism. In practise, it means that there are no real guidelines for determining proper or improper human conduct. Consequentially, any conduct that most people would recognize as being wrong (such as murder, theft and rape) is implicitly "justified" by ethical subjectivism. An objective ethics of some sort is needed to fix this problem. Logical consistancy is a prerequisite for a political or economic position to even potentially be valid.<br /><br />This is also true of utilitarianism. Murray Rothbard's criticism of utilitarianism is a very important contribution to the libertarian paradime. Utilitarianism tends to attempt to "justify" things that can easily be seen as unethical as if they were asthetics. But asthetics is a subjective preference for ends, while questions such as wether or not to use force have to do with the means to ends. My desired ends may be to obtain wealth, but that would not necessarily justify stealing to obtain it. Utilitarians often attempt to justify the means by pointing to the ends, particularly short-term ends. The mere fact that someone "preferred" to use force (I.E. found it to be in their utility) can be sufficient enough for a utilitarian to support such an action.<br /><br />It is impossible to consistantly apply a principle using only utilitarianism as a methodology. Any principle can be overturned so long as a somewhat convincing arguement is made that it produces utility to someone in some way; and in a "conflict of utilities" the "winner" is arbitrarily decided by the utilitarian's own judgement. The "utility" of a murderer is to kill someone else, and the action of murdering is the means to that end. At best, utilitarianism can be somewhat useful in terms of demonstrating the negative or unintended consequences of certain actions (which Ludwig Von Mises's version of utilitarianism could be said to represent), but it is horrible as the basis for an ethical system.<br /><br />While it is considered antiquated by many, natural law and natural rights theory, as well as the broader implications of evolutionary theory, provides a fairly valid fundamental framework for an ethical system. Guidelines for human conduct can be discovered through reason by properly identifying human nature and its relationship to the physical world. Man can make mistakes in the attempt to do this, but that does not mean that it is subjective or undiscoverable, it means that further adaptation is necessary. Natural law is a "process" of naturalization by which human behavior adapts to a mode that is necessitated by one's environment. "Natural order" emerges when people have adequately adaptated. On the other hand, the further people are from adapting to natural laws the harder survival becomes and the lower the quality of life is. This lack of success could be said to be an incentive to adapt further.<br /><br />It is through such a process that objective values are discovered and accumulated over time. The human race has learned, through trial and error, that certain modes of conduct are necessary in order for both the individual's well being and "society" to flourish. In short, man has a natural incentive towards social cooperation because the consequences of not engaging in lead to a decrease in well-being, even to the point of poverty and death. An important factor in this adaptation process is empathy. An individual learns to abstain from harming others by knowing what it's like to be harmed, by being able to live mutually with others. The more that humans evolve socially, the more that they are able to overcome their primitive impulses and interact with others in a mutually beneficial manner.<br /><br />The practical universal outlawry of murder, theft and rape in the vast majority of the world is the sign of an adaptation to what could be called the natural law. They represent, or rather are based on, objective ethics that have been made obvious to people over the course of many years. Most people, in their everyday lives, do not engage in these actions. The human race can be said to be mostly adapted in this particular case. However, these very same actions, on the political level, have not yet been considered unethical by the masses of people. To this extent the human race has not yet adapted and therefore has alot of work cut out for it. Ethics on the political level always lags behind ethics on the personal level. That is, for most people there is always an ethical double standard with respect to standards of conduct for the average person vs. people with political power.<br /><br />In summary, the following points stand clear:<br /><br />1. Praxeology and objective ethics can be made compatible and harmonious.<br />2. Reality is real. Duh.<br />3. Truth is discovered, not pre-programed into our minds.<br />4. Statistical empiricism fails as a methedology in the social sciences.<br />5. Economic value and mere preferance for ends or happiness is subjective, and this does not have to conflict with objective ethics.<br />6. Ethical subjectivism ignores that our environment at least hints that we must adapt via particular modes of conduct, and it becomes bare hedonism in practise.<br />7. Utilitarianism ignores ethical considerations in the name of asthetics and subjective definitions of happiness, using "psychic utility" and "psychic harm" as the only standards of conduct.<br />8. Ethics and social organization are discovered and implemented in an evolutionary process and result from the universalization of principles to each individual.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-89716732619226183052007-07-30T19:50:00.000-04:002007-07-30T21:10:16.572-04:00Ron Paul and ImmigrationIt's time for a little honesty about Ron Paul, particularly his position on immigration. While Ron Paul is all the rage in libertarian circles right now (for some very good reasons), on certain issues he is more of a right-wing populist or paleo-conservative. Whenever he "deviates" it's in the socially conservative direction, on issues such as immigration. He certainly is the most libertarian person to be in congress for a long time, but one should also be aware that he has affinity with the Christian right and other such groups.<br /><br />Immigration restrictionist policies (immigration quotas, illegalizing immigrant jobs, publicly-funded walls, federal control of state's borders, etc.) are government interventions, economically and otherwise, and therefore are outside of the realm of libertarianism. Interventionism X (welfare) does not justify intervention Y (police statism and protectionism). Ron Paul is appealing to the sentiment of right-wing populists like Pat Buchannan on this issue. Aside from those who follow Hans Herman Hoppe's immigration position, and many Ron Paulians, no libertarian in their right mind supports immigration restrictionism.<br /><br />Like all anti-immigrationists, Ron Paul uses the welfare state (the real problem) as an excuse to persue other government interventions such as publicly funded walls and mass-deportation. His vote for things such as publicly funded walls should be pointed out as unlibertarian by any libertarian with two cents. The fact that people suck off the welfare state is not an excuse to forcibly remove them from their own property or illegalize their jobs. Domestic citezens are "guilty" of just the same, on a much larger scale than immigrants ever will be.<br /><br />Furthermore, the arguement is nonsensical in that for the most part illegal immigrants do not qualify for those government services; it is the legal citezens who do, and it is the legal citezens who are at least partially responsible for supporting it. There is no moral difference between a legal citezen and an "illegal" sucking off of the welfare state. All of the welfare-related complaints about illegal immigrants apply equally to domestic citezens. Under this logic, therefore, domestic citezens should be deported and have their jobs illegalized as well.<br /><br />Ron has fallen into the trap of interventionism on this issue. Mises's critique of interventionism applies here. That is, interventions are proposed as a solution to past interventions, rather than a repeal of the previous intervention. The initial intervention is the welfare state. But, while he has tried his best to oppose the welfare state, Ron Paul falls back on supporting new interventions as a "solution": government-funded walls, immigration quotas and deportation. If one seriously thinks that this is going to solve "the problem", then one is fooling oneself. In practise, this will result in a further march towards a police state, more growth in federal funding, and meanwhile immigrants will still get through "illegally", just like before.<br /><br />That is only on the consequentialist side of the arguement. The other side of the arguement, and the more important one, is that it's a violation of property rights to (1) force someone off of their voluntarily aquired property or force a landlord to evict a tenant (2) to illegalize someone's voluntary employment agreement; this too violates the property rights of both the immigrant and the citezen associating with them (3) to siphon funds from the tax-payer to build walls (4) to initiate force on someone for crossing unowned land and (5) in general, to force people to dissassociate with eachother on their own property. What do all of these things have in common? They are inherent in anti-immigration policies.