Liberty – Page 10 – A Geek With Guns

Anarchist Freedom

Religious freedom has been in the been the political hot potato as of late. According to Republicans people should be free to discriminate against others so long as they’re doing it for religious reasons. I’ve decided to take a page from their book and will begin preaching about anarchist freedom.

What is anarchist freedom? It’s like religious freedom but for anarchists. The people currently beating the religious freedom drum have been pointing out that a person shouldn’t have to go against their deep religious beliefs by associating with sinners. As a devout anarchist it is my belief that agents of the state are wicked extortionists. Being forced to associate with them goes against my strongly held conviction that extortionists should be kept at arm’s reach.

Since Republicans seem to be a fan of discriminatory freedom I’m sure they will support my freedom to not associate with state agents. This means that I should be free to not pay taxes (disassociating with tax collectors, who were considered the lowest of the low even in Jesus’ time), be pulled over by police officers (disassociating with murderers, thieves, and general aggressors), or follow laws passed by politicians (disassociating with people who believe themselves to be owners of other human beings). It’s really that simple. Once Republicans support my anarchist freedoms I will acknowledge that they are sincere about this whole religious freedom thing.

Dating Advice for Libertarian Men

It’s April 1^st but instead of trickery I have genuinely useful advice for my fellow male libertarians. There is a stereotype, justly deserved in my experience, that libertarian men have a hard time getting dates. As a libertarian male who tends to do OK when it comes to dating I’ve been planning a dating advice for libertarian males presentation at AgoraFest. But somebody beat me to it. Avens O’Brien produced a list of 12 reasons why libertarian men aren’t getting laid. Usually I would avoid linking to one of those lists where each item is presented on a separate goddamn page to rake in a few extra fractions of a cent in advertising revenue but this is incredibly important information so I’m making an exception. But to help you out I’m going to list all 12 items and links directly to them.

From the feedback I’ve received points one, two, five, nine, and ten are the really big sticklers. All of the women I’ve dated were willing to forgive a lot so long as their significant other didn’t constantly complain, had a sense of humor, had hobbies outside of philosophized about liberty and politics, wasn’t an asshole, and wasn’t awkwardly aggressive.

The important thing to keep in mind about this list is that it’s written by a women so it’s going to be far more valuable than the shit libertarian men like to post about the need to be all alpha and shit.

Voluntary Association Versus Selective Discrimination

There seems to be some confusion amongst libertarian circles over the difference between voluntary association and selective discrimination. Don’t worry though, Padre Chris is here to clear things up.

Voluntary association is the principle that everybody is free to choose who they want to associate with and who they don’t want to associate with. Period. This means a bigoted asshole can choose not to associate with Muslims and decent human beings can choose to not associate with that bigoted asshole. Selective discrimination differs in that individuals can only choose to disassociate with somebody if their reason is on an approved list. In this case the bigoted asshole can only choose to not associate with Muslims if the people who create the list of criteria put “being Muslim” as an approved reason to discriminate. Other people may also only choose to not associate with a bigoted asshole if the list contains “being a bigoted asshole”.

Libertarianism, due to the non-aggression principle (the only way you can prevent somebody from voluntarily associating with another is to put a gun to their heads and make them associate), mandates voluntary association. However many libertarians mistakenly believe that cases of selective discrimination are forms of voluntary association. That’s what happened with libertarians who supported Indiana’s SB 101. They heralded the law as a good piece of legislation because it allows businesses to not associate with people based on religious reasons. But the legislation contains a clause that lets the state decide whether or not to prosecute somebody for discriminating even if it’s based on religious reasons.

Herein lies the problem. Under the state there can only be selective discrimination. Nobody, for example, is free to not associate with state agents. Furthermore the state periodically either prohibits or mandates certain types of discrimination. In the South many states mandated racial discrimination under Jim Crow laws. Today racial discrimination is mostly prohibited for non-state actors but many states are enabling, and sometimes mandating through marriage and bathroom usage laws, discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals. The only thing that has really changed between then and now is that race has been removed from the list of acceptable reasons to discriminate and religion has been moved up the list (I would say added but it’s almost always been there).

