Anarchoblogs

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!

A local chamber of commerce and city ward’s office denied a permit to build a mosque in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the nation because the government can’t tax it as much as alternatives.

A special use permit was denied to an organization seeking to open a mosque near the West Rogers Park neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago, Ill., Vince Gerasole reported last week at CBS 2.

“It sounds a bit like the controversy over the proposed mosque in New York near where the Twin Towers fell. Perhaps at first glance, but not when you scratch beneath the surface,” he reported.

The local chamber of commerce and alderman’s office denied the permit because alternatives would generate a higher tax revenue to the government. “The chamber says the mosque’s tax exempt status in that commercial location would eliminate much needed tax dollars and halt growth,” according to Mr. Gerasole’s report.

The lot’s been vacant for two years and is formerly the site of the stellar hot dog joint called “U Lucky Dawg” at 6821 N. Western Ave.

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Rogers Park had a population of over 63k with a median income of over $31k:

• 31.8% White
• 29.6% Black
• 27.8% Latino
• 6.40% Asian
• 4.48% “Other”

Four blocks south of the lot where the permit was denied is a mile-long stretch of Devon Ave., commonly known as “Little India”, where Indo-Pak restaurants, shops, grocers, community centers, ethnocentric media organizations as well as Christian, Hindu and Muslim places of worships solely dominate. Less than a block south is a KFC where the marquee advertises the sale of halal meat year-round. The neighborhood and the neighboring West Ridge are the definition of a melting pot—filled with local mom ‘n pop markets and large franchises, Catholic and Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues, Hindu and Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques.

It’s a neighborhood with the large, secular Loyola University-Chicago, families, singles, straight, gay, young, assisted living centers for the elderly, public and private K-12 schools, faith- and arts-based schools. There’s no label to place on the neighborhood other than the abstract “diverse” because that’s exactly what it is.

Having lived in Rogers Park for 6-7 years of my adult life and Chicago for my entire life, I don’t believe another neighborhood in the Chicagoland area—or any other I’ve seen across the U.S.—can claim such a high level of diversity, tolerance and cooperative relations between the demographics.

The West Ridge Chamber of Commerce is actually 30-40% Muslim, Amie Zandel—president of the organization—told CBS 2.

There’s little reason to believe the organization and Alderman Bernard Stone’s (D-50th Ward) office isn’t being entirely honest—that an organization is being forcefully prohibited by the government from opening an establishment of free association on private property because the government’s hands are tied on much it can steal from them at gunpoint.

Probably why you won’t see the so-called ‘progressives’ rally around this cause. Arguing against the permit regime of opening establishments cuts to the heart of their regulation fetish and cities like Chicago with an overwhelming government apparatus stepping in to forcefully prohibit limited government-revenue-sucking establishments is consistent with their warped nihilism, masqueraded as utilitarianism.

The ‘progressive’ blogger known as “digby” argued the controversy over the Cordoba House wasn’t about property rights, but about “common decency”. And seeing as no government was seriously considering the idea of forcing the Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero to not open, I don’t disagree. I’ll even go far as to say that Islam is an absolutely disgusting, authoritarian religion. I just don’t hate the voodoo-philosophy more than that of the other monotheistic doctrines which dominate the West and adherence to superstition doesn’t negate people’s inalienable property rights.

The root of the controversy was blatant meanness, demagogues exploiting xenophobia and all-around cognitive dissonance that lead to nasty tribalism and outright lies about recent history. digby’s concern is played when this mysticism results in the outright tragic aggression of the reported arson at a mosque in Tennessee, Saturday morning.

To her defense, digby isn’t very educated on geopolitics and because of that, she doesn’t fully understand the danger of the “American exceptionalism” meme. If so, I’d expect her blog to be more substantive. But international law scholar Phyllis Bennis is correct to note the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ nonsense “is not about religion”, but “about war”, as she wrote Friday at The Huffington Post.

This issue in Chicago is little more than a property rights issues with an actually more unjust than the Park51 organization ever even potentially faced in New York City. Park51 is actually free from government prohibition of erecting an establishment for peaceful, free association. The Faizan-e-Madina organization’s freedom is actually being violated by the government.

Filed under: National News Tagged: Amie Zandel, atheism, Bernard Stone, Chicago, Cordoba House, digby, Faizan e Madina, Ground Zero Mosque, Islam, Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Islamophobia, libertarian, Muslim, neoconservatives, New York City, Park51, Phyllis Bennis, regulation, religion, tax expemtion, taxation, US, Vince Gerasole, West Rogers Park, xenophobia

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.