<br /><br />Ron Paul's position on immigration is better then Pat Buchannan's, but it is not too far off from it. While he does not openly champion protectionism, he still supports the police enforcement side of the equation in the name of "constitutionalism", and makes a somewhat Buchannite arguement with respect to how the welfare state relates to immigration.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-13763076923785179872007-07-30T18:47:00.000-04:002007-07-30T18:49:32.220-04:00It's the 1930's All Over Again<a href="http://www.mises.org/story/2663">by Lew Rockwell</a><br /><br />Jittery stock markets, an economy drunk on credit, and politicians calling for varieties of dictatorship: what a sense of déjà vu! Let us recall that the world went bonkers for about ten years way back when. The stock market crashed in 1929, thanks to the Federal Reserve, and with it fell the last remnants of the old liberal ideology that government should leave society and economy alone to flourish. After the federal Great Depression hit, there was a general air in the United States and Europe that freedom hadn't worked. What we needed were strong leaders to manage and plan economies and societies.<br /><br />And how they were worshipped. On the other side of the world, there were Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, but in the United States we weren't in very good shape either. Here we had FDR, who imagined himself capable of astonishing feats of price setting and economy boosting. Of course he used old-fashioned tricks: printing money and threatening people with guns. It was nothing but the ancient despotism brought back in pseudo-scientific garb.<br /><br />Things didn't really return to normal until after the war. These "great men" of history keeled over eventually, but look what they left: welfare states, inflationary banking systems, high taxes, massive debt, mandates on business, and regimes with a penchant for meddling at the slightest sign of trouble. They had their way even if their absurd posturing became unfashionable later.<br /><br />It's strange to go back and read opinion pieces from those times. It's as if everyone just assumed that we had to have either fascism or socialism, and that the one option to be ruled out was laissez-faire. People like Mises and Hayek had to fight tooth and nail to get a hearing. The Americans had some journalists who seemed to understand, but they were few and far between.<br />So what was the excuse for such a shabby period in ideological history? Why did the world go crazy? It was the Great Depression, or so says the usual explanation. People were suffering and looking for answers. They turned to a Strongman to bail them out. There was a fashion for scientific planning, and the suffering economy (caused by the government, of course) seemed to bolster the rationale.<br /><br />All of which brings me to a strange observation: when it comes to politics, we aren't that much better off today. It's true that we don't have people running for office in ridiculous military suits. They don't scream at us or give sappy fireside chats or purport to be the embodiment of the social mind. The tune is slightly changed, but the notes and rhythms are the same.<br /><br />Have you listened carefully to what the Democrats are proposing in the lead-up to the presidential election? It's just about as disgusting as anything heard in the 1930s: endless government programs to solve all human ills. It's as if they can't think in any other way, as if their whole worldview would collapse if they took notice of the fact that government can't do anything right.<br /><br />But it also seems like they are living on another planet. The stock market has a long way to fall before it reaches anything we could call low. Mortgage interest rates are creeping along at the lowest possible rates. Unemployment is close to 4%, which is lower than even Keynesians of old could imagine in their wildest dreams.<br /><br />The private sector is creating a miracle a day, even as the stuff that government attempts is failing left and right. The bureaucracies are as wasteful and useless as they've ever been, spending is already insanely high, debt is skyrocketing, and there's no way that any American believes himself to be under-taxed.<br /><br />The Democrats, meanwhile, go about their merry business as if the public schools were a model for all of society. Oh, and let us not forget their brilliant idea of shutting down the industrial economy and human prosperity so the government can plan the weather 100 years from now. We can only hope that there are enough serious people left to put a stop to this harebrained idea.<br /><br />But before we get carried away about the Democrats, let's say a few words about the bloodthirsty Republicans, who think of war not as something to regret, but rather the very moral life of the nation. For them, justice equals Guantánamo Bay, and public policy means a new war every month, and vast subsidies to the military-industrial complex and such other Republican-friendly firms as the big pharmaceuticals. Sure, they pay lip service to free enterprise, but it's just a slogan to them, unleashed whenever they fear that they are losing support among the bourgeois merchant class.<br /><br />So there we have it. Our times are good, and yet we face a choice between two forms of central planning. They are varieties of socialism and fascism, but not overtly: they disguise their ideological convictions so that we won't recognize that they and their ilk have certain predecessors in the history of political economy.<br /><br />Into this mix steps Ron Paul, with a message that has stunned millions. He says again and again that government is not the way out. And even though his political life is nothing short of heroic, he doesn't believe that his candidacy is about him and his personal ambitions. He talks of Bastiat, Hazlitt, Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard — in public campaign speeches! And let no one believe that this is just rhetoric. Take a look at his voting record if you doubt it. Even the New York Times is amazed to discover that there is a principled man in politics.<br /><br />It is impressive how crowds are hard-pressed to disagree with him. How much good is he doing? It is impossible to exaggerate it. He provides hope when we need it most. You see, the American economy may look good on the surface but underneath, the foundation is cracking. The debt is unsustainable. Savings are nearly nonexistent. Money-supply creation is getting scary. The paper-money economy can't last and won't last. One senses that the slightest change could cause unforeseen wreckage.<br /><br />What would happen should the bottom fall out? Scary thought. We need ever more public spokesmen for our cause. In many ways, the Mises Institute bears a heavy burden as the world's leading institutional voice for peace and economic liberty. And we are working in every way possible to make sure that the flame of freedom is not extinguished, even in the face of legions of charlatans and powermongers. Even though the politics of our times is as dark as ever, there are bright lights on the horizon.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-29265415297707234442007-07-26T21:01:00.001-04:002007-07-26T22:49:29.913-04:00Individualism, Properly UnderstoodThere is some confusion in terms of how many people tend to define individualism. According to some, individualism is akin to dictatorship, where one individual controls everyone else regaurdless of consent or ethical consideration. Thus, in this view, individualism and narcissism are virtually indistinguishable. Another common mischaracterization of individualism is the idea that it's social isolationism, where everyone lives as an absolute hermit. Typically, the "cure" for individualism that is proposed is some kind of collectivism, in which "society" or "nation" or "state" are said to be supreme over the individual. In collectivism, people are identified uniformly as members of groups rather than as unique individuals unto themselves, with their own minds and actions.<br /><br />It is my contention that collectivism is what is truly nihilistic, while seemingly paradoxically, individualism results in society-wide and "collective" ends when consistantly carried through. All collectivist plans for "society" inevitably must be enforced by some kind of oligarchy or dictatorship, and therefore require nihilistic control over the masses by a small few. On the other hand, individualism does not advocate the total social separation of each individual from the other (everyone would simply die) or bare nihilism, it advocates the freedom of each individual in a universal manner.