Bed-Wetting Conservatives
by Thomas R. Eddlem
I’m tired of Bed-wetting Conservatives.
You know the kind of person I’m talking about.
The "Bed-wetting Conservative" is always fretting Democrats will take over the White House, especially whenever the Republican Caesar is criticized. They’re always saying things like "If you think it’s bad now, it’ll be a lot worse with Nancy Pelosi (or insert Democrat here) in the White House." The bed-wetters consider Democrats in the White House as the worst of all possible nightmares, and virtually wet themselves in fear of that event. And here’s the most important point: they like – and need – to be scared to the level of bed-wetting.
The "bed-wetting conservative" is not really a conservative; he is a concubine of the Republican Party. The bed-wetting conservative, who has predictably had his conservative principles betrayed by the Republican Party with regularity for at least a decade, helps me to understand a variety of societal psychoses, such as why Hillary Clinton keeps taking Bill Clinton back. And the quadrennial return of the District of Columbia beltway paycheck patriots to the GOP fold helps me to understand why the battered wife keeps going back to her abuser.
The bed-wetting conservative frets about Democrats inhabiting the White House even when it is patently untrue that Democrats could make the office worse. Even when the Republican in the White House openly claims the power to lock up any American citizen without explaining why they are being locked up (which is about as tyrannical as it gets), the bed-wetter still stumps for the Republican as the "lesser of two evils." The mathematical equation is such that no matter how far the Republican President moves to the left, he cannot possibly move to the left of the Democrats.
Bed-wetters are the kind of people who rail against our unfaithful allies, like Germany and Italy, who have issued arrest warrants against our CIA agents for kidnapping innocent people off their streets and sending them away for months or years of torture. These allies have "no guts." But if any foreign country were to do the same thing to the United States, the bed-wetter would scream for nothing less than every square millimeter of that country to reach a temperature of nothing less than 10,000,000 degrees Kelvin within 30 minutes and subsequently paved with trinitite.
"Foreigners have no rights," the bed-wetter will openly tell you when foreigners are placed in torture prisons without trial. When American citizens are given the same treatment as the foreigners, the bed-wetter knows they are all guilty of being terrorists – no trial needed. After all, why would the President lock up an innocent person? Even when these same prisoners are later released, the bed-wetter’s faith is untroubled. You can ask him: "If the prisoner was guilty, why did the President let this dangerous person go? And if he was innocent, why did he lock him up in the first place?"
He has a ready reply: "We can’t take chances in this post-9/11 world." (You can always tell when a bed-wetter is out of rational arguments, because it always forces them to resort to referring to the calendar.)
They know how the real world works, because they’ve seen it on the television show "24." They know terrorists are just biding their time by such low-tech distractions as IEDs and car bombs in Iraq. From "24," we should know terrorists really have access to billions of dollars of scientific equipment and laboratories, as well as the advanced microbiologists needed to produce bioweapons. Terrorists also have the ability to summon a cohort of nuclear scientists and all the enriched plutonium needed for nuclear weaponry at a whim. And they know they’ve got thousands of "sleeper" cells placed in the United States. (I’m wondering: Since all these cells have been consistently "sleeping" for at least five years now, shouldn’t we start calling them "coma cells"?)
While most bed-wetters are fans of "24," not all are. Most also attend the neo-con madrasahs on talk radio, including Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin. Sean Hannity is the arch-type bed-wetting conservative. "Hannitized" doesn’t rhyme with "lobotomized" for nothing. Hannity provides the Orwellian two minutes of hate against the enemy of the day, which is always a Democrat.
The talk radio madrasahs like to brag about their burgeoning manhood (which amounts to nothing more than neuticals), and how it helps them to teach the bed-wetters how the world works. To wit:
Only the leadership of the President can save us from this otherwise inevitable nuclear holocaust. Only total, unquestioned power in the hands of the President can save us. Torture is good, they stress, because that’s the only way to get the terrorists. We don’t need trials when we have the President doing the "deciding." And forget about the U.S. Constitution and 2,000 years of Christian just war theory; the President needs unchecked war powers to take the war to the enemy.
Bed-wetters like to have the king’s – I mean, the President’s – party in charge of Congress. But they are really concerned about holding onto the President’s office. And they all share the irrational conceit that their party will always hold onto the throne’s power, even when that control is so obviously overdue for a change. That’s why they are willing to give the president power to lock up anyone without explaining himself to the plebeians. Republicans will always hold the presidency, the Republican president has a good heart and would only lock up the right bad guys. There’s no reason to believe a future Democrat president would ever misuse the total arbitrary dictatorial power they assert for their Republican president. The rest of the world just doesn’t understand: "Duh! If no Democrat ever takes power, then they can’t misuse it!" And if a skeptic were to point out that the party in power historically shifts, the bed-wetter knows that’s the time to rally the skeptic most urgently to the Republican cause!
Bed-wetters believe intuitively that when the President deploys troops abroad that he is as infallible as the Pope when pronouncing Catholic doctrine. No matter how poorly the president deploys troops abroad in wars that continue to make us less safe, they cling to the president because we shall not be safe if he is replaced by a Democrat. Even though the bed-wetter believes the President can’t be wrong and is infallible when placing troops abroad, bed-wetters strangely believe that any doubt by anyone in their social circle about the President’s military engagements hurt the war effort and will lead to defeat. Doubts only embolden the enemy, even when we really don’t know who the enemy is. The President, evidently, draws his infallible power from our unquestioning faith and that infallible power dissipates with any doubt.
The scenario is a bit like the Star Trek episode "The Children Shall Lead," where faith in the Gorgon gave children visitors onto the Starship Enterprise extraordinary powers. But when the children’s faith in the Gorgon was shaken, the Gorgon evaporated. Like that Star Trek episode, any lack of faith in the President is helping the "Alien upon us, the enemy within." Does that sound familiar? Next we’ll expect to hear the bed-wetters summon the president with the following chant: "Hail, hail, fire and snow, call the angel we will go, far away, for to see, friendly angel come to me."
My friend William Norman Grigg is fond of using the phrase "clap for Tinkerbell" to describe this phenomenon.
Therefore, the bed-wetter will never volunteer a criticism of a Republican president. However, bed-wetting conservatives are ready to point out some minor character flaw in the President, always on domestic policy, when they are criticized as automatons of the president. They’ll say something such as: "I’ve criticized him in the past for spending proposals." But their criticism is nearly always "in the past," and never a contemporary criticism like "the president IS proposing too much spending."
Criticism of Democrats is required, especially the party’s congressional leadership, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. They’re right, of course, to say that a madam, Madame Nancy Pelosi, is now presiding over the House of Representatives as Speaker. Madams have presided over whorehouses for millennia, and it is perhaps appropriate that the House of Representatives should have its first madam. But the madam of a whorehouse is decidedly less dangerously violent than recent inhabitants of the White House have been.
Many appear to be afflicted with the view that "Democrat Party" people (they always say "Democrat," never "Democratic Party," even when Democrat party doesn’t fit grammatically) have never inhabited the White House. The exception to this psychosis is dead Democrats. Literally, the bed-wetter thinks the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat. Dead Democrats are the only heroes a bed-wetter will ever cite. Bed-wetters won’t even extol the principles of Reagan any more, because his stated principles stand in too great a contrast with the Bush regime’s principles. Instead, they cite only Harry Truman and John Kennedy as heroes. And even these citations are limited to mentioning them as heroes in the context of being agents of revolutionary change in favor of general government power. They wouldn’t ever cite the restraint of a past president.
How do you cure a conservative bed-wetter? In the short term, probably the solution is ordinary drug store incontinence products. But the only real long-term cure is a regular dose of books. Bed-wetters avoid books whenever possible. Warning: Books are a part of the "liberal drive-by media," and as Stephen Colbert might say, "books have facts and facts have a known liberal bias." They do, in a laissez-faire, traditional liberalism sense.
This random contagion with books – and not the "clap for Tinkerbell" effect – is causing The War party to lose its Joementum.
Spread the word about the cure for bed-wetting conservatives!
Monday, February 19, 2007
Immigration, Again
I still have to wonder why immigration is such a huge issue for so many people. I still consider myself to be a neutral on the question. Just about all of the positions put forth both for and against immigration, both legal and illegal, are fallitious and constitute unecessary government intervention in one way or another. There are people who wish to go after employers, others who wish to buff up police powers big time at the borders, others who wish to subsidize immigrants in mass, others who wish to overtly resitrict legal immigration and others who wish for complete "open borders".
There is also a whole host of motives on both sides. The main ulterior motives of the anti-immigration crowd are economic protectionism, racism and alarmism about "national security". The main ulterior motives of the pro-immigration crowd are blind egalitarianism, politicians wanting to expand their voting bases (especially Democrats with respect to racial/ethnic minorities) and economic regulation. Quite a strange brew of motives indeed. Interestingly, even the anti-immigration crowd has some egalitarian arguements. In either case, it will become apparent that every proposed "solution" to the question of immigration, both for and against, amount to some expansion of governmental powers and extend theiir effects into more than just immigration.
The idea of going after employers in the name of fighting immigration opens up a pandora's box for regulating buisinesses in general - in practise, it amounts to increased economic regulation of domestic buisiness. Lets be frank. A bunch of people in the southern and western states seem to feel that their job-security is threatened by an in-flux of new workers from other countries. As such, they prefer to resort to protectionism so that they can artificially block certain sectors of labor from co-existing with their own (this is not a new phenomenon: it goes as far back as the Irish and Chinese in 19th century America). Afterall, the illegal workers sector constitutes a competitive black market. The only way to eliminate such competition is through government protectionism. We would effectively be prohibiting productive jobs.
The anti-employer position inevitably boils down to an unwillingness to accept the prospect of competition from jobs possessed by immigrants and the buisinesses that hire them. The claim that such activity "steals jobs from Americans" is nonsense: point me to the droves of middle class American citezens who are lining up to pick berries in a field or be a maid at a cheap hotel for a living, because that is the type of work that alot of these jobs entail. 5 dollar an hour jobs to pick fruits in a field simply isn't the type of job that the vast majority of Americans are going to take. The idea that immigration "drives down non-immigrant wages" is fallicious; what it does is open up employment and hence generate competition. In short, all it does is create comparative advantage both ways. Unfortunately, the anti-immigration crowd tends to be dominated by protectionist urges. The doctrine of Pat Buchannen is mystifying. He is staunchly anti-immigration and protectionist, and these have always been the areas that he has concentrated most of his efforts in.
The entire issue boils down to protectionism, racism, "national security" hysteria, utopian egalitarianism, the horrible economic conditions of varius foreign countries and politician's wills to expand their voting bases. The reason why the issue currently has no rational solution is because all proposed solutions, both pro and con, discount private property. Going after employers violates private property, going after illegals who have come within the consent of private property owners violates private property, subsidized immigration violates private property, crossing land without the private owner's consent violates private property, artificial government blockades on immigration violate private property, and buffing up police powers at the borders violates private property.
The entire issue, as it has been politisized both pro and con, violates private property. All of the proposed anti-immigration measures (as well as the pro-immigration ones) violate private property rights. This issue has no solution because it isn't an issue. It was made into one by special interests. The only policy we should persue with regaurd to immigration is to do nothing at all; in other words, the matter cannot be properly addressed through political means. If I welcome someone into my private property, be they an immigrant or not and wether the property is my home or buisiness, then this is simply voluntary human behavior (yet many in the anti-immigration crowd effectively are trying to criminalize both the person who welcomes someone onto their property and the person they welcome). If I hire a willing immigrant, this is a voluntary contract. On the other hand, if an immigrant trespasses on my private property without my permission or makes me pay taxes to subsidize him, then a true issue has arisen. The entire issue is "solved" within the confines of private property - borders are both open or closed depending on the consent of the private property owner.
There is also a whole host of motives on both sides. The main ulterior motives of the anti-immigration crowd are economic protectionism, racism and alarmism about "national security". The main ulterior motives of the pro-immigration crowd are blind egalitarianism, politicians wanting to expand their voting bases (especially Democrats with respect to racial/ethnic minorities) and economic regulation. Quite a strange brew of motives indeed. Interestingly, even the anti-immigration crowd has some egalitarian arguements. In either case, it will become apparent that every proposed "solution" to the question of immigration, both for and against, amount to some expansion of governmental powers and extend theiir effects into more than just immigration.
The idea of going after employers in the name of fighting immigration opens up a pandora's box for regulating buisinesses in general - in practise, it amounts to increased economic regulation of domestic buisiness. Lets be frank. A bunch of people in the southern and western states seem to feel that their job-security is threatened by an in-flux of new workers from other countries. As such, they prefer to resort to protectionism so that they can artificially block certain sectors of labor from co-existing with their own (this is not a new phenomenon: it goes as far back as the Irish and Chinese in 19th century America). Afterall, the illegal workers sector constitutes a competitive black market. The only way to eliminate such competition is through government protectionism. We would effectively be prohibiting productive jobs.
The anti-employer position inevitably boils down to an unwillingness to accept the prospect of competition from jobs possessed by immigrants and the buisinesses that hire them. The claim that such activity "steals jobs from Americans" is nonsense: point me to the droves of middle class American citezens who are lining up to pick berries in a field or be a maid at a cheap hotel for a living, because that is the type of work that alot of these jobs entail. 5 dollar an hour jobs to pick fruits in a field simply isn't the type of job that the vast majority of Americans are going to take. The idea that immigration "drives down non-immigrant wages" is fallicious; what it does is open up employment and hence generate competition. In short, all it does is create comparative advantage both ways. Unfortunately, the anti-immigration crowd tends to be dominated by protectionist urges. The doctrine of Pat Buchannen is mystifying. He is staunchly anti-immigration and protectionist, and these have always been the areas that he has concentrated most of his efforts in.
Further, with a one-size-fits-all attempt to crack down on anyone who engages with illegal immigrats, it is inevitable that you are now criminalizing completely innocent American citezens who voluntarily decide to help the immigrants by providing them with food and/or shelter. Why would we want to criminalize the act of helping people? We would be effectively criminalizing "charity", I.E. the voluntary giving away of or shared use of one's property (gift and bequest). It is a nonsensical method to persue the matter with an apriori assumption of the criminality of anyone who engages in any activity with illegal or legal immigrants. To simply criminalize masses of American citezens in such a way would be outrageous. This would be use of the immigration issue as a means to wage a war on the American people, effectively.
