Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

But What About The Borders

Nationalism seems to be running strong in the veins of many pretend libertarians. I keep seeing people who call themselves libertarians arguing for stronger borders. Their argument usually goes something like, “In order to create a libertarian society we need a strong federal government to keep out the antilibertarians!”

Not surprisingly this attitude is more prevalent amongst politically active libertarians. There must be some kind of connection between the delusion that one can vote their way to libertarianism and believing giving the government more power will better enable voting their way to libertarianism.

But how can one create a libertarian society, that is to say a stateless society, by expanding the State’s power? I guess one could hope to expand the State’s power until it reaches that inevitable point of becoming so massive it collapses in on itself but that’s a pretty bloody road, especially for political libertarians. As a general rule the more totalitarian a state becomes the less tolerant of dissidents it becomes. Political opponents are usually the first against the wall since they made themselves very obvious to the State.

When Your Return On Investment Doesn’t

As a resident of the Twin Cities I’ve recently suffered the bullshit spewed by stadium advocates. When the local handegg team started whining about wanting an even bigger stadium the smart people said it was a stupid idea and the stupid people said it was a smart idea. The stupid side claimed the stadium will bring a huge boost to the local economy. People from around the country will supposedly flock to the new stadium where they wouldn’t have come to the old stadium (apparently handegg fans travel to games for the buildings, not to watch the teams). This, in turn, will flood local eateries, convenience stores, hotels, and every other business with patrons. And that will lead to a flood of tax revenue (handegg fans also seem to think tax revenue is a meritorious thing). Since everybody will benefit, they claim in spite of facts, the stadium should be at least publicly funded.

One issue never touched by stadium advocates is what happens when the breadwinning team decides to leave? That’s the question denizens of St. Louis are probably wishing they had asked themselves before they built their shiny new stadium:

The St. Louis Rams’ decision to relocate to Los Angeles brought a double dose of bad news for the city’s residents on Tuesday: Not only are they losing the football team they’ve hosted for the last 21 years, they also still have to pay for the stadium they built to lure the Rams to their hometown in the first place.

At the beginning of 2015, city and state taxpayers still owed more than $100 million in debt on the bonds used to finance the Edward Jones Dome, the stadium St. Louis put $280 million in public funds behind in 1995.

It isn’t scheduled to pay off that debt until at least 2021, and that could be more difficult without the Rams and the $500,000 rent payment the team made each year. The city itself owes $5 million per year over that period, and the loss of the Rams could increase costs in the short-term.

Politicians, being incapable of admitting to fuck ups, are trying to spin this to their favor. But the bottom line is the city will have to pay off the stadium without a continuos source of rent. That will almost certainly lead to a rise in property taxes if not other taxes to make up the difference.

Publicly funded stadiums are nothing more than exercises in transferring wealth from the people to the politicians and their cronies. Even though the Rams are moving on the team gets to enjoy a great deal of wealth it otherwise wouldn’t have had because it was tight with the local politicians who were willing to put the tax victims on the line.

Centralized Failure

People have been using the attacks in Cologne to argue in favor of stronger border controls because, you know, the attacks must have been caused by immigrants and not the usual drunken debauchery that accompanies New Year’s Eve. Such arguments miss the point (well they miss several points but I’ll only address the biggest one here), which is the danger of centralization. It has been revealed that the police in Cologne were being overwhelmed with reports:

An internal police report reveals officers “could not cope” with the volume of attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, German media say.

Women were “forced to run the gauntlet” through gangs of drunken and aggressive men outside the station, it said.

Police say the number of reported crimes from the incident has risen to 121, about three-quarters of which involve sexual assault.

[…]

“The task forces could not cope with all the events, assaults, and crimes – there were just too many happening at the same time,” the senior officer concluded.

Cologne police chief Wolfgang Albers has rejected claims teams were understaffed, insisting “we were well prepared”.

But he described what happened as “a completely new dimension of crime”.

I’ve discussed the weaknesses inherent in centralized security before. In this case it appears the central point of failure, relying on the police for security, was a major factor in these attacks getting as out of hand as they did. As the number of attacks increased the inability of the police to effectively respond became more obvious so the perceived risk of perpetuating additional attacks decreased. Since the average German citizen is unable to carry a firearm the risk of attacking them is already lower than it is in most states here. Couple that with the inability of the police to respond and you have a feedback loop of more attacks reducing the perceived risk of committing attacks, which in turn increases the likelihood of more attacks.

