Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

Breaking the Law, It’s More Valuable than Most People Realize

One of the most annoying claims I hear people make is, “I’m a law abiding citizen!” No, you’re not, nobody is. In fact everybody in the United States, on average, commits three felonies a day. Considering there are approximately 27,000 pages of federal statutes it shouldn’t surprise anybody that obeying the law is impossible.

When I discuss civil disobedience and agorism as an alternative to politics the most common rebuttal I hear is that both are illegal. What critics often fail to realize is that those methods are illegal by design. Breaking the law is critical if one wants to change society:

What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.

The state of Minnesota, for instance, legalized same-sex marriage this year, but sodomy laws had effectively made homosexuality itself completely illegal in that state until 2001. Likewise, before the recent changes making marijuana legal for personal use in WA and CO, it was obviously not legal for personal use.

Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in MN, CO, and WA since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?

[…]

The more fundamental problem, however, is that living in an existing social structure creates a specific set of desires and motivations in a way that merely talking about other social structures never can. The world we live in influences not just what we think, but how we think, in a way that a discourse about other ideas isn’t able to. Any teenager can tell you that life’s most meaningful experiences aren’t the ones you necessarily desired, but the ones that actually transformed your very sense of what you desire.

We can only desire based on what we know. It is our present experience of what we are and are not able to do that largely determines our sense for what is possible. This is why same sex relationships, in violation of sodomy laws, were a necessary precondition for the legalization of same sex marriage. This is also why those maintaining positions of power will always encourage the freedom to talk about ideas, but never to act.

Why would anybody advocate for legalizing homosexuality if they didn’t partake in it or know somebody who partook in it? The same goes for cannabis, strong cryptography, and standard capacity magazines. As the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words.

The whole point of civil disobedience is to partake in an illegal activity to raise awareness of its prohibition, demonstrate that there are people who derive enjoyment from the prohibited act, and demonstrate that the prohibited act’s practice isn’t harmful to others. Cannabis would have almost certainly remained illegal in Colorado and Washington if it wasn’t for disobedient individuals demonstrating that smoking the plant is enjoyable to many and harmless to everybody else. The same goes for homosexuality. It took individuals participating in same-sex relationships to demonstrate that same-sex relationships are enjoyable to many and harmless to everybody else.

Agorism, in my opinion, is, in part, meant to demonstrate that a functioning society is possible without the state. The only way to demonstrate such a thing is to participate in actions outside of the rules established by the state. Commerce, being the area of our lives the state attempts to control the most, is a prime candidate for demonstration purposes. When you think about it, almost everything we do in our lives is made possible through commerce. The simple act of eating food is made possible, for most people in the United States, by farmers selling their goods to wholesalers, who hire truckers to haul food to trains, which haul the food to barges, which transport the food to a packaging plant, which packages up the food and gives it to more truckers, who transport the food to distribution centers, which put the food on their trucks, which transport the food to grocery stores, which sell the food to consumers.

The state claims that each and ever step along that path must be tightly regulated in order to ensure consumer safety. Agorists can prove the state wrong by providing food, transportation, or packaging outside of the state’s regulations. Doing so in a manner that satisfies customers’ demands demonstrates the viability of commerce that isn’t tightly regulated by the state.

Just as you have to break eggs to make omelets you also have to break laws to make societal changes.

Anonymous Going After America’s Second Largest Slave Owner

Many people mistakenly believe that slavery ended in the United States with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. I understand why so many people make that mistake, it’s taught in all of America’s public schools (at least the ones that still teach history, which is an ever decreasing number of them). What isn’t covered is the fact that slavery wasn’t ended, the rules were simply changed. Previously white individuals were able to own individuals of African decent as slaves; today the state and those it grants special privileges to are able to own individuals who have received the label “criminal”, which, ironically, is a label that is entirely defined by the state (but I’m not saying there’s a conflict of interest or anything).

Today there are two major slave owners in the United States. The first is the United States government, which owns slaves through it’s wholly owned corporation Federal Prison Industries (also known as UNICOR). The second is the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), an entity given the legal right to own slaves by the federal government. Anonymous is planning to go after the latter:

The oldest and largest for-profit prison company is not what it would have you believe, at least according to Anonymous. A faction of the hacktivist group released a report Tuesday morning concluding that the publicly traded prison operator Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is not an efficient, profitable free-market solution — but a bad investment for shareholders.

Companies like CCA currently profit from America’s addiction to incarceration – converting a bloody trail of prison riots, deaths, and general human misery into black balance sheets. The conventional financial wisdom is that CCA will be reliably profitable in the future because of its strong history of growth over the past thirty years. But this growth has been fueled by a historical anomaly. Between 1970 and 2005, the U.S. prison population grew by 700 percent, far outpacing both population growth and crime. As a result, our country now has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners.