Libertarianism, at least the anarchist branch of it, advocates equality under the law. Nobody can have privileges others do not enjoy. In the case of discrimination equality under the law would require that everybody be free to voluntary associate or disassociate with anybody else or nobody be free to do so. None of these “religious freedom” laws accomplish that. They merely grant people of certain religions privileges that others do not enjoy. Libertarians shouldn’t involve themselves in the political discrimination battle unless the result would create equality under the law. In the case of religious freedom a libertarian should only involve themselves if the bill would allow anybody of any religion, or lack of religion in the case of atheists, the freedom to discriminate based on their beliefs and left not exception for the state to intervene.

People should be free to choose who they want to associate and disassociate with. That freedom can only exist under anarchy. But we currently suffer under a state so libertarians must not get suckered into supporting legislation that appears to enable voluntary association but really only allows discrimination in a manner approved by the state.

In Libertopia Valid Contracts Require Exit Clauses

Yesterday I stumbled across this lovely story of a landlord putting a clause into their lease agreement that would punish renters that wrote bad reviews with a $10,000 fine. As if that wasn’t enough the lease agreement also gives the landlord the copyright to anything a renter creates involving the property (including photographs of the property and written reviews of the property):

The Social Media Addendum, published here, is a triple-whammy. First, it explicitly bans all “negative commentary and reviews on Yelp! [sic], Apartment Ratings, Facebook, or any other website or Internet-based publication or blog.” It also says any “breach” of the Social Media Addendum will result in a $10,000 fine, to be paid within ten business days. Finally, it goes ahead and assigns the renters’ copyrights to the owner—not just the copyright on the negative review, but “any and all written or photographic works regarding the Owner, the Unit, the property, or the apartments.” Snap a few shots of friends who come over for a dinner party? They’re owned by your landlord.

The article notes that the agreement would be shredded by any judge. But the more interesting part about this story was the conversation I got into with one of my libertarian friends. When I posted this story on Facebook I noted that I wouldn’t abide by an agreement such as this one. My friend stated that I shouldn’t sign it then because I was planning to violate the voluntary agreement and therefore would be committing fraud.

This brought up an interesting debate over what constitutes a voluntary agreement. Some libertarians believe any contract signed in the absence of coercion is voluntary. I don’t subscribe to that belief. Based on my view of libertarianism I believe any voluntary agreement must include an exit clause for any party that signs it. If an exit clause does not exist for all parties then the agreement ceases to be voluntary as soon as one party changes their mind. One of the reasons I don’t consider the United States military to be a voluntary organization is because people who enlist have little recourse if they later decide they want out. Without an exit clause a supposedly voluntary agreement becomes a form of, abeit limited in most cases, indentured servitude.

I say all of this with the understanding that exit clauses can have stipulations. Entering a business agreement with other parties is difficult if one of them backing out could leave you on the hook for their financial responsibilities. For example, it would certainly be valid to require a party exiting from a business agreement to pay their portion of any debt incurred. Libertarians can debate this objection of mine but my other objection, I believe, is harder to argue against from a libertarian standpoint.

As longtime readers know I don’t believe intellectual property is anything more than state created fiction. However even if we accept intellectual property is a thing copyright in this country is defined arbitrarily by uninvolved parties. Right now the length of a copyright in the United States is the life of an author plus 70 years. Work for hire copyrights are valid for 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation if it’s unpublished. But these durations are created entirely by politicians in Washington DC and can therefore be redefined without any input from creators or copyright holders. In other words the copyright claimed by the landlord, over your creation, could become indefinite with the stroke of a pen. How can one be expected to abide by an agreement that could change at anytime without their input?

