Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

What You Mean to Your Government

Monday’s are usually fairly slow news days and this week is no exception. Due to the lack of any more news I find interesting enough to post about I’ve decided to leave this story here. My reasoning is that this story covers nine government conspiracies that actually happened. They are:

  1. The U.S. Department of the Treasury poisoned alcohol during Prohibition — and people died.
  2. The U.S. Public Health Service lied about treating black men with syphilis for more than 40 years.
  3. More than 100 million Americans received a polio vaccine contaminated with a potentially cancer-causing virus.
  4. Parts of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which led to U.S. intervention in Vietnam, never happened.
  5. Military leaders reportedly planned terrorist attacks in the U.S. to drum up support for a war against Cuba.
  6. The government tested the effects of LSD on unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens.
  7. In 1974, the CIA secretly resurfaced a sunken Soviet submarine with three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.
  8. The U.S. government sold weapons to Iran, violating an embargo, and used the money to support Nicaraguan militants.
  9. A public relations firm organized congressional testimony that propelled U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War.

The article is an interesting read because these stories really show what the United States government thinks of its own people and people abroad. Life has little meaning to it. If people have to be poisoned to enforce a prohibition against drinking alcohol then the government has no moral issue with doing it. If the people aren’t supporting a war effort the government has no issue hiring a public relations firm to build support. This is what government does and it is why I don’t feel it should exist.

Reasons to Abandon Politics

My journey as a libertarian has seen me through a gun rights activist who looked at few other political issues, to a Constitutional libertarian who believe most of societies ills would be fixed by strictly adhering to the United States Constitution, to an anarcho-capitalist, and finally to an anarchists (without adjectives). During this journey I’ve come to many conclusions and learned many lessons. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that statism, regardless of its form, will always take the shape of an oligarchy. This is why I’m an anarchist. If nobody rules then everybody rules. So long as any individual enjoys privileges above another individual then the disease of statism will spread. By leveling the playing field, by ensuring nobody enjoys privileges above another the foundation for a free exists.

My journey has also seen me drudge through the political system. During my time in politics I believe I learned my most valuable lesson: freedom cannot be had through political participation. This realization has lead me to pursue agorism. Through counter-economics, that is performing as many transactions within the untaxed “black” market, the state can slowly be starved and the services it provides can be replaced by voluntary alternatives. The agorist community in my area is slowly growing as more people face the realization that freedom cannot be had through politics. By participating in agorism they are taking the first step in separating themselves from statism. They are abandoning politics. Abandoning politics is something I urge every anarchist to do. Why? Because it is the antithesis of what anarchists fight for.

The political process is necessarily hierarchical. Participation means you are either running for a position that will grant you power over others or are helping somebody else gain a position of power over others. Worse yet, the system is rigged in such a way as to make radical change impossible. Preventing radical change is the only activity for which real checks and balances exist in the political system. Demonstrating this fact is as simple as looking at the history of America’s political system. When was the last time you can recall an actual radical change, that is to say when power was taken from the political elite and their cronies, happened through the political system? Although every rule has its exception you’ll be hard pressed to find one for this.

Besides being the antithesis of anarchism, participating in the political process has another problem: dependency. I have seen more friends succumb to political dependency than I care to admit. They live for politics. It consumes them. In fact I can think of no less than five marriages that were destroyed because one of the two spouses became politically addicted. I have other friends who even depend on politics for their livelihood. Recently one of my friends has begun shilling for a local political campaign. I’m not talking about a little promotion, it was as if my friend was being paid to shill for this campaign. This seemed odd to me because he had been discussing his disgust of political campaigns and continuously described himself as an anarcho-capitalist. After looking through financial records for said campaign (thanks to the Internal Revenue Service for publishing that information, it is the only thing I will ever thank it for) I saw that $4,500 had been paid from the campaign to my friend over the span of roughly two months. Suddenly his advocacy of this candidate made perfect sense. Getting paid approximately $2,250 per month just to shill for a candidate isn’t bad money. But he is now dependent on the political system for a good chunk of his income. The main downside to such a dependency is that eliminating the state has become the antithesis of his survival. If the political system went away he would be out roughly $2,250 a month.