The only reason the CCA has been a reliable growth industry is because the state has continued to create new jailable offenses. Let’s face it, the war on drugs (not produced by politically connected pharmaceutical companies) has been a boom for slave holders in the United States. It has ensured that any poor schmuck found to be in possession of a certain verboten weed is eligible for slavery. When your business makes money by employing slave labor, and the slave labor pool you draw from is constantly increased by the state, there’s nowhere to go but up.

It’s nice to see that somebody has an issue with the prison-industrial complex. Although I can’t imagine Anonymous will be able to cause any significant long-term harm to the CCA it will be entertaining if they are able to cause some short-term damage. Furthermore, through their targeted activism, Anonymous may be able to raise public awareness of the slavery institution still practiced in the United States. Someday this country may even be able to move away from the barbaric practice of imprisonment and find a more effective alternative.

Fixing the Roads Without Government

Every time I talk to a statist about anti-statism they always end up falling back on the pathetic question, “Without government who will build the roads?” Seriously, there’s an organized crime ring going around the world bombing the shit out of brown people and the only thing these statists are worried about are the God damned roads. You know, the roads filled with craters that never get filled in because the Department of Transportation is too busy ripping up several perfectly good highways (if you live in Minnesota you know what I’m talking about)?

But here I am to tell all the statists out there that their precious roads will be just fine without the state. In fact the roads may be better because without the state to punish people who are filling in potholes we may actually have a qualify transportation infrastructure:

A man dubbed the “pothole Robin Hood” is under police investigation for taking asphalt from the city of Jackson, Miss., and filling in potholes on city streets.

Ron Chane admits that he takes the asphalt and repairs potholes, and then signs the filled-in holes with the message “citizen fixed,” he told ABC News.

“It’s sort of like Robin Hood. Once we saw that people were appreciating what we did, we went out again and made a goal of fixing 100 potholes. We’ve actually filled 101 potholes, so our mission has been completed,” Chane said.

Yup, somebody is actually working to maintain the infrastructure everybody relies on and the police are investigating him because he took asphalt, which his tax dollars paid for, from the crooks who weren’t using it. Statism: throwing logic out the door since inception.

Five Reasons to Abandon Politics

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know that I’ve moved away from the political means to attain my goals. Instead of begging politicians and destroying my soul by working within the political machinery I’ve decided to rely on civil disobedience and agorism. Oftentimes people still working within the political machinery ask why I can’t participate in politics and perform acts of civil disobedience and participate in agorism. Well, here are five good reasons:

  • It eats up a horrifying amount of time and energy
  • It’s an addiction
  • It doesn’t change anything
  • In the end, it’s about violence
  • Politics is a relic of a barbaric past

Details about each reason are provided at the link but suffice it to say each reason is an inescapable reality of participating in politics. If I still participated in politics I wouldn’t have time to perform acts of civil disobedience or participate in agorism. When I did involve myself in the political system I was constantly bombarded with demands to phone bank, drop literature, march in parades, attend meetings, donate money to candidates, and other activities I refused to do. Every campaign wanted my time and money and, in the end, they failed to change anything. Some of the candidates won, some of them lost, but the country is still a shit hole.

I don’t believe civil disobedience and agorism are strategies guaranteed to win but they are fun to do and radically different, which is necessary because their alternative, politics, has failed to achieve anything other than tyranny since its inception. When one strategy has failed miserably the need to do something radically different arises.

I Guess We’ll Need a New Tax in Minnesota

At the beginning of this month a new tax on cigarettes took effect here in Minnesota. While proponents of the new tax claim it will help fund education the tax is actually being used to bailout billionaire Zygi Wilf since the proceeds from gambling having met the levels projected by the politicians who decided to provide public funding for the new Vikings stadium. Unfortunately, the politicians may have to find something else to tax now that cigarette sales have dropped:

DULUTH – After the Minn. state tax increase on cigerettes on July 1., Duluth tobacco shops and gas stations said their sales have decreased.

Some gas stations said cigarette sales are down by thousands of dollars a week.

Meklye Wahedi, a cashier at “Cigs for Less” said carton sales are especially down.

“People were buying 3 or 4 at a time, they would come in the next week and but 3 or 4 again, and yeah, it increased a lot,” Wahedi said. “When July 1 first hit, that’s when it was really slow.”

We will have to wait and see if sales increase but if they don’t the Minnesota legislation will likely have to create a new tax on something else. This demonstrates the issue with taxes, as taxes are increased individuals begin to avoid those taxes. If a new tax on cigarettes raises the overall price of cigarettes sufficiently less people will buy them and the state will take in less tax money, leading to more taxes. It’s a never ending cycle.

Independence Day

It’s July 4th, which means millions of people across the United States are waving red, white, and blue flags; launching off fireworks; and feeling patriotic. I will be partaking in the ritual of blowing shit up because such a ritual should be practiced every day but I will not be celebrating my patriotism as I have none.