While the left generally takes a more pro-immigration position, they nonetheless would never turn down an oppurtunity to have a witch hunt on buisiness and employers. The left's main talking point in this area is that these immigrant jobs constitute "exploitation of cheap labor". Comparatively, this is not the case. The Mexicans who constitute the main constituency of immigrants at the southern border were being payed 1/10th (or less) of any seemingly low-wage that job they can aquire here in America. People who hire illegals are giving poor people jobs at 10 times the wages they would have earned before. In this respect, they are in fact benefiting them considerably.
If those jobs are under the table, the better (no taxes and no "benefits")! Indeed, an "under the table" (I.E. black market) job is beneficial in comparison to a legal minimum wage job because what you lose in government "benefits" you make up for in the lack of the taxes you would have payed for them (thus keeping the money to spend on your well-being yourself in the first place). A black market job of 5 dollars an hour with no taxes is no worse than a legal job of 10 dollars an hour in which half of the money is taken in taxes, and 5 extra dollars an hour to spend to begin with is almost intrinsically superior to a 5 dollar an hour loss for "social benefits". The only possible arguement against this point is paternalism: "We know better than they do how to spend their money". Hogwash, I say.
If I lived in Mexico with what amounts to a shack and made only 50 cents an hour, I'd be overjoyed to jump over to America to be "exploited" for 3, 4 or 5 dollars an hour, any day. There is nothing inherently wrong with such jobs. Everyone has to start somewhere, and work their way upwards. Immigrants, or anyone else who takes such jobs, are perfectly free to leave these jobs if they find a comparative advantage at another job with a higher wage. Many people who come over the southern border from Mexico and further are fleeing the impoverished conditions of their own countries and they come to America seeking economic oppurtunity. This fact should clue us in to one thing that might constitute the beginning of a solution: it is Mexico's responsibility to develope a more prosperous economy, hence alleviating the incentive for poor people to be fleeing for America.
Of course, I am of the opinion that the only way to do that would be for Mexico to privatize itself meaningfully. Until such a thing happens, or if economic conditions in America as compared to Mexico drastically changed, America will continue to have a "comparitive advantage" in terms of labor and wages that functions as a rational (although in some cases somewhat misleading) incentive for people to cross the border. Almost noone in the entire debate over immigration mentions Mexico's role in any of this. What should Mexico do to stop droves of people from fleeing it to seek economic oppurtunity elsewhere? My answer is capitalism. Stop taxing, inflating, spending, regulating and engageing in assorted plunderings of the Mexican people to death and see what happens. Come on, Mexico - give laizzes-faire a chance.
One of the right's main talking points with regaurd to (and against) immigration is that immigrants get access to welfare "benefits". This is both true and false, or rather, partially true. But so do American citezens. I see no moral difference between the two - the two consistant positions would be "welfare for everyone" or "welfare for noone" (I choose the latter). Immigration isn't the problem there, you have to abolish the welfare benefits altogether. Further, I would actually wager that many "illegal" immigrants do not get such welfare "benefits", because to do so would alert the legal authorities of their presence. Such things inherently require that the person engage with the government, therefore revealing their illegal presence. They would likely have to commit fraud to even approach getting into the welfare, social security, and medicare systems, let alone anything else. The conservative who maintains that immigrants should be denied welfare benefits while non-immigrants should be allowed to have them is simply a hypocrit; in going after immigration they are missing the mark, which is the nature of the welfare state itself.
Others, many on the left, take a different position on "benefits" for immigrants and support mass-subsidization of immigration. They demand that illegal immigrants currently in America be granted S.S., Medicare and the entire host of social programs in mass. Others make a caviat only for legal immigrants, while many argue for the method the same thing but under the method of legalizing them all. The problem of the initial demand is that it grants people who pay nothing into the system a completely free ride, while the citezens pay through taxes and inflation. The problem with the "legal only" caviat as well as the "benefits upon legalization" premise is that it's simply an expansion of the welfare system, which is unecessary and counterproductive. All of these so-called "solutions" are simply expansions of social spending.
For the left, immigration is a hot-button issue to support their much-prized social programs (I.E. welfare state). Immigration for them is in this sense just a wedge issue to push through the same old agenda: increasing social spending endlessly, payed for by inflation and taxation. In short, it's just another way for the government to achieve revenue. It's a revenue-producing issue. More voters means more revenue for the government and a lame excuse to increase spending on politician's pet entitlement programs. This is a major ulterior motive as to why the Democratic party is so pro-immigration to the point of absurdity: it feeds their tax machine, their "magic multiplier". In this sense, the entire nature of the welfare "net" is to capture as many people as possible in the net, as to make them dependant and more or less fixed in place. That is, afterall, what a "net" does - it traps you in place.
The hardcore left in the political establishment practically base their entire power on demagogueing egalitarian notions with regaurd to economic and racial groups. In short, the Democratic Party (as well as the Republican Party in recent years) "exploits" egalitarian idealism to win the vote of minorities. It functions as a cheap springboard to power, and being aware of this the hardcore left tend to rabidly gloat in favor of what could be called "socialized immigration". They see immigrants, especially ones coming from countries dominated by minority groups, as another rationale for another special interest group. This is simply exploitation of identity-politics and victimization. The end result is simply higher campaign contributions and duped voters. And more power for the government.
The idea of 100% open borders is fallicious if it means that immigrants can just cross people's private property as they please. In this sense, borders can only be open to the extent that enterance is voluntary on the part of the owner of the property. The advent of government or "public" property blurs this matter. In either case, immigrants are capable of freely crossing property borders on a consentual basis. Part of the problem is that property borders are not entirely well-defined when we introduce government and "public" property into the picture. Technically, the line between Mexico and the United States is completely arbitary and does not designate the jurisdiction of private property borders. When immigrants come to the borders of private property owners, then the real jurisdiction comes into play. It is my contention that within such a well-defined structure of ownership, most immigrants would have no problem coming through. What buisiness is going to refuse to sell in-coming people products? What real estate agent is going to refuse to sell someone a home? And it's not as if Mexicans are coming by and knocking on everyone's door in the neighborhood.
Some take a strong anti-immigration stance because they view immigration, particularly at the southern border, as an inherent national security threat to be reacted to with military engagement domestically. Because paying a Mexican 5 dollars an hour to pick fruits in a field or work the counter at Wal-Mart is such a threat to our national security, right? Nonsense. This crowd is using the immigration issue as a carte blanch for expanding police powers domestically. Further, there is the contention that the Mexican immigrants are a bunch of criminals. I would put forth that whatever crime they bring with them is mostly the result of prohibition and economic desperation. The "drug lords" and criminal gangs are a direct result of the international "drug war" combined with inadequate economic conditions. To paint all of these people as criminals is nothing short of propaganda, as is the idea of tying any of this ordeal into the "war on terrorism".
While I strongly believe in defense as opposed to offense, the extensive militarization of the country's borders is simply a bad idea because it is inevitably the pre-text to or realization of a police state. If we had armed troops stopping everyone across all city borders, if not simply walking the streets, then we would be in a certain stage of a police state. Executive authority should not be able to dominate in such a way; it would be a gross "inbalance of powers" and direct threat to people's liberties. The lay citezen should not be that easily accessable and directed by the military powers. Immigration is no excuse for what amounts to an extensive buffing up of military-industrial contracting and military presence as it effects the common citezen. The constitution is supposed to only grant the president the power of a mere figure-head, with little power of his own outside of the veto power and as head commander of the military as granted by the preceding authority of congress. The "far right" and assorted anti-immigration radicals support using such executive power to militarize the states federally.
While I oppose the left's version of "open borders", I concur with Walter Block in considering Hans Herman Hoppe's views on immigration to be a reversion to conservatism. While professor Hoppe correctly critisizes the Buchannanite and Leftist views on immigration, he nonetheless maintains a flawed position in favor of considerably restricting immigration. While he is correct in maintaining that immigration can be resitricted within the confines of private property, I nonetheless get the impression that his own position does not quite fit the criteria that he himself puts forth. He seems to be for restricting immigration as an end in itself, rather than something that is up to the owner of the property. I do not see any compelling reason for one to consider immigration in itself as something to be discouraged in general. I view it as conditional and situational.
It is impossible not to comment on the perhaps most pathetic and radical of the anti-immigration crowd: of course, the racists. A bunch of racists are scared at the prospect of whites not being a majority anymore in certain areas of the country. They have engaged in an alarmist propaganda campaign intended to convince people that a growing population of minorities, particularly hispanics, will cause "social decay". It is a pathetic "racial" or "cultural" purity complex; quasi-marxist cultural warfarism. This group is beyond help. They are extreme "racial protectionists", polylogists and authoritarians. Not even the staunchest anti-egalitarian could logically favor them. They suffer from a corrupt ideology.The entire issue boils down to protectionism, racism, "national security" hysteria, utopian egalitarianism, the horrible economic conditions of varius foreign countries and politician's wills to expand their voting bases. The reason why the issue currently has no rational solution is because all proposed solutions, both pro and con, discount private property. Going after employers violates private property, going after illegals who have come within the consent of private property owners violates private property, subsidized immigration violates private property, crossing land without the private owner's consent violates private property, artificial government blockades on immigration violate private property, and buffing up police powers at the borders violates private property.
The entire issue, as it has been politisized both pro and con, violates private property. All of the proposed anti-immigration measures (as well as the pro-immigration ones) violate private property rights. This issue has no solution because it isn't an issue. It was made into one by special interests. The only policy we should persue with regaurd to immigration is to do nothing at all; in other words, the matter cannot be properly addressed through political means. If I welcome someone into my private property, be they an immigrant or not and wether the property is my home or buisiness, then this is simply voluntary human behavior (yet many in the anti-immigration crowd effectively are trying to criminalize both the person who welcomes someone onto their property and the person they welcome). If I hire a willing immigrant, this is a voluntary contract. On the other hand, if an immigrant trespasses on my private property without my permission or makes me pay taxes to subsidize him, then a true issue has arisen. The entire issue is "solved" within the confines of private property - borders are both open or closed depending on the consent of the private property owner.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Rejoinder to Prof. Perlstein on Legalizing Drugs in New Orleans
Rejoinder to Prof. Perlstein on Legalizing Drugs in New Orleans
by Walter Block
In this article, I made the case that the best way to stop the horrendous murder rate in New Orleans is to legalize drugs. Prof. Perlstein of Loyola New Orleans offers several criticisms of my argument, for which I thank him. His scholarly and thoughtful reply gives me the chance to clarify and further expand on my thesis.
1. My faculty colleague starts off on somewhat of a false note, claiming that "Block doesn't believe the population of drug abusers would increase." But I never said any such thing in the article he is criticizing, nor in any of my other publications on this subject. My view is the very opposite. Indeed, I stated on 1/26/07: "Just as Las Vegas evolved from a stretch of desert into a world class city when it was the only one to offer gambling, so will the Big Easy surpass its previous preeminence (it was once the leading city in the entire South) when it alone offers legal drugs. This industry all by itself, will put us back on the map." There will be millions of drug addicts who will flock to the Big Easy were we to institute such a humane proposal; the more the better as far as I am concerned. This, at least, was the experience of the English during their all too brief period of legalization. People came there from all over the British Dominions to avail themselves of this bit of economic freedom.
But these are not at all the sorts of people Perlstein wants to see repopulating Crescent City, not top drawer at all. He calls them "desperados… the most unstable, unhealthy and criminally inclined segment of the population." And, in this, he is correct, at least superficially. The point is, that these poor souls are at present exactly as this "criminal justice journalist" describes them. But they are not human garbage. Nor is it very "progressive" to view them in any such manner. Rather, they are victims of a cruel and unjust drug prohibition law. Their plight stems almost entirely from this evil legislation. Under legalization, they would bloom, as do newly watered flowers after a period of drought.
2. Why is this? It is because drug prohibition radically raises its price. The desperation of the addict stems from the fact that apart from a few rich athletes, doctors, singers and actors, the only way this price may be paid is through prostitution, or drug pushing or robbery. According to one estimate "a gram of 100% pure heroin … would be cut 10 to 15 times and sell for about $2,000. But take it away from the black market, make it legal, and heroin is a pretty cheap drug. The British National Health Service (NHS) pays about $10.00 for this gram of heroin." In my view, the latter figure is perhaps ten times too high. NHS is a socialist organization. On the free market it would sell for about $1.00. If feeding a drug habit cost about as much as eating a few candy bars per day, these people, these human beings, could lead quasi-normal lives. They could have ordinary jobs. Without the desperate search for the next "fix" and the wherewithal to finance it, this flotsam and jetsam would be turned in one fell swoop into productive members of the New Orleans community.
It was once said of Israel that there was a perfect match between a people without land, and a land without people. To discuss that point would take us way too far afield. But no words could more accurately describe addicts in the U.S., and indeed in the entire world, on the one hand, and the territory of what used to be New Orleans. Perlstein may not appreciate this, but there are acres and acres, no, square mile after square mile, of empty abandoned houses just waiting for people to repair and occupy them. We are in desperate need of new occupants, who would be willing to work, and this describes to a "T" drug addicts no longer in thrall to exorbitant black market drug prices.
The point is, Perlstein is very much in error in his second argument, too. Here he maintains that I am failing to take into account what "A first-year criminology student can tell you" namely "that most burglars and robbers are stealing to feed a drug habit." Of course they are. But this stems, solely, from the astronomical prices paid for substances that grow like weeds. And this in turn is entirely a function of prohibition. Their prices would be very low under free enterprise, and there would thus be no more reason for anyone to engage in crime to support an addiction.
Increased crime is a great danger according to my critic, especially at a time when "the overwhelmed New Orleans police department can't keep up with stray shoplifters." Of course, the cops can’t deal with petty theft, let alone the more serious kind: they are too busy hassling, arresting and incarcerating people for the non-crime of polluting their own bodies. Some 60% of all inmates are in prison due to drug "crimes." Were drugs legalized, and the police free to stop real crimes, they would undoubtedly do a far better job of dealing with them.