Yeah, the summer’s almost over, and I’ve finished my August work for Center for a Stateless Society. In September I’ll be scaling back my work with the Center so I can better focus on graduate school. My monthly commitment is now 4 regular news commentaries and 2 irregular commentaries that can hopefully be offered as exclusives to various publications. The leveraging of voluntary organization to benefit all individuals involved continues!

Speaking of individuals, my August feature (the last regular c4ss.org feature I’ll be doing for a while), Social Individualism and Solidarity explores these concepts as foundations of a free society.

My first commentary of the week, And Real Criminals Go Unpunished is on the charges Ahlam Mohsen faces for throwing a pie into the face of a senator, and how ruling elites get away with murder. Mohsen has been released on bail since the article was published, but is still facing charges and investigation.

I wanted to emphasize a positive example of liberty moving forward or non-authoritarian organization in my second commentary of the week, so in Breaking the Information Monopoly I took a look at how the current information landscape is both breaking up established power and also provides an inkling of a free society in action.

And yes, there is a fundraiser. If you like what we’ve been doing to get more radical libertarian voices heard and more ideas examined, why not throw in some funds to help us focus on the important work we’re doing?

Ross Kenyon: “Why (good) libertarians and socialists/progressives aren’t really at odds with each other.”

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.

Kevin Carson on the utopian silliness of statism.

24 Aug 2010 | C4SS

It’s quite common for mainstream liberals to dismiss as “naïve” and “utopian” the anarchist vision—all varieties of anarchism, not just market anarchism—of a society governed by voluntary associations between free people. Without the state to prevent it, society and the economy will be dominated by the savage, combative, greedy and self-centered.

But if anything is naïve and utopian, it’s the view of the state as something that protects ordinary people against big business. If the liberals’ implicit Hobbesian view of human nature is correct, rather than my Kropotkinian view, then we’re all doomed in any case.

So it’s utopian to believe that the ruthless people in charge of businesses will be restrained from making those businesses bigger and bigger at the expense of their competitors, or the ruthless rich will be restrained from getting endlessly richer and richer at the expense of a progressively poor working class and disappearing middle class, by the simple removal of entry barriers and the presence of unfettered competition. But apparently, in the mainstream liberal view of the world, it’s not utopian at all to believe that simple procedural rules and paper restrictions can prevent the state from being controlled by the same ruthless people for their own ends.

Frankly, in terms of gritty realism, I’ll put my belief in the power of market competition to restrain business against their belief in the power of democratic majorities to control the state, any day of the week.

The state, since the beginning of history, has been the instrument of a ruling class. It first came into existence when human predators figured out the peasantry produced a sufficient surplus to be milked like cattle; since then, starting with the king, priests and nobles, moving on to feudal landlords and capitalists, one ruling class after another has been milking us.

It’s utterly naïve and utopian to believe a majority of the public can exert meaningful control over the state apparatus. A minority of insiders will always have an advantage in time, attention span, interest, information, and agenda control over those of us on the outside. The average person on the outside only has a limited amount of time or energy for maintaining an interest in politics, after dealing with the primary issues of work and family, friends, and local community. But for the elites that control the state, politics is a major part of their daily work and social life. Can anything be matched for sheer naïve optimism with the belief that, in the long run, we can maintain a higher degree of vigilance over the functioning of the state than they can?

If the state exists as a level of economic control by which a ruling class can profit, you’d better believe the most savage, combative, greedy and self-centered will always have a leg up in gaining control of it. Our only hope, in that case, is that the self-centered savages who gain control of the state will be smart enough to see it as in their self-interest to take good care of us so they can get more work out of us. That’s essentially what happened in the New Deal. The so-called “progressive” policies of the 20th century were brought about, not by democratic pressure (as in the Art Schlesinger received version of history), but in the interest of one faction of the capitalist elite.

So anything done by the state to make our lots more bearable will be done, not because the state is “all of us working together,” but as a side-effect of plutocratic and managerial elites pursuing their own self-interest. Apparently the same people who cannot be trusted in the economic sphere become fully trustworthy when they’re sitting in the “executive committee of the ruling class”.

May the liberals’ illusions rest kindly on them.