Putting yourself into a position where you are dependent on your enemy to survive ensures you will probably never make a real attempt to defeat your enemy. Consider the average political addict. They often depend on one or more campaigns for their financial well being. Their friendships begin to revolve more and more around politics. As their time in politics increases their interest in non-political activities decreases. I’m sure you have or have had a friend who attempts to bring up politics at every social gathering. Such behavior tends to push non-political friends and friends with differing political views away. From my observations this has a habit of not only creating an echo chamber around political participants but makes them almost entirely reliant on politics for their general happiness. For an anarchist this becomes a vicious cycle because they don’t want to destroy the political system as it would also destroy their primary source of happiness.

Politics also has many similarities to cultism. The longer somebody is involved in the political process the more they push away non-political friends and friends who have differing political opinions. Cults tend to isolate themselves from outsiders. This isolation reinforces dependency on the cult. Social circles hold a lot of power over us. At some point most people want to fit in with some crowd. Even rebels tend to want to fit in with their fellow rebels. So if your only friends are fellow members of your cult you will likely attempt to appeal to them by being a good cult member. Failing to abide by a political party’s, campaign’s, or candidate’s beliefs can lead to ostracization. Again, this is another thing political participation shares with cultism. I’ve seen this happen numerous times. For example, anybody who espoused a belief in public schooling at a Ron Paul gathering tended to get humiliated, shouted at, and shutdown rather quickly. Seeing a majority of participants disagree with somebody espousing public education wasn’t surprising but seeing how zealous they were at ensuring the heathen wasn’t heard was frightening. Needless to say such people quickly learned to keep their dissenting opinions to themselves less they be ostracized by their friends.

If your goal is to abolish statism then you should abandon the political process and find a more radical way of pursing your goal. Political participation will only lead to ruin. In fact it is designed to lead to ruin if your goals are something other than further empowering the oligarchs. To paraphrase a famous saying, if politics could change things it would be illegal. Always remember that the political process is the system put in place by the current rulers. Nobody is going to give their enemies an effective way to defeat them and anarchists are the enemies of the current rulers.

Incandescent Light Bulbs, Another Casualty of the Corporate-Political State

It’s 2014, which means incandescent light bulbs are kind of illegal. Granted, the prohibition on incandescent light bulbs has enough exceptions where those wanting such bulbs can find them. After all, a manufacturer need only label their bulbs “rough service” bulbs and they can sell them just as they always have. Otherwise you can probably follow the European route and seek out “heat lamp bulbs”. But let’s discuss the death of the standard incandescent bulb. What killed it? Was it environmental concern? No. While the ban was sold as environmental concern it was just another example of the corporate-political state at work:

People often assume green regulations like this represent the triumph of environmental activists trying to save the plant. That’s rarely the case, and it wasn’t here. Light bulb manufacturers whole-heartedly supported the efficiency standards. General Electric, Sylvania and Philips — the three companies that dominated the bulb industry — all backed the 2007 rule, while opposing proposals to explicitly outlaw incandescent technology (thus leaving the door open for high-efficiency incandescents).

This wasn’t a case of an industry getting on board with an inevitable regulation in order to tweak it. The lighting industry was the main reason the legislation was moving. As the New York Times reported in 2011, “Philips formed a coalition with environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council to push for higher standards.”

Why would General Electric, Sylvania, and Philips push to ban incandescent bulbs? Because it would push many of their competitors out of business. Producing a compact fluorescent (CFL) or light-emitting diode (LED) bulb is a much more expensive and complicated process than producing an incandescent bulb. In addition to being much easier to produce incandescent bulbs are also much cheaper to buy. So incandescent bulbs are the biggest competitor to CFL and LED bulbs. CFL and LED manufacturers wanted to eliminate competition to their bulbs.

This is standard operating procedure for large corporations. They seek out ways to use the political system to eliminate their competitors. Usually they will attempt to hijack a thriving political movement to do most of the dirty work. Environmental groups are common targets for hijacking because they usually have very passionate members and have shown a great deal of success at manipulating the political system.

If you’re a member of any political or social movement be wary of large corporations that approach you seeking an alliance or partnership. Chances are almost 100 percent that they’re interested in using you to knock one or more of their competitors out of a market. Once their competitors are out of the way they will dump you and, in all likelihood, work to have you rendered political irrelevant. After all, if you can demonstrate an ability to take out their competitors you are also a threat to them.