It’s also worth considering if signing a knowingly invalid agreement with the express purpose of violating it is fraud. To this I would ask if you can fraud a fraudster? Clarifying further I would ask if you stole stolen property to return it to the original owner would you be a thief? In both cases I would answer in the negative. Taking stolen property with the purpose of returning it to its original owner is a method of righting a wrong. Likewise calling somebody out on their bullshit is also a method righting a wrong. If somebody is including an unenforceable clause in a contract then they should be called out. One way of calling them out is to sign the agreement, violate the clause, and demonstrate that it’s unenforceable. As an upside, since it would force the including of the clause to expend resources, this method of calling out their bullshit would raise the stakes of including invalid clauses as opposed to just telling them the clause is invalid.

In summary I would argue that the linked agreement would not only be invalid under current laws but would remain invalid under stateless Libertopia. Just because two parties signed a contract doesn’t mean it’s a valid agreement even under libertarianism.

Starving the Beast

There’s a lot of hoopla about large companies storing their cash outside of the United States. According to Bloomberg New a handful of large technology companies currently have $2.1 trillion sitting in offshore banks:

Eight of the biggest U.S. technology companies added a combined $69 billion to their stockpiled offshore profits over the past year, even as some corporations in other industries felt pressure to bring cash back home.

Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc., Google Inc. and five other tech firms now account for more than a fifth of the $2.10 trillion in profits that U.S. companies are holding overseas, according to a Bloomberg News review of the securities filings of 304 corporations. The total amount held outside the U.S. by the companies was up 8 percent from the previous year, though 58 companies reported smaller stockpiles.

Ironically it’s the progressives that are making the biggest stink about this. They are bitching that the tech companies are being irresponsible by not bringing the money back into the country where it can be taxed. I say this is ironic because progressives like to claim they oppose war, militarized police, and violations of human rights. All of those things are made possible because of tax dollars.

By keeping that money outside of the United States these tech companies are preventing the state from extract tax revenue. That means it has fewer resources to build bombs; outfit local police departments with armored personnel carriers and cell phone interceptors; and hire more law enforcers to harass minorities, the homeless, and other people powerless to defend themselves.

Every company should strive to keep as much money as it can outside of the United States. Only by depriving the state of resources can we force it to either collapse or cancel rights violating programs that it can no longer afford to fund. I would even go so far as to say this practice furthers agorist goals even if it isn’t necessarily anti-state in its entirety (since other states are usually collecting some kind of tax revenue).

Instead of condemning these companies for keeping their cash overseas we should be cheering them on. We’re not going to vote our way out of this imperialistic police state but we may be able to force our oppressors’ hand into pulling back many of its more egregious practices.

Social Conservatives are the Worst Thing to Happen to Libertarianism

Ron Paul provided libertarians a potential political strategy. The idea was simple, overwhelm the Republican Party with libertarians and use it to spread libertarian ideals. Although I know I will receive protests from libertarians still participating in Republican politics I feel safe in saying that this strategy has not only failed but has backfired miserably. By associating libertarianism and Republican politics the gateway (to Hell) was opened for social conservatives to filter into libertarian groups. While social conservatives have always been involved in libertarianism I don’t believe it was to the extent that they are now. Furthermore the public association of libertarianism and the Republican Party wasn’t there.

I don’t blame Ron Paul or libertarians who entered Republican politics (of which, regretfully, I was one of). There was no way to know how the strategy would work out until it was tried. However the toll paid for the mistake has been high. Libertarianism is primarily concerned with the principle of non-aggression. Non-aggression leads to voluntary association. Voluntary association simply means any individual or group of individuals is free to associate or not associate with any individual or group of individuals they choose. You can begin to see why social conservatives find libertarianism appealing. It is a philosophy that allows them to associate with their echo chamber while discriminating against anybody they dislike.