<br /><br />Individualism is universalist in that it consistantly applies ideas about human conduct and rights to each individual, while collectivism holds the individual in a completely subordinate position with respect to groups and social constructs and assigns groups an unequal distribution of rights. Obviously, since everyone is an individual, individual rights apply to everyone. In individualist philosophy, no majority is supposed to legally be able to overthrow your individual rights of self-ownership (which entails self-defense by defacto), life, free expression, free association, labor and property. You possess those rights by virtue of being a human being, by one's nature as an individual.<br /><br />True liberty (individualism, properly understood) is where each individual's liberty is limited by the like liberty of everyone else (for example, my individual right to "free" speech prohibits everyone else from initiating force to stop me from freely expressing myself on my own property, so in order to consistantly have "free speech" each individual must be effectively shielded from invasion by everyone else); not the absolute rule of the majority, which is nothing but "might makes right" and violates the rights of the individual and minority.<br /><br />Majoritarianism is a form of collectivism in which rules for the conduct of people are inconsistantly applied, where a group with superior numbers is allowed to get away with what an individual or group with minority numbers is not allowed to do. Majoritarianism is the narcissistic rule of the many over the few. It need not be confined to absolute majorities, it can be manifested in "numerical majorities", in which there is a multitude of interest groups and one of them with the largest numbers empowers itself at the expense of the rest. In practise, this type of majoritarianism is akin to an oligarchy.<br /><br />The idea of "collective rights" or "group's rights" is based on an unequal distribution of rights, by defacto. It categorizes rights as belonging to groups, and therefore the distribution of rights becomes group-specific (wether it be categorized by nationality, race, economic class, etc.), where each group is in practise designated as having a special set of rights, different from other groups. And the idea that "society's rights" trump the individual's rights is nonsensical. "Society" is not an individual, but a statistical aggregate of individuals. The cumulative result of each individual's rights constitutes "the whole". "Society" does not have rights, real flesh and blood people do, individuals do.<br /><br />The individualist answer to the wise question, "When is it just for a group to do that which it is not just for an individual to do?", is "never". The idea that a particular group of people should be allowed to do things that it is immoral for an individual to do is anathema to individualism. A dictator, by their nature, has the power to do to others that which is immoral. The dictator is therefore immoral by individualist standards. When we apply principles of human conduct consistantly to each individual, then in determining ethics it becomes irrelevant what political position, economic status, ethnicity or any other such group-identity a given person belongs to.<br /><br />An individualist believes that one should act in their self-interest. Self-interest is not the same thing as bare narcissism. When people's pride goes to their heads, they in fact act against their own self-interest. Someone who never interacts with anyone else is acting against their rational self-interest. It is necessitated by the fundamental facts of existance that one must engage in some kind of association with other people or die. An individualist is aware of the fact that it is in one's self-interest to voluntarily trade with others and maitain one's personal relations in a non-violent manner. Thus, the concept of mutual self-interest and social cooperation arises as a result of individualism.<br /><br />Indeed, there is no such thing as a selfless person. By definition of being a concious being with self-ownership (I.E. self-control), each individual has a self and therefore self-interest. It would be impossible to act without it. Eating food, having clothing and shelter, being protected from violence, are necessary functions of self-interest, and simultaneously they only can efficiently be obtained by cooperation between multiple individuals acting together in their self-interest. Thus, there is a natural incentive towards human cooperation that is part of the functionality of self-interest. Goals for "the community" cannot be met without a manifestation of cooperation in conjunction with self-interest.<br /><br />The individualist does not oppose individuals giving to and helping eachother, what is opposed is the use of force to make people do so against their will and self-interest. What is opposed is parasitism, where one individual or group is forcefully coerced to sacrfice to the benefit of another individual or group. This is the exact opposite of social cooperation: it is the method of theft and phony philanthropy. The individualist clearly sees that the best way to benefit people is for them to work together voluntarily in their self-interest so that all parties gain. True philanthropy results from cooperation. If the methods to one's well-intended ends are not cooperative, if they are coercive, then this is not true charity, but rather a destructive act that disintegrates the social order.<br /><br />It is quite apparent that collectivistic schemes hinges not on harmony between people but antagonism between them. As soon as the consistant application of rules to the individual is removed, as soon as one group is exempted from such considerations, as soon as one group is forcefully made to sacrifice to benefit another, a huge hole has been poked in human rights. The result is a struggle between groups, with one group struggling to maintain dominance over another, and with a subject group struggling to cope with such dominance or escape it. Social order cannot result from such antagonistic relationships between people. The Hobbesian "war of all against all" is not the result of too much individual rights, it is the result of a democratic system in which each group competes for power of the other by either fighting over the reigns of power itself or for indirect influence over it and favorism from it.<br /><br />The introduction of a power-elite, a monopolistic group of individuals, into a society disrupts the harmony between the individuals that make it up. It creates a fundamental "class divide" of a sort in which on one hand there is that group of individuals who possess ruling power, and on the other hand there are those who are subject to that ruling power. The class with ruling power is resitricted to a relative minority. It can be said to be made up of two distinct groups that are tied at the hip: those who directly hold the reigns of narcissistic power, and those special interests who ally with them to indirectly control the reigns of power. So long as such people are considered to be particular collections of particular individuals, rather than individual entities in themselves, this view of modern society is perfectly compatible with individualism. It is just such a society that individualism opposes.<br /><br />The nature of power in human relations is constantly being blurred by collectivist abstractions. The individualist clearly sees through the rhetoric of the "nation", "state", "the people", "race" and "class" that is so often used in political discourse. The concept of the "nation" is anthropromorphic and polylogistic in that it assigns what objectively can only be defined as a territory of land with traits as if it were a single individual person, and it treats different territories as if each territory has its own uniform character as if it were one individual. Of course, the concept of "nation" is typically used to get people to identify with the "state". That is, one's identification with a particular territory is blurred as to imply definition with "the state". The individualist clearly sees that "the state" is made up of a particular oligarchy of individuals, and thus cannot realistically be alluded to as if were one and the same with the overall territory or "the people" as a whole.<br /><br />To the consistant individualist, while race can be used to describe some superficial physical differences between individuals, as soon as it goes much beyond this it becomes nothing more than a collectivist construct. A methedological individualist proclaims that the human mind's essential logical structure is the same with each individual (barring those with severe mental disabilities, granted). On the other hand, a methedological individualist realizes that each individual is different in their physical abilities, ideas, actions and so on; I.E. each person is on certain criteria inherently unequal and therefore diverse. Therefore, an individualist opposes all forms of polylogism, where different groups are treated as having different logical structures, while at the same time members of these groups are erroneously treated as being identical to eachother. For example, Marxism is economic polylogism, where one's economic class is supposed to uniformly and absolutely determine one's ideas, the logical structure of one's mind; economic determinism. An individualist rejects such notions.