Drug Testing is Big Business

Scott Walker, self-proclaimed governor of Florida, has made big pushes to force state employees and welfare recipients to get tested for unpatentable drugs. This push has been met with cheers by many people of the neoconservative persuasion. I don’t understand their reasoning but I guess somebody receiving state money is supposed to only use patentable drugs. Either way, that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is the reason Scott Walker has been pushing for drug testing of recipients of state money. It’s not because he wants to be tough on crime or believes unpatentable drug use is bad. The reason he supports drug testing is because he stands to make a fortune off of it:

If you have a $62 million investment, representing the biggest single chunk of your $218 million in wealth, and you put it in a trust under your wife’s name, does that mean you’re no longer involved in the company?

Florida Gov. Rick Scott says it does.

Scott has aggressively pursued policies like testing state workers and welfare recipients for drugs, switching Medicaid patients to private HMOs and shrinking public health clinics. All these changes could benefit that $62 million investment, but Scott sees no legal conflict between his public role and private investments.

All governmental systems eventually devolve into fascism. By this I mean the state always ends up merging with the merchants. Under socialism system the state claims ownership over all merchant activities outright. Say what you will about socialism, at least it’s upfront about wanting to merge the state and merchants. Under a republic, such as the United States, the politicians simply pass laws that favor merchants they have a financial interest in. Whether politicians mandate the use of services provided by market actors they’ve invested in or use their political connections to financially benefit their spouses the outcome is the same. The politically well-connected merchants make a fortune and everybody else suffers.

Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Out to Get You

Back in the day you could call a person paranoid when they claimed that the government was spying on everybody. Today, thanks to Edward Snowden, such paranoid has proven to be justified:

And while the NSA story alone undoubtedly gives the “paranoid” plenty of reasons to say “I told you so,” a slew of other reports from this year gave them even more reasons to retreat into the wilderness and start subsistence farming.

[…]

For instance, the ACLU released a cache of documents showing that police around the country are collecting license plate scanner information that could be used to track physical locations of many Americans without consistent retention policies.

[…]

Speaking of being tracked, an enterprising hacker discovered that the E-Z Pass he used to make paying tolls simpler was being read all around New York City. Turns out, the city had been tracking E-Z Passes for years as a way to measure traffic patterns.

[…]

Speaking of technology with obviously exploitable surveillance capabilities:  Someone might be watching you through your laptop’s webcam – without even activating the warning light.

[…]

Oh, and to top it all off: There was suspicious aerial activity going on at Area 51. Although no admissions of alien activity have emerged, much to John Podesta’s dismay, recently released documents reveal that the CIA tested its first drones at the Nevada military base.

2013, above most other years, has demonstrated how widespread surveillance has become. The Orwellian present we find ourselves in has been made possible through advancing technology. This has lead many people to blame technology and seek a Luddite existence that they believe will keep them safe from surveillance. While technology has made widespread surveillance possible it is also the tool that allows us to fight widespread surveillance.

Cryptography allows us to conceal our communications from prying eyes and even to conceal the source and destination of communications. Tor allows you to access the Internet anonymously (so long as you use it correctly). Tails is a Linux distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive that attempts to anonymity all of your online activity. GnuPG allows you to encrypt the contents of your e-mail so those bastards at the National Security Agency (NSA) can’t see what you and your correspondent are discussing. Off-the-Record Messaging does the same thing for instant messages. Many other tools exist that allow you to maintain anonymity and privacy.

The only way to stop the widespread surveillance apparatus of the state and corporations is to use technology to counter their technology. Hiding in a hole may sound effective but the surveillance state can watch you even if you don’t carry a cellular phone, use a computer, or drive a car. Cameras are everywhere in our society and you can’t avoid their soulless stare unless you board yourself up in your home and refuse to come out (and even then your home could be bugged). But we can make the cost of surveillance so high that it bankrupts the spies.

Registering Firearms: Something You’ll Never See Me Do

Do you want to know something I will never do? This:

MIDDLETOWN, CT (WFSB) – There are only five more days until the new gun laws go into effect for our state, that means a dash to register assault weapons or high capacity magazines.

A long line of people stood outside of the Public Safety Building in Middletown all day Thursday to register firearms.

Specifically, anything the state considers an assault weapon or a high capacity magazine must be registered before Jan. 1, 2014.

Remember all of those warnings to never talk to the cops? Those warnings also apply here. Never volunteer information to police officers. Their job is to expropriate wealth from the general population. Their tool is enforcing the state’s decrees. The only reason the state wants to know what you own is so it can tax or take it. Registering a firearm and magazines is volunteering the fact you own those possession to the police. Later those cops will use that information to either tax or take your registered firearms and magazines because that is their job.

