Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

It’s a Thug’s Life in the IRS

Look, I get it, the state needs to threaten people with violence in order to coerce them into paying taxes. If we’re going to give people guns and send them out to threaten peaceful people could we at least hire competent individuals:

Special agents at the IRS accidentally shot their firearms 11 times between 2009 and 2011, and at least three of the cases “may have resulted in property damage or personal injury.”

Agents actually fired their guns accidently more often than they intentionally fired them in the field, according to an audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

Emphasis mine. Give a man a gun and he’s held accountable for his actions. Give a man a gun and a badge and he’s unaccountable for anything. I still think gun control advocates should be focusing their efforts on these unaccountable government thugs instead of people like me. If I negligently discharged a firearm in public I’d be brought up on charges yet government agents who negligently discharge their firearm in public are let off. Who’s more dangerous, the accountable individual or the unaccountable thug?

We’re Accountable Because We Say We’re Accountable

Whenever anarchists challenge statists about rampent abuses of power such as the National Security Agency (NSA) spying on anybody and everybody, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) creating terrorist so it has somebody to bust, or the United States bombing of children in the Middle East the standard response is that a more accountable state is needed. An accountable state is a paradox because a state maintains a monopoly on creating and enforcing laws. In order to be prosecuted the state must first find itself guilty of breaking the law.

Case in point, agents of the FBI has been involved in numerous shootouts but not once has the FBI decided any of those agents were in error:

But if such internal investigations are time-tested, their outcomes are also predictable: from 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 “subjects” and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings.

In most of the shootings, the F.B.I.’s internal investigation was the only official inquiry. In the Orlando case, for example, there have been conflicting accounts about basic facts like whether the Chechen man, Ibragim Todashev, attacked an agent with a knife, was unarmed or was brandishing a metal pole. But Orlando homicide detectives are not independently investigating what happened.

How can a monopoly holder of justice ever be held accountable? Advocates of democracy will claim the people can hold the state accountable by voting out agents that do wrong. The first problem with such a claim is that most employees of the state, including FBI agents, aren’t elected officials. The second problem is that justice becomes a decision of a voting majority. If a voting majority believe a murder was justified then the murderer remains unaccountable.

Monopoly holders of justice can’t be held accountable because they hold a monopoly on the very thing that would otherwise make them accountable and that’s one of the biggest failures of statism.

Why Third Parties Will Never Succeed in Politics

Inevitably, when people become disenfranchised with one or both of the two major political parties, somebody suggests that they go a third party to “really change things.” While working in a third party is certainly better than one of the two major parties that reason is simply because third parties are impotent so people working in them aren’t able to use the state’s capacity for violence to inflict their will on the general populace. The reason for their impotency is because the two major parties already control the state and can rewrite the rules whenever they want:

Last year, Republican Jonathan Paton lost his bid for Congress to Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick by about 9,000 votes. Meanwhile, Libertarian Kim Allen in the race got just over 15,000 votes.

But for the Libertarian, Paton would be a congressman today – assuming, as Republicans do, that Libertarian votes would logically slide over to the R column.

What’s a good Republican to do about a bunch of spoilers who are keeping them from electoral glory?

Well, today we found out.

This afternoon, Gov. Jan Brewer signed an elections bill that basically wipes out Libertarian and other third-party candidates, boosting their signature requirements to unattainable levels. Green Party candidates would actually have to collect more signatures than they have party members.

This is exactly the kind of shenanigan that I predicted would happen if Gary Johnson would have obtained anywhere near the 5% of the popular vote needed to qualify for federal campaign funds. Whenever a third party begins to obtain any meaningful power the two major parties rewrite the rules. In Arizona the Green Party is effectively through since they need more signatures than they have party members and, if the Libertarian Party is able to achieve anywhere near enough signatures, the requirement will be increased again.

Working within the political system will never lead to liberty because the system is rigged against change.

There’s Something Fishy Going on Around Here

Michael Hastings, the journalist who effectively ended Stanley McChrystal’s career, died in a car crash early this week. What makes this story even more interesting is that Mr. Hastings had supposedly contacted WikiLeaks shortly before his death and was concerned that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) was stalking him:

CULVER CITY (CBSLA.com) — Questions persist following the death of Michael Hastings Tuesday, after reports that the award-winning journalist told WikiLeaks the government was watching him.

WikiLeaks tweeted a message to their millions of followers Wednesday stating that the 33-year-old author and war correspondent had contacted the organization’s lawyer to say he was being watched by the FBI.

Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.—
WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 19, 2013

“Michael Hastings was a journalist who definitely gave the government trouble, the Pentagon trouble, so if they were surveilling him it wouldn’t be that surprising,” said friend and fellow journalist Cenk Uygur.

Had this occurred last year I would have likely written Mr. Hastings’s death off as a coincidence. I was more ignorant of the federal government’s corruption back then. Things have obviously changed since then. We now know that the National Security Agency (NSA) have worked in cooperation with private corporations to intercept our communications, actively listen to our phone conversations, and exploiting flaws in at least one operating system before patches are released. We also know that the FBI has been creating terrorists for years, arming Mexican drug cartels, and spying on Americans with drones. In other words, the federal government is completely out of control and currently accountable to nobody.

Today I take the whispers that Mr. Hastings was murdered by the federal government seriously. If the federal government is willing to go so far as to develop an advanced surveillance state and create terrorists in order to drum up fear then it’s no small stretch to believe it would also knock off people who became inconvenient. We live in dark, albeit interesting, times.

Dismissing Criticisms You Can’t Counter

A couple of weeks ago Michael Lind, an writer for Salon, thought he had the ultimate trump card against libertarianism. He asked why no libertarian countries exist. As I, and many other libertarians explained, libertarianism is a philosophy built upon the idea of non-aggression, which is ultimately incompatible with statism. Mr. Lind, looking to generate more page hits from outraged libertarians, decided he would attempt to rebut that argument:

An unscientific survey of the blogosphere turns up a number of libertarians claiming in response to my essay that, because libertarianism is anti-statist, to ask for an example of a real-world libertarian state shows a failure to understand libertarianism. But if the libertarian ideal is a stateless society, then libertarianism is merely a different name for utopian anarchism and deserves to be similarly ignored.

The caricature created by Mr. Lind is that everybody who advocates anti-statism is a utopian anarchist and therefore can be dismissed without argument. It