3. My Loyola colleague labels as a "fiction" my contention that "An inordinate amount of these (New Orleans murders) consists of drug dealers shooting each other in turf wars." Perhaps journalist professors do not read newspapers, or consult crime statistics. Perhaps Prof. Perlstein could begin his research with this. To pick one quote at random from the hundreds of news stories listed therein: "They call themselves the Lemon Crew, the Scorpions, Tiny Rascals and 60 Lansdowne Crips, and there are dozens of others, laying claim to blocks and neighborhoods across the city. They are Philadelphia's gangs, and some are extraordinarily violent, contributing to the surge in shootings and murders engulfing the city." Want something closer to home, maybe from the Times Picayune? Here: "Saying an increase in violent crime on the West Bank is the result of post-Katrina gangs "fighting over turf," Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee on Wednesday showed off several high-powered weapons, including a possible grenade launcher, various narcotics and $31,000 in cash that investigators confiscated Monday in a drug raid in Waggaman."
4. Dr. Perlstein objects to legalizing drugs in New Orleans on the ground that we are already "fragile enough as it is" in terms of psychological and health services. But, once again, addicts are in their present dire straights only because of prohibition and the resultant inordinately high drug prices. Eliminate these, and virtually all of these problems recede. As for "newbie cocaine and heroin users," I have already answered this objection, but will happily do so again: Anyone who wants to, can shoot up right now. There is surely no one, at present, who refrains from drug use simply because of prohibition. At least, under legalization, no one would go to school yards and try to hook youngsters, as at present.
5. My intellectual opponent is not at all impressed with New Orleans following the path blazed by Las Vegas. Why, the latter doesn’t even have any major league sports franchises. Were drugs legal here, "people would leave New Orleans in droves." What? They are not already doing that, due to the fact that we are fast becoming the murder capital of the country? If the status quo in this regard continues, we will soon lose the Hornets and the Saints in any case. Prof. Perlstein doesn’t seem to realize that the Big Uneasy is already emptying out. Posit no more murders, at least not the overwhelming majority of them that are drug gang turf related. Imagine a few million additional peaceful citizens rebuilding and then occupying our hundreds of thousands of empty dwellings. Think of New Orleans with a larger population than Dallas and Atlanta combined.
In his conclusion, my learned colleague, I fear, contradicts himself. On the one hand, he admits, he concedes, that the "‘war on drugs’ is a dismal failure." On the other hand, he adamantly rejects a possible breakthrough. The federales owe us big. They don’t seem to be disposed to pay us back with coin of the realm. Maybe, just possibly, they can be embarrassed into allowing us a free enterprise zone in this regard. But Perlstein dismisses this proposal as something that should have been written "for entertainment purposes only," as an "April Fools joke."
Those empty hulks of houses will only become "drug dens" under present prohibition, their likely fate. Under legalization in sharp contrast, large numbers of people who are slowly dying horrendous deaths will be able to get their lives back together again. Does not Dr. Perlstein have any sympathy for their plight? And in so doing, they will go a long way toward curing our own malaise: economically, spiritually, psychologically, and, most important, in radically reducing our horrendous murder rate.
Our horrendous murder rate is due to drug gangs shooting it out with each other over turf. Under legalization, this stops forthwith, just as it did when prohibition of alcohol ended. "Progressives" should be appalled.
Perhaps he opposes a free market in drugs for New Orleans alone. We are too brittle, too helpless in the aftermath of Katrina. Where, then, should this legalization take place? In the entire country? Not too likely. In some city that is doing reasonably well? None would likely take what so many people regard as a leap in the dark. Legalization has to occur somewhere, and no more likely place for this is our own New Orleans. Perlstein dismisses this proposal as something that should have been written "for entertainment purposes only," as an "April Fools joke." But it is our present policy that is ludicrous.
by Walter Block
In this article, I made the case that the best way to stop the horrendous murder rate in New Orleans is to legalize drugs. Prof. Perlstein of Loyola New Orleans offers several criticisms of my argument, for which I thank him. His scholarly and thoughtful reply gives me the chance to clarify and further expand on my thesis.
1. My faculty colleague starts off on somewhat of a false note, claiming that "Block doesn't believe the population of drug abusers would increase." But I never said any such thing in the article he is criticizing, nor in any of my other publications on this subject. My view is the very opposite. Indeed, I stated on 1/26/07: "Just as Las Vegas evolved from a stretch of desert into a world class city when it was the only one to offer gambling, so will the Big Easy surpass its previous preeminence (it was once the leading city in the entire South) when it alone offers legal drugs. This industry all by itself, will put us back on the map." There will be millions of drug addicts who will flock to the Big Easy were we to institute such a humane proposal; the more the better as far as I am concerned. This, at least, was the experience of the English during their all too brief period of legalization. People came there from all over the British Dominions to avail themselves of this bit of economic freedom.
But these are not at all the sorts of people Perlstein wants to see repopulating Crescent City, not top drawer at all. He calls them "desperados… the most unstable, unhealthy and criminally inclined segment of the population." And, in this, he is correct, at least superficially. The point is, that these poor souls are at present exactly as this "criminal justice journalist" describes them. But they are not human garbage. Nor is it very "progressive" to view them in any such manner. Rather, they are victims of a cruel and unjust drug prohibition law. Their plight stems almost entirely from this evil legislation. Under legalization, they would bloom, as do newly watered flowers after a period of drought.
2. Why is this? It is because drug prohibition radically raises its price. The desperation of the addict stems from the fact that apart from a few rich athletes, doctors, singers and actors, the only way this price may be paid is through prostitution, or drug pushing or robbery. According to one estimate "a gram of 100% pure heroin … would be cut 10 to 15 times and sell for about $2,000. But take it away from the black market, make it legal, and heroin is a pretty cheap drug. The British National Health Service (NHS) pays about $10.00 for this gram of heroin." In my view, the latter figure is perhaps ten times too high. NHS is a socialist organization. On the free market it would sell for about $1.00. If feeding a drug habit cost about as much as eating a few candy bars per day, these people, these human beings, could lead quasi-normal lives. They could have ordinary jobs. Without the desperate search for the next "fix" and the wherewithal to finance it, this flotsam and jetsam would be turned in one fell swoop into productive members of the New Orleans community.
It was once said of Israel that there was a perfect match between a people without land, and a land without people. To discuss that point would take us way too far afield. But no words could more accurately describe addicts in the U.S., and indeed in the entire world, on the one hand, and the territory of what used to be New Orleans. Perlstein may not appreciate this, but there are acres and acres, no, square mile after square mile, of empty abandoned houses just waiting for people to repair and occupy them. We are in desperate need of new occupants, who would be willing to work, and this describes to a "T" drug addicts no longer in thrall to exorbitant black market drug prices.
The point is, Perlstein is very much in error in his second argument, too. Here he maintains that I am failing to take into account what "A first-year criminology student can tell you" namely "that most burglars and robbers are stealing to feed a drug habit." Of course they are. But this stems, solely, from the astronomical prices paid for substances that grow like weeds. And this in turn is entirely a function of prohibition. Their prices would be very low under free enterprise, and there would thus be no more reason for anyone to engage in crime to support an addiction.
Increased crime is a great danger according to my critic, especially at a time when "the overwhelmed New Orleans police department can't keep up with stray shoplifters." Of course, the cops can’t deal with petty theft, let alone the more serious kind: they are too busy hassling, arresting and incarcerating people for the non-crime of polluting their own bodies. Some 60% of all inmates are in prison due to drug "crimes." Were drugs legalized, and the police free to stop real crimes, they would undoubtedly do a far better job of dealing with them.
3. My Loyola colleague labels as a "fiction" my contention that "An inordinate amount of these (New Orleans murders) consists of drug dealers shooting each other in turf wars." Perhaps journalist professors do not read newspapers, or consult crime statistics. Perhaps Prof. Perlstein could begin his research with this. To pick one quote at random from the hundreds of news stories listed therein: "They call themselves the Lemon Crew, the Scorpions, Tiny Rascals and 60 Lansdowne Crips, and there are dozens of others, laying claim to blocks and neighborhoods across the city. They are Philadelphia's gangs, and some are extraordinarily violent, contributing to the surge in shootings and murders engulfing the city." Want something closer to home, maybe from the Times Picayune? Here: "Saying an increase in violent crime on the West Bank is the result of post-Katrina gangs "fighting over turf," Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee on Wednesday showed off several high-powered weapons, including a possible grenade launcher, various narcotics and $31,000 in cash that investigators confiscated Monday in a drug raid in Waggaman."
4. Dr. Perlstein objects to legalizing drugs in New Orleans on the ground that we are already "fragile enough as it is" in terms of psychological and health services. But, once again, addicts are in their present dire straights only because of prohibition and the resultant inordinately high drug prices. Eliminate these, and virtually all of these problems recede. As for "newbie cocaine and heroin users," I have already answered this objection, but will happily do so again: Anyone who wants to, can shoot up right now. There is surely no one, at present, who refrains from drug use simply because of prohibition. At least, under legalization, no one would go to school yards and try to hook youngsters, as at present.
5. My intellectual opponent is not at all impressed with New Orleans following the path blazed by Las Vegas. Why, the latter doesn’t even have any major league sports franchises. Were drugs legal here, "people would leave New Orleans in droves." What? They are not already doing that, due to the fact that we are fast becoming the murder capital of the country? If the status quo in this regard continues, we will soon lose the Hornets and the Saints in any case. Prof. Perlstein doesn’t seem to realize that the Big Uneasy is already emptying out. Posit no more murders, at least not the overwhelming majority of them that are drug gang turf related. Imagine a few million additional peaceful citizens rebuilding and then occupying our hundreds of thousands of empty dwellings. Think of New Orleans with a larger population than Dallas and Atlanta combined.
In his conclusion, my learned colleague, I fear, contradicts himself. On the one hand, he admits, he concedes, that the "‘war on drugs’ is a dismal failure." On the other hand, he adamantly rejects a possible breakthrough. The federales owe us big. They don’t seem to be disposed to pay us back with coin of the realm. Maybe, just possibly, they can be embarrassed into allowing us a free enterprise zone in this regard. But Perlstein dismisses this proposal as something that should have been written "for entertainment purposes only," as an "April Fools joke."
Those empty hulks of houses will only become "drug dens" under present prohibition, their likely fate. Under legalization in sharp contrast, large numbers of people who are slowly dying horrendous deaths will be able to get their lives back together again. Does not Dr. Perlstein have any sympathy for their plight? And in so doing, they will go a long way toward curing our own malaise: economically, spiritually, psychologically, and, most important, in radically reducing our horrendous murder rate.
Our horrendous murder rate is due to drug gangs shooting it out with each other over turf. Under legalization, this stops forthwith, just as it did when prohibition of alcohol ended. "Progressives" should be appalled.
Perhaps he opposes a free market in drugs for New Orleans alone. We are too brittle, too helpless in the aftermath of Katrina. Where, then, should this legalization take place? In the entire country? Not too likely. In some city that is doing reasonably well? None would likely take what so many people regard as a leap in the dark. Legalization has to occur somewhere, and no more likely place for this is our own New Orleans. Perlstein dismisses this proposal as something that should have been written "for entertainment purposes only," as an "April Fools joke." But it is our present policy that is ludicrous.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Some Perspective On Global Warming
Global warming seems to be arising as the major issue for the left. It would seem that radical environmentalism has increased in popularity to the extent that the political status quo on the left now more or less accepts the radical environmentalist view on climate change. For many people, global warming is apparently the most important issue facing us, as opposed to war or civil liberties. When flipping through the wasteland known as television, I have repeatedly seen special shows on the Science Channel with a radical environmentalist agenda, painting a picture of an evironmental doomsday on earth within decades as "scientific fact". The problem with all of this is that it is truly on shaky ground scientifically, and it is pure alarmism. The idea that we face the possibility of the earth's surface turning into a gigantic incinerator within a century is not sound science, it is quackery. Even if it was aknowledged that the earth in general is warming, this process would be an incredibly slow one, not a sudden huge jump in temperature.
To begin with, there are some aspects of this issue that are often overlooked. It is a fact that 90% of the world's ice is in antarctica (I.E. the south pole), and all scientific data on antacrtica tells us that it is not warming or cooling, but remaining rather stagnant. In short, there is only one melting ice-cap at best: the north pole/arctic, and the north pole plus Greenland only constitutes 10% of the world's natural ice. This means that even if the arctic ice sheet completely melted, we would be left with 90% of the world's ice still. Not only that, but 90% of the world's fresh water comes from Antarctica. Further, this would almost indicate that the world's ice is gravitating towards the south pole, rather then simply dissapearing in mass (a reasonable hypothesis; much more reasonable then global apocalypse). The rise in sea levels that would result if the north pole were to completely melt would take place gradually, thus eliminating any possibility of a sudden "doomsday". This rise would also not be too large considering the vast area of the that the ocean encompasses.
Other scientific data on the temperatures of cities themselves is rather revealing. One finds that in the most populated cities, temperatures are slowly warming, yet only 100 miles away from those cities, in less dense areas, temperatures are either cooling or remaining about the same. A very simple reason for this is obvious: the cities are the areas that produce the most heat, the most electricity. Of course the cities are going to be heating up more than less densely populated areas. They are filled with concrete, which tends to conserve heat as a material. But a mere one or two hour drive from these areas brings us into territory that has nowhere near such concentration of heat, and therefore these areas are considerably stagnant. Many of these non-city areas are actually showing signs of cooling.
The extent to which human activity effects the environment is being greatly exaggerated by people with an agenda - particularly by people with power who want to keep and/or expand it (such as Al Gore). It is certainly undeniable that human activity has some sort of effect on the environment, but the reality is nowhere close to the picture painted by the environmentalist movement. At best, human activity is only adding a few percentile points to the rate of environmental change that already is occuring naturally. The most radical of environmentalists would have us believe that environmental change is entirely or almost entirely caused by human activity. This notion is completely out of square with nature, as nature is not something that is unchanging. Nature is not something that can only be changed by industrial human activity, it is something that has, does and will change on its own over considerable periods of time.
