Anarchoblogs

On June 4th of this year, 30 upstanding individuals rallied for photography and pamphleting rights in solidarity with me. These good folks achieved coverage not only by the independent TV station WFMZ but also by a local Spanish-language newspaper. This goes to show that if the cause is worthy and you exert the effort, noteworthy results, such as the above, will happen! I challenge you to replicate their work locally for a worthy cause that’s pertinent to your community. I know you can do it. Post here if you need help.

Well, yes, I am a communist. And a socialist, capitalist and everything in between – as long as it’s not also authoritarian. I’m for everything that’s libertarian, but nothing that’s authoritarian. In other words, I’m for free market capitalism and free market socialism. But I’m not for state socialism or state capitalism. There is a huge difference and it’s important to be cognizant of it.

State capitalism is what exists in North America right now. State communism is a reasonable descriptor of the former Soviet Union. What would free market capitalism look like? It’s hard to know for sure, without a central planner, but here are some ideas about it I really enjoy. For starters, there would be no state. Law and defense services would arise from voluntary relationships (contracts), instead of from the dictatorial central government. Oh, there would be plenty of regulations, maybe even more than now. But they would be promulgated by each property owner, applicable only to his property and only enforced by him or his agents. No central authority here.

What would free market socialism look like? It might be a community in which people voluntarily join together to share the fruits of their labors without an excessive fixation on property, wage labor and hierarchy. But I don’t really care, because as long as there is no aggression involved, it’s all fine with me. Let bygones be bygones. In market anarchy, a capitalist community can border a socialist one, with a commune down the street and mutualist coops patronized by all on the main strip. Everyone doing their own thing, and interfering with no one else’s thing is a recipe for civilization.

So, yeah, I kinda am a communist.

Kudos to Mimi and Eunice for all the great comics over there. Subscribe now for daily entertainment that will tickle your brain!

This video is very revealing, in a legal way. It’s from Marc Stevens, radio show host and dedicated legal researcher. He dissects the law in a very foundational way, without assumptions and without any undue reverence for it. Are you, as various governments claim, a taxpayer? Can the government legally prove this? You aren’t going to concede that point, are you?

No, the government can’t prove you’re a taxpayer, Stevens claims. Not unless you admit it, I suppose. And in this video he shows a California bureaucrat tickled pink by the idea that he needs evidence. Evidence to prove someone is a taxpayer? That’s ridiculous. Check out the above video and more over at Stevens’ website. Marc even has a fascinating book about his escapades researching the law in the courtroom called Adventures in Legal Land.

Over at C4SS’ Stateless U in ATP 101 we’re reading The Market for Liberty. Here are my comments on one of the discussion questions.

“Is restitution preferable to retribution? Why or why not?”

An arrangement for the resolution of disputes that focuses on restitution is more effective that one that makes as its goal the punishment of offenders. Restitution compensates victims for their losses at the expense of their aggressors. This constitutes a powerful incentive against criminal action, since offenders will have to repay every bit of value they destroyed in order to continue in civilized society. Punishment, on the other hand, is simply vengeance. Not only does it not help victims, it actively puts them and others at greater risk by placing convicts in an overly harsh crime school that breeds resentment and further delinquency.

The concept of punishment is not based on the idea of righting a wrong, argue the Tannehills in “The Market for Liberty.” Instead, the idea is to cause pain, loss or suffering to the offender in an amount equal to or (usually) exceeding the damage he caused. The Tannehills rightly point out that this is revenge. Revenge doesn’t resolve disputes, it simply creates an ever-increasing progression of new disputes that won’t be resolved until reasoning people come to their senses and end the vendetta.

Restitution is the idea that anyone who uses first force should repay those individuals negatively affected by his action. The aggressor should make his victims whole. If he can’t cover the restitution payment(s) immediately, he can take on a payment plan. His lifestyle options will be determined by what his insurance company is comfortable with. If it was a petty crime, his life might continue largely the same. But if it’s a serious crime, he might have to relocate to a secure facility where his insurance company can ensure he doesn’t hurt anyone.

Contrast this to government prison, where inhumane conditions and a dearth of opportunities for rehabilitation arise from the state’s extra-market position. If a prisoner is stuck in a bad jail, he can only appeal to the authorities. There is no marketplace in operation to keep prison providers honest and fair. Punishments are often excessive, fostering spite. Instead of encountering openings for personal progress, a government prisoner is incentivized to learn more and better criminal techniques. There are few motivations for positive change.

Restitution is preferable to retribution because the former provides all the incentives for peaceful, progressive civilization while the latter influences its victims towards more, and more advanced, crime. Retribution is revenge, and that never solved anything. Revenge simply multiplies disputes and hardens hearts. Restitution is a reasoned alternative that actually helps victims and offenders alike. It gives victims a better chance of carrying on their lives while providing offenders a path back to civilization and freedom.

Photo credit: sercasey. Photo license.

This is a great interview. It sheds light on why prisons are such a prominent feature of modern American culture. The fact that 1% of the US population is in prison and that they’re used as slaver labor is not well-known. And that’s why this interview also makes me sick. I didn’t want to watch it, but I did. The truth is too terrible not to be aware of it, no matter how much it hurts. Awareness is, after all, the first step towards change.