An Agorist’s View On Closed Borders

Borders are a sticky issue within libertarian circles. A lot of libertarians favor tightly controlled borders. Hell, even well-respected anarcho-capitalist thinkers like Hans Hermann Hopped favor strongly controlled government borders. Any libertarian in support of controlled borders is, in my opinion, foolish. But what about the agorist view? Agorism is all about continually transitioning economic activity from the white to the black market. In the case of borders the white market consists of those preventing people from crossing government borders and the black market consists of smugglers helping people across those same borders. And black market actors have enjoyed a great deal of success in overcoming the white market.

Let’s look at a quintessential historical example of heavily secured borders: East Germany. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) erected the famous Berlin Wall in an effort to stop its people from accidentally exiting the utopia of communism. For reasons nobody quite understands there were people who were actually trying to leave. Seeing a market demand many enterprising entrepreneurs stepped up to the plate and created a black market for smuggling people out of the GDR. One of those smugglers was Rainer Schubert. Mr. Schubert operated his successful smuggling operation for three years before the Stasi finally caught him. According to the Glasgow Herald he smuggled more than 100 people across the heavily guarded border. And he wasn’t alone. It turns out that there was quite an enterprise in helping people cross the heavily secured border of the GDR.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the demand for black market operations for crossing fortified borders hasn’t diminished, but has merely shifted elsewhere. The example most Americans are probably familiar with are Central Americans crossing the Mexican border into the United States. Smugglers who bring people from Central America into the United States are commonly referred to as coyotes and they have setup quite a black market business for themselves.

Agorism is necessarily opposed to government control over imaginary lines. By attempting to prevent people from crossing its borders a government creates a white market. As a philosophy based on moving white market activity into the black market agorism supports the efforts of smugglers helping people get across those borders illegally. Such efforts end up moving a lot of white market activity into the black market. People crossing a border illegally are not paying governments for visas, passports, or other travel documents. Because they’re in the country illegally they’re not going to declare any income, which keeps money out of the hands of the revenuers. In addition to that, most of their work will likely be done “under the table” since they won’t want to risk leaving a paper trail that could get them arrested and/or deported so it’ll be paid for with cash (or some other form of exchange that is difficult for the government to surveil).

White Versus Black Markets

Agorism is built upon black markets. Most people think of black markets as seedy back alleyways where you’re just as likely to be shanked by a seller as you are to die from the drugs they peddle. Meanwhile white markets are thought of as well-lit shopping centers where everything is guaranteed to be safe by an army of government regulators. Truthfully the difference between white and black markets is the former is under the control of the State and the latter is not. Nowhere is this difference better illustrated than in Samuel Edward Konkin’s rebuttal to Rothbard’s criticism of agorism:

With the side-excursion over, we turn to Counter-Economics, admittedly the basis of agorism and the New Libertarian Strategy. Rothbard finds NLM neglecting the “white market”—yet there is one crucial point on which it is most definitely not neglected, here or in my other Counter-Economic writing. The agorist imperative is to transform the White into Black. Nothing could be clearer. To do so is to create a libertarian society. What else can a libertarian society mean in economic terms but removing market activity from the control of the State? Market activity not under control of the State is black market. Market activity under the control of the State is white market and we are against it.

To illustrate, slaves building pyramids are white market. Slaves who run away, deal on the side stones and tools they ripped off, and otherwise engage in non-slave activity are black market—and free to that extent. What should the libertarian view be toward white-market pyramid building? Or, if you think pyramids would not exist in a free society but aqueducts might, what should our new be toward aqueduct building on the white market vs. black-market water smuggling? New Libertarians urge the slaves to screw the aqueduct and go for their private buckets until such time as aqueducts can be built under voluntary arrangements. Would Rothbard suggest anything else? Gradual phasing out of aqueduct construction and hence gradual phasing out of slavery?

If anything the white market is the seedy back alleyway where government agents wait to beat you to death with baseball bats. Consider the businessman who complies with each of the State’s numerous fee generating regulations only to fail to properly file his taxes one year. Quickly he will find himself face to face with a revenuer who will make him an offer: pay the demanded tax money and you may be let off with a fine and/or some jail time otherwise the alternative is death. I’ve not heard of a single “illegal” Mexican laborer going to somebody’s home, kicking in their door, and threatening to murder them if they fail to reroof their house again after three years.