It must be kept in mind that the environment is a self-healing and entropic system. One of the major problems with the ideology of environmentalism is that it considers the current status quo of the environment to be an ideal that shouldn't change. This notion is actually in opposition to nature. The environment is naturally something that changes over time. If we were to take the environmentalist's view and apply it to few million years ago, then humans would have never formed, since the environment is presumed to be something we want to keep static, and it took an environmental change to spawn the human species. Environmentalism seeks to preserve the status quo of the climate and general environment without realizing that the environment naturally does not stay static. Nature is an entropic and unstatic system. It is always in a state of flux.
Any natural change in the environment is viewed as bad, while artifical manuevers putting species in environments in which they are not naturally adapted to is viewed as "preserving the environment". In this way, environmentalism is actually anti-naturalist because it opposes the prospect of allowing the environment to change at all. Things that would naturally die out are considered as things to be artificially saved. This is true questionable meddling with nature. It would seem that our environmentalist friends actually oppose the way the environment works. They believe in creating an environmentally static atmosphere when the environment is inherently an unstatic thing.
The way that environmental change effects humans is also being quite overblown. It is not considered that any real changes that may be going on are slow and gradual processes. Human beings can adapt. We are not doomed to waking up one day with a radically different environment that forces us to die out. Humans are the most short-term adaptive species on the planet. Humans survived an ice age, yet now we have alarmists trying to convince us that humans can't survive a gradual temperature change of a few degrees! If sea levels rise, humans have some very common sense means to cope with this: use technology that builds coastal homes on a higher plane, or simply move away from the coasts. Since environmental changes are so gradual, there is almost always a way for humans to change their mode of living in preparation.
It would appear that the environmentalist movement is more concerned with preserving the status quo (in opposition to any natural changes) than with preserving the well-being of the human race. The well-being of the human race does not entirely depend on keeping environmental conditions exactly the same. To the contrary, geologically and biologically speaking, the well-being of the human race is more dependant on the ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Yet instead of coming up with ways to adapt to change, we see the radical environmentalist movement concentrating all of their efforts on the goal of stopping any and all change. Their ideology depends on a rejection of nature, not an embrace of it. They would be willing to give up the entire human race in the name of keeping the environment the same.
In many ways, the cause of environmentalism is being used as a cover for a different agenda. In particular, it is being used as a rationale for economically socialist policies; anything that curbs industrial activity and the developement of technology. Since they blame industrial activity on all of the ills of the world, the most radical application of their agenda would mean a gradual reduction in commercial, industrial and technological activity and developement. The ultimate consequence of most environmental policies would appear to be a crippling of market activity, especially market activity involving industry and high-technology. All of this constitutes a reduction in human well-being in the name of keeping things the same. It is rather Luddite in nature.
Radical environmentalists are like watermelons. As the saying goes, "green on the outside, red on the inside".
To begin with, there are some aspects of this issue that are often overlooked. It is a fact that 90% of the world's ice is in antarctica (I.E. the south pole), and all scientific data on antacrtica tells us that it is not warming or cooling, but remaining rather stagnant. In short, there is only one melting ice-cap at best: the north pole/arctic, and the north pole plus Greenland only constitutes 10% of the world's natural ice. This means that even if the arctic ice sheet completely melted, we would be left with 90% of the world's ice still. Not only that, but 90% of the world's fresh water comes from Antarctica. Further, this would almost indicate that the world's ice is gravitating towards the south pole, rather then simply dissapearing in mass (a reasonable hypothesis; much more reasonable then global apocalypse). The rise in sea levels that would result if the north pole were to completely melt would take place gradually, thus eliminating any possibility of a sudden "doomsday". This rise would also not be too large considering the vast area of the that the ocean encompasses.
Other scientific data on the temperatures of cities themselves is rather revealing. One finds that in the most populated cities, temperatures are slowly warming, yet only 100 miles away from those cities, in less dense areas, temperatures are either cooling or remaining about the same. A very simple reason for this is obvious: the cities are the areas that produce the most heat, the most electricity. Of course the cities are going to be heating up more than less densely populated areas. They are filled with concrete, which tends to conserve heat as a material. But a mere one or two hour drive from these areas brings us into territory that has nowhere near such concentration of heat, and therefore these areas are considerably stagnant. Many of these non-city areas are actually showing signs of cooling.
The extent to which human activity effects the environment is being greatly exaggerated by people with an agenda - particularly by people with power who want to keep and/or expand it (such as Al Gore). It is certainly undeniable that human activity has some sort of effect on the environment, but the reality is nowhere close to the picture painted by the environmentalist movement. At best, human activity is only adding a few percentile points to the rate of environmental change that already is occuring naturally. The most radical of environmentalists would have us believe that environmental change is entirely or almost entirely caused by human activity. This notion is completely out of square with nature, as nature is not something that is unchanging. Nature is not something that can only be changed by industrial human activity, it is something that has, does and will change on its own over considerable periods of time.
It must be kept in mind that the environment is a self-healing and entropic system. One of the major problems with the ideology of environmentalism is that it considers the current status quo of the environment to be an ideal that shouldn't change. This notion is actually in opposition to nature. The environment is naturally something that changes over time. If we were to take the environmentalist's view and apply it to few million years ago, then humans would have never formed, since the environment is presumed to be something we want to keep static, and it took an environmental change to spawn the human species. Environmentalism seeks to preserve the status quo of the climate and general environment without realizing that the environment naturally does not stay static. Nature is an entropic and unstatic system. It is always in a state of flux.
Any natural change in the environment is viewed as bad, while artifical manuevers putting species in environments in which they are not naturally adapted to is viewed as "preserving the environment". In this way, environmentalism is actually anti-naturalist because it opposes the prospect of allowing the environment to change at all. Things that would naturally die out are considered as things to be artificially saved. This is true questionable meddling with nature. It would seem that our environmentalist friends actually oppose the way the environment works. They believe in creating an environmentally static atmosphere when the environment is inherently an unstatic thing.
The way that environmental change effects humans is also being quite overblown. It is not considered that any real changes that may be going on are slow and gradual processes. Human beings can adapt. We are not doomed to waking up one day with a radically different environment that forces us to die out. Humans are the most short-term adaptive species on the planet. Humans survived an ice age, yet now we have alarmists trying to convince us that humans can't survive a gradual temperature change of a few degrees! If sea levels rise, humans have some very common sense means to cope with this: use technology that builds coastal homes on a higher plane, or simply move away from the coasts. Since environmental changes are so gradual, there is almost always a way for humans to change their mode of living in preparation.
It would appear that the environmentalist movement is more concerned with preserving the status quo (in opposition to any natural changes) than with preserving the well-being of the human race. The well-being of the human race does not entirely depend on keeping environmental conditions exactly the same. To the contrary, geologically and biologically speaking, the well-being of the human race is more dependant on the ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions. Yet instead of coming up with ways to adapt to change, we see the radical environmentalist movement concentrating all of their efforts on the goal of stopping any and all change. Their ideology depends on a rejection of nature, not an embrace of it. They would be willing to give up the entire human race in the name of keeping the environment the same.
In many ways, the cause of environmentalism is being used as a cover for a different agenda. In particular, it is being used as a rationale for economically socialist policies; anything that curbs industrial activity and the developement of technology. Since they blame industrial activity on all of the ills of the world, the most radical application of their agenda would mean a gradual reduction in commercial, industrial and technological activity and developement. The ultimate consequence of most environmental policies would appear to be a crippling of market activity, especially market activity involving industry and high-technology. All of this constitutes a reduction in human well-being in the name of keeping things the same. It is rather Luddite in nature.
Radical environmentalists are like watermelons. As the saying goes, "green on the outside, red on the inside".
Thursday, February 15, 2007
War: The Total Negation Of Liberty
"Only one thing can conquer war: that liberal attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation, and which can never wish to bring about a war, because it regards war as injurious even to the victors." - Ludwig Von Mises
The central axiom of libertarianism is that noone may aggress against the person or property of others; put more fully, each individual may act as they choose so long as they do not enact aggression on the person and property of others. It would therefore be the case that war is the biggest violation of libertarian ethics that there can possibily be. While murder and vandalism are small-scale violations of liberty that are obviously opposed, war is an engagement that multiplies this violation to huge masses of people and property. War is the mass-destruction of person and property: mass-murder and mass-vandalism. War is "legal murder" on quite a large scale. It therefore logically follows that the libertarian must be staunchly anti-war.
This does not mean that the libertarian must be a total pacifist (although they can be, but most aren't), because self-defense is a value that comes about as a result of non-aggression. Self-defense is not an overt act of aggression, but a mechanism against and in reaction to it. The people who are defending themselves from acts of aggression are entirely justified in their defensive action. It nonetheless remains to be the case that defense is most often the excuse used to justify aggressive war. Of course, this is a disingenuous notion; a lame excuse for mass-murder.
Is it possible to have a "just war"? It depends on how we define war. If by war we mean an act of aggression and invasion of a territory, then there cannot possibly be such thing as a just war. The very nature of such an act is offensive, not defensive. However, if by a "just war" we mean the act of defending oneself against such an act of aggression, then this defensive action indeed can be justified. But to call such defensive action war seems to be innacurate. War would be the act of invading and aggressing. The people defending are not invading or aggressing. It is upon this basis that we justify those who take action against an invading aggressor.
To forbid such self-defense would be a gigantic error that would, in practise, function to allow aggressors to get away with their acts while their victims sit idly by while being plundered. Surely we would not want to forbid people from defending themselves. On these grounds, technically the "insurgents" in Iraq are justified so long as they are only defending themselves against the invading and aggressing force that occupies them (those who do more than this, who blow up people randomly, obviously are not justified on these grounds and do not qualify as insurgents).
Most wars come about as the result of a conflict not between two countries, but between two or more governments. This conflict is often territorial, although it also may be economic. Wars are often waged by a government in the attempt to economically or politically dominate a particular area outside of its periphery. In short, when a government wishes to expand its territory, it resorts to war. And when a government wishes to exercise authority over areas outside of its territory, it resorts to war. Most war, therefore, is a consequence of the nature of nation-states in themselves. It is practically inevitable that there is going to be conflict between the jurisdictions of two given nation-states because nation-states have a natural tendency to expand and centralize. There is no easier way for a government to achieve this than through war.
In many ways, in earlier times it was obvious to most people that wars were a conflict between two governments, two sets of rulers, as opposed to a literal battle between peoples in themselves. However, this has been increasingly blurred over time by the false idea that wars are fought to defend the people, as opposed to political interests. Essentially, the difference between nation and state has been expressly blurred to justify war. The move towards modern warfare has effectively made people even more willing to genuinely support them and enlist themselves to fight in them then they would have been in centuries past.
What motive may governments have to engage in a war? War presents governments with the oppurtunity to recieve the obedience of the domestic populace, by putting forth the notion that the war being fought is in defense of them (when in reality it is in persuit of the political interests of the ruling elite and those who ally with them). War also presents governments with the oppurtunity to increase its police and executive powers domestically, and gain support for any other policies it may promote in war-time. Further, war presents governments with the economic oppurtunity to raise more revenue, particularly through the method of increasing the money supply.
With these economic oppurtunities, governments provide an incentive to effectively "buy" allies in the private sector - that is, it presents governments with a smooth means to ally at the hip with big buisiness. Another motive that governments have to engage in war is to set up a means to politically and economically control the region being invaded; to indirectly control foreign governments and natural resources. In other words, empire and plunder. While wars have been fought in the name of religion and other such things, these rationales are more often than not only a cover for the real political motives involved.
Propaganda is an essential tool in order for the political class to dupe the population into supporting a war. The purpose of war-time propaganda is to convince the people that there is a constant enemy that threatens their lives (I have debated with quite a number of American right-wingers who literally believe that we face the threat of Muslims invading our whole country and imposing a Muslim theocracy onto us). If no enemy exists, one is concocted out of thin air. The people are to be given the impression that the war is a preservation of their "traditions" and values. Whatever general political, ethical or religious values people have are exploited as to give the war an appearance of nobility.
Interestingly, many modern wars are propagandized for with arguements claiming that the war serves egalitarian notions such as democracy and equality. The war propgandist's job is essentially to convince everyone that "slavery is freedom", that war is justified because it "protects our freedom". This line of arguement is a reducto ad absurdum, of course, because you cannot protect freedom by violating it. The idea that you have to give up freedom in order to preserve it is purely Orwellian. It belongs in the same "dangerous ideas" bin as fascism and communism.
The way in which war effects the liberties of the domestic population of the war-waging country itself is devastating. Much of this impact is economic. It would be impossible to fund a modern war completely with taxes. Further, such levels of taxation would be direct and obvious to the public, and therefore it would conjure considerable resistance. This is why goverments rely much more on other means to fund wars: by borrowing money from foreign governments and creditors, and by increasing the money supply itself. The borrowing brings about debt, the cost of which is passed onto the public. The increasing of the money supply brings about inflation, which manifests itself by a rise in the cost of living. As such, war brings about conditions that considerably decrease the economic well-being of the population of the war-waging country.
Economic liberty is violated further by the formation of what we may call "the military-industrial complex" - the alliance between the military establishment and various industries and buisinesses. The word industrial is in there for a reason. This alliance presents a means for big buisinesses to get special privileges; tax-funded contracts, bail-outs, and assorted special protections from competition. All of this is at the expense of the general population in the form of inflation and taxes. It constitutes a wealth transfer to various rich corporate elites. What would be considered the "working" and "middle" classes pay for this the most.
War also presents many threats to the personal liberties of the population of the war-waging country. If there is a draft, then this means that various people will be conscripted against their will to accept and keep a job, and this is a job that poses a greatly heightened risk of injuring or killing them. A draft is a violation of voluntary contract, plain and simple - it is tantamount to slavery. Slavery means that you are forced with the threat of violence to take a job and to keep that job. It's involuntary servitude - a coerced contract; slavery to the state. Further, during war-time, dissidents face the possibility of being thrown in jail or even violently aggressed against by law enforcement (see the Kent State shootings).
Expansions of police powers during war-time provide a means for the government to effectively nullify precedents that are meant to protect the citezen such as habeus corpus, the requirement of a warrant and reasonable cause, freedom of the press, freedom of association and any real sense of "personal privacy". In short, war provides a chance for the political establishment to break the law. The expansions of political power that take place during war never shrink back to where things were before. The post-war nation is never the same as the pre-war nation. It is always in a situation with more political power, and therefore less individual liberty on the part of the population.