Prison is an anachronism. It solves nothing. It doesn’t help victims, it doesn’t improve society and it definitely doesn’t assist offenders in becoming peaceful members of society. In fact, today it is used to punish peaceful members of society as much or more so than the violent ones. Please come back tomorrow for more detailed thoughts on the advantages of restitution over punishment.

Over at C4SS’ Stateless U in ATP 101 we’re reading The Market for Liberty. Here are my comments on one of the discussion questions.

“In what way or ways would it be most difficult for insurance companies to function successfully as sources of justice and defense against aggression?”

I don’t think insurance companies can function as sources of justice and defense. At most they can offer people pooled risk services. They can insure contracts, pay out instant restitution and collect damage payments from the insurance companies of losers in arbitration.

The source of justice in a stateless market anarchist society might be arbitration agencies, and I expect these would be independent entities separate from the insurance companies and defense agencies. In order for the arbitration agencies to retain credibility, they would need to maintain distance from the insurance companies, lest people think they were biased in favor of one or another.

The source of defense in a stateless society might be police, or defense, agencies. These would also need to observe a careful distance from the insurance and arbitration companies for the same reason.

Thus, perhaps the answer is that insurance companies would need to studiously avoid proximity to defense agencies and arbitration services in order to maintain maximum credibility and avoid the appearance of favoritism or conflict of interest. Integrity and impartiality are the most critical elements of free market justice and defense, since first force can not be used to compel submission. Only voluntary relations will stand.

Photo credit: xurble. Photo license.

I found this video, and some further thoughts, over at The Peaceable Kingdom. Libertarians expend a lot of energy hating the state and its aggressive agents, but how often do we try to love them? Remember, we’re not going to win this with violence. We’ll win this with self-improvement, education, empathy and counter-economics, among other things. Let’s start with finding things to love about statists. We can build on that.

Over at C4SS’ Stateless U in ATP 102, I watched and critiqued Roderick Long’s talk “Foundations of Libertarian Ethics.” [See above.]

In “Foundations of Libertarian Ethics,” Roderick Long deftly refutes Lockean and Randian critiques of anarchy, using these same critiques against themselves in support of market anarchy. Long also evaluates strategies for achieving the stateless society, convincingly arguing the Spoonerite position that voting and running for office are not immoral. He also makes a convincing case that voting is not irrational.

Long first takes on Locke’s argument that without a central government, people will subscribe to different interpretations of justice. But Long points out that people have different interpretations of justice under government too. In fact, one can expect more legal uniformity under anarchy, not less, Long says. He cites the example of European merchant law that arose when state commercial law became outdated. Each national government had different laws, and they wouldn’t enforce each others’ decisions. So merchants formulated their own laws and applied them in a highly uniform way across the globe. The merchants enforced their law without the state via word of mouth, boycott, credit reports and ostracism.

While Long’s analysis wins outs, I don’t think legal uniformity across jurisdictions is particularly important. As long as individual property owners or legal jurisdictions post their laws and keep them understandable, there should be no problem.

Long next examines Locke’s claim that a generally known standard of law is required, and that anarchy would not produce this. But government produces too many laws, Long argues, since it is not restrained by market demand. And this is the same thing as there not being a generally known law code, because people simply can not know all the laws that congress and other law-making bodies churn out.

Long makes an insightful argument here, but Lockeans may see it as as a pyrrhic victory against a strawman. Locke didn’t argue for a large state such as the ones primarily in existence today. His ideal smaller state might not produce as much confusion in the realm of law.

Another defect of anarchy, Locke posits, is that individuals would be judges in their own cases, since everyone in a state of anarchy has the right to judge the law. They would be biased for themselves. Long argues that Locke is mistaken. There can be a third party judge under anarchy, it simply doesn’t have to be the same individual or institution for every single dispute. People can take turns being judges for others. Only anarchy allows this. Contrast this with the state: what if you have a dispute with them? Then the state gets to judge itself! What about if you sue the supreme court, Long asks. Who will be the final arbiter then?

Long’s argument doesn’t strike any vital organs. Inside the state there are many different individuals reigning as judges. When one of these judges is faced with a conflict of interest, he can recuse himself, and is often obligated to do so. Arguing that the state judges disputes that involve the state is a collectivization where Locke speaks of individuals. That’s a double standard. His argument about who will reign as judge if the supreme court is sued does stick, since the supreme court is the fixed final arbiter of disputes. Eventually the case could make its way to be heard in front of the supreme court. Given its unique position, it could theoretically hear a case against itself.

Locke’s final objection to anarchy is that everyone could be his own police officer. Long argues that Locke simply thinks that if there are organized threats under anarchy, a lone individual will be at a disadvantage. An organized defense, in other words, is necessary. But, Long argues that an organized defense doesn’t necessarily presuppose or require state involvement. He is convincing here. His killer critique of Locke on this point is that if you are worried about organized threats being hard to defend against, you don’t actually want to go and create one in the form of government!