<br /><br />When an individualist proclaims that the individual is the true unit of value, they are simultaneously saying that the human race, human life and its quality in general, is the truue unit value in that the human race is the cumulative result of every individual. On the other hand, when a collectivist proclaims that the individual must be subordinate to "society" or "the state" or "the nation", they are in practise saying that the masses at large must be subordinate to an allegedly specially endowed group of men. That is true elitism and narcissism. It is the idea that the human race at large must sacrifice its life and quality thereof to appease a particular group of individuals. If the ideologies of collectivism dominate for long enough, the human race will be swallowed up.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-64229129798423399072007-07-25T17:26:00.000-04:002007-07-25T17:39:43.317-04:00A Perspective on EducationOne thing that bothers me: we tend to assume that class-room-style schooling is the only kind of education. I think that's a major mistake. It's frankly quickly becoming archiac; an authoritarian model of the late 19th century, modeled after the Prussian system. I would bet that for many people a one on one atmosphere is much more conductive to learning. There's also self-education and education from good parenting. Further, I think that the future of education (and media in general) is on the internet. I would be thrilled to take college courses through one on one webcam dialogue with a teacher, and using file sends.<br /><br />I also would be thrilled to have more specialized say in what subjects I take, rather than pre-picked packages. When a student is actually interested in a topic, they are more likely to succeed. That's one of the reasons why public education has failed: it takes almost no consideration for what the student's interests are as an individual, and rigorously goes over the same things in highschool that already was supposed to be learned in middle school or elementary school. Why should we be surprised that the average highschooler is bored out of their mind? It feels like a jail-cell. It frankly borders on child abuse.<br /><br />Another probem is the "one size fits all" approach. Each individual is different; that's why they are an individual. It is not possible for each individual to benefit from the exact same education model and subject selection. Standardization in many ways is anathema to true education. It works sort of like communism: everything is flattened and those who do well are pushed downwards, while those who aren't so talented are artificially propped up and presented with things that are beyond their means. It just doesn't work. We are not ants. We have individuality. The system supresses that. The extremely bright kids are overlooked and frankly left behind. On the other hand, the kids that need special help do not recieve it either.<br /><br />The really bright and eccentric kids are almost uniformly drop-outs, and tend to get bad grades in highschool (Albert Einstein or Bill Gates anyone?). That speaks volumes for how unworkable the education system is. I'm no genuis, but I've learned more in my post-highschool years reading essays on the internet then I ever learned in highschool. In highschool, are kids taught economics? No. Are they taught sociology? Not really, although they do have social studies class, but alot of it is frankly biased, nationalist and romantic. Are they taught survival skills? Not at all! Are they vocationally trained? Perhaps a little bit, but it's mostly just a "what would you like to do when you grow up?" day once per year.<br /><br />Another point that is not often considered is that our Prussian-style education system creates a disincentive towards parental responsibility. That is, the teachers or schoolmasters take over the role of parents, while the actual parents are given an incentive to transfer responsibility away from themselves and towards the bereaucrats. The public schools thus become nothing more than baby-sitters that have no real connection with the children. At best, the teacher is like a lazy baby-sitter. At worst, an abusive one. A teacher may be qualified to teach, but it is not likely that they are qualified to baby-sit a classroom full of children.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-87452673318083055742007-07-24T11:36:00.001-04:002007-07-24T11:45:53.228-04:00Free Market Anarchism vs. Anarcho-Socialism<p><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/POiTHp0kqQs" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed><br /><br /><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7JZgqCSNmGc" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p><br /><p>More video responses to a socialist by <a onclick="_hbLink('ChannelLink','Watch');" href="http://www.youtube.com/user/XOmniverse">XOmniverse</a> and <a onclick="_hbLink('ChannelLink','Watch');" href="http://www.youtube.com/user/Kbiomech">Kbiomech</a>.</p>Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-72083863265589113322007-07-23T11:30:00.000-04:002007-07-23T20:02:29.459-04:00Defining Poverty and WealthSome points to consider......<br /><br />1. Wealth and poverty can be viewed in relative terms: wealthy or poor in comparison to what? A relatively "poor person" in modern-day America enjoys a standard of living that was unthinkable even for kings of ages past. And in terms of nationality, the "poor" in a modern developed economy is much better off than the "poor" in, say, Africa. Afterall, they have television sets, radios, nike shoes, and so on. They do not technically "need" these things; they are luxuries. The average person today enjoys luxuries that simply were not available to people in the past, because the technology did not exist. One point that this brings to surface is the fact that improvements in technology increases the capacity for wealth.<br /><br />2. Income is not the only measure of wealth. Indeed, it can be very misleading. You can take two people with the same income and one will be rather poor and the other rather luxurious due to their consumption habits as individuals. Someone who consumes wrecklessly is going to impoverish themselves in the long-term. On the other hand, someone with a high time-preferance is going to save more and thus have more long-term economic security. Furthermore, the purchasing power of the monetary unit is perhaps even more vital than income statistics, for it determines what standard of living any given income can afford.<br /><br />3. One way to determine wealth is in terms of what quantity and/or quality of property one owns. A person who lives in a upper-middle class home in a gated community is certainly wealthy in comparison to a person who lives in a mud-brick hut or teepee. A person who owns a car is certainly wealthy in comparison to a person who uses a horse and buggy or chariot to get around. In terms of quantity, if two people are interested in baseball cards, and one has a huge collection, while the other only has a few booster packs, the former is certainly wealthy in comparison to the latter.<br /><br />4. If wealth is to be defined more generally in terms of what makes one happy, "psychic wealth", it becomes utterly subjective and asthetic. What one values asthetically is within the realm of subjective value. If someone genuinely finds happiness by living the life of a hermit in the woods, there is nothing we can do to tell that person what would make them more happy. They determine that, not us. What one values in terms of consumer preferances falls within the subjective realm, as only they can determine what makes them happy. In areas such as music, movies and comic books, the wealth of happiness has no objective definition.<br /><br />5. The existance of scarcity of resources implies that it is not really possible for everyone to live the lives of billionaires because the resources in terms of land, labor and capital that is necessary for such a thing to happen does not exist. Furthermore, the inherently unequal distribution of those resources across the face of the planet combined with the inequality between people's abilities as individuals means that there will never be absolute equality in economic ends. That is, there will always be multiple tiers of wealth in any given society.<br /><br />6. There can be said to be two kinds of poverty. The first kind of poverty is the unfortunate result of people's own bad decisions, excessive consumption, a lack of personal initiative, and so on. The second type of poverty is created by government interventions in the economy that hamper production or stimulate excessive consumption, or simply by theft, wether governmental or not. The first kind of poverty is worsened by the latter kind. If the 2nd type of poverty were removed, poverty in general would diminish considerably, even for those who are poor as a result of their own bad decisions.