Tag: Agora! Anarchy! Action!

The State Releases One of Its Three Political Prisoners

I reported earlier this month that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) were holding Leah Planet, Katherine Olejnik, and Matt Duran prisoner. Leah was being held for refusing to testify against her fellow anarchists noting that the arrests were effectively a witch hunt as the FBI was unable to obtain any evidence that lead to charges. The state has released Lead:

On July 25, Plante, along with two of her closest friends (co-conspirators, if you’re filtering reality through the brain of an FBI agent), Matt Duran and Kteeo Olejnik, were arrested after FBI agents and Joint Terrorism Task Force officers broke down her door with a battering ram.

The officers had a warrant for computers, black clothing, and “anarchist literature.” Plante was then arrested without a warrant, and for items that any of us might have in our possession right now.

[…]

On Friday, October 19, however, she was released with very little information as to why. Her only post-prison comments were attacks against misogynistic posts on her website.

Apparently it was too hard to justify caging somebody for refusing to condemn her friends. Unfortunately Matt and Katherine are still being held in cages. We’ll see how long it takes for the FBI to either create some trumped up charges or release the two and pretend there wasn’t a state sanctioned witch hunt going on.

A Message to My Fellow Gun Rights Advocates

I know the election is looming and I know Obama has openly stated, again, that he supports a new “assault weapon” ban but we really need to talk.

With the election coming up the arguments, as expected, are getting very heated. What I can’t fathom is why advocates of gun rights are getting into such heated arguments over the presidential race. Many gun rights activists are actually arguing over which anti-gunner will be “less” of an anti-gunner. Is this what we’ve reduced ourselves to? Have we fallen so far that we’re actually willing to support an advocate of gun control so long as they’re not “worse” than another advocate of gun control? Will we throw our support behind a candidate who favors an “assault weapon” ban so long as his opponent supports an “assault weapon” ban and a ban on private sales?

This is getting ridiculous. I honestly can’t believe so many activists in the gun rights community are arguing in favor of an anti-gunner like Romney just because he’s not as anti-gun as Obama. I know people love politics and using the political means to achieve their goals. That’s fine, you can keep doing that without having to sell your soul. The president is only one piece of the political gun rights puzzle and a rather minor piece at that. In order to get a new “assault weapon” ban through legislation needs to be passed by the House and the Senate before the president even has the opportunity to sign it. Since the presidency is a lost cause when it comes to gun rights why not focus on controlling Congress? So long as one of the two houses are held by pro-gun candidates getting gun control legislation through will be difficult.

The bottom line is this: the more energy you expend on the already lost presidential election the less energy you’ll have to expend on congressional battles. I realize that the president is the most well-known political figure in this country and therefore he’s the guy you want to focus on but there’s no point if neither candidate will deliver what you want. Why not focus on the potentially winnable battle even if it will be less glorious? Sure, nobody will likely hear about whatever congress critter you’ve worked to get elected but if he is a supporter of gun rights you’ll have actually achieved something.

Of course you don’t need to rely on the political means to achieve victory. You could always practice civil disobedience, jury nullification, or agorism. We now have the technology to render gun control entirely irrelevant, let’s use it.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Laugh at Gun Control

Much of the gun rights community seems to be in a tizzy. During Tuesday’s presidential debate the issue of gun control came up. Not surprisingly both candidates played their expected parts. Mitt Romney pretended that he’s performed at 180 degree turn and is now a staunch supporter of gun rights while Barack Obama remained consistent and said he supports another “assault weapon” ban:

During their second election debate, both men largely danced around a gun-control question, a reflection of how they are wary of offending voters who support gun rights.

However, Obama did say that he would back an assault-weapons ban like the one President Bill Clinton signed in 1994. That law expired in 2004 without being renewed by Congress.

Romney signed such a ban as governor of Massachusetts, but he has indicated that he would not support banning assault weapons as president. He did not say why his stance is different now, but in winning the Republican nomination he courted conservative voters who generally oppose gun restrictions, and he was endorsed by the influential National Rifle Association.

Needless to say this move was smart for both parties. I’m sure Romney gained a few additional supporters in the form of gun rights activists who were suckered by his claimed change of heart. Likewise Obama probably enjoyed a few additional supporters in the form of gun control advocates who he has been keeping at arm’s length (until now, when he actually wants their votes). Ultimately I don’t care.