I understand why people are willing to register their firearms and magazines. They believe doing so will protect them, at least for a while, from government harassment. But registration always leads to confiscation or taxation. In the long run what these people in line are doing is telling the state where to round up aesthetically imposing semi-automatic rifles and standard capacity magazines. When the law changes again and makes those objects illegal or taxable the state will know where to find them. It will then send its enforcers, the police, to ensure you comply with the new law at the point of a gun. And if you managed to “lose” those registered firearms and magazines when the state comes knocking you can damn well bet that you will be spending some time in a cage. Meanwhile the people who didn’t go for the state’s carrot will be able to maintain that they own no such firearms or magazines.

Minimum Wage and the Corporate Welfare State

There has been a lot of talk recently about raising the state mandated minimum wage again. One side argues that many workers don’t make enough money to live off of and the other side argues that raising minimum wage will cause another jump in unemployment. Both sides are actually right on this issue. But both sides are also missing part of the picture. Why are many employers paying employees so little? The answer is quite simple. Low wages are subsidized by the state through its welfare programs:

Wal-Mart’s low wages have led to full-time employees seeking public assistance. These are not the 47 percent, lazy, unmotivated bums. Rather, these are people working physical, often difficult jobs. They receive $2.66 billion in government help each year (including $1 billion in healthcare assistance). That works out to about $5,815 per worker. And about $420,000 per store. But the federal and state aid varies widely; in Wisconsin, a study found that it was at least $904,542 a year per store. (See the accompanying chart.)

The author advocates raising the minimum wage to reduce welfare spending. That doesn’t address the root of the problem, which is the state introducing distortions in the market. Wal-Mart doesn’t just receive benefits in the form of welfare benefits being provided to its employees by the state. It has also received benefits in the form of tax deductions, tax credits, road improvements, water service improvements, and a slew of other deals. These deals give Wal-Mart an advantage over its competitors. When the competitors, unable to compete with a subsidized giant like Wal-Mart, goes out of business the Wal-Mart employees also lose leverage in wage negotiations. One of the most effective tools that employees have when negotiating for better wages is the ability to go somewhere else. When there is less competition in a market there are less places for employees to go and that weakens their position.

So long as the root of the problem, subsidies, isn’t address no governmental decree in regards to wages is going to make a damn bit of good. Minimum wage laws effect everybody. A large corporation like Wal-Mart can absorb paying employees more money but many of its smaller competitors cannot. Raising the minimum wage can therefore further reduce competition and therefore often act as another subsidy to the largest corporations. Taking away Wal-Mart’s subsidies, on the other hand, will take away its major advantages over competitors. Once this advantage is removed Wal-Mart’s competitors will have a better chance surviving and that will increase competition. With more competition in the market employees will have one of the most effective tools for fighting for better working conditions.

Open Carry Sensationalism

Have you heard the news? Us gun owners have discovered a new way to instill fear into the hearts of men! How? By advocating for the ability to openly carry a firearm. OK, it’s not a new strategy. Some of us have been open carrying for quite some time now. And it’s not a strategy meant to instill fear. But if you read Salon’s latest gun control article, and knew nothing about open carry laws, you would be lead to believe that gun owners are fighting for open carry laws so they can scare grandmothers and little children:

The debate over open carry is the new front line in the battle over gun rights and public safety in American culture. In Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, gun rights activists have been staging protests, demanding broader liberty to display their guns in public rather than keep them concealed under clothing. Major candidates in statewide elections have voiced support for open carry, asserting that the conspicuous display of firepower will deter crime. For decades, though, social scientists have studied the way people behave around guns, and they’ve found that all of us — not just criminals — will be affected by seeing guns in our everyday environment.

This is pure sensationalism. We already live in a society where guns are openly carried by people. These people are called cops and they’re responsible for killing eight times as many people as terrorists. In fact the number of Americans killed by cops has surpassed the number of Americans killed in the Iraq War. We’re not only exposed to people carrying firearms every day but those people have a rather violent history.

Let’s discuss carry permit holders for a second. Compared to carry permit holders cops are three times more likely to murder somebody. Here in Minnesota the rate of murder and manslaughter committed by carry permit holders is .542 per 100,000 whereas the rate for the general population is 1.78 per 100,000. So people should actually feel less threatened by permit holders openly carrying firearms than by the general population sans firearms.