Unfortunately the influx of social conservatives has also tainted libertarianism with racism, homophobia, transphobia, religious discrimination, and other forms of bigotry. None of these are inherit in libertarianism but neither are they prevented. But when somebody outside of libertarianism sees a self-proclaimed libertarian declaring Muslims the enemy of all humanity or homosexuals sinners deserving of eternal damnation that reflects poorly on those of us who aren’t bigoted assholes. This is made worse by the public connection between libertarianism and the Republican Party, which has a notable history of bigotry.

The effect of this is that people often assume I’m a bigot when I say that I’m a libertarian. It pains me that I often have to clarify that I don’t discriminate against Muslims, homosexuals, bisexuals, or transgender individuals when I mention that I’m a libertarian.

Now that I’ve bitched publicly about the damage I believe social conservatives have done to libertarianism I want to make a proposal. Since I’m a libertarian this proposal is made with the understanding that individuals are free to ignore it without consequence. But I would like to see libertarians utilize voluntary association to disassociate with people who express bigoted ideals and loudly shout them down when they start spewing their ignorant bullshit. In other words make it well known that they’re not welcome in libertarian circles. This is the only way I see libertarianism being able to divorce itself from the filth that social conservative have infested it with.

While voluntary association certainly allows bigots to be bigots that shouldn’t be the main draw. The main draw of voluntary association should be the absence of coercion.

Konkin: First Significant Thinker to Get Libertarianism Totally Right

Stephan Kinsella, an excellent libertarian thinker to whom I cannot even hold a candle to, made a quick post where he declared Hans-Herman Hoppe the first significant thinker to get libertarianism totally right. In the post Samuel Edward Konkin III received an honorable mention:

One of the people I’m learning a bit more about is Sam Konkin III. From everything I know about him he was pretty solid on everything—the state, IP, everything. He was in fact one of the pioneers of the modern anti-IP movement. However, he was more of a minor figure and did not have a fully fleshed out political theory that I am aware of. He is known for “agorism” and his fairly brief (but profound and correct and perspicacious) comments on IP, but ….

But he didn’t quite top Hoppe in Kinsella’s opinion. Personally I rank Konkin at the top of my list of libertarian thinkers. There are several reasons for this. He was decidedly anti-state. If I remember correctly he lived in the United States illegally and avoided having any legal source of income so he didn’t have to pay income taxes. That’s the type of consistency that is rare to come by. More importantly though Konkin managed something that few well-known libertarians have managed: he described an entire philosophy in a few short essays.

Many people mistakenly believe that Konkin didn’t have a fully fleshed out political theory but I believe he did a better job of fleshing out a libertarian philosophy than almost anybody else. Libertarianism, when you really boil it down, tends to advocate the principle of non-aggression. Where people go from there differs wildly but the foundation is simple. Konkin, by not writing lengthy books explaining a view of the One True Libertarian Theory, demonstrated he understood something about libertarianism that few others did: libertarianism shouldn’t try to describe the single proper society.

Liberty implies individuals having the freedom to form whatever group they desire with the understanding that members are allowed to come and go as they please. Non-aggression ultimately means one person cannot coerce another person into participation. If a group of individuals want to form a collective where all goods are commonly owned they should be free to do so. Any individual in that group should be free to leave if they so desire as well. While collective ownership is almost always scoffed at by libertarians it isn’t incompatible with non-aggression so long as the people participating in the collective are doing so voluntarily.

Konkin identified the opponent of libertarianism and, through his advocacy of agorism, proposed a means of destroying it using a libertarian strategy: voluntary association. By participating in “black” markets individuals can associate with one another on their terms and keep resources out of the hands of the state. It’s a simple strategy that doesn’t need volumes of material to explain. Furthermore Konkin didn’t waste time telling everybody how to do agorism in minute detail because that really is up to the individuals participating in the “black” market.