While wars most certainly have been going on since far back in history, the 20th century marks the rise of total war. The 20th century marks the rise of war-technology capable of mass-destruction at the push of a button; the atomic bomb presented us with a means to destroy an entire city with a weapon the size of a human fist. In comparison, as bad as the past may have been in many respects, the 20th century makes the middle ages appear to be peaceful times. The 20th century was in a state of non-stop war in many ways, and now that we have moved into the 21st century this hasn't stopped.
It was only in the 20th century that we could even concieve of the advent of a world war, and now we have had two of them so far, and we might be moving towards a third. Sadly, international treaties and bodies that are supposed to be dedicated to global peace have done almost nothing to stop the advance of war (and in some ways, they may have advanced us towards war in themselves). A policy of foreign intervention is inevitably a pretext for war. Only a policy of non-intervention and free global association can prevent war.
There is no more pressing of an issue in our times than war. The establishment of peace should be the main goal of humanity. People need to engage in a strong advocacy and reassertion of the principle that it is peaceful cooperation that is the boon of civilization. Aggression is the destructor of social order.
The central axiom of libertarianism is that noone may aggress against the person or property of others; put more fully, each individual may act as they choose so long as they do not enact aggression on the person and property of others. It would therefore be the case that war is the biggest violation of libertarian ethics that there can possibily be. While murder and vandalism are small-scale violations of liberty that are obviously opposed, war is an engagement that multiplies this violation to huge masses of people and property. War is the mass-destruction of person and property: mass-murder and mass-vandalism. War is "legal murder" on quite a large scale. It therefore logically follows that the libertarian must be staunchly anti-war.
This does not mean that the libertarian must be a total pacifist (although they can be, but most aren't), because self-defense is a value that comes about as a result of non-aggression. Self-defense is not an overt act of aggression, but a mechanism against and in reaction to it. The people who are defending themselves from acts of aggression are entirely justified in their defensive action. It nonetheless remains to be the case that defense is most often the excuse used to justify aggressive war. Of course, this is a disingenuous notion; a lame excuse for mass-murder.
Is it possible to have a "just war"? It depends on how we define war. If by war we mean an act of aggression and invasion of a territory, then there cannot possibly be such thing as a just war. The very nature of such an act is offensive, not defensive. However, if by a "just war" we mean the act of defending oneself against such an act of aggression, then this defensive action indeed can be justified. But to call such defensive action war seems to be innacurate. War would be the act of invading and aggressing. The people defending are not invading or aggressing. It is upon this basis that we justify those who take action against an invading aggressor.
To forbid such self-defense would be a gigantic error that would, in practise, function to allow aggressors to get away with their acts while their victims sit idly by while being plundered. Surely we would not want to forbid people from defending themselves. On these grounds, technically the "insurgents" in Iraq are justified so long as they are only defending themselves against the invading and aggressing force that occupies them (those who do more than this, who blow up people randomly, obviously are not justified on these grounds and do not qualify as insurgents).
Most wars come about as the result of a conflict not between two countries, but between two or more governments. This conflict is often territorial, although it also may be economic. Wars are often waged by a government in the attempt to economically or politically dominate a particular area outside of its periphery. In short, when a government wishes to expand its territory, it resorts to war. And when a government wishes to exercise authority over areas outside of its territory, it resorts to war. Most war, therefore, is a consequence of the nature of nation-states in themselves. It is practically inevitable that there is going to be conflict between the jurisdictions of two given nation-states because nation-states have a natural tendency to expand and centralize. There is no easier way for a government to achieve this than through war.
In many ways, in earlier times it was obvious to most people that wars were a conflict between two governments, two sets of rulers, as opposed to a literal battle between peoples in themselves. However, this has been increasingly blurred over time by the false idea that wars are fought to defend the people, as opposed to political interests. Essentially, the difference between nation and state has been expressly blurred to justify war. The move towards modern warfare has effectively made people even more willing to genuinely support them and enlist themselves to fight in them then they would have been in centuries past.
What motive may governments have to engage in a war? War presents governments with the oppurtunity to recieve the obedience of the domestic populace, by putting forth the notion that the war being fought is in defense of them (when in reality it is in persuit of the political interests of the ruling elite and those who ally with them). War also presents governments with the oppurtunity to increase its police and executive powers domestically, and gain support for any other policies it may promote in war-time. Further, war presents governments with the economic oppurtunity to raise more revenue, particularly through the method of increasing the money supply.
With these economic oppurtunities, governments provide an incentive to effectively "buy" allies in the private sector - that is, it presents governments with a smooth means to ally at the hip with big buisiness. Another motive that governments have to engage in war is to set up a means to politically and economically control the region being invaded; to indirectly control foreign governments and natural resources. In other words, empire and plunder. While wars have been fought in the name of religion and other such things, these rationales are more often than not only a cover for the real political motives involved.
Propaganda is an essential tool in order for the political class to dupe the population into supporting a war. The purpose of war-time propaganda is to convince the people that there is a constant enemy that threatens their lives (I have debated with quite a number of American right-wingers who literally believe that we face the threat of Muslims invading our whole country and imposing a Muslim theocracy onto us). If no enemy exists, one is concocted out of thin air. The people are to be given the impression that the war is a preservation of their "traditions" and values. Whatever general political, ethical or religious values people have are exploited as to give the war an appearance of nobility.
Interestingly, many modern wars are propagandized for with arguements claiming that the war serves egalitarian notions such as democracy and equality. The war propgandist's job is essentially to convince everyone that "slavery is freedom", that war is justified because it "protects our freedom". This line of arguement is a reducto ad absurdum, of course, because you cannot protect freedom by violating it. The idea that you have to give up freedom in order to preserve it is purely Orwellian. It belongs in the same "dangerous ideas" bin as fascism and communism.
The way in which war effects the liberties of the domestic population of the war-waging country itself is devastating. Much of this impact is economic. It would be impossible to fund a modern war completely with taxes. Further, such levels of taxation would be direct and obvious to the public, and therefore it would conjure considerable resistance. This is why goverments rely much more on other means to fund wars: by borrowing money from foreign governments and creditors, and by increasing the money supply itself. The borrowing brings about debt, the cost of which is passed onto the public. The increasing of the money supply brings about inflation, which manifests itself by a rise in the cost of living. As such, war brings about conditions that considerably decrease the economic well-being of the population of the war-waging country.
Economic liberty is violated further by the formation of what we may call "the military-industrial complex" - the alliance between the military establishment and various industries and buisinesses. The word industrial is in there for a reason. This alliance presents a means for big buisinesses to get special privileges; tax-funded contracts, bail-outs, and assorted special protections from competition. All of this is at the expense of the general population in the form of inflation and taxes. It constitutes a wealth transfer to various rich corporate elites. What would be considered the "working" and "middle" classes pay for this the most.
War also presents many threats to the personal liberties of the population of the war-waging country. If there is a draft, then this means that various people will be conscripted against their will to accept and keep a job, and this is a job that poses a greatly heightened risk of injuring or killing them. A draft is a violation of voluntary contract, plain and simple - it is tantamount to slavery. Slavery means that you are forced with the threat of violence to take a job and to keep that job. It's involuntary servitude - a coerced contract; slavery to the state. Further, during war-time, dissidents face the possibility of being thrown in jail or even violently aggressed against by law enforcement (see the Kent State shootings).
Expansions of police powers during war-time provide a means for the government to effectively nullify precedents that are meant to protect the citezen such as habeus corpus, the requirement of a warrant and reasonable cause, freedom of the press, freedom of association and any real sense of "personal privacy". In short, war provides a chance for the political establishment to break the law. The expansions of political power that take place during war never shrink back to where things were before. The post-war nation is never the same as the pre-war nation. It is always in a situation with more political power, and therefore less individual liberty on the part of the population.
While wars most certainly have been going on since far back in history, the 20th century marks the rise of total war. The 20th century marks the rise of war-technology capable of mass-destruction at the push of a button; the atomic bomb presented us with a means to destroy an entire city with a weapon the size of a human fist. In comparison, as bad as the past may have been in many respects, the 20th century makes the middle ages appear to be peaceful times. The 20th century was in a state of non-stop war in many ways, and now that we have moved into the 21st century this hasn't stopped.
It was only in the 20th century that we could even concieve of the advent of a world war, and now we have had two of them so far, and we might be moving towards a third. Sadly, international treaties and bodies that are supposed to be dedicated to global peace have done almost nothing to stop the advance of war (and in some ways, they may have advanced us towards war in themselves). A policy of foreign intervention is inevitably a pretext for war. Only a policy of non-intervention and free global association can prevent war.
There is no more pressing of an issue in our times than war. The establishment of peace should be the main goal of humanity. People need to engage in a strong advocacy and reassertion of the principle that it is peaceful cooperation that is the boon of civilization. Aggression is the destructor of social order.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Left-Wing Anarchism: A Critique
What exactly is anarchism? According to conventional wisdom, anarchy is one and the same with complete chaos and disorder. This conception of anarchism has to be rejected because it is a baseless assumption that has nothing to do with the philosophy in question. It makes an apriori assumption that the lack of a central authority would lead to complete wrecklessness on the part of every individual (and, of course, is puts forth no rational arguement as to why a central authority is the only way to create any real order). It also appears nonsensical because we clearly see that chaos and disorder still pervades despite the fact that we live in a world controlled by governments. If we accept the conventional definition of anarchy, then we would have to consider various atmospheres in which governmental authority exists to be "anarchism". Another common definition of anarchism assumes that it means "anyone can do whatever they want under any circumstance". In actual fact, not one single anarchist, no matter how dim-witted, has ever suggested such a thing.
A much better definition of anarchism would be a state of affairs in which there is no central monopolistic authority, I.E. no government. Surprisingly, however, there is only one branch of anarchism that truly fits this definition without delving into a host of other "requirements", and that branch is known as anarcho-capitalism, which is merely the most radical application of libertarianism (the point of this work, however, is not to make a defense of anarcho-capitalism, but to critisize non-capitalist anarchism). The bulk of anarchist ideology, however, consists of something entirely different from anarcho-capitalism. Indeed, one finds that most anarchist groups do not necessarily hold the abolition of government as their main goal. These anarchist groups's resistance to government is not so much their main pillar, but rather only one application of their resistance to something else. Such anarchists do not necessarily see government as the greatest exploitive institution in society, rather it is only one of a host of institutions which they consider to be exploitive; and many of them consider other institutions to be even more exploitive than government.
Indeed, the majority of the anarchist movement consists of left-wing anarchists of varying sorts. And by left-wing we do not mean the comparitively "moderate" modern liberal movement, but rather the "far-left-wing", as far left as one can possibly go. The central object of this group's opposition is not government, but "heirarchy" (what they percieve to be heirarchy, that is) or indeed any institution in which each individual member is not completely equal (of course, left-wing anarchists consider any such arrangement to be a heirarchy). The only reason that such groups advocate the abolition of government is because it is a heirarchal institution. If government were a completely equalitarian institution (which obviously is not the case), they would be forced to support it fully.
In the abstract, left-wing anarchists argue that they oppose all "exploitation". This contention in itself has no problems - who, anarchist or not, doesn't oppose what they consider to be exploitation? However, what exactly do our left-anarchist friends consider to constitute "exploitation"? Here, we get to the crux of their ideology: any institutional arrangement in which any individual has higher status or power than anyone else is considered to be exploitive. If we are to take this seriously, every single institution ever in existance must be considered exploitive, because there is no such thing as an institution in which everyone is completely equal (this is a utopian impossibility). Indeed, under this strange definition, the institution of the family itself must be exploitation (an idea Karl Marx supported), since the parents exercise authority over their children. The institution of employment must also be considered as inherent exploitation under this definition, since the worker's status are never equal to eachother, and never equal to their employers (and of course, employer's statuses are never equal to eachother either).
It thus becomes apparent to us that, in order to be true to their own ideology, a left-wing anarchist must oppose all institutions of whatever kind. Indeed, to take this ideology to heart would mean that property ownership as a whole must be viewed as nothing but exploitive, since it is never equal with respect to everyone. We therefore find ourselves confronted with the fact that the left-wing anarchist's main passion is the abolition of private property. This is very interesting, because this is the main passion of communism. It is the same rationale used by communists to argue for abolishing religious institutions. Indeed, Karl Marx himself, in his early stage, could be considered an anarchist. It was Marx himself, afterall, who thought that under communism the state would "wither away". Of course, this opposition to the state is only an afterthought that is supposed to be an enevitable consequence of the main agenda: the abolition of private property. The main reason why the left-wing anarchist opposes government is because they accept the communist contention that private property is entirely the creation of government (an absurd notion).
Of course, these notions are absurd. It should be clearly evident that the only way to even approach the abolition of private property is through governmental force. It should therefore be clear that the left-wing anarchist, in practical reality, faces the fact that the only way for them to abolish "exploitation A" (private institutions) is to rely on "exploitation B" (governmental institutions). In short, the left-wing anarchist is faced with the contradiction that while they consider government to be heirarchal, they must support that heirarchal institution when it makes any moves to hamper other institutions that are considered heirarchal (private property, family, etc.).
The entire notion of anarcho-communism is absurd in that it requires a government to enforce such collectivization. Even if they were to achieve collectivization of property, what they are left with in reality is an all-powerful government that owns all property. This government itself, of course, would be no less "heirarchal" than any other. In short, the real-life application of the left-wing anarchist's ideas would lead to, ironically, a communist and totalitarian government, because there is no way to completely abolish private institutions such as buisinesses and churches without governmental action. The left-wing anarchist may indeed cheer on government collectivization of property under the false impression that the government will then dissapear once private property has been eradicated.
The falliciousness of the left-wing anarchist's assumptions are rather obvious. For one, they assume that private property (I.E. capitalism) is inherently a heirarchy. In actual fact, this is not the case. A heirarchy is an institution with a pure pyramid-type of structure, in which groups are fixed in various positions of authority. Further, a heirarchy inherently must be static, that is, there cannot be any real mobility in authority within it. But the market is not an institution in which there is no upward or downward mobility in authority. It is precisely defined by it's unstatic nature. In capitalism, there is no one person at the top who can command every single person below them, as a king can in a heirarchal government. To be sure, there is economic inequality, but inequality in itself is not heirarchy. In a heirarchy, those at the bottom stay there, and those at the top stay there. In capitalism, those at the bottom have the oppurtunity to rise upwards, and those at the top also face the possibility of sloping back downwards.