The situation quickly changes when you’re dealing with the black market though. You no longer have to company with a laundry list of regulations designed only to extract fees from your business. Since you receive no official income from black market dealings you don’t have to decide whether you are going to pay taxes or have your kneecaps broken with a man with a baseball bat and a vaguely Italian accent.

All white market activity is slave activity. Although on the surface the rules have changed with most nation states replacing chattel slavery with, what I like to call, bureaucratic slavery the outcome isn’t dissimilar. White market actors are enslaved. Like serfs from feudal times, white market actors today must pay a percentage of their gains to the State. If they fail to do so they will be kidnapped and forced to labor in a prison or outright killed if they resist. Oftentimes people will make a remark like “If you don’t like it, leave,” but even that option can be taken by the State if you fail to hand over its demanded share of your efforts.

Ultimately what separates the white market from a black market is in the latter everybody is free to transact when they want with who they want whereas the former everybody is required to transact with the State under penalty of death.

Obama Boosts The Agorist Gun Market

And so beings yet another period of standard capacity magazines becoming as rare as credibility in politicians. Obama has issued a series of arbitrary decrees that are likely to bolster the agorist gun market:

President Barack Obama directed federal agencies Monday to carry out a series of steps to reduce gun violence, including measures to restrict sales by unlicensed dealers — sometimes called the gun show loophole.

Regulators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will clarify that anyone engaged in the business of selling firearms must get a federal firearms dealers license and check the backgrounds of all buyers.

You have to appreciate a governmental system with so many checks and balances that one man can arbitrarily rewrite the rules. More importantly, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has become much stingier about who they will issue Federal Firearm Licenses (FFL) to. If you are somebody who sells a gun every couple of years it’s unlikely the ATF will issue you an FFL and therefore your act of selling is now criminal. Don’t let that get you down though, operating in the black market is far more rewarding than operating in the white market. Not only do you get to keep all of your money since you don’t have to declare the income but your customers don’t have to deal with the hassle of filling out a Form 4473 and submitting to an instant background check. Agorist gun deals and buyers win whenever additional burden is placed on commerce.

“The goal is keeping bad actors away from firearms,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

So these rules are going to keep guns out of the hands of police officers and other government agents?

ATF will also notify firearms dealers that they must file a report when guns from their inventory are lost or stolen, including those in transit. A White House statement said an average of 1,333 guns recovered from crime scenes in each of the past five years were traced back to dealers who never received them.

Another burden and another win for the agorist gun market. Who wants to make themselves a target by filling for an FFL when it carries ridiculous requirements such as constantly informing the government of the status of their inventory? It’s far better to not officially be in the business of selling guns so the ATF won’t decide to perform “random” inspections on their place of business because it suspects they haven’t been properly keeping the State informed about their inventory.

White House officials said the administration would seek funding from Congress to allow ATF to hire 200 new agents and investigators to enforce gun laws.

Excellent! There wasn’t enough agents arming Mexican drug cartels already. This should give the agency more staff so they can arm their cartel partners even faster.

There you have it, Obama is working hard to make the black market an attractive alternative to his white market. You have to appreciate a man who makes business for you at the expense of his own.

Political Victories Are Only Temporary Victories

I hate redoing work. This is part of the reason I don’t pursue politics. Any political victory is only a temporary victory. At some future point the victory you achieved will be undone. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) is just the latest example of this. If you go through the history of the bill you will see it was introduced and shutdown several times:

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act was introduced on July 10, 2014 during the 113th Congress, and was able to pass the Senate Intelligence Committee by a vote of 12-3. The bill did not reach a full senate vote before the end of the congressional session.