But in the spirit of Independence Day I will take a moment to reflect on how I’ve made myself more independent. Years ago I moved my cloud services to my personal cloud. I am no longer reliant in Google for my e-mail, calendaring, and address book as I host all of those services on my own system. When I say my own system I mean my own system. My server is sitting in my dwelling, not on a rack in a data center located somewhere I’ve never heard of. I’m still living within my means, which means I have no debt and can declare myself independent of the banking cartel. Although I’m no model of physical perfection I do exercise regularly and try to eat healthy so I’ve been able to keep myself independent of the pharmaceutical industry that grips this nation with an iron fist. I carry a firearm, which allows me to protect myself and those I care about instead of relying on, and hoping that, the police to keep me and mine safe.

Waiving flags and declaring your love for Big Brother is no way to celebrate a holiday called Independence Day. If you want to do the holiday justice celebrate by making yourself more independent. Even little things like learning to brew beer or repair your means of transportation can make you a more independent person.

Have a great Independence Day and try not to blow yourself up.

Conscription

One of the ugly concepts that rears its ugly head from time to time is the idea of mandatory “national service.” One of my friends, who is ironically as Democratic as they come, posted this opinion piece by Michael Gerson:

The impetus for this discussion has come from the military. During an event at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival last year, Gen. Stanley McChrystal offhandedly endorsed universal national service for young people graduating from high school or college, fulfilled in either a military or civilian setting. His particular concern was the growing disconnect between the less than 1 percent of Americans who serve in the armed forces and the rest of the country. The result is not only an unequal distribution of burdens but also the unequal development of citizens. “Once you have contributed to something,” McChrystal said, “you have a slightly different view of it.”

The first sentence really shows what mandatory “national service” is about, finding more meat for the grinder. America has embroiled itself in several overseas wars and it wants to embroil itself in more. Empire building on this scale requires a lot of soldiers and enlistment rates aren’t what they used to be. Conscription, which the fascists are trying to relabel national service, is an easy way to fill the military ranks.

Relabeling conscription allows the state to use another ploy, civilians service options. Before Obama’s election most of my friends that self-identify as Democrats were anti-war and most of them remain anti-conscription today. Needless to say, since my friend who posted this self-identifies as Democrat, I had to point out the obvious fact that “national service” is merely a fancy word for conscription. In reply he said that there would be civilian options for “national service” such as AmericCorps and the Peace Corp. The civilian option is the carrot on the stick that lures people who otherwise oppose conscription to support the practice.

While most of my friends who self-identify as Democrat oppose mandatory military service many of them support mandatory civilian service. Collectivism, after all, always entails some kind of mandatory service and people who self-identify as Democrat, at least in my experience, are generally collectivists in disguise. What my friend, and many supporters of mandatory civilian service, fail to consider is that the civilian options can be taken away. Passing a law that requires individuals to perform work of the state’s choosing is easier to accomplish if a majority of supporters of both major parties can be suckered into supporting it. Passing said law is difficult, changing the rules of conscription once the laws is passed is relatively easy. In the end, if said law was passed, the civilian option would be stricken from the record in a short amount of time. Before you know it “national service” will be synonymous with military service.

Those who accept conscription must also accept the idea that the state owns individuals. If the state owns individuals it can make them do whatever it wants. Since the state’s existence is entirely dependent on expropriation, and the primary purpose of the military is to expropriate wealth from foreign countries, it will use individuals to expropriate wealth, which means anybody conscripted will almost certainly be placed in the armed forces. I hear several self-identified Democrats saying, “But they promised a civilian option!” Once you accept the idea that the state owns individuals you also necessary accept the idea that the state can change the rules whenever it wants because the people are its property to do with as it pleases.

Mandatory conscription would be a disaster in this country. The only reason higher ups in the military advocate the practice is because they want more people to send overseas to die. No matter what they promise to get popular support for conscription they will ensure that, in the end, every conscript is forced into the military.

The FDA Demonstrates Its Incompetence Again

In order to sell pharmaceuticals in the United States they must first be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Why does the state get a monopoly on determining whether or not a drug is safe? Because many people have been suckered into the belief that the state is some kind of egalitarian entity that is beyond corruption or mistake, unlike private approval agencies such as Underwriters Laboratories (UL). However, the FDA has a long history of failures. Its most recent failure demonstrates the danger of granting any organization a monopoly on assessing the safety and effectiveness of pharmaceuticals:

The FDA announced last week that the 300mg generic version of Wellbutrin XL manufactured by Impax Laboratories and marketed by Teva Pharmaceuticals was being recalled because it did not work. And this wasn’t just a problem with one batch – this is a problem that has been going on with this particular drug for four or five years, and the FDA did everything it could to ignore it.