A Randian objection Long addresses is the claim that no market is possible without a government legal order. But the opposite is also true, argues Long. How can a government come to exist without some kind of trade to finance its creation? It is indeed difficult to imagine a government preceding the marketplace. Governments produce nothing, they only consume. Thus there must be something to consume in the first place. A legal order, on the other hand, can arise spontaneously as individuals need it and by mutual agreement in a primitive analogue to what Murphy describes in chapter one of “Chaos Theory.”

Long also critiques the Randian idea that under anarchy, there would be no final arbiter, and therefore no legal finality. Long questions the claim that government actually provides any legal finality. For example, government has made many guarantees of help to the poor, but people remain in poverty. Also, government legal decisions don’t always result in restitution, Long notes. It’s not a question of a guarantees, he argues, but that certain incentives are more reliable. Government, being a monopoly, it is insulated from feedback and thus the right incentives are not in place

Finally, Long considers how to achieve a stateless society. There are two strategies, he says, the takeover strategy and the bypass strategy. Like Spooner, he thinks there is nothing really wrong with voting or running for office. It shouldn’t be the primary focus of one’s activism, he thinks, but neither should one abstain entirely. If, by voting, libertarians could change the outcome of a state’s actions from horrible to merely bad, wouldn’t it be worth it?

Long’s analysis is measured and strong. He is absolutely right. At some point, agorists and other libertarian (r)evolutionaries will be toe-to-toe with the state. Wouldn’t the outcome be more favorable if some of our own were on the inside and able to moderate the government response? This is a compelling argument.

Is voting irrational because it will most likely have little or no effect, Long asks. What about writing a libertarian blog post? Is that irrational, since it may have little to no effect as well? Long makes a striking point here. I must say that I feel my 250+ blog posts here have been considerably more effective than my two votes for Ross Perot in the 90’s. I get enormous personal satisfaction from the brain work required to research and write these posts. And the reactions I get are highly rewarding as well. That said, I think voting in state elections has its place. If we have even a slight hope of moderating the state’s evil, it may be worth it to vote (and run for office).

In this talk, Roderick Long persuasively rebuts both Lockean and Randian arguments against anarchy while navigating a shrewd path through the voluntaryist-partyarch debate minefield. His analysis is insightful and refreshing, if sometimes less than entirely pertinent.

Marc Emery is a Canadian man who is now in (US) federal prison for 5 years over his business of selling cannabis seeds to the public. It breaks my heart to see this man in prison. He has harmed no one. There is no victim for the crime he is accused of. In Canada, his offenses are punishable by fines. So how did he end up across the border in a cage for five years? Watch this short video from Liberty on Tour to find out.

Apart from the victimless crime issues and the cruel and unusual punishment angle, consider the fact that Marc was practicing agorism. Maybe he was doing it openly and publicly, instead of secretly as many agorists claim it should be done. Maybe he was paying some taxes. Nevertheless, he is an agorist and is currently under the thumb of the federal government. There is a lesson here for other (prospective) agorists. Agorism is a form of civil disobedience or peaceful non-compliance. As an agorist, you may someday be caught, caged and prosecuted. When this happens, what will you do? How will you get out of this terrible situation? This is a question that needs to be addressed in order for the agoristic strategy of building the new world inside the shell of the old to succeed.

As Roderick Long has noted, when the government is about to do something terrible, wouldn’t it be better if it did something just bad instead? Can we moderate the government’s actions by participating in it through voting, running for office, lobbying, letter-writing and other more traditional forms of activism? And if we can, isn’t that worth the ameliorative effect that could result? What do you think? Once you or another practicing agorist you know is facing time in a cage, how will we get them out? How will we protect our fledgling economies from state aggression?

Have you heard about the sovereignty movement? This is what I call the people who rally around the ideas expressed very briefly in this video. There are many lines of thought present in the movement. Some think that all unconstitutional government tyranny arises from our voluntary consent. Others think there is a second, secret constitution. I have heard the idea that there are two governments, one based on the constitution and one borne from the federal governance of Washington, DC. Some argue that the 14th amendment, instead of freeing the slaves, enslaved us all, morphing us from sovereigns to citizens. Others look for hidden meanings in words, and tend to take symbolism literally.

I find this movement fascinating and complex while also tending towards the ridiculous and unbelievable. There is a surreal kind of logic to their work. The foundation for their most useful work is solid. Proponents test their hypotheses in the courts. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t. It’s this solid foundation of experimentation which, when actually used, most impresses me about the sovereignty movement. Here is some additional work on how these methods and ideas can be used to hold government agents accountable. Don’t write it off without looking into it! You never know when you might be hauled in front of a state judge and forced to fend for your life, liberty and property.

1215.org’s Law Notes is foundational, reasonably rational and more connected to reality than some other sources. There are even 8 hours of lectures available.

Marc Stevens is on the fringe of this movement as far as I can tell (by which I mean he sounds reasonable). His research is reliable and his conclusions tested by hard experience. He has a book and a weekly radio show.

Robert Arthur Menard is a Canadian proponent of sovereignty theory who has apparently met with great real-world success. He has tons of videos on YouTube. And I believe he is associated with thinkfree.ca.

What do you think of these ideas? Let me know in the comments.