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-58934658028563786262007-07-22T05:01:00.000-04:002007-08-01T21:20:28.627-04:00Thoughts on Discrimination and Immigration<p>Discrimination (wether it be racial, religious, or based on sexual orientation) generally does not benefit the discriminator, it hurts all parties involved. In economic terms, discrimination is suicidal, because either (1) you're lowering the amount of customers or (2) you're hiring a less qualified worker over a more qualified one, and therefore are accepting lower productivity. Racial discrimination is a suicidal buisiness practise in a modern, multicultural society. </p><p>Racists do not benefit from being racists, unless the costs of being a racist are externalized via governmental means (a practise that should be opposed at all costs). As manifested economically, lessening the amount of people you sell to or hiring less qualified workers over more qualified ones, is suicide. In a relatively competitive atmosphere the heavy discriminators go out of buisiness by their own folly, and a boycott can help hasten their fall. </p><p>Let the discriminators shoot themselves in the foot. There is no need for affirmative action. The discriminators are imposing losses on themselves. Better yet, form one's own non-discriminatory buisiness in competition with them, and eventually watch as the people flock to your buisiness rather than theirs, since you are providing the service that the discriminators are refusing to yield to so many people. Hire all of the qualified workers that they refused, and watch as your firm's level of productivity outdoes theirs. </p><p>On the other hand, not all discrimination is a bad thing per se. What I mean by this is that we inherently must discriminate in terms of who we let into our own homes. If some random guy knocks on my door, and I don't let him into my home, I have "discriminated" against him, but obviously this is an entirely different thing than typical racial discrimination. Owning property inherently implies that you have discriminatory power over who you let use it; there is nothing inherently wrong with this. </p><p>Should it be illegal for me to refuse to allow someone into my home? I would hope not. Discrimination in itself is not a crime. Discrimination is an exclusionary judgement, and action taken based on such a judgement. Everyone has a right to discriminate all they like in terms of who they let use their own property. Even racists should be allowed to engage in the suicidal buisiness practises mentioned above. A valuable idea: all of us non-racists should band together and discriminate against them!</p><p>While discrimination in terms of one's own property cannot legitimately be illegalized, there is another type of discrimination, what I'll call institutional or external discrimination, that indeed should never be legal. That is, it is absolutely illegitimate for the law to require someone to discriminate in a particular manner, and it is illegitimate for the law to enforce discriminatory judgements over someone else's property. To decide who gets to use someone else's property is to make an illegitimate claim of control over that property. </p><p>As can be seen, the issue isn't really discrimination itself so much as property rights. The real question is who the legitimate owner of a given piece of property is. People can discriminate on their own property as they please, and it is not inherently wrong per se. It is important, however, to keep in mind that to discriminate too liberally in terms of economic relations with others will be to deny oneself the benefits of society. What people cannot legitimately do is (1) discriminate over someone else's property or (2) make discrimination mandatory. </p><p>In my opinion, immigration restrictions count as both of these follies. That is, laws attempting to limit immigration, crack down on employers hiring them and illegalize selling homes or other products to immigrants, falls under the category of mandatory and external discrimination. Indeed, laws illegalizing the hiring of immigrants and laws requiring landlords to evict immigrants constitute external and mandatory discrimination, and therefore they are violations of property rights (of both immigrants and citezens associating with them).</p><p>Furthermore, the economics that shows that racial discrimination is suicidal as a buisiness practise also has some implications in the area of immigration. For one thing, to turn down droves of willing workers from abroad is disadvantageous to local buisiness, who could very well use such employees. And to limit the amount of people in the country is simultaneously to limit the amount of potential internal consumers. Thus, if anything it is in the best interests of enterprenuers to have a steady flow of immigrant labor, and there's nothing inherently wrong with this. </p><p>Without resorting to such laws, a community that bars all immigration into it and refuses to sell products to immigrating people is engaging in a massive economic suicide. If there are other, more intregrated communities, and if communities are considered as being in economic competition with eachother, it is clear that the more integrated communities will out-compete the more separatist ones. While it would be legitimate for separatists to discriminate on their own property, if they try to do so on a large scale they will harm themselves in the long-run. </p><p>It seems to me that the incentives under liberty inevitably make way for a relatively integrated, not segregrated, society. Therefore, I am convinced that in an atmosphere of freedom separatism would be an uncommon practise, and to the extent that it is practised it would be at a considerable loss in comparison to integrated institutions and communities, and would therefore have an inevitable incentive to allow some degree of integration.</p><p>While my views on discrimination can be misconstrued by those on the left as being apologia for racists, I believe that to eliminate all mandatory and external discrimination, while allowing the separatist types to discriminate so long as it's on their own property, is the surest path towards an integrated society and quite a strong blow against racists because of the economics and incentives of the matter. On the margin, the separatists would effectively be forced to stop discriminating, or at least discriminate less. </p><p>Ultimately, separatists are trying to accomplish something that is impossible. It is impossible to manage to stop immigration in its tracks, and it is impossible to economically benefit while persueing a large-scale discriminatory buisiness practise. The movement of people of different ethnicities and nationalities across land masses is inevitable, and will only intensify over time. The integration of people, done on a voluntary basis, is a good thing that should be encouraged. On the other hand, discrimination on one's own property is legitimate. However, when it is done by buisinesses it is generally an anti-competitive buisiness practise, and thus there is every incentive in the world to not discriminate in such a manner. </p>Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-1794417174750258272007-07-18T16:21:00.000-04:002007-07-21T17:37:15.035-04:00Save the Planet!<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/5BjrOi4vF24"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/5BjrOi4vF24" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-34258712076233616642007-07-16T01:08:00.000-04:002007-07-16T20:51:39.021-04:00Where Rights Come From<p><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Um2Qrh9wh-g" width="425" height="350" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent"></embed></p><p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/Franc28">Video by Francois Tremblay</a></p>Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-34293743066509304572007-07-15T00:30:00.000-04:002007-07-15T21:31:05.948-04:00Definition of One's Terms<strong>The State</strong><br /><br />A state is a territorial monopoly that possesses ultimate decision-making power, a monopoly on the use of force, over the individuals who live within that territory. It is made up of either a single absolute monarch/ruler or an oligarchy (a multitude of rulers) of some sort, a relative minority of the overall population of the given territory. Thus, a state is an institution constituted by a minority of the populution of a given territory (I.E. all states are oligarcies) that exercises a monopoly power over the use of force within that territory. It is the final arbiter of all disputes not only between its subjects, but between itself and its subjects, and therefore it is a judge in it's own case. Since it is a judge in it's own case, the state can be considered lawless, as it is not bound by any arbiter above itself and possesses the capability to exempt itself from its own rules. This is true no matter what type of state is in question.