Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

Full Video of the Panel Discussion with William Binney, Todd Pierce, and Myself

I said I’d post video of the panel discussion once it was available. Robin Hensel was good enough to upload the video to YouTube very quickly. There are two videos. Here’s part one:

Here’s part two:

Now if you’ll excuse me I have an e-mail server to beat with a wrench. Do you want some valuable life advice? Ubuntu Server is not a good base to build an e-mail server on. The repository still has Dovecot 2.2.9 even though the latest version is 2.2.18. I also had a hell of a time getting it to actually disable SSLv3 (I disabled it in the config file, restarted the service, and found that I could still connect via SSLv3 with openssl s_client -connect).

Verboten Drugs are Cheaper Than Ever

When I point out the failure of the war on drugs to stop drug usages a fairly common rebuttal is that the prohibition keeps the costs of drugs high and therefore prevents many people who would be using them from using them. My observations have indicated that claim is bullshit because I know dirt poor people who use cannabis. But now there’s research refuting that claim:

Cocaine, heroin and marijuana have become cheaper and stronger over the past two decades, despite increases in drug seizures by authorities fighting the global illegal drug market, a new study found.

The researchers looked at seven international drug surveillance databases to examine how the purity and price of illegal drugs changed between 1990 and 2009.

In the United States, the average purity of heroin, cocaine and marijuana increased by 60, 11, and 160 percent respectively, between 1990 and 2007, while the prices of these drugs, adjusted for inflation and purity, fell about 80 percent.

How can this be? Those drugs are illegal! Here we see another conflict between political dreams and reality. Political dreamers like to believe legally prohibiting something will make it go away. Reality dictates that people have wants and will seek to fulfill those wants. Creating prohibitions just makes people adjust their behavior in order to fulfill their wants.

For example, the severity of many drugs laws are based on the volume or weight of drugs a person possesses. A small amount of cannabis can net you a fine whereas a large amount can land your ass in prison on charges of intent to distribute. Drug consumers don’t want to end up in prison and drug producers don’t want their customers lock up in prison. To that end drug producers have been busy making a more potent products so their customers can enjoy the same effects in a small package. Instead of risking charges of intent to distribute cannabis users can now face a fine and still have the same potency as before.

Reducing costs makes sense. If you’re a drug producer you want as wide of a customer base as possible. Poorer people are often unable to enjoy more expensive forms of entertainment so they opt for cheaper forms. By making drugs cheaper the producers are able to access the poorer markets and therefore enjoy a larger customer base.

Once again we see markets overcoming state hurdles. The continuous pattern of markets triumphing over statism is why I firmly believe agorism, which utilizes markets, is the most tactic most likely to bring us real freedom.

Dumbest Thing You’ll Read All Day

Salon has a long running track record of trying to disagree with libertarians on everything. Sometimes this causes it problem. For example, due to the publication’s idiotic claims that Rand Paul is a libertarian (he’s not by any definition I use) it has to disagree with everything he does. Rand has been claiming he opposes the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance program and that means Salon has had to find a reason to back peddle on its previous opposition of the same so it doesn’t find itself on the same side as Rand. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the dumbest thing you’ll read all day:

Perhaps to those like Sen. Rand Paul who’ve never had to fight assumptions based on one’s ethnicity or the color of one’s skin, the thought of cell phone data being pooled and analyzed is disconcerting. However, as someone who regularly puts up with extra scrutiny, whether it’s at an airport or a shopping mall, I welcome the leveling of the playing field that bulk data collection brings. I urge our government not to follow the Russian method of profiling, but, instead, to use bulk data collection to arrive at objective analyses.

That’s right, opposing surveillance is now white privilege. I’m not sure how that is since persecuted minorities have the most to lose from the NSA’s surveillance. The data it collects isn’t used to clear anybody, it’s only used when it can lead to somebody’s prosecution. With everything being illegal in this country anything you say at any point is likely incriminating to the right prosecutor. If you’re part of a targeted minority, such as Muslims, the last thing you want to do is have the NSA collect your phone calls because something you said could very well be used to fabricate charges to justify putting you in a cage.