The actual fact of the matter is that capitalism is neither a heirarchy or a state of total equality. It is an unstatic and relatively spontanous distribution. There are ups and downs, but these ups and downs do not form a pyramid. There is not one group at the top who dictates to everyone else. "The rich" do not form a cabal and dictate the economic conditions of everyone else. In a heirarchy, each position is fixed into a uniform one. This is not the case with capitalism. There are people who make 30,000 dollars in a year, and there are people who makes 60,000 dollars in a year. There are also people who make 30,100 dollars in a year, and 60,100 dollars in a year. There is an invitable variance even within the groups that we tend to generalize into entire economic classes. Let's take "the middle class" for example.
I would generalize the middle class to constitute those who make between 40,000 and 100,000 dollars in a year. It is essentially a fact that the majority of the American population make somewhere between these two figures in a year (admittedly towards the lower end), and inherently this means that there is no heirarchy, because if there were a heirarchy there would be a retrogressive "slope" that wouldn't allow the majority of people to make it into this category. As an example, if there were a heirarchy, we would end up with something roughly as follows: 200,000 people make 20,000 a year, 100,000 people make 40,000 a year, 50,000 people make 80,000 a year, and so on. The actual statistics in America are quite different from this: the vast majority of people are middle class, a small percentage are rich, and a comparitively small percentage are poor.
The much decried "gap between rich and poor" is filled by the majority! Obviously, the rich certainly constitute a minority in comparison to the overall population, but the idea that the majority can be the rich is nonsensical (there wouldn't be enough capital to make this happen). Where is the heirarchy in all of this? Nowhere to be found: all that can be found is inequality, not heirarchy. If it were an actual heirarchy, the majority who constitute the middle class would instead be the poor. In other words, if capitalism was a heirarchy, there would be more poor people than middle class people under it. This is not the case. Capitalism is precisely what allowed us to break the chains of the preciding heirarchal systems, by allowing a "middle class" to form in the first place through the fruits of people's labor. A true heirarchy can only be formed if people are denied the fruits of their labor to the extent of forming a pyramid.
The idea that private property ownership or exchange of such property is inherently an exploitation at the expense of others is quite mystifying. The idea that owning something in itself requires the exploitation of others to make you own it is nonsensical. It doesn't require the exploitation of others for me to enjoy the private property of groceries. To obtain the groceries, I engaged in a voluntary exchange with the grocery store. Both me and the grocery store benefited - I got the groceries because I valued them more then the money, and the grocery store got my money because they valued it more then keeping the groceries. It is a mutually beneficial exchange. Further, the workers who produced the groceries also engaged in a mutually beneficial exchange - they got payed money (in the form of wages) to produce the product, and their employer got the produced product in exchange for their payment.
In order for any of this to constitute exploitation, one group or individual would have to expropriate from the other against their will, and only one party would gain something. In all of these cases, both parties gained something, and both parties valued what they gained more then what they gave. If it were the case that everyone was completely indifferent, then noone would be able to take any action at all. Action requires a judgement of preferance on the part of individuals. Even the person who has accepted less than they initially desired has still demonstrated a preferance: something over nothing. Something can only constitute exploitation if it is against any preferance at all on the part of the individual, that is, if it is a coerced engagement (such as theft and fraud). All of our examples have been, on the contrary, voluntary engagements in which individuals have clearly made judgements of preferance.
The contention that all private property derives from government is a strange one, considering that private property precedes government in reality. The analogy of Crusoe demonstrates this very easily. Crusoe lands on an island, and builds himself a home out of wood. This is an establishment of private property that naturally arose as a result of homesteading. To claim that there is no way that Crusoe can establish this property without government is nonsensical. This example works with more than just land and homes. If Crusoe finds some clay, and uses that clay to form it into a sculpture, he has established the sculpture as his private property. If Crusoe farms the previously unused land outside his home to produce crops, those crops are his private property. If Crusoe voluntarily exchanges these crops for gold, the gold becomes his private property.
Moreover, Crusoe is his own property property - I.E. he owns himself. The most fundamental private property right is that over your own body. Private property is an inevitable result of human activity in itself. It arises as a consequence of the fact that we live in a finite world with scarce resources. Private property results from (1) the initial homesteading and transformation of the resources the earth makes available to us and (2) the ensueing voluntary exchange of those resources once they have already been homesteaded and transformed.
We again return to the inevitable fact that it is impossible to have any institution that is purely egalitarian in nature; that is, no institution can have 100% equality among it's counterparts. For example, let us take the institution of employment. Inherently, the employer and employee cannot function in 100% equal ways, because their functions are entirely different. The employee's function is to work to produce in order to get paid, while the employer's function is to hire and pay people in order for them to produce. And we find the same thing is true among employees themselves - it is impossible to pay ever employee in the entire world the exact same paycheck, it is impossible to have them all work the same hours, it is impossible for them to all enjoy the same working conditions, and it is impossible for them to all perform the same kind of job.
The same method applies to religious institutions. Inherently, the congregation and religious authorities (preachers, priests, rabbis, etc.) cannot function in 100% equaly ways, because their functions are entirely different. The priest's function is to preside over the religious ceremonies, while the congregation's function is to engage in the ceremonies. It is impossible for the entire congregation to take on the role of the rabbi or priest. It is impossible for everyone to share the same religious beliefs and support (or oppose) the same religious institutions. It would be impossible for any religious institution to function at all without any individuals with the status and authority to run them.
The absurdity of this egalitarianism goes further. It is impossible for a buisiness owner and their customers to function in 100% equal ways, because their functions are entirely different. The buissiness owner's function is to run the buisiness and react to the consumers, and the consumer's function is to buy goods and services from the buisiness. It is impossible for the consumer to take on the function of the buisiness owner, and it is impossible for the buisiness owner to take on the function as the consumer. It is impossible for all buisiness owners to present all consumers with the exact same thing, and it is impossible for all consumers to desire and obtain the exact same thing.
Of course, our left-wing anarchist friends are likely to claim that the buisiness owner has absolute authority over the consumer. This is, of course, contrary to the most obvious of economics. It is the consumer, afterall, who the buisiness produces for, and without the consumer's voluntary purchases there would be no way for a buisiness to make any money. The consumer, in fact, exercises authority over the buisiness by choosing to buy or not buy their products. Further, this choice on the part of the consumer (which constitutes "demand") forces the buisiness owner to make adaptations. If the consumers simply stop buying their product, they will go out of buisiness if they do not find a way to appease what the consumers want in some way. And if the consumers engage in a mass-consumption spree, therefore greatly diminishing the available supply, this also forces the buisiness to make certain adaptations.
We also must face the fact that people themselves are inherently unequal. People vary in their mental and physical attributes. For example, someone may possess the attribute of enhanced physical strength. In exercising this physical strength to make a living, or as a demonstration in a contest (which they won), our left-wing anarchists friends would have to consider this an unjust exercise of "authority", since noone is allowed to have any more power then anyone else. But the obvious fact of the matter is that people can be said to indeed have more power than others by virtue of their own abilities as individuals. Someone who possesses considerably enhanced intellect (what we would call a genuis) inherently does have more mental power than most others. To consider one exercising their own abilities in a way that is better than others as an inherent abuse of authority over others is nonsense.
If we are to take this seriously, then the basketball team who wins the match has excersized "exploitive authority" over the losing team. They must have "exploited" the losing team. Steven Hawking certainly has much more authority and status in science than an elementary school science student does. Does this mean that Mr. Hawking must be exploiting science students? Could it be that people can naturally exceed more than others without exploiting them? Just because someone achieves more status, authority or money than others does not inherently mean that others take a "loss" because of it. This concept seems impossible to our left-anarchist friends. To them, the only way for someone to achieve any more authority or status then anyone else is to exploit others. But the idea that any inequality in status, functionality and results within an institution inevitably must be the consequence of exploitation is ridiculous.
In short, all institutional arrangements have an inequality (and therefore a diversity) between their counterparts. All institutions have different functions for different people acting within them. The left-wing anarchist view is rather childish. It seeks to get rid of all authority of any kind. They fail to understand not only that some kind of authority is necessary to have any social order at all, but that it is impossible to get rid of all authority. They also fail to recognize the difference between inequality itself and an imposed heirarchy. They seek an absurd utopia in which noone has any authority over anyone else and noone has any more than anyone else. The core of their ideology does not consist of a hatred for government, but a hatred for all institutions in general, due to their hatred for any inequality between people. They fail to understand that people are inherently unequal with respect to eachother, and as a consequence they seek to abolish all inequalities since they consider them all to be artificially manufactured. At the heart of the matter is their inability to properly distinguish government from other institutions. In many ways, this ideology is the most radical one that there can possibly be, because it more or less calls for the abolition of social organization itself.
A much better definition of anarchism would be a state of affairs in which there is no central monopolistic authority, I.E. no government. Surprisingly, however, there is only one branch of anarchism that truly fits this definition without delving into a host of other "requirements", and that branch is known as anarcho-capitalism, which is merely the most radical application of libertarianism (the point of this work, however, is not to make a defense of anarcho-capitalism, but to critisize non-capitalist anarchism). The bulk of anarchist ideology, however, consists of something entirely different from anarcho-capitalism. Indeed, one finds that most anarchist groups do not necessarily hold the abolition of government as their main goal. These anarchist groups's resistance to government is not so much their main pillar, but rather only one application of their resistance to something else. Such anarchists do not necessarily see government as the greatest exploitive institution in society, rather it is only one of a host of institutions which they consider to be exploitive; and many of them consider other institutions to be even more exploitive than government.
Indeed, the majority of the anarchist movement consists of left-wing anarchists of varying sorts. And by left-wing we do not mean the comparitively "moderate" modern liberal movement, but rather the "far-left-wing", as far left as one can possibly go. The central object of this group's opposition is not government, but "heirarchy" (what they percieve to be heirarchy, that is) or indeed any institution in which each individual member is not completely equal (of course, left-wing anarchists consider any such arrangement to be a heirarchy). The only reason that such groups advocate the abolition of government is because it is a heirarchal institution. If government were a completely equalitarian institution (which obviously is not the case), they would be forced to support it fully.
In the abstract, left-wing anarchists argue that they oppose all "exploitation". This contention in itself has no problems - who, anarchist or not, doesn't oppose what they consider to be exploitation? However, what exactly do our left-anarchist friends consider to constitute "exploitation"? Here, we get to the crux of their ideology: any institutional arrangement in which any individual has higher status or power than anyone else is considered to be exploitive. If we are to take this seriously, every single institution ever in existance must be considered exploitive, because there is no such thing as an institution in which everyone is completely equal (this is a utopian impossibility). Indeed, under this strange definition, the institution of the family itself must be exploitation (an idea Karl Marx supported), since the parents exercise authority over their children. The institution of employment must also be considered as inherent exploitation under this definition, since the worker's status are never equal to eachother, and never equal to their employers (and of course, employer's statuses are never equal to eachother either).
It thus becomes apparent to us that, in order to be true to their own ideology, a left-wing anarchist must oppose all institutions of whatever kind. Indeed, to take this ideology to heart would mean that property ownership as a whole must be viewed as nothing but exploitive, since it is never equal with respect to everyone. We therefore find ourselves confronted with the fact that the left-wing anarchist's main passion is the abolition of private property. This is very interesting, because this is the main passion of communism. It is the same rationale used by communists to argue for abolishing religious institutions. Indeed, Karl Marx himself, in his early stage, could be considered an anarchist. It was Marx himself, afterall, who thought that under communism the state would "wither away". Of course, this opposition to the state is only an afterthought that is supposed to be an enevitable consequence of the main agenda: the abolition of private property. The main reason why the left-wing anarchist opposes government is because they accept the communist contention that private property is entirely the creation of government (an absurd notion).
Of course, these notions are absurd. It should be clearly evident that the only way to even approach the abolition of private property is through governmental force. It should therefore be clear that the left-wing anarchist, in practical reality, faces the fact that the only way for them to abolish "exploitation A" (private institutions) is to rely on "exploitation B" (governmental institutions). In short, the left-wing anarchist is faced with the contradiction that while they consider government to be heirarchal, they must support that heirarchal institution when it makes any moves to hamper other institutions that are considered heirarchal (private property, family, etc.).
The entire notion of anarcho-communism is absurd in that it requires a government to enforce such collectivization. Even if they were to achieve collectivization of property, what they are left with in reality is an all-powerful government that owns all property. This government itself, of course, would be no less "heirarchal" than any other. In short, the real-life application of the left-wing anarchist's ideas would lead to, ironically, a communist and totalitarian government, because there is no way to completely abolish private institutions such as buisinesses and churches without governmental action. The left-wing anarchist may indeed cheer on government collectivization of property under the false impression that the government will then dissapear once private property has been eradicated.
The falliciousness of the left-wing anarchist's assumptions are rather obvious. For one, they assume that private property (I.E. capitalism) is inherently a heirarchy. In actual fact, this is not the case. A heirarchy is an institution with a pure pyramid-type of structure, in which groups are fixed in various positions of authority. Further, a heirarchy inherently must be static, that is, there cannot be any real mobility in authority within it. But the market is not an institution in which there is no upward or downward mobility in authority. It is precisely defined by it's unstatic nature. In capitalism, there is no one person at the top who can command every single person below them, as a king can in a heirarchal government. To be sure, there is economic inequality, but inequality in itself is not heirarchy. In a heirarchy, those at the bottom stay there, and those at the top stay there. In capitalism, those at the bottom have the oppurtunity to rise upwards, and those at the top also face the possibility of sloping back downwards.