The bill was reintroduced for the 114th Congress on March 12, 2015, and the bill passed the Senate Intelligence Committee by a vote of 14-1. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, (R-Ky) attempted to attach the bill as an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act, but was blocked 56-40, not reaching the necessary 60 votes to include the amendment. Mitch McConnell hoped to bring the bill to senate-wide vote during the week of August 3–7, but was unable to take up the bill before the summer recess. The Senate tentatively agreed to limit debate to 21 particular amendments and a manager’s amendment, but did not set time limits on debate. In October 2015, the US Senate took the bill back up following legislation concerning sanctuary cities.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. This time the politicians attached CISA to the budget, which as we all know is a must pass bill:

Congress on Friday adopted a $1.15 trillion spending package that included a controversial cybersecurity measure that only passed because it was slipped into the US government’s budget legislation.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin, inserted the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) into the Omnibus Appropriations Bill—which includes some $620 billion in tax breaks for business and low-income wage earners. Ryan’s move was a bid to prevent lawmakers from putting a procedural hold on the CISA bill and block it from a vote. Because CISA was tucked into the government’s overall spending package on Wednesday, it had to pass or the government likely would have had to cease operating next week.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, said the CISA measure, which backers say is designed to help prevent cyber threats, got even worse after it was slipped into the 2,000-page budget deal (PDF, page 1,728). He voted against the spending plan.

All those hours invested in the political process to fight CISA were instantly rendered meaningless with the passage of this bill. However, the bill can be rendered toothless. CISA removes any potential liability from private companies that share customer data with federal agencies. So long as private companies don’t have actionable information to share the provisions outlined in CISA are inconsequential. As with most privacy related issues, effective cryptography is the biggest key. Tools like Off-the-Record (OTR) messaging, OTR’s successor Multi-End Message and Object Encryption (OMEMO), Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), Transport Layer Security (TLS), Tor, and other cryptographic tools designed to keep data private and/or anonymous can go a long ways towards preventing private companies from having any usable data to give to federal agencies.

In addition to effective cryptography it’s also important to encourage businesses not to cooperate with federal agencies. The best way to do this is to buy products and services from companies that have fought attempts by federal agencies to acquire customer information and utilize cryptographic tools that prevent themselves from viewing customer data. As consumers we must make it clear that quislings will not be rewarded while those who stand with us will be.

Effective cryptography, unlike politics, offers a permanent solution to the surveillance problem. It’s wiser, in my opinion, to invest the time you’d otherwise waste with politics in learning how to properly utilize tools that protect your privacy. While your political victories may be undone nobody can take your knowledge from you.

A Problem Only Government Could Create

The International Business Times has an article discussing the limited liability granted to gun manufacturers:

As the United States grapples with a rash of mass shootings, some are calling for tighter laws limiting who can purchase firearms — a politically controversial subject that has yielded more rhetoric than legislation. But another, lesser-known dynamic effectively shelters gun manufacturers from government oversight: Under legislation dating back to the 1970s, Congress has consistently adopted positions championed by the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association, writing special provisions that have effectively exempted firearms from regulation by consumer watchdog agencies.

Of course the article insinuated it is the fault of the National Rifle Association (NRA), which lobbied for the grant of limited liability:

Cementing these exceptions to safety oversight constituted a significant political victory for the National Rifle Association in the 1970s and helped pave the way for high-profile gun rights battles to come. Gun owners themselves, however, are left with little recourse to hold companies accountable for faulty products outside the civil court system. Whether gun manufacturers choose to recall a firearm is entirely at their discretion. If they do, there is no mandatory protocol to follow to alert owners, and no official repository of recall notices.

But this isn’t a problem created by the NRA, it’s a problem created by the State. The reason gun owners are generally oppositional to attempts by the State to regulated any aspect of firearms is because those regulations ultimately get used as a form of gun control.

The ongoing smartgun debate is a classic example of safety being used to justify a prohibition. Instead of acknowledging access control technology as something worth investigating the gun control community wants to mandate its use. That adds costs and unreliability, both because the technology is in its infancy, to firearms. And since the technology cannot be retrofitted into older firearms mandating its usage can remove all existing firearms from the market.

Safety regulations always sound good on paper, especially if they’re for protecting the children, but it’s only a matter of mandating too many safety features to make a production functional or cost effective to create a ban.

When the State passes a law it’s not a contract. The State can change the terms at any moment without the consent of the people. A law passed under the auspices of consumer protection has no clauses guaranteeing it won’t be used to create a legal prohibition. There’s also no recourse if a consumer protection law ends up being used to create a ban.

One has to be a fool to willingly enter a binding agreement without recourse that authorizes the other party to change the rules whenever they want. If people want to pursue improving the safety of firearms they should start an independent non-governmental entity to certify firearms much like Underwriter Laboratories. That would allow for safety certification that allows for recourse, namely ignoring the standard, if it’s used outside of the initial scope it was created for.