I no longer worry about an “assault weapon” ban or any other form of gun ban. You see technology has made gun control entirely impossible. Computer numerical control (CnC) machines and 3D printers allow any individual to manufacture the registered parts of many firearms in their own home. If an “assault weapon” ban goes through and AR-15 receivers become illegal to purchase then one only needs to gain access to a CnC machine and manufacture their own. One doesn’t even need to go as far as getting a CnC machine or a 3D printer, almost anybody can make an AK-47 receiver out of sheet metal. If people in a third-world country can manufacture a firearm then you and I, who enjoy the technologic advancements of the first-world, should have no problem whatsoever manufacturing firearms.

We should no longer allow ourselves to be subjected to the desires of sociopaths. If the state says we can’t have “assault weapons” then we should manufacture “assault weapons” in droves. Instead of begging politicians to allow us to keep our arms let’s work to simplify the construction of arms so that any individual can do it in their home with minimal knowledge. Once almost every person is able to manufacture a firearm in their home the entire gun control debate will become completely pointless. There is no way to control something that everybody can easily make.

Why Hobbes was Wrong About the Necessity of the State

When an anarchist brings up the idea of abolishing the state around a statist they are usually met with a very Hobbesian argument. They claim that without the state humans would become vicious beasts roaming the world with the purposes of raping, killing, and stealing. Such a claim is absurd by its very nature:

Now, setting aside the fact that anarchism does not imply an absence of law or defense, and setting aside the fact that Hobbes’ ideas about the state of nature are completely ridiculous, just consider how interesting their claim was in that particular situation. Five armed men sitting in a field dozens and dozens of miles from a police officer having a civil chat about anarchism without any one of us trying to rape, rob or kill any of the others is a rather remarkable thing if Thomas Hobbes is right about human nature. Equally interesting is the fact that none of us feared or even contemplated the possibility of being raped, robbed or killed by anyone out there in the wilds of the Colorado plains that day. Like Coloradoans of the 19th century, we met scores of armed men over the course of the day, none of which we personally knew, and yet it never even crossed any of our minds to be concerned for our chastity, our wealth or our lives.

If the state is the only thing keeping humanity from barbarism then humans should revert to barbarism when away from the state’s influence, right? This isn’t the case as noted by the millions of hunters that have managed to leave the state’s sphere of influence, with guns no less, and return home safely. Shouldn’t lumberjacks working far from civilization carve each other up with chainsaws? How can shipping vessels traverse the vast expanses of the ocean without the crews murdering or raping each other? Wouldn’t astronauts kill one another since they’re completely beyond the reach of the state?

The primary failure of the Hobbesian idea that humans are naturally barbarous is that it requires ignoring the fact humans developed societies in the first place. If humans were naturally uncooperative how did they cooperate enough to form societies? Humans predate states therefore people of the ancient world must have avoided murdering one another in the absence of states long enough to form tribes, villages, and eventually cities. This fact alone demonstrates the fallacious nature of Hobbes’s claim.

Agorism Helping Those in Need

Agorism, as I see it, is a movement with two purposes. First there is the obvious purpose of bringing an end to the violent state by witholding resources, such as tax money, from it. The second purpose is to help your fellow individual. Many goods and services that are necessary for survival are priced far higher than the poor can afford. Often the high prices are due to the increased overhead caused by regulatory compliance, intellectual property laws, and taxes. How long do you think a pharmaceutical company could rake in hundreds of dollars of profit for a single bottle of pills if the state didn’t maintain a monopoly for that company? Without the granted patents on the pill or the regulations that prevent newcomers from entering the market the price of those pills would quickly fall as other producers entered the market and started selling the pills for far less.