<br /><br />The defining features of any state are (1) the power of taxation, that is, the organization unilaterally fixes a "price" for living within the territory, and enforces this under the threat that force will be used in some way if payment is not made (2) the placement of barriers to competition from any other institutions in the enterprise of law, security and arbitration within the territory (3) control over who is allowed to enter and exit the territory (4) enforcement of both economic and social regulations of the lives of those who are within the territory and (5) the propogation of mystical or false justifications for its power, which is usually coupled with the formation of a class of intellectual elites and the use of "bread and circuses", economic and social bait, to lure the populace into compliance.<br /><br />The formation of a state is very much like how a mafia works. Every state's creation is founded on some very basic things such as the invasion and occupation of a territory, the confiscation of land property within a given territory, familial inheritance of stolen property, extortion of a community by a small band of thugs for an extended period of time and the practise of having a syndicate bait people into remaining complacent. When such a practise becomes institutional, a state has formed. States expand their power by expanding the jurisdiction of their territory and trying to control areas outside of its jurisdiction, increasing taxation and finding other methods of accrueing funds such as cartelization or control of banking, increasing the amount of people directly working for it and "buying out" and colluding with special interests within the public.<br /><br /><strong>Monarchy and Tribe</strong><br /><br />An absolute monarchy is a state in which one individual possesses ultimate decision-making power over everyone within the territory. Tribal and primitive societies are localized forms of absolute monarchy. Both tribal states and European absolute monarchies share a hereditary aspect. In hereditary monarchy, membership of the state is determined by "birthright" from particular familial chains, and incest and hegemonic arranged marriages between multiple states is common due to the incentive to keep the familial ties established. The most primitive form of government stems from the family, when a particular family is given monopoly power over the given territory, and a patriarchal shaman or king is put at the top. Monarchy can be generalized as rule of the many by an extreme few, in its purest form by one person.<br /><br />Non-absolute monarchy starts to form when the monarchal family begins to collude with or grant power to particular interest groups and oligarchal bodies within the territory. This means that something resembling a parliament forms, but the system continues to be a monarchy so long as the monarch is given ultimate decision-making power to the extent of putting the parlaiment in a suboordinate position. The union of church and state was one mechanism by which the monarch came into collusion with oligarchies such as the clergy. It also functioned as a mechanism to attempt to justify the power of the king, not from familial ties so much as the idea of "the divine right of the king". Economically, the increased bereaucracy of the monarchy was the result of patronage and protectionism between the king and nobles, which formed the fuedal system.<br /><br />The ancestral aspect of tribal states is also religious. That is, the earliest states literally considered the ruling family to be gods. And over time, if the current ruling family were not considered gods, they were considered the ancestors of gods, and so the bloodline of the monarchs was the main justification given for state rule. As this idea too had worn threadbare in European societies, the divine right of the monarch became the main justification given for state rule. Thus, the essence of popular justification for state power in primitive societies and monarchies stems from the divine and the familial. Even when the familial becomes less relevant, the divine is commonly used to justify it. In either case, ancestor-worshop is the primary derivation of such systems.<br /><br /><strong>Representative Democracy</strong><br /><br />A state starts to transform into a democracy when the role of the monarch is phased out, and the role of the oligarchy is expanded. While the state has one ruler in an absolute monarchy, and one ruler in collusion with an oligarchy in parlaimentary monarchy, in a democracy the state is made up of a multitude of rulers. Democracy does not get rid of privileged rulers. It replaces a system in which one person is at the top of the heirarchy with one in which multiple people are at the top of the heirarchy. Indeed, democracy does not get rid of heirarchy. What democracy does is allow more people to become part of the political class, and hence it actually expands special privileges.<br /><br />The initial premise of democracy is that by expanding access to the governmental apparatus to everyone, wether that be through voting or through eligibility for holding political office, we will get rid of exploitation of men by men. The idea is that this will get rid of the special privileges in society, converting everyone into more or less a state of "equality under the law". This premise of democracy is practically universally accepted, especially in west. It is simply assumed that democracy is the best form of government. But these premises are wrong. In a democracy, the state itself is still constituted by a relative minority in comparison to the overall population; an oligarchy.<br /><br />The introduction of the institution of voting does not make "the people" unanimously consent to the state. To begin with, many of the people in a democracy choose not to vote, and therefore have not demonstrated consent to the state. As for those who do vote, democracy forces "the people" into a hobbesian state of cultural warfare in which those who take part in the voting process are battling over how to use the state for their advantage at the expense of others. Since majority rule is the standard for voting in a democracy (and it is important to keep in many that it is almost always a numerical majority rather than an actual one) out of those who participate in the voting process, those who "win" are in effect forcing their will on the minority, those who "lose". Thus, those who "lose" cannot be said to have demonstrated consent either. Furthermore, even those voters who "win" are not directly controlling the state, they are voting for what is supposed to be representatives, and those representatives still possess the power to go against the will of even those who voted for them.<br /><br /><strong>Constitutional Republic</strong><br /><br />A constitutional Republic is a type of state that, while containing certain aspects of representative democracy, relies on the existance of a "rule of law" in the form of a written constitution that is meant to limit both the power of the state and to protect the citezen from the excesses of majority rule. It is therefore more aristocratic than a more pure democracy would be. Ideally, a constitutional Republic is supposed to avoid having a monarch, while at the same time avoid having an absolute participatory democracy. The concept of a "limited state" can be considered largely synonimous with a constitutional republic.<br /><br />Over time, written constitutions restrain a state less and less because they become interpreted and nullified by the state itself, since it is a judge in its own case as the courts are most likely still within the state apparatus itself. While the constitution in a Republic is supposed to be the supreme law of the territory, the state has the ability to simply not enforce it, or to either change it or interpret it as to reverse its original purpose. Furthermore, even if such a constitution were fully enforced by the state, constitutions typically contain imperfections in themselves, being written by fallible men and having vested interests create loopholes within the document from its inception.<br /><br />A constitutional Republic has been transformed into a democracy or some other type of system when either the rule of the majority (numerical or not) or the state itself has produced the effect of a nullification of the constitutional document that is supposed to bind the state. Furthermore, constitutional contracts have never been signed by the entire populace as sensible common contract standards would require, but rather signed by aristocracies made up of a small band of individuals constituting or allied with the state apparatus itself. That is, no constitutional contract has ever been an actual voluntary contract with the people because the people at large have never had any choice in choosing the contract, signing it or making it. Those who are born into the system are simply assumed to have tacitly consented to the contract.