Laws Are The Problem; Laws Are The Solution

One of my socialist anti-gun friends posted this article on Facebook. It’s a fascinating article not so much because of its content but because of the cognitive dissonance the author, Chauncey Devega, openly displays:

When the New York Times editorial board issued its powerful condemnation of America’s gun culture, they went beyond mere outrage in response to the recent murder sprees in San Bernardino, California, and Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Times went so far as to suggest that “assault rifle”-style weapons should be banned from civilian ownership. As is our national ritual, President Obama also condemned gun violence, and just as he has been forced to do too many times during his tenure, pleaded that Americans must find a way to stop killing each other. The American people do in fact support stronger gun control laws; the NRA, functioning as the lobbying arm for the gun industry, opposes even the most basic common sense gun laws. The NRA wins while the American people die.

Devega disparages the fact gun control hasn’t been a political success as of late. As an author for Salon this probably doesn’t surprise anybody. What is surprisingly is the fact he then notes the fact that gun control in the United States is founded on racism:

After the Civil War, white Southerners desperately tried to snuff out the freedom dreams and democratic power of now free African-Americans. Once Reconstruction was betrayed, white Southerners would launch a reign of terror where it is estimated that approximately 50,000 black Americans were killed by whites. White elites understood the practical and symbolic power of the gun. As such, they passed laws that made it illegal for black Americans to own firearms. African-American Civil War veterans, a group that had earned their full citizenship as men via martial prowess, would be made the focus of special violence by white Southerners.

[…]

The notion that gun ownership should be exclusive to white people would be asserted once more. Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, worked to pass stricter gun laws because of the Black Panthers using open carry laws. Robert Williams would be forced into exile in Cuba. Black people who fought back against white racial terrorism were killed by white mobs, police, and other State actors.

Laws are the problem! Laws are the solution! This article is a self-contradictory mess, which is unavoidable when one is arguing democracy is the solution to minorities being oppressed. Democracies are based on the will of the of the designated voting bodies. Here in the United States the designated voting bodies include the Congress of the United States, the congresses of the individual states, the councils of incorporated cities, the school boards of each school district, and so on. Most of them operate under majority rules. Therefore the laws passed will inevitably reflect the will of the majority of those bodies. Congress is made up predominantly of white Christian males.

Voting bodies are just half of the equation though. The other half is law enforcement. It wouldn’t matter what any designated voting body decreed if it didn’t have a means of enforcing those decrees. In this country there are very powerful police forces whose primary job is to enforce the will of the designated voting bodies. Like the designated voting bodies, law enforcers are predominantly white.

Some of you are probably wondering why I’m making a big deal out of race. Since I don’t subscribe to collectivism I don’t believe membership in a category, such as race, is a valid indicator of their behavior. I mention it because it is the crux of Devega’s article:

There will be no effective gun control in the United States, even in the aftermath of horrific events such as Sandy Hook, the Planned Parenthood Shooting, or the San Bernardino massacre, until politicians, pundits, and analysts realize that the gun is a type of totem or fetish object for too many white men. As such, when we try to talk about gun control in America, a centuries-deep sense of white masculinity that understands the gun as its exclusive right is made to feel imperiled and upset.

If guns are a type of totem or fetish object for white men why does he think a voting body make up predominantly of white men is going to overcome their fetish? Why does he believe law enforcement bodies, against predominantly made up of whites, are going to fairly enforce the laws? Hell, we know for a face law enforcers don’t fairly enforce the laws. Although the laws passed today aren’t overtly racist, in fact many of them appear to be quite the opposite on the surface, the results indicate that they are either crafted to be covertly racist or the enforcers are enforcing the laws in a racist manner unchecked (in the case of the latter it would be necessary for the designated voting bodies to either be directly or implicitly accepting of such enforcement).

Devega claims that guns interfere with democracy. If that’s the case then he should support repealing every single gun law because democracy is the problem. It established a power hierarchy. One group of people are able to create and enforce laws while the other group of people cannot. That means the first group gets to make the rules and the rules it makes, due to human nature, favor the members of that group.