Practicing agorism, and therefore loosening the state’s grip and helping your fellow individuals, can be done in many different ways. One can sell their goods and services “under the table” in order to avoid paying taxes, which serves the dual purpose of keeping money from the state and bringing down the overall costs incurred by the producer (and therefore, in turn, the overall costs incurred by the customer). Another way to practice agorism is to exploit currently existing purchasing systems to offer goods and services to others at a lower price. For example, an entrepreneur or entrepreneurs with enough capital to make a bulk purchase of a good could negotiate a lower price per unit than those purchasing low quantities of that good. Once the entrepreneur or entrepreneurs had the goods in hand they could resell them at a cost still lower than would normally be incurred when purchasing low quantities. A second example would be exploiting insurance policies to acquire more goods than were needed and reselling the surplus, which is what some people are doing in order to help diabetics who can’t normally afford testing strips:

Although some estimates peg the manufacturing cost at about a dime per strip, it’s not unusual for a single strip to retail for $1 or more. And it’s not unusual for diabetics dependent on insulin to have to test three to 10 times a day. The cost quickly adds up.

“It’s out of reach of most people,” said Lemoyne Bloom, who advertised on craigslist to buy unused test strips in South Florida with the goal of reselling them at bargain-basement prices — but with enough of a profit margin to still make money.

[…]

One shade away from this black market is the largely legal practice of buying unused strips from diabetics or their middlemen and then reselling them, usually over the Internet. The so-called gray market circumvents full retail prices charged by pharmaceutical companies.

Advocates of such resales say the only victim is Big Pharma, which has priced its products so high that diabetics no longer can afford them. The marketplace is doing what big pharmaceutical companies won’t: providing test strips at a low enough cost that diabetics have a shot at regular testing.

“Some people just give us their strips and we don’t resell those, we donate them,” Bloom said. “That’s why we’re here, to help people.”

[…]

Who sells their test strips to these middlemen? “A lot of people have insurance and get strips they don’t need,” Bloom said.

Even though the state now mandates every American either purchase health insurance or face fines many people can’t afford health insurance. Those who can’t afford health insurance often cannot afford basic medical supplies either. This presents a real problem for those with medical conditions requiring periodic intervention such as diabetes. Normally these individuals would be left with no real option other than forgoing needed medical care but agorism gives them an alternative. Industrious entrepreneurs have found an exploit in the state manipulated health insurances system that grants them access to cheap testing strips. Using this exploit both the entrepreneurs and those in need of testing strips benefit while the state and its cronies suffer (even if their suffering is minor one can be bled to death by thousands of paper cuts).

Agorism is about mutual cooperation and that’s exactly what’s happening in the “gray” market for diabetes testing strips.

Locking People in Cages

A Seattle anarchist is likely to be tossed into a cage because she’s unwilling to cooperate with a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) witch hunt:

Today Leah Plante will again appear before a federal grand jury in Seattle, Washington, for the third time, and refuse to testify about her political beliefs and political associations. It is likely that she will be imprisoned for her principled stance against what she calls a witch hunt against local anarchists.

The grand jury is investigating anarchists in the Northwest, following FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force raids in search of “anarchist literature.” Two other anarchists, Matthew Kyle Duran and Katherine Olejnik, have already been imprisoned for refusing to cooperate.

I have to give Leah Plante credit for having one hell of a backbone. Her kidnapping at the hands of law enforcement agents appears to be nothing more than a typical interstate anarchist witch hunt that the FBI likes to perform periodically (before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul similar raids were conducted on anarchist gathering spots). These witch hunts, like any form of state witch hunt, are run in a fairly specific manner. First a warrant is issued that targets anything and everything you may find at a typical target’s home (anarchist literature in an anarchist home for example) then the targeted individuals are hauled in front of a grand jury and expected to testify against their friends. These coerced (if they don’t testify they’re locked in a cage) testimonies are then used as evidence to bring charges against the targeted individuals.

If she does testify her friends may face charges and spend time in a cage and if she doesn’t testify she’ll probably spend time in a cage. As usual the state offers no escape from its wrath.

Who Will Protect the Poor

When discussing anarchy it’s inevitable that somebody will make some snide comment about protecting the poor. In the eye’s of a statist the state protects the poor but in a stateless society the poor would go without protection because they would be unable to afford protection services. This argument is absurd though because it relies on the false premise that the state actually protects the poor, it doesn’t:

Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer.

After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. Louis neighborhood at the height of the Cold War, she wonders if her own government is to blame.

In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis.

Local officials were told at the time that the government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. Louis from aerial observation in case the Russians attacked.

But in 1994, the government said the tests were part of a biological weapons program and St. Louis was chosen because it bore some resemblance to Russian cities that the U.S. might attack. The material being sprayed was zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine fluorescent powder.