The actual fact of the matter is that capitalism is neither a heirarchy or a state of total equality. It is an unstatic and relatively spontanous distribution. There are ups and downs, but these ups and downs do not form a pyramid. There is not one group at the top who dictates to everyone else. "The rich" do not form a cabal and dictate the economic conditions of everyone else. In a heirarchy, each position is fixed into a uniform one. This is not the case with capitalism. There are people who make 30,000 dollars in a year, and there are people who makes 60,000 dollars in a year. There are also people who make 30,100 dollars in a year, and 60,100 dollars in a year. There is an invitable variance even within the groups that we tend to generalize into entire economic classes. Let's take "the middle class" for example.
I would generalize the middle class to constitute those who make between 40,000 and 100,000 dollars in a year. It is essentially a fact that the majority of the American population make somewhere between these two figures in a year (admittedly towards the lower end), and inherently this means that there is no heirarchy, because if there were a heirarchy there would be a retrogressive "slope" that wouldn't allow the majority of people to make it into this category. As an example, if there were a heirarchy, we would end up with something roughly as follows: 200,000 people make 20,000 a year, 100,000 people make 40,000 a year, 50,000 people make 80,000 a year, and so on. The actual statistics in America are quite different from this: the vast majority of people are middle class, a small percentage are rich, and a comparitively small percentage are poor.
The much decried "gap between rich and poor" is filled by the majority! Obviously, the rich certainly constitute a minority in comparison to the overall population, but the idea that the majority can be the rich is nonsensical (there wouldn't be enough capital to make this happen). Where is the heirarchy in all of this? Nowhere to be found: all that can be found is inequality, not heirarchy. If it were an actual heirarchy, the majority who constitute the middle class would instead be the poor. In other words, if capitalism was a heirarchy, there would be more poor people than middle class people under it. This is not the case. Capitalism is precisely what allowed us to break the chains of the preciding heirarchal systems, by allowing a "middle class" to form in the first place through the fruits of people's labor. A true heirarchy can only be formed if people are denied the fruits of their labor to the extent of forming a pyramid.
The idea that private property ownership or exchange of such property is inherently an exploitation at the expense of others is quite mystifying. The idea that owning something in itself requires the exploitation of others to make you own it is nonsensical. It doesn't require the exploitation of others for me to enjoy the private property of groceries. To obtain the groceries, I engaged in a voluntary exchange with the grocery store. Both me and the grocery store benefited - I got the groceries because I valued them more then the money, and the grocery store got my money because they valued it more then keeping the groceries. It is a mutually beneficial exchange. Further, the workers who produced the groceries also engaged in a mutually beneficial exchange - they got payed money (in the form of wages) to produce the product, and their employer got the produced product in exchange for their payment.
In order for any of this to constitute exploitation, one group or individual would have to expropriate from the other against their will, and only one party would gain something. In all of these cases, both parties gained something, and both parties valued what they gained more then what they gave. If it were the case that everyone was completely indifferent, then noone would be able to take any action at all. Action requires a judgement of preferance on the part of individuals. Even the person who has accepted less than they initially desired has still demonstrated a preferance: something over nothing. Something can only constitute exploitation if it is against any preferance at all on the part of the individual, that is, if it is a coerced engagement (such as theft and fraud). All of our examples have been, on the contrary, voluntary engagements in which individuals have clearly made judgements of preferance.
The contention that all private property derives from government is a strange one, considering that private property precedes government in reality. The analogy of Crusoe demonstrates this very easily. Crusoe lands on an island, and builds himself a home out of wood. This is an establishment of private property that naturally arose as a result of homesteading. To claim that there is no way that Crusoe can establish this property without government is nonsensical. This example works with more than just land and homes. If Crusoe finds some clay, and uses that clay to form it into a sculpture, he has established the sculpture as his private property. If Crusoe farms the previously unused land outside his home to produce crops, those crops are his private property. If Crusoe voluntarily exchanges these crops for gold, the gold becomes his private property.
Moreover, Crusoe is his own property property - I.E. he owns himself. The most fundamental private property right is that over your own body. Private property is an inevitable result of human activity in itself. It arises as a consequence of the fact that we live in a finite world with scarce resources. Private property results from (1) the initial homesteading and transformation of the resources the earth makes available to us and (2) the ensueing voluntary exchange of those resources once they have already been homesteaded and transformed.
We again return to the inevitable fact that it is impossible to have any institution that is purely egalitarian in nature; that is, no institution can have 100% equality among it's counterparts. For example, let us take the institution of employment. Inherently, the employer and employee cannot function in 100% equal ways, because their functions are entirely different. The employee's function is to work to produce in order to get paid, while the employer's function is to hire and pay people in order for them to produce. And we find the same thing is true among employees themselves - it is impossible to pay ever employee in the entire world the exact same paycheck, it is impossible to have them all work the same hours, it is impossible for them to all enjoy the same working conditions, and it is impossible for them to all perform the same kind of job.
The same method applies to religious institutions. Inherently, the congregation and religious authorities (preachers, priests, rabbis, etc.) cannot function in 100% equaly ways, because their functions are entirely different. The priest's function is to preside over the religious ceremonies, while the congregation's function is to engage in the ceremonies. It is impossible for the entire congregation to take on the role of the rabbi or priest. It is impossible for everyone to share the same religious beliefs and support (or oppose) the same religious institutions. It would be impossible for any religious institution to function at all without any individuals with the status and authority to run them.
The absurdity of this egalitarianism goes further. It is impossible for a buisiness owner and their customers to function in 100% equal ways, because their functions are entirely different. The buissiness owner's function is to run the buisiness and react to the consumers, and the consumer's function is to buy goods and services from the buisiness. It is impossible for the consumer to take on the function of the buisiness owner, and it is impossible for the buisiness owner to take on the function as the consumer. It is impossible for all buisiness owners to present all consumers with the exact same thing, and it is impossible for all consumers to desire and obtain the exact same thing.
Of course, our left-wing anarchist friends are likely to claim that the buisiness owner has absolute authority over the consumer. This is, of course, contrary to the most obvious of economics. It is the consumer, afterall, who the buisiness produces for, and without the consumer's voluntary purchases there would be no way for a buisiness to make any money. The consumer, in fact, exercises authority over the buisiness by choosing to buy or not buy their products. Further, this choice on the part of the consumer (which constitutes "demand") forces the buisiness owner to make adaptations. If the consumers simply stop buying their product, they will go out of buisiness if they do not find a way to appease what the consumers want in some way. And if the consumers engage in a mass-consumption spree, therefore greatly diminishing the available supply, this also forces the buisiness to make certain adaptations.
We also must face the fact that people themselves are inherently unequal. People vary in their mental and physical attributes. For example, someone may possess the attribute of enhanced physical strength. In exercising this physical strength to make a living, or as a demonstration in a contest (which they won), our left-wing anarchists friends would have to consider this an unjust exercise of "authority", since noone is allowed to have any more power then anyone else. But the obvious fact of the matter is that people can be said to indeed have more power than others by virtue of their own abilities as individuals. Someone who possesses considerably enhanced intellect (what we would call a genuis) inherently does have more mental power than most others. To consider one exercising their own abilities in a way that is better than others as an inherent abuse of authority over others is nonsense.
If we are to take this seriously, then the basketball team who wins the match has excersized "exploitive authority" over the losing team. They must have "exploited" the losing team. Steven Hawking certainly has much more authority and status in science than an elementary school science student does. Does this mean that Mr. Hawking must be exploiting science students? Could it be that people can naturally exceed more than others without exploiting them? Just because someone achieves more status, authority or money than others does not inherently mean that others take a "loss" because of it. This concept seems impossible to our left-anarchist friends. To them, the only way for someone to achieve any more authority or status then anyone else is to exploit others. But the idea that any inequality in status, functionality and results within an institution inevitably must be the consequence of exploitation is ridiculous.
In short, all institutional arrangements have an inequality (and therefore a diversity) between their counterparts. All institutions have different functions for different people acting within them. The left-wing anarchist view is rather childish. It seeks to get rid of all authority of any kind. They fail to understand not only that some kind of authority is necessary to have any social order at all, but that it is impossible to get rid of all authority. They also fail to recognize the difference between inequality itself and an imposed heirarchy. They seek an absurd utopia in which noone has any authority over anyone else and noone has any more than anyone else. The core of their ideology does not consist of a hatred for government, but a hatred for all institutions in general, due to their hatred for any inequality between people. They fail to understand that people are inherently unequal with respect to eachother, and as a consequence they seek to abolish all inequalities since they consider them all to be artificially manufactured. At the heart of the matter is their inability to properly distinguish government from other institutions. In many ways, this ideology is the most radical one that there can possibly be, because it more or less calls for the abolition of social organization itself.
Monday, February 12, 2007
The Trouble With "Geolibertarianism"
Political ideology often splits itself up into a large amount of sub-categories, and sub-categories of sub-categories. Libertarianism is not immune to this. Libertarianism as a term in itself is used to describe quite a wide variety of sub-groups. Among these self-distinguishing sub-groups are the "geolibertarians". What exactly is a geolibertarian? According to wikipedia, "geolibertarianism holds that all land is owned in common by society, and therefore if individuals claim the land as their property they must pay rent to the community for doing so". It is a philosophical descendant of Georgism. At the heart of this ideology is the contention that either noone can own the land, or everyone owns the land equally. The latter contention would be land communalism. The former would be a denial of any property right in land in any way at all, while mysteriously this claim is used as a rationale for communalizing land.
Geolibertarians claim that despite their distinguishing position on land ownership, they retain all private property rights. But how can this possibly be so in practise? The geolibertarian may very well personally oppose just about anything standing in the way of voluntary exchange of property in every area but land, but the actual effects that would ensue if their desired land system were put into place are entirely different from their vision. All of the other private property that they claim to maintain must inevitably go down the tubes if there is no ownership of the land in which that property is produced on and hence the resources that the land provides us with. If there is no personal ownership of the land, then it logically follows that there is no ownership of the resources that come from it. Of course, all of the resources necessary to produce private property are a product of the land.
If a person does not own the land within the jurisdiction of their home, then they do not own their home or any of the property within it. If a farmer does not own the land within the jurisdiction of their farm, then they do not own the crops, animals or machines within it. If a buisiness-owner does not own the land within the jurisdiction of their buisiness, then they do not own their buisiness or any of the capital it produces. The entire "free market half" of libertarianism, if you will, entirely crumbles with geolibertarianism. Without land ownership, noone could own a guitar, dinner table, or baseball bat since they came from wood that came from the land. Noone could own any bananas, cabbages or potatoes since they came from the land. Noone could own any cotton products (such as clothing), since the cotton came from the land.
The question of land ownership precedes market exchange in many ways. It is a fundamental that is necessary for a genuine market to arise. The land itself is what presents us with our resources, and hence it is also what presents us with scarcity. Scarcity is the main economic factor that makes communalism of any sort, including land communalism, a utopian fantasy that merely reduces everyone's access to resources in practise. The view of land communalism doesn't aknowledge any validity to homesteading. It does not recognize that someone can transform previously unused/unowned land by making it into something new, through their labor or in payment for the labor of others to produce it for you. To harken to a simplistic scenario, when Crusoe has built himself a home out of wood on the island, the land within the jurisdiction of that home becomes his property because he transformed it, and hence now owns it as expressed through his exercise of control over it. Without any homesteading of the land in the first place (without the preceding homesteading of land by Crusoes, if you will) there would be no way to establish market exchange for homes, since there would be no owners of the land to initially sell to others.
Land is in a state of non-ownership until it is homesteaded in some way. Market exchange starts to take place after some land has been homesteaded already. Once there is some homesteaded land to exchange, we form the basis of the more common and modern method of obtaining home ownership - by either voluntarily exchanging money for possession of the home, or paying rent to the owner of the home. Geolibertarians would not only claim that there is no way to justify renting out a home to people, but the logical consequence of their own ideology would inevitably lead to opposition to exchanging for home ownership as well, because if they don't recognize the validity of the owner's ownership over the land, they therefore don't recognize the validity of someone else exchanging money to that owner in order to transfer ownership to themself.
In his classic book "For A New Liberty", Murray Rothbard clarifies this matter quite well:
"If every man owns his own person and therefore his own labor, and if by extension he owns whatever property he has "created" or gathered out of the previously unused, unowned, "state of nature," then what of the last great question: the right to own or control the earth itself? In short, if the gatherer has the right to own the acorns or berries he picks, or the farmer the right to own his crop of wheat or peaches, who has the right to own the land on which these things have grown? It is at this point that Henry George and his followers, who have gone all the way so far with the libertarians, leave the track and deny the individual's right to own the piece of land itself, the ground on which these activities have taken place. The Georgists argue that, while every man should own the goods which he produces or creates, since Nature or God created the land itself, no individual has the right to assume ownership of that land. Yet, if the land is to be used at all as a resource in any sort of efficient manner, it must be owned or controlled by someone or some group, and we are again faced with our three alternatives: either the land belongs to the first user, the man who first brings it into production; or it belongs to a group of others; or it belongs to the world as a whole, with every individual owning a quotal part of every acre of land. George's option for the last solution hardly solves his moral problem: If the land itself should belong to God or Nature, then why as it more moral for every acre in the world to be owned by the world as a whole, than to concede individual ownership? In practice, again, it is obviously impossible for every person in the world to exercise effective ownership of his four-billionth portion (if the world population is, say, four billion) of every piece of the world's land surface. In practice, of course, a small oligarchy would do the controlling and owning, and not the world as a whole.
But apart from these difficulties in the Georgist position, the natural-rights justification for the ownership of ground land is the same as the justification for the original ownership of all other property. For, as we have seen, no producer really "creates" matter; he takes nature-given matter and transforms it by his labor energy in accordance with his ideas and vision. But this is precisely what the pioneer—the "homesteader"—does when he brings previously unused land into his own private ownership. Just as the man who makes steel out of iron ore transforms that ore out of his know-how and with his energy, and just as the man who takes the iron out of the ground does the same, so does the homesteader who clears, fences, cultivates, or builds upon the land. The homesteader, too, has transformed the character of the nature-given soil by his labor and his personality. The homesteader is just as legitimately the owner of the property as the sculptor or the manufacturer; he is just as much a "producer" as the others."
Rothbard goes on:
"Furthermore, if the original land is nature- or God-given then so are the people's talents, health, and beauty. And just as all these attributes are given to specific individuals and not to "society," so then are land and natural resources. All of these resources are given to individuals and not to "society," which is an abstraction that does not actually exist. There is no existing entity called "society"; there are only interacting individuals. To say that "society" should own land or any other property in common, then, must mean that a group of oligarchs—in practice, government bureaucrats—should own the property, and at the expense of expropriating the creator or the homesteader who had originally brought this product into existence."