<br /><br /><strong>Theocracy</strong><br /><br />A theocracy is a state either constituted by or subject to religious institutions and leaders. A theocracy may be monist in form, where the administrative heirarchy of the government is identical with the administrative hierarchy of the religion, or it may have two "arms", but with the religious hierarchy dominating the state administrative hierarchy. The union of church and state in European monarchy was theocratic. The word theocracy originates from the Greek θεοκρατία (theokratia), meaning "the rule of God". This in turn derives from the Greek words θεος, meaning “god,” and κρατειν (kratein), meaning “to rule.” Thus the meaning of the word in Greek was “rule by gods" or human incarnation(s) of god(s). The most primitive theocracies were therefore primitivist and tribal societies in which the ruler was literally considered to be a god, or descended from one.<br /><br /><strong>Communism</strong><br /><strong></strong><br />Ideologically, communism proposes that the individual must be subordinate to the collective, while as a system it makes the individual, and the masses of individuals constituting the overall populace, subordinate to the state. A communist state is a state that owns most if not the entirety of the means of production within the territory. That is, the state claims and enforces ownership over as much of the property within the territory as possible, in the name of collective ownership of property. Communism is genuinely opposed to private property and market transactions that are free from state control.<br /><br />The stated purpose of the communist state is to equalize economic ends to flatten everyone out on a certain level, and for this reason the state takes control of the means of production and attempts to centrally plan the economy. In communism, production and consumption of goods and services are attempted to be essentially completely controlled by the state apparatus, leaving pretty much no room for individual choice in such matters. Typically, a communist state is ruled by one party and does not have genuine democratic voting. Ideologically, communism is ideally supposed to be a global system.<br /><br /><strong>Fascism</strong><br /><strong></strong><br />Fascism, as a political ideology, considers the individual and other societal interests subordinate to the needs of the state. Fascism as a modern political system formed out of socialism, with the merging of socialist and conservative viewpoints around the time of the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century. Fascism tends to embrace nationalism, more specifically national socialism, which is to mean national territorialism, which is a reinforcement of the state's monopoly of a nation-sized territory. Since nationalism is strong in fascism, fascism is opposed to communism only insofar as communism is globalist, but it also just as opposed to international capitalism.<br /><br />Economically, the fascist system is more about government regulation and control of property than government ownership of property. More specifically, the main economic difference between communism and fascism is that in fascism, the state colludes with private buisiness and heavily regulates private property, while in the communist system the state attempts to absorb all property into itself and there is hardly any private property to regulate. Fascism is typically very aggressive in its foreign policy. In practise, both fascism and communism don't have too much difference between their results, but do differ somewhat in their economic content.<br /><br /><strong>Imperialism</strong><br /><strong></strong><br />Imperialism is the forceful extension of a state's authority by territorial expansion or by the establishment of economic or political dominance over territories outside of its jurisdiction. An imperialist state is one that engages in a lot of warfare. Imperialism involves invasion and occupation of territories by states, as well as the practise of nation-building. Imperialism and an expansive and aggressive foreign policy go hand in hand. It can be represented by control of a state by another (a puppet state type of deal) or forced citezenship to the imperial state on the part of people in foreign territories. Colonialism is a peculiar form of imperialism where people from the territory of the imperial nation literally move to the occupied territory to live.Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31691110.post-80438612043058858382007-07-14T21:04:00.000-04:002007-07-16T20:43:06.821-04:00America: Free Market or Right-wing Socialism?<p>It is generally assumed without proof that the status quo, the current economic system in America, is capitalism. In the current political climate, the political left accepts this assumption and concludes that capitalism is bad because they see some negative things going on in the current system, some real and some entirely imagined. The political right accepts this assumption and concludes that the current system is good, that it is a free market economy, and they tend to have high confidence in the state of the economy because they see some good things going on in the current system, some real and some entirely imagined.</p><p>The trouble is, both of them are wrong. The left is under the illusion that the system they're attacking is capitalism. The right is under the illusion that the system they're supporting is capitalism. But the economic system of America is not free market capitalism, and argueably never was. If capitalism could be said to have ever existed as a system in America, it was roughly between 1750 and 1850, and it was never fully implemented, so we couldn't even say that the free market has ever really been implemented in full. That's because in order to get to the point of a pure free market, the state cannot exist.</p><p>This is important to point out. To the extent that there is a state, to the extent that there it has power over the individual, is the extent that the market is not free. To the extent that the government taxes, borrows, inflates, spends, legislates, subsidizes, prohibits, colludes, etc., is the extent to which the market is not free. To the extent that the government confiscates, claims ownership of or regulates property is the extent to which the market is not free. Every service that the government tries to provide, and monopolistically so, is a disruption of the voluntary economy. The enterprise of law and arbitration itself is a scarce resource like all others, and the existance of a government represents a disruption of a free market in this area. </p><p>So how can economic and governmental systems be evaluated? Boiling everything down to capitalism vs. communism is a bit oversimplistic. There certainly are systems that are somewhere in between the two. And it's not wise to red-bait people who are not necessarily red. However, it also must be emphasized that there is no such thing as a static equilibrium. Because no system is completely static, it is impossible to genuinely be "perfectly in the middle" of a political or economic spectrum. The advocation of such a position is contradictary and most certainly disingenuous.</p><p>One way to classify systems of economic organization would be to use a general spectrum of more vs. less economic control. A sensible interpretation may look as follows, in the order of the least economic control to the most:</p><p><strong>The Free Market</strong> - No Economic Control. The free market is a system in which there is no government control of the economy. It is an economy based entirely on the voluntary decisions of those taking part in it. The free market is based primarily on private ownership of property, obtained through homesteading and voluntary exchange between property titles. To be carried out in practise, there can be no government in the commonly understood sense of the word. </p><p><strong>Laizzes-Faire</strong> - Very Little Economic Control. Laizzes-faire is a system in which the government has strictly limited control over the economy. In it's most pure form, the only government services allowed is police, courts and defense. A laizzes-faire system largely has private ownership of the means of production and minimal if not negligable regulation. </p><p><strong>Interventionism</strong> - Moderate Economic Control. Interventionism is essentially the process that leads towards socialism. It is not a permanent, static system perfectly in the middle, but rather a transatory system. </p><p><strong>Socialism</strong> - Heavy Economic Control. Socialism is a system in which the government has considerable control over the economy. The government may own a significant portion of the means of production and it tries to centrally plan the economy.</p><p><strong>Totalitarianism</strong> - Total Economic Control. There is no economic freedom in totalitarianism. The entire "economy" is completely determined, owned and regulated by the government. The state, in essence, replaces the economy entirely. There can be no "economy", in the commonly understood sense, to speak of.