The FDA apparently approved this drug – and others like it – without testing it. The FDA just assumed if one dosage strength the drug companies submitted for approval works, then the other higher dosages work fine also. With this generic, American consumers became the FDA’s guinea pigs to see if the FDA’s assumption was right. It wasn’t.

Why would an organization tasked with assessing whether or not drugs are safe and effective fail to test higher dosages of previously approved drugs? Because the organization has a legal monopoly on therefore knows no consequence will befall it for failing in its assigned task.

For a non-state approval organization reputation is everything. UL, for example, has an invested interest in testing every product before granting approval because failing to do so could harm its reputation. An approval organization that has a poor reputation isn’t going to be relied on by anybody. The FDA, and other government created monopolies, face no risks because their approval can be mandated by law.

I Love it When a Plan Backfires

Shortly after the shooting in Newtown Mr. Obama issued 23 executive orders that he claimed would help reduce gun violence in the United States. One of those orders said, “Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” It’s been half of a year since those executive orders were issued and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has completed it’s study. What did it find out? The opposite of what it was planned to find out:

1. Most gun deaths in the US are due to suicide, not violent crimes with guns or accidental shootings. This is a said statistic, but again, this goes back to mental healthcare, not guns.

“Between the years 2000-2010, firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.” [Source]

2. Mass shootings account for a negligible amount of crime in the US. In fact, mass shootings are one of the rarest forms of violent crime in the country.

“The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths. Specifically, since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in a day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” [Source]

3. This one is probably our favorite. The study admits that self defense is a common occurrence and happens at least as much violent crimes involving guns. This is a direct busted myth to the anti gun argument that guns are almost never used for self defense.

“Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence […]. Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.” [Source]

4. Furthermore, on self defense, if you carry a gun and fight back against a violent assailant, you are less likely to be killed or harmed than someone who decided to fight back and employ another self defense tactic or weapon.

“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns […] have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.” [Source]

That has to hurt. I’m sure this study, as with most studies that fail to propagate the state’s propaganda, will never buried deep in some hole and never acknowledged again. It’s also likely that several people at the CDC will no longer have jobs as that is often the price of failing to tow the party line. Still, the report is pretty good for gun owners because it shows that even government agencies can’t successfully coverup the fact that guns are useful tools for self-defense.

Rebellion Exists Everywhere

New York City, which is ruled be the despotic dictator Michael Bloomberg, is generally ahead of the curve when it comes to implementing a complete police state. To paraphrase a Star Wars quote, the more you tighten your grip, the more people will slip through your fingers. While New York City has a prohibition against gatherings larger than 50 people, unless the group buys a permit, people have decided to give the oligarchy of that city a giant middle finger and hold massive illegal gatherings underground:

In the distance, beyond the bend in the trackbed, a weird chanting began to ripple out and echo through the space. I saw the glow of candles, and as I approached I saw that everyone had been drawn to the end of the line. On what would have been part of a subway platform, a few people were leading the group in some sort of wild incantation. By the time I got there it reached a euphoric crescendo, and one of the performers overlooking the crowd yelled something like, “Bring your candles to the Echo Vault!”

By the time I drifted back to the vault with the others, a woman on “stage” (Jessica Delfino) was singing a hypnotic a cappella ballad about New York. Then a drummer, Joel Saladino, joined her, bashing away at the kit in a series of increasingly ferocious drum solos.

I climbed the stairs up another two stories and carefully tiptoed across one of the crossbeams extending the width of the Vault, trying not to think about how I’d probably break an ankle or worse if I fell. The view from back there was incredible, and when the stage at the opposite end filled with the Extra Action Marching Band, I could see the party was really getting started. It was like the Zion dance party in Matrix Reloaded, but with fewer douchebags. The music was thunderous and suddenly the mood was exultant—everyone danced, because that was the only way to deal with the inexplicable joy that was exploding down there.

If we’d gotten caught, the organizers would no doubt have faced some serious criminal charges. But if it was up to me, I’d give them the keys to the city for raising such an audacious middle finger to the notion that New York City’s underground is dead and gone.

What Stark and Austin and the musicians managed to create, almost miraculously, was a Temporary Autonomous Zone to remind us that this is still a city worth living in, despite the creeping feeling that New York’s being bled dry by an ever-expanding corporate vampire real estate army.

No matter how tight the rulers of New York City, or anywhere else, clamp down the people will always find a way to bypass the authorities. This is why human progress, which is only possible thanks to anarchy, can continue. The state tries to prevent change from occurring by passing laws but laws are meaningless when they can’t be enforced.

Knowing that illegal underground gatherings like the one mentioned in the story, albeit on a much smaller scale, occur here in the Twin Cities puts a smile on my face. Rebellion is everywhere and it’s a beautiful thing.