Police Dislike When the Tables are Turned

As policing in the United States continues its downward spiral into thuggery people are finally starting to fight back. More people are recording police encounters to hold officers accountable. Demands are being made in many major cities to curtail police powers. And in a few places people are actively interfering in police attempts at kidnapping. All of this has many of the more psychopathic officers upset:

Whatever the reason, Melbourne police are grateful that for the second time in recent weeks experience and training overcame fear as officers found themselves surrounded and assaulted by hostile anti-police crowds.

This Friday night, Lt. Steve Sadoff saw 22-year-old Phoenix Chansler Low coming out of the Main Street Pub with an open container.

“The officer told him to go back inside or get rid of it,” said Melbourne Police Commander Dan Lynch. “From there it went downhill. The subject was very intoxicated and he began fighting with the officer.”

The scary thing was what happened next. A crowd of people started closing in on Lt. Sadoff and he was attacked from behind, Lynch said. Sadoff used his taser to get Low off him, and it scared the crowd away long enough for him to radio for help and make the arrest.

The person who attacked Sadoff from behind got away.

The “touch on crime” crowd want you to focus on the fact that an officer was attacked and not the fact that the officer initiated the situation by getting in the face of a person who had performed no crime (carrying an open alcohol container outside of a bar does not involve a victim and is therefore not a crime). Had the officer let the patron be nothing would have happened.

“This is the second incident in the past few weeks where officers were making an arrest and the arrestee or people around attempted to interfere with the officer attempting to do his job,” Lynch said. “It is tremendously concerning to us. Every confrontation an officer has is an armed confrontation and the officers are trained to use the minimal amount of force necessary.”

No, this is the second incident in the past few weeks where people prevented officers from kidnapping somebody. People are getting fed up with unaccountable police officers kidnapping and shooting people who haven’t hurt anybody. Decades of little police accountability combine with officers who enjoy power trips has eroded the public’s faith in modern policing. Since they lack faith in the institution they are unwilling to cooperate with it. If officers are really becoming concerned about this trend then they should start taking measures to regain the public’s trust. That starts with refusing to enforce victimless crimes and actually using minimum necessary force to resolve situations (not just talking about it).

Watching Cronies Fail

A major benefit of providing solutions to government meddling is watching as the government’s cronies fail. Cab drivers in Mexico, as cab drivers in much of the world, are unhappy with ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft. Their unhappiness is understandable since they’ve been shielded from competitors by their government for decades. When you haven’t had to compete in a market it can be scary facing competition because it makes you realize that you have to actually provide a superior service if you want to thrive.

On Monday cab drivers in Mexico went on strike to protest Uber. The protest was a plea for the Mexican government to ban Uber. The end result was to give Uber a great dead of publicity and convince a lot of people to try Uber since they couldn’t get around using traditional cabs:

Monday’s protest from Mexican Taxi drivers, against ride-sharing mobile apps such as Uber, has proved a boon for the San Francisco-based company. After offering a protest-edition special with two free 10-dollar rides, downloads of the app rose by 800 percent, Uber Communications Director for Mexico Luis de Uriarte said on Tuesday.

Unlike Uber, the signs of regulated taxis were off in Mexico on May 25, as some 5,000 drivers took to the streets of Mexico City. Chanting “Get out Uber!” union leaders demanded the government impose a ban on the smartphone-based service.

With the hashtags #UberNoPara (Uber doesn’t stop) and #MexicoNoPara (Mexico doesn’t stop), Uber launched a campaign offering two MEX$150 (US$9.8) fares for free between 7:00 a.m. and 9:59 p.m. on Monday. The initiative not only have become a commercial success, it brought PR blowback on the taxi drivers.

Uber and Lyft are providing a solution to a market that has been crippled by government regulations for decades. Many localities put an artificial cap on the number of legal taxi cabs that can operate. Other localities, while not putting an artificial cap in place, require potential taxicab drivers to pay a licensing fee, which adds a barrier to entry. The result has been lackluster taxicab services in much of the world. With ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft anybody can act as a taxicab. Suddenly cronies that have been protected from competition are facing the competition of anybody with a vehicle and they’re floundering.

Providing solutions to government create problems weakens its grip by showing how unnecessary it is. While government protected taxicab drivers were refusing to provide services ride-sharing swooped in to save the day. Because of this people are unlikely to accept any prohibition against ride-sharing services.