If seeing a person openly carrying a firearm instills fear or aggression I haven’t noticed it even though I’m always openly carrying a firearm while biking. Nobody cares nor have people made any attempt at avoiding me on the trail (in fact I get asked for directions with notable frequency).

Open carry is already normalized in American society thanks to the police. The article sites a 1967 study to argue that people act more aggressively when in the presence of a gun:

Even when you’re not holding a gun, you can be psychologically affected by seeing one. Since 1967, researchers have been observing the “weapons effect,” a phenomenon in which the mere presence of a weapon can stimulate aggressive behavior. Of course, a person doesn’t respond to a gun the way a cartoon bull reacts to the matador’s cape; we aren’t spontaneously enraged every time we notice a firearm. But empirical research has repeatedly shown that when people are already aggravated, seeing a gun will motivate them to behave more aggressively.

Imagine you’ve volunteered to participate in a study on a college campus. You arrive to find the lab somewhat cluttered: There’s a badminton racquet and some shuttlecocks on a table. The researchers tell you to ignore that stuff — it’s for a different study. They hook you up to a machine that administers electric shocks, and hand the controls to another participant like yourself. He zaps you. Repeatedly. (He’s secretly part of the research team, following specific instructions — but as far as you know he’s just being a jerk.) Now it’s your turn to zap him. How many shocks will you administer?

Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage repeated this experiment with 100 male students at the University of Wisconsin, sometimes replacing the badminton equipment with a revolver and shotgun (or no stimulus at all). They found that participants administered more electric shocks when in the presence of guns. According to Berkowitz and LePage, the weapons were “aggressive cues.”

There’s a major flaw in that study’s methodology. How a person perceives a gun sitting on a table is likely to differ from how he or she perceives a gun carried on a person. If this weren’t the case then police officers would find themselves constantly dealing with more aggressive than average behavior. Most people, when dealing with a police officers, tend to act less than aggressive. The primarily reason for that likely stems from the fact that aggression is unwise when the other person has the ability to defend him or herself. As Robert Heinlein wrote in Beyond This Horizon, “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” A good example of this may have been a time period often cited by gun control advocates: the Old West. Unlike portrayals in Hollywood and claims by gun control advocates indicate, the Old West was quite peaceful (at least until the federal government started grabbing for more power in the region). Openly carrying firearms during that time period wasn’t uncommon yet the rate of violence was quite low.

Openly carrying a firearm isn’t anymore dangerous for a society than secretly carrying a firearm. The manner of carry isn’t important, the people carrying are. In our society firearms are openly carried by law enforcement agents, who have higher rate of violence than the average carry permit holder. Our civilization hasn’t collapsed due to this. Civilization also hasn’t collapse in states where open carry is legal. Advocating to legalize open carry in other states isn’t a dangerous new strategy being used by us gun nuts. It’s an acknowledgement that legalized open carry hasn’t negatively impacted any state so there is no justifiable reason to prohibit the act elsewhere.

Scott Adams: Possible Future Anarchist

I work in an office environment so it should go without saying that I’m a fan of the Dilbert comic. In a strange but positive turn of events, a recent post by Dilbert’s author, Scott Adams, leads me to believe he’s traveling down the road to anarchism:

I have a hundred-year plan to eliminate government.

The key to making this work is picking one element of government at a time and using technology to eliminate it. Remember, we have a hundred years to develop and test lots of little plans. So we won’t permanently eliminate any part of government until citizens have seen proof it can work on a state level, or for a brief test period nationally, or in another country.

He gives several examples of how technology could be used to replace government functions. If you’re a neophile anarchist, such as myself, what he’s saying is nothing new. I’ve been advocating the use of technology to eliminate the state by providing competition and alternatives to its programs. One of the state’s greatest weaknesses is its inability to adapt to long term changes. We see this whenever the state moves to regulate a new technology, often before the ramifications of that technology are understood.

Its regulations are seldom sensible and usually take the form of outright prohibitions or licensing. My favorite example of this is Wisconsin’s ban using electromagnetic weapons for hunting. Electromagnetic weapons, as far as hunting goes, are still fantasy but the Wisconsin government has already banned such usage even though we have no understanding of how such technology would effect hunting.

I theorize that the state’s hatred of new technologies stems from its fear of being supplanted by them.