</p><p>But there are also various types of economic control. Economic control can be split up into government ownership and government regulation. Communism specifically involves government ownership, while Fascism specifically is based more on government regulation and collusion between private interests and the government. There are also various types of economic organization that are more specific than socialism or interventionism, which are forms of socialism or interventionism, or alternate forms of economic organization for stateless societies. </p><p>Syndicalism, for example, is a system based heavily or entirely on unions and worker-directed communes. Some anarchists believe that they can set up syndicalist and communist economic systems without a state. Pure free marketers tend to disagree, pointing out that both systems require force and confiscation, wether through a state or not, in order to be brought about. On the other hand, communist or socialist anarchists tend to make the claim that the free market is inherently coercive, and will lead to dictatorship. But in reality the free market is simply whatever the outcome is of people's voluntary labor and exchanges.</p><p>It should be clear that, no matter how totalitarian the government is, some degree of voluntary economic activity is going to take place, even if it is illegal. This is particularly obvious when we look at the case of prohibitions. It is illegal to voluntarily buy or sell certain drugs, but people find ways to do it anyways. It is impossible to completely stamp out free economic activity. On the other hand, illegal economic activity cannot be considered a true free market, because it is the consequence of government intervening to prohibit and/or limit the supply of a good or service. It becomes a free market as soon as the government ends the prohibition, and abstains for regulating it or claiming ownership over it. </p><p>There are many ways in which a government can erode the free market. To begin with, it's very existance disrupts it, because it's very existance and the continuation of that existance is dependant first and foremost on taxation, which siphons money away from the private sector, away from the original owner of the property. There are all sorts of different taxes. There are income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, land-value taxes, inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes, and so on. There are also alternative ways for the government to accrue revenue, all of which disrupt the free market. It can borrow credit from foreign governments or banks, which also siphons money away from its private use. It can monopolize banking and print new money. It can also impose tariffs, which are essentially a tax on imports. </p><p>How the government spends this money disrupts the free economy, as it determines how the money will be redistributed away from its original owner and use towards new owners and uses. In short, government's revenue devices and it's spending of that revenue inherently creates a network of redistribution of resources. Government spending represents a reallocation of labor and goods and services other than would have voluntarily been chosen. First and foremost, this money goes to the primary functions of government such as police, courts and the military. Beyond this, it also goes to a whole host of other services such as public education, healthcare and roads. As the power of a government increases, it starts taking control of things that blatantly aren't really "necessities", such as space exploration and the arts. </p><p>Government services tends to be monopolized over time. The most obviously monopolized of these services would be the police. The government outlaws the private competition to the services that it provides. Furthermore, even if a degree of competition to a particular service is allowed, it is eroded by the spending of tax money on the public sector, which inherently erodes the capital of the private competition and warps the incentive structure. People often try to justify public services with the claim that there is no profitability in it, but they have it backwards. It is the public services that erode the profitability of the competition. If the public services were privatized, they would quickly become vastly more profitable, as well as vastly cheaper and more available to the masses.</p><p>Government spending for goods and services comes in all types. There is foreign aid, which transfers money and weapons from government to government. There is personal welfare, which gaurantees a direct redistribution of wealth between citezens. Modern warfare, of course, requires a whole lot of spending that goes to machinery, and to pay those in the army. It comes in the form of subsidies to agriculture, energy and various industries. It comes in the form of government contracts and bail-outs that go to buisinesses. As a piece of the pie, the money for all of this shows up in the paychecks of government bereaucrats. All of this involves a massive redistribution of resources, contrary how they would have been otherwise used and away from original ownership.</p><p>There seems to be no area that the government doesn't want to spend some money on, no matter how frivolous the cause in question is and regaurdless of wether or not it is necessary. It funds science, it funds the arts, it funds broadcasting, it funds sporting events. There is almost no special interest that the government does not collude with and redistribute resources to. Internally, the government expands the amount of people working for it, to run all of the departments and agencies, and mega-becreaucracies such as the department of homeland security. It all adds up. </p><p>There are many ways in which the government controls the economy without spending money. It can prohibit goods and services outright, or set a limit on their supply. It can impose wage and price controls. It can set minimum and maximim prices and wages. It can set quotas on imports and exports. It can use licensing to bestow the privilege of being allowed to legally work in certain fields. It can set up all sorts of regulations and requirements for goods and services. It can deliberately organize cartels. It can trust-bust buisinesses for having "predatory pricing", which can be defined subjectively however one desires, wether it's super lower prices or high ones. It can impose penalties and give out special rewards. It can control the rate of interest. It can force employers to hire certain people. </p><p>Governments can use conscription to either force people to work for it directly or for some other, private group. They can institutionalize and legalize involuntary servitude. They can control the hours of the workday. They can make union membership compulsory. They can impose compulsory consumption. They can restrict immigration, I.E. the amount of people and willing labor coming into and out of the territory. They can monopolize technology and intellectual property through the selective and privileged use of patent laws. They can use eminent domain on one's land and home property to either transfer ownership to the state or to some private lobbying interest and/or buisiness. They can put up barriers to unused resources and claim ownership of unused land. They can try to direct private investment. </p><p>America? A laizzes-faire haven? Give me a break. The American state, to varying degrees, engages in all of the kinds of intervention that's been mentioned. At best, it's an interventionist system quickly headed towards right-wing socialism. Perhaps a more sober examination reveals it already to be a right-wing socialist, fascist type of system. While the government in America does not own the means of production to the extent that a communist country would, it heavily redistributes, regulates and controls the economy in all kinds of ways. It has a long history of government-buisiness collusion and protectionism. </p><p>It's as if the left doesn't like right-wing socialism, but they think that right-wing socialism is the free market, so they want left-wing socialism or communism. And it's as if the right doesn't like left-wing socialism and communism, but they think that right-wing socialism is the free market, so they want right-wing socialism or fascism. The cliche idea that Republicans are die-hard free marketers hasn't had any truth to it for decades, since the 1950's at least, and even when the cliche had some truth to it, those weren't really the people who were running the party and in the mainstream of it. And the cliche idea that the Democrats are a bunch of commies doesn't necessarily hold up either, as they've historically been quite sympathetic to fascism and conservative brands of socialism. </p><p>It's time for people to understand what a free market actually is, in comparison to the current system, and that the current system is far from it. </p>Brainpolicehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13201986426822895299noreply@blogger.com7