Go and Make It

This is effectively what us agorists have been advocating for decades:

What if we stopped attacking people for a cause and started attracting people to a cause? What if we became creators instead of mere critics and conquerors? Rather than waging war—either figuratively (in arguing) or literally — what if we channeled all of our passion and energy into disruptive acts of creation?

What if we bypassed electoral politics and established a more cooperative era…one in which the best ideas win?

In this new age, politicians would be replaced by innovators. Political capital would be replaced by creative capital.

Social change would not be planned by bureaucrats. It would emerge from the collective creativity of artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs working in cooperation.

Agorism utilizes counter-economics to provide goods and services in a manner that doesn’t feed the state. Permits are not acquired, taxes are not collected or paid, and regulations are not consciously adhered to. Instead goods and services that people want, not what the government says the ought to have, are created and sold for a lower price since all of the cost of bureaucratic overhead is absent.

We living in a world where solutions can be more easily created. “Go and make it,” is an excellent slogan for a new revolution. It encompasses the power of individuals to create solutions and the fact that the new revolution won’t be fought with the state’s tool of war but with markets.

Market Solutions Versus State Solutions: Global Positioning System

Continuing on my theme of comparing market solutions to state solutions, today I’m going to discuss the Global Positioning System (GPS). For those of you unfamiliar with GPS it’s a network of satellites that provides positional information for navigation purposes. Development started in 1973 by the Department of Defense (DoD) and it became fully operational in 1995. Today anybody who uses a computer navigation system, say their phone or a dedicated GPS receiver, relies on this network.

There are several points to note about GPS. It was originally developed to improve the DoD’s ability to blow up people in foreign countries. Civilians were begrudgingly given access to the network but only through a degraded signal. In 2000 civilians were finally allowed to access a non-degraded GPS signal and that’s when the real innovation began.

The DoD’s exclusive access to the full capabilities of GPS resulted in no notable quality of life improvements for everyday people. Instead the DoD saw GPS as a way of improving its ability to kill people. Even today the state still uses GPS to enhance its own power. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), for example, uses GPS to perform warrantless surveillance.

Meanwhile the market has been utilizing GPS to improve the lives of everyday people. In 1991 a GPS receiver weighing less than 3 pounds was finally created. Today GPS receivers are so small that they fit in our phones. Using these miniaturized GPS receivers we are able to navigate with our phones. Google and (to a much lesser extent) Apple’s mapping services give consumers free access to constantly updated maps that enable real-time turn-by-turn navigation when coupled with a GPS signal. Market access to GPS gave rise to Geocaching, a game where players use GPS to locate hidden caches. Task management apps allow users to create reminders that will fire off when they enter their home or place of work. Bicycling apps allow cyclists to keep track of where they road, how fast they were going, and how high the hills the ascended were. Phones and other devices can utilize GPS to report their location so they can be easily recovered if stolen. Thanks to the market you can even use GPS to defend yourself against the state. Apps such as Waze will alert you to reported police presence before you’re close enough to be clocked on a radar gun.

Where the state saw a network of navigational satellites only as a means of improving its ability to kill and spy the market saw it as a means of improving our lives in a vast number of ways. Thanks to the market GPS is so integrated into our daily lives that we take it for granted.

Opposing the War on Immigrants

One of the issues anarchist and statist libertarians often butt heads is immigration. Us anarchist libertarians don’t believe the imaginary lines created by illegitimate entities should exist. Statist libertarians often cherish those imaginary lines to such a point that they demand fences, guard towers, and armed patrols to keep people on the other side out.

The problem with strong borders is that they necessarily require a strong enforcer. A strong enforcer in the hands of the state will always lead to the expansion of state power:

Libertarians should pay more attention to the ban on immigration. These regulations are big government at its worst: over-militarization, over-criminalization, over-regulation, anti-market, and anti-liberty. Nearly every aspect of American life is affected by them, yet many libertarians are still ambivalent.

Its consequences are devastating. Consider this fact: the number one reason for arrests under federal law last year was for unsanctioned entry into the United States. And it’s not even close. Half of all federal arrests in the United States are for immigration offenses — drugs are a distant second at just 15 percent.

If libertarians are focused on reducing government power and intrusion into the lives of peaceful people, immigration ought to receive at least as much attention as the drug war. But it’s almost like the liberty movement is stuck in the 1980s when illegal immigration, though common, was largely ignored.