Mises wasn’t an anarchist and Rothbard and Hoppe both invested a lot of time telling people what the One Truth Libertarian Theory was. Konkin briefly described libertarianism and left people to explore the potential societies that can arise when people are allowed to associate voluntarily. In other words Konkin basically took market anarchism to its logical extent by letting markets determine what kind of associations will succeed and what kinds will fail.

Getting the State Out of Marriage

The opinion of an Alabama Supreme Court justice has caused a minor amount of jimmies to get rustled. Justice Glenn Murdock opined that allowing same-sex marriage to continue in Alabama could result in all marriages behind banned in the state. Needless to say this has the writers over at Think Progress very upset:

Thus, according to Murdock, if gay couples and straight couples must enjoy the exact same marriage rights under the Constitution, the proper remedy might be to deny those rights to everyone, rather than extending them to same-sex and opposite-sex couples alike.

In the unlikely event that a majority of the state supreme court adopts this approach, that could cause a largely academic matter that has divided federal judges to suddenly become hugely important. Though the overwhelming majority of federal judges to consider the question after the Supreme Court’s most recent gay rights decision in 2013 agree that the Constitution does not permit anti-gay marriage discrimination, these judges have split on rationale. Some judges have held that denying equal marriage rights to gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals deprives them of their right to equality under the law; while others have held that denying such rights to these individuals violates a “fundamental right” to marry. (Other judges have embraced both rationales in favor of marriage equality, or they’ve embraced a hybrid of the two rationales.)

According to the author’s view denying anybody the ability to marry would be the denial of the right to marriage. I actually propose an alternate view. Rights are supposed to be acts individuals can partake in freely. Privileges, on the other hand, are acts individuals can partake in so long as they have permission to do so. This means any act the state interferes with becomes a privilege instead of a right. Marriage, by being regulated by the state, is today a privilege that one must seek approval from the state to partake in.

Progressives and libertarians agree that people should be free to marry who they want. Where the two groups disagree is how such a freedom can exist. According to progressives the freedom to marry can only exist if the state allows it to. Libertarians believe that the freedom to marry can only exist if the state is entirely divorced (excuse the pun) from the process. The difference between the two beliefs is stark. If the state is involved then it has the power to grant or deny marriages. Currently the fight for marriage equality focuses on same-sex couples. However granting same-sex couples the privilege to marry doesn’t necessarily grant, say, polyamorous groups the privilege to marry. Meanwhile divorcing the state from marriage would mean the institution is up to individuals to define so same-sex couples and polyamorous groups would both be free to declare themselves married.

By denying all marriages Alabama could create a de facto environment where state approval of marriage is no longer sought and therefore individuals would be more apt to declare themselves married on their own terms. In my opinion far more would be accomplished if Alabama denied all marriage licenses than if it approve heterosexual and homosexual couples to get married. The former would encourage people to ignore the state whereas the latter would require, say, polyamorous groups to drudge through a long legal fight to seek permission to get married.

Anarchists in Space

Or the Middle East. But as far as some American are concerned that might as well be in space. With the expanding threat of the Islamic State (IS) much of the Middle East is more chaotic than usual (which is saying something). Old states are crumbling, a new state is rising, and within the chaos a little bit of anarchy is cropping up:

The Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Kurdish National Council (KNC) established in the region of Rojava a society that mixes fierce libertarianism (guns are everywhere and there are no taxes – none) and Occupy-friendly anarchist thought with a healthy dose of feminism. While most Kurdish groups, especially those the US is friendly with, would some day like to establish a Kurdish state, in Rojava they have leap-frogged over the idea of the nation state into a more advanced system that they call Democratic Confederalism.

Heavily armed anti-state feminists? Sounds like my kind of crowd! If you know your Middle Eastern history then you’re aware that the Kurds have always had their own thing going. Other Middle Eastern nations have tried conquering them time and again but have never really succeeded. The IS is no different. While other Middle Eastern cities have fallen to its onslaught the Kurds have managed to keep it at bay.