If the geolibertarians are to take themselves seriously, and function in a system that still has rental of land, then they inevitably must support rent control, since they consider all land rental to be inherently exploitive and thus unjust (sound kind of Marxist to you?). Rent control (which, for the most part, just freezes rents in place in practise), of course, is a dangerous economic intervention by the government that creates a shortage in the supply. It would make sense that a geolibertarian would wish to diminish the supply of homes available for people to obtain ownership over, since those titles to home ownership rely on ownership of the land in which the homes rest on, which our geolibertarian friends vehemently reject.
Why geolibertarianism tries to put itself foreward as remainingly staunchly libertarian is mystifying. It is land communism, and land communism is the first step taken in any transformation towards communism (I.E. the state confiscates land ownership and claims all land as to be "public domain", while of course it is now the legal "owner" of all land in practise, while everyone else maintains ownership in name only). Geolibertarianism, in practise, is advocacy of transfering all land ownership into the "public domain", and if all land ownership is in the public domain, then no genuine private ownership of all of the property that comes from the land (which is all of it) can exist. When Soviet Russia had the entire agricultural industry in the "public domain", this was an inevitable result of the nullification of all property rights in the land in which the agricultural goods and services derived from. Geolibertarians are argueing for just this, as it applies to all land. Therefore they can scarcely be considered libertarian, at least in the economic domain - and in practise, a geolibertarian government would not be distinguishable from a communist one (even if the geolibertarians genuinely oppose the consequences of their own ideology). They may think themselves as supporters of market exchange, but they reject the very fundament necessary for market exchange to exist.
According to libertarian philosophy, it is government that constitutes the genuine exploitive class. Georgist philosophy replaces government as the exploiter with land owners as exploiter.
Geolibertarians claim that despite their distinguishing position on land ownership, they retain all private property rights. But how can this possibly be so in practise? The geolibertarian may very well personally oppose just about anything standing in the way of voluntary exchange of property in every area but land, but the actual effects that would ensue if their desired land system were put into place are entirely different from their vision. All of the other private property that they claim to maintain must inevitably go down the tubes if there is no ownership of the land in which that property is produced on and hence the resources that the land provides us with. If there is no personal ownership of the land, then it logically follows that there is no ownership of the resources that come from it. Of course, all of the resources necessary to produce private property are a product of the land.
If a person does not own the land within the jurisdiction of their home, then they do not own their home or any of the property within it. If a farmer does not own the land within the jurisdiction of their farm, then they do not own the crops, animals or machines within it. If a buisiness-owner does not own the land within the jurisdiction of their buisiness, then they do not own their buisiness or any of the capital it produces. The entire "free market half" of libertarianism, if you will, entirely crumbles with geolibertarianism. Without land ownership, noone could own a guitar, dinner table, or baseball bat since they came from wood that came from the land. Noone could own any bananas, cabbages or potatoes since they came from the land. Noone could own any cotton products (such as clothing), since the cotton came from the land.
The question of land ownership precedes market exchange in many ways. It is a fundamental that is necessary for a genuine market to arise. The land itself is what presents us with our resources, and hence it is also what presents us with scarcity. Scarcity is the main economic factor that makes communalism of any sort, including land communalism, a utopian fantasy that merely reduces everyone's access to resources in practise. The view of land communalism doesn't aknowledge any validity to homesteading. It does not recognize that someone can transform previously unused/unowned land by making it into something new, through their labor or in payment for the labor of others to produce it for you. To harken to a simplistic scenario, when Crusoe has built himself a home out of wood on the island, the land within the jurisdiction of that home becomes his property because he transformed it, and hence now owns it as expressed through his exercise of control over it. Without any homesteading of the land in the first place (without the preceding homesteading of land by Crusoes, if you will) there would be no way to establish market exchange for homes, since there would be no owners of the land to initially sell to others.
Land is in a state of non-ownership until it is homesteaded in some way. Market exchange starts to take place after some land has been homesteaded already. Once there is some homesteaded land to exchange, we form the basis of the more common and modern method of obtaining home ownership - by either voluntarily exchanging money for possession of the home, or paying rent to the owner of the home. Geolibertarians would not only claim that there is no way to justify renting out a home to people, but the logical consequence of their own ideology would inevitably lead to opposition to exchanging for home ownership as well, because if they don't recognize the validity of the owner's ownership over the land, they therefore don't recognize the validity of someone else exchanging money to that owner in order to transfer ownership to themself.
In his classic book "For A New Liberty", Murray Rothbard clarifies this matter quite well:
"If every man owns his own person and therefore his own labor, and if by extension he owns whatever property he has "created" or gathered out of the previously unused, unowned, "state of nature," then what of the last great question: the right to own or control the earth itself? In short, if the gatherer has the right to own the acorns or berries he picks, or the farmer the right to own his crop of wheat or peaches, who has the right to own the land on which these things have grown? It is at this point that Henry George and his followers, who have gone all the way so far with the libertarians, leave the track and deny the individual's right to own the piece of land itself, the ground on which these activities have taken place. The Georgists argue that, while every man should own the goods which he produces or creates, since Nature or God created the land itself, no individual has the right to assume ownership of that land. Yet, if the land is to be used at all as a resource in any sort of efficient manner, it must be owned or controlled by someone or some group, and we are again faced with our three alternatives: either the land belongs to the first user, the man who first brings it into production; or it belongs to a group of others; or it belongs to the world as a whole, with every individual owning a quotal part of every acre of land. George's option for the last solution hardly solves his moral problem: If the land itself should belong to God or Nature, then why as it more moral for every acre in the world to be owned by the world as a whole, than to concede individual ownership? In practice, again, it is obviously impossible for every person in the world to exercise effective ownership of his four-billionth portion (if the world population is, say, four billion) of every piece of the world's land surface. In practice, of course, a small oligarchy would do the controlling and owning, and not the world as a whole.
But apart from these difficulties in the Georgist position, the natural-rights justification for the ownership of ground land is the same as the justification for the original ownership of all other property. For, as we have seen, no producer really "creates" matter; he takes nature-given matter and transforms it by his labor energy in accordance with his ideas and vision. But this is precisely what the pioneer—the "homesteader"—does when he brings previously unused land into his own private ownership. Just as the man who makes steel out of iron ore transforms that ore out of his know-how and with his energy, and just as the man who takes the iron out of the ground does the same, so does the homesteader who clears, fences, cultivates, or builds upon the land. The homesteader, too, has transformed the character of the nature-given soil by his labor and his personality. The homesteader is just as legitimately the owner of the property as the sculptor or the manufacturer; he is just as much a "producer" as the others."
Rothbard goes on:
"Furthermore, if the original land is nature- or God-given then so are the people's talents, health, and beauty. And just as all these attributes are given to specific individuals and not to "society," so then are land and natural resources. All of these resources are given to individuals and not to "society," which is an abstraction that does not actually exist. There is no existing entity called "society"; there are only interacting individuals. To say that "society" should own land or any other property in common, then, must mean that a group of oligarchs—in practice, government bureaucrats—should own the property, and at the expense of expropriating the creator or the homesteader who had originally brought this product into existence."
If the geolibertarians are to take themselves seriously, and function in a system that still has rental of land, then they inevitably must support rent control, since they consider all land rental to be inherently exploitive and thus unjust (sound kind of Marxist to you?). Rent control (which, for the most part, just freezes rents in place in practise), of course, is a dangerous economic intervention by the government that creates a shortage in the supply. It would make sense that a geolibertarian would wish to diminish the supply of homes available for people to obtain ownership over, since those titles to home ownership rely on ownership of the land in which the homes rest on, which our geolibertarian friends vehemently reject.
Why geolibertarianism tries to put itself foreward as remainingly staunchly libertarian is mystifying. It is land communism, and land communism is the first step taken in any transformation towards communism (I.E. the state confiscates land ownership and claims all land as to be "public domain", while of course it is now the legal "owner" of all land in practise, while everyone else maintains ownership in name only). Geolibertarianism, in practise, is advocacy of transfering all land ownership into the "public domain", and if all land ownership is in the public domain, then no genuine private ownership of all of the property that comes from the land (which is all of it) can exist. When Soviet Russia had the entire agricultural industry in the "public domain", this was an inevitable result of the nullification of all property rights in the land in which the agricultural goods and services derived from. Geolibertarians are argueing for just this, as it applies to all land. Therefore they can scarcely be considered libertarian, at least in the economic domain - and in practise, a geolibertarian government would not be distinguishable from a communist one (even if the geolibertarians genuinely oppose the consequences of their own ideology). They may think themselves as supporters of market exchange, but they reject the very fundament necessary for market exchange to exist.
According to libertarian philosophy, it is government that constitutes the genuine exploitive class. Georgist philosophy replaces government as the exploiter with land owners as exploiter.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
No Muslim Peril
No Muslim Peril
by Charley Reese
Let's suppose that I interviewed David Duke, the Louisiana politician who rails against what he calls Jewish supremacy, and also interviewed the lunatic preacher who disrupted the funerals of American servicemen with his message of killing all the gays.
And let's suppose I presented these men's views as typical of American Christian thought.
You'd say, and rightly so, that these men are not representative of mainstream Christianity, much less mainstream America. Well, the same thing applies to Islam. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Broadcasting or reporting the words of a few extremists does not reflect mainstream Muslim thought.
Yellow journalism is never all right, but as long as it's confined to celebrities and other nonimportant matters, it is at least not too harmful. But yellow journalism applied to national security and to foreign affairs should be considered unacceptable.
A number of irresponsible journalists and broadcasters, egged on by the crazy neocons, are trying to duplicate the mass fear of foreigners that characterized earlier times in America when demagogues spoke of the "yellow peril." Now demagogues speak of the "jihadi peril." And, as was inevitable, the demagoguery slips away from Muslim extremists and talks about Muslims and Islam as if there were no difference.
Yes, there are some Muslim extremists, just as there are some Christian extremists, Hindu extremists, Jewish extremists and so forth. Extremism is a personality disorder not confined to any one religion or political system. Anyone can become infected with it.
Islam has been around for more than 1,300 years. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful people, just like you and I, and they are not plotting to storm the citadels of the West. Muslim countries are full of universities, professors, poets, novelists, scientists and engineers. It was the Muslims who preserved the wisdom of the classical world and passed it on to the Europeans, thus making the Renaissance possible.
And there have been American Muslims since at least the late 1800s. Most of them so assimilated into American society that no one noticed them. They are as patriotic as any other American.
Most of the conflict in the Middle East – at least until we stirred the caldron in Iraq – is about secular matters, not religion. Hamas and Islamic Jihad oppose Israeli occupation of Palestine. Hezbollah opposes Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Even Osama bin Laden, if you bother to read what he says, opposes us on secular matters – support for Israel, the invasion of two Muslim countries and our massive military presence in the Persian Gulf.
The neocons would like to convince you that it is a war over religious matters so they won't have to address the real causes, which are our own bad policies in that part of the world.
You should know that the wealthy powers in this world wouldn't waste a dime on a religious conflict. It's control of the world's oil that interests them, and also the arms business. War to them is a profitable enterprise, especially since they and their children don't have to fight the wars.
These elite almost panicked when communism collapsed. How could they maintain power and make money without an enemy at the gate? Then bin Laden gave them exactly what they wanted with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now they have an enemy so ill-defined, their "war on terror" can go on forever, provided they can keep the American public ignorant and ill-informed.
by Charley Reese
Let's suppose that I interviewed David Duke, the Louisiana politician who rails against what he calls Jewish supremacy, and also interviewed the lunatic preacher who disrupted the funerals of American servicemen with his message of killing all the gays.
And let's suppose I presented these men's views as typical of American Christian thought.
You'd say, and rightly so, that these men are not representative of mainstream Christianity, much less mainstream America. Well, the same thing applies to Islam. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Broadcasting or reporting the words of a few extremists does not reflect mainstream Muslim thought.
Yellow journalism is never all right, but as long as it's confined to celebrities and other nonimportant matters, it is at least not too harmful. But yellow journalism applied to national security and to foreign affairs should be considered unacceptable.
A number of irresponsible journalists and broadcasters, egged on by the crazy neocons, are trying to duplicate the mass fear of foreigners that characterized earlier times in America when demagogues spoke of the "yellow peril." Now demagogues speak of the "jihadi peril." And, as was inevitable, the demagoguery slips away from Muslim extremists and talks about Muslims and Islam as if there were no difference.
Yes, there are some Muslim extremists, just as there are some Christian extremists, Hindu extremists, Jewish extremists and so forth. Extremism is a personality disorder not confined to any one religion or political system. Anyone can become infected with it.
Islam has been around for more than 1,300 years. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful people, just like you and I, and they are not plotting to storm the citadels of the West. Muslim countries are full of universities, professors, poets, novelists, scientists and engineers. It was the Muslims who preserved the wisdom of the classical world and passed it on to the Europeans, thus making the Renaissance possible.
And there have been American Muslims since at least the late 1800s. Most of them so assimilated into American society that no one noticed them. They are as patriotic as any other American.
Most of the conflict in the Middle East – at least until we stirred the caldron in Iraq – is about secular matters, not religion. Hamas and Islamic Jihad oppose Israeli occupation of Palestine. Hezbollah opposes Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Even Osama bin Laden, if you bother to read what he says, opposes us on secular matters – support for Israel, the invasion of two Muslim countries and our massive military presence in the Persian Gulf.
The neocons would like to convince you that it is a war over religious matters so they won't have to address the real causes, which are our own bad policies in that part of the world.
You should know that the wealthy powers in this world wouldn't waste a dime on a religious conflict. It's control of the world's oil that interests them, and also the arms business. War to them is a profitable enterprise, especially since they and their children don't have to fight the wars.
These elite almost panicked when communism collapsed. How could they maintain power and make money without an enemy at the gate? Then bin Laden gave them exactly what they wanted with the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now they have an enemy so ill-defined, their "war on terror" can go on forever, provided they can keep the American public ignorant and ill-informed.
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