Statist libertarians, and other opponents of freedom of movement that claim to support small government, cannot have both a small government and heavily defended borders. Anybody who follows a philosophy that advocates free markets should understand the problem here. The state is a monolithic entity that is slow to adapt to changes and relies on violence to accomplish all of its goals. Meanwhile immigrants are more akin to market actors. There are millions of them and when you have millions of people who can quickly adapt to changes going against a single entity that seldom adapts to changes the former group is going to win.

We see this today. When the state throws up border crossings on major highways immigrants use less traveled routes. When the state builds a wall immigrants climb over it, cut through it, or tunnel under it. When the state patrols the border immigrants watch their patrol patterns and learn how to avoid them. No matter what the state does immigrants adapt their strategies to compensate.

Furthermore immigrants seldom have a lot of money so they come up with cheap solutions. This harkens back to asymmetrical warfare. One side uses cheap tactics to take out the other side’s very expensive equipment. Eventually the size utilizing cheap tactics wins by simply bleeding the other side dry. Immigrants, likewise, use cheap tactics that the state tries to counter with extremely expensive equipment and tactics. A handful of immigrants crossing the border can cause the state to spend out police patrols to pull over anybody who has a bit too much melanin in their skin to check for their citizenship papers. Patrols like that cost a lot of money.

Libertarians, even those who believe those imaginary lines are important, should oppose the war on immigrant on the grounds that it’s incredibly inefficient and a detriment to liberty.

Market Solutions Versus State Solutions: Google Edition

Xcel Energy demonstrated the difference between how markets and the state utilize drones. Now Google unwittingly provided another demonstration. When Google created the Play Store it saw it as a service that would improve the lives of their customers by providing a method to easily download Android applications. When the National Security Agency (NSA) saw the Play Store it saw it as a method to infect Android phones so they could be surveilled:

The information about Irritant Horn comes from documents provided by Edward Snowden to The Intercept and CBC. The program, which appears to have been in its early stages in 2011-2012, had NSA analysts use a type of man-in-the-middle attack to implant spyware on Android devices connecting to the Android Market or Samsung’s apps store. Basically, besides the requested app, the targets were served malicious software that allowed spooks to eavesdrop on everything that happened on the device. The NSA even explored using the capability to modify the target device, for propaganda or disinformation purposes.

Google wants to provide Android users with Firefox so they can browse the web. The NSA wants to provide Android users with a modified version of Firefox that reports on their browsing habits and potentially feeds them disinformation.

Whether the NSA was successful in highjacking Google’s service is up in the air. I think the answer to that heavily depends on the security used by the Play Store. If the Play Store uses effective tools to encrypt communications between an Android device and the Play Store as well as digitally sign provided software the likelihood of the NSA being successful is low. This is because a properly secured connection cannot be highjacked and digitally signing the software will alert you if it has been altered. Even if Google cooperated with the NSA the user would be able to tell if the software was modified so long as the developer signed it (that still leaves the possibility of the NSA enlisting the developer but then the problem isn’t the Play Store).

Two lessons should be taken away from this story. First, the market sees services as means to fulfill consumer wants whereas the state sees services as means to exploit them. Second, proper security is important and markets actors should focus on it to protect consumers from the state (and other malicious entities).

Giving Back to Society

It amuses me when people talk about the wealthy market actors needing to “give back to society” and then saying holding a political office is a public service.

Let’s consider the difference between a wealthy person who created a product that people wanted versus a politicians. Steve Jobs, for example, became an extremely wealthy man by producing computers, portable music players, and phones that people really wanted. People wanted these products so much that they were willing to give him money in exchange. How can one claim he needs to “give back to society” when he already gave people in society what they wanted?

Politicians are the polar opposite. Instead of fulfilling the wants of people in society politicians dictate what they want society to want. When a politician says a community needs a new school they don’t build one with their own money and see if members of the community want it. What they do is hold a meeting with their fellow politicians, vote to build a new school, then plunder more money from the community by issuing a tax increase to build it. Where a market actor gives to the community a politician takes from the community. How can holding political office be considered a public service when the job involves stealing from people?

If anybody needs to “give back to society” it’s the politicians and they can start by giving back all of the money they’ve plundered from me over the years. I chose to give Steve Jobs my money of my own volition. The only reason I give the politicians money is because the alternative involves a cop smashing my face in with a truncheon.