According to statists anarchy should devolve into survival of the fittest. The people in Rojava should be slaughtering one another. But they’re not and that isn’t surprising. If you know the history of anarchism you know that it likes to creep up in areas of turmoil and act as an oasis to the burtchery surrounding it. Not only are the people in Rojava enjoying a far freer existence than the people around them but they’re also doing so with classic anarchist tools of organization and justice:

In the cantons of Rojava, there is a small central government with an absolute minimum of 40% female delegates, but most of the day-to-day work of running society happens at a local level, street by street and village by village. Democratic Confederalism’s chief architect, Abdullah Ocalan, says that “Ecology and feminism are central pillars” of the system he has spearheaded, something that you would have to go very far to the margins to hear from Western politicians. In Rojava, men who beat their wives face total ostracism from the community, making their lives in a highly social, connected society virtually impossible. Instead of a police force and jails, ‘peace committees’ in each municipality work to defuse the cycles of inter-family revenge killings by consensual agreements between both sides – and it works.

Like the Catholic concept of subsidiarity, anarchist societies strive to make decisions on the most local level possible starting with the individual. Rojava is doing that by leaving the day-to-day decisions at the local level and only involving more people in the decision making process when it’s absolutely necessary.

In addition to decentralized decision making the people of Rojava are opting for social ostracism instead of vengeful violence (imprisonment, lashings, and other forms of institutionalized violence) as a form of punishment. Statists often claim that anarchism can’t work because vengeful violence against bad actors in society is necessary to prevent societal collapse. But history shows that social ostracism and outlawry, that is taking away the protection of the law from those who refuse to live within it, is very effective at protecting a society from bad actors. There are few threats more frightening to most human beings than being completely cutoff from other human beings. Such is the burden of being a social species.

Obviously this won’t get much play in the media because the narrative of statism must be upheld at all costs. But for those of us who advocate anarchy it’s just another example of it working in the real world.

You Can’t Stop the Signal

If you research the development of communication technology you’ll notice two trends. First, when the technology first begins to gain popularity there are always government busybodies arguing that it must be controlled. Second, any attempt to control the technology utterly fails in the long wrong. When the printing press started gaining prominence the Inquisition wanted to control it to prevent the printing of heresy. While they achieved some limited success in controlling what was printed in certain languages, namely the languages the Inquisition officials that works in censorship knew such as Italian, the result was that people printed censored works in languages, such as German, that Inquisition officials were less familiar with. Today the same game is being played with modern communication technologies. Every government seems hellbent on censoring modern communication technologies and some states have been especially tyrannical in their efforts. Cuba is one of those states. But the watchful censors of the Cuban government have been continuously outsmarted by a bunch of kids:

HAVANA (AP) — Cut off from the Internet, young Cubans have quietly linked thousands of computers into a hidden network that stretches miles across Havana, letting them chat with friends, play games and download hit movies in a mini-replica of the online world that most can’t access.

Home Internet connections are banned for all but a handful of Cubans, and the government charges nearly a quarter of a month’s salary for an hour online in government-run hotels and Internet centers. As a result, most people on the island live offline, complaining about their lack of access to information and contact with friends and family abroad.

A small minority have covertly engineered a partial solution by pooling funds to create a private network of more than 9,000 computers with small, inexpensive but powerful hidden Wi-Fi antennas and Ethernet cables strung over streets and rooftops spanning the entire city. Disconnected from the real Internet, the network is limited, local and built with equipment commercially available around the world, with no help from any outside government, organizers say.

Never underestimate the power of kids wanting to communicate with one another. Unlike many adults, kids haven’t have the fear of the state beaten into them and therefore are more willing to flip it the bird and do as it wants. Combine this willingness to disobey with an amazing capacity to learn new technologies quickly and you have a recipe for rendering state censorship efforts impotent.

As long as we have states we will likely have attempts to censor communications. But you can’t stop the signal. Humans have an innate desire to communicate with one another and will smash through any barrier that lies between them and their friends.