Until that power hierarchy is abolished cities will continue passing laws criminalizing homelessness, poor neighborhoods will continue to be demolished and replaced with more valuable properties that pay high property taxes, intellectual property laws will continue to serve the politically connected at the expense of their competitors, and gun control laws will target non-whites. That’s because the homeless, poor, small businesses, and non-white population are minorities not only in our society but especially in our designed voting bodies.

Fuck Your Free Speech

Have you heard? There’s a culture war being waged! Our very way of life is threatened! Nowhere is this more apparently than on college campuses! Evil liberal college students are trying to suppress our right to free speech:

If Emory University students got their way, end-of-semester course evaluations would ask them to indicate whether their professors had committed “microaggressions” against them.

The explicit goal of such a question on evaluations would be to punish professors who engaged in speech that offended students. According to student-protesters, as reported by The Emory Wheel:

We demand that the faculty evaluations that each student is required to complete for each of their professors include at least two open-ended questions such as: “Has this professor made any microaggressions towards you on account of your race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, language, and/or other identity?” and “Do you think that this professor fits into the vision of Emory University being a community of care for individuals of all racial, gender, ability, and class identities?” These questions on the faculty evaluations would help to ensure that there are repercussions or sanctions for racist actions performed by professors. We demand that these questions be added to the faculty evaluations by the end of this semester, Fall 2015.

I’ve tried to stay out of this “culture war” nonsense because I made the mistake of assuming most libertarians understood what the root problems were. But as I see more and more libertarians latching onto the culture aspect I realize my assumption made an ass out of me. So let’s take a step back and look at the big picture.

Free speech isn’t the issue here, contrary to what many libertarians claim. Truth be told libertarianism doesn’t acknowledge free speech. Libertarianism acknowledges property rights. So long as you’re on your own property you can say whatever you want but the second you step foot on somebody else’s property they can boot you for saying something they don’t approve of. From a libertarian perspective the first problem isn’t free speech, it’s the lack of clear property rights. Public universities fall into the same murky category as all government property. Ownership is unclear therefore who gets to make the rules is unclear. But there’s another fundamental problem here. Even unclear property rights tend to be a trivial problem so long as the interests of everybody involved are mostly aligned.

These campus disputes are exacerbated by the fact a lot of people with vastly different beliefs are trying to control organizations that have no clear membership criteria. Most high school students have it drilled into their heads that their highest mission in life is to get a diploma so they can work for somebody. Therefore a high school student’s senior year usually consists of sending applications to universities. Although some students have specific schools in mind most just want to get accepted somewhere so they can get that piece of paper that fulfills their mission objective. On the flip side of this equation are the universities. They base who they accept primarily on academic criteria. In the end you have a bunch of students with no expressed purpose other than obtaining a diploma joining an organization that has no expressed membership criteria other than academic scores. Basically we’ve got a bunch of people who don’t necessarily agree with one another joining the same organization.

Let’s compare this with a pirate ship. Pirate ships are interesting because they necessarily require a crew cooperating with one another to function. Ownership of a pirate ship was much clearer than the ownership of a public university but it wasn’t what many libertarians would consider ideal. No single person who owned the ship. Instead each crew member effectively owned a share of the ship. Pirate ships also usually had a constitution. People wanting to join a pirate ship had to agree to the clauses of the ship’s constitution, which outlined everything from the chain of command to punishments to the division of plunder, before being accepted. The reason for this is obvious: a ship only functions if the entire crew is working together. To avoid having everything fall apart pirate ships told potential crew members what was expected of them before they signed up. Pirates chose their ship based on what they wanted. If a pirate didn’t want to, say, attack British ships (believe it or not many pirates were ideological and wouldn’t attack just anybody) they signed up with a ship that had a stated prohibition against attacking British ships. Furthermore any changes to the rules had to be approved by all members of the ship since each member was effectively a partial owner of the ship.

How does a pirate ship relate to a university? It’s an organization that’s a far more interesting example than, say, a hippie cooperative that specialized in gluten free, organic, free trade, all natural food and doesn’t suffer from the same pitfalls as most public universities.

Some university students want a tightly controlled environment where things like offensive speech are prohibited. Other students want a very loosely controlled environment where people can say almost anything without consequence. Neither of these desires are right or wrong, it’s just a difference in preference. Problems arise because ownership of most universities are unclear and they don’t outline membership criteria up front. Free speech isn’t the issue. Students becoming members of organizations with unclear processes for establishing and changing rules that also don’t align with their preferences is the problem.