Kevin Carson is a research associate at the Center for a Stateless Society, contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective. Mr. Carson has also written for a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

Filed under: Political Science Tagged: anarchism, capitalism, class warfare, corporatism, Kevin Carson, liberalism, libertarian, market-anarchism, Newspeak, progressives, socialism

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.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) on the exploitation of xenophobia and tribalism to encourage the violent violation of property rights, liberty and reason itself.

by Ron Paul

23 Aug 2010 | LewRockwell.com

Is the controversy over building a mosque near Ground Zero a grand distraction or a grand opportunity? Or is it, once again, grandiose demagoguery?

It has been said, “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.” Are we not overly preoccupied with this controversy, now being used in various ways by grandstanding politicians? It looks to me like the politicians are “fiddling while the economy burns.

The debate should have provided the conservative defenders of property rights with a perfect example of how the right to own property also protects the 1st Amendment rights of assembly and religion by supporting the building of the mosque.

Instead, we hear lip service given to the property rights position while demanding that the need to be “sensitive” requires an all-out assault on the building of a mosque, several blocks from “Ground Zero.”

Just think of what might (not) have happened if the whole issue had been ignored and the national debate stuck with war, peace, and prosperity. There certainly would have been a lot less emotionalism on both sides. The fact that so much attention has been given the mosque debate, raises the question of just why and driven by whom?

In my opinion it has come from the neo-conservatives who demand continual war in the Middle East and Central Asia and are compelled to constantly justify it.

They never miss a chance to use hatred toward Muslims to rally support for the ill-conceived preventative wars. A select quote from soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq expressing concern over the mosque is pure propaganda and an affront to their bravery and sacrifice.

The claim is that we are in the Middle East to protect our liberties is misleading. To continue this charade, millions of Muslims are indicted and we are obligated to rescue them from their religious and political leaders. And, we’re supposed to believe that abusing our liberties here at home and pursuing unconstitutional wars overseas will solve our problems.
The nineteen suicide bombers didn’t come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or Iran. Fifteen came from our ally Saudi Arabia, a country that harbors strong American resentment, yet we invade and occupy Iraq where no al Qaeda existed prior to 9/11.

Many fellow conservatives say they understand the property rights and 1st Amendment issues and don’t want a legal ban on building the mosque. They just want everybody to be “sensitive” and force, through public pressure, cancellation of the mosque construction.

This sentiment seems to confirm that Islam itself is to be made the issue, and radical religious Islamic views were the only reasons for 9/11. If it became known that 9/11 resulted in part from a desire to retaliate against what many Muslims saw as American aggression and occupation, the need to demonize Islam would be difficult if not impossible.

There is no doubt that a small portion of radical, angry Islamists do want to kill us but the question remains, what exactly motivates this hatred?

If Islam is further discredited by making the building of the mosque the issue, then the false justification for our wars in the Middle East will continue to be acceptable.

The justification to ban the mosque is no more rational than banning a soccer field in the same place because all the suicide bombers loved to play soccer.

Conservatives are once again, unfortunately, failing to defend private property rights, a policy we claim to cherish. In addition conservatives missed a chance to challenge the hypocrisy of the left which now claims they defend property rights of Muslims, yet rarely if ever, the property rights of American private businesses.

Defending the controversial use of property should be no more difficult than defending the 1st Amendment principle of defending controversial speech. But many conservatives and liberals do not want to diminish the hatred for Islam—the driving emotion that keeps us in the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don’t want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society – protecting liberty.

The outcry over the building of the mosque, near Ground Zero, implies that Islam alone was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to those who are condemning the building of the mosque, the nineteen suicide terrorists on 9/11 spoke for all Muslims. This is like blaming all Christians for the wars of aggression and occupation because some Christians supported the neo-conservative’s aggressive wars.

The House Speaker is now treading on a slippery slope by demanding an investigation to find out just who is funding the mosque – a bold rejection of property rights, 1st Amendment rights, and the Rule of Law—in order to look tough against Islam.

This is all about hate and Islamaphobia.

We now have an epidemic of “sunshine patriots” on both the right and the left who are all for freedom, as long as there’s no controversy and nobody is offended.

Political demagoguery rules when truth and liberty are ignored.

Ron Paul represents the 14th district of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Filed under: National News, Political Science Tagged: constitutional rights, Cordoba House, First Amendment, Ground Zero Mosque, Islam, libertarian, liberty, Middle East, neoconservatives, New York City, Park51, property rights, racism, religion, Republicans, Ron Paul, War on Terror, xenophobia