Instead of protecting the poor the state inflicts harm on them. Many times throughout history the poor have been used a guinea pigs by states for many gruesome experiment. Let’s not forget the Tuskegee syphilis experiment:

The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished, African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama; 400 who had previously contracted syphilis before the study began, and 200 without the disease. For participating in the study, the men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.

We should also remember when the United States government experimented on poor college students without their consent:

Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal[1] human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973.[2] The program used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, which led to controversy regarding its legitimacy.[3][4][5][6] MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people’s individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.[7]

These are just a tiny handful of examples. To claim that the state protects the poor is absurd. In fact the poor are the favored prey of the state. If you want to protect the poor you should detest the state.

Jeffery Tucker on the Presidential Debate

You have to love Jeffery Tucker, the man is a wordsmith. His quote on Wednesday’s presidential debate summed up the political system in this country perfectly:

Romney and Obama are both extraordinarily talented and smart. That’s what it takes to pull off the world’s biggest hoax. In their public debates, they must shamelessly play along with the expectation that they are masterminds of history’s largest and most expansive government with thousands of departments, millions and millions of regulations, astonishingly complex networks of graft and corruption, and legacy content dating back more then a century, and, further, claim — with a straight face — that their personal “vision” can encompass and control the whole apparatus, and, by extension, the nation and the world. They must pull off this ostentatious and wildly implausible display of the pretense of knowledge with the look and feel of genuine conviction. Anyone who can do this has to be pathological, if he believes what he is saying, or duplicitous to an extent that vastly exceeds the human norm. It’s all mightily impressive, so much so that the entire show could and should be moved to Broadway as a profitable venture. In that way, it could become consumer-pleasing entertainment rather persist in what it actually is: the biggest threat to peace, prosperity, and freedom in the world today.

There really isn’t much else to say on the subject.

No Win Situations

Statists would have you believe that there is no way to not consent to the state. As Herbert Spencer pointed out long ago in his book The Right to Ignore the State, there is no way to argue against the state according to advocates of statism:

In affirming that a man may not be taxed unless he has directly or indirectly given his consent, it affirms that he may refuse to be so taxed; and to refuse to be taxed is to cut all connection with the State. Perhaps it will be said that this consent is not a specific, but a general, one, and that the citizen is understood to have assented to every thing his representative may do, when he voted for him. But suppose he did not vote for him; and on the contrary did all in his power to get elected some one holding opposite views—what then? The reply will probably be that by taking part in such an election, he tacitly agreed to abide by the decision of the majority. And how if he did not vote at all? Why then he cannot justly complain of any tax, seeing that he made no protest against its imposition. So, curiously enough, it seems that he gave his consent in whatever way he acted—whether he said “Yes,” whether he said “No,” or whether he remained neuter! A rather awkward doctrine, this.

If you vote for the man who becomes president statists will claim you’ve consented to everything the president does for the duration of his term. If you vote for a man who doesn’t become president statists will claim you’re still consented to the system because you participated by voting. Finally, if you don’t vote for a presidential candidate statists will claim you have no right to complain because you didn’t attempt to get somebody else into office.

Statists have attempted to shield themselves from any debate but claiming everybody consents to the state whether they vote or not. One is generally considered the loser of an argument if they have to resort to claiming it’s impossible to disagree with them.

Anarchists Aren’t the Problem

When I discuss anarchism it’s inevitable that somebody will claim the lack of a state will inevitable lead to roving gangs of bandits preying on the weak. What people making such an argument have failed to address is how such a system is functionally different than what we live under today. Under today’s system we have a giant roving gang called the state preying on everybody who lives within its claimed territory. As Robert Higgs explained, anarchists aren’t the ones who have perpetuated history’s great atrocities:

Anarchists did not try to Carry Out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not Carry Out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

The systematic slaughter of so many people is very difficult without a state. To claim that states are the only thing standing between civilization and barbarism demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge regarding history. States have perpetrated great genocides throughout the world whereas stateless societies such as Medieval Iceland, Medieval Ireland [PDF], the American Old West [PDF], and Neutral Moresnet are notable for their relative peace.

The state isn’t what lies between civilization and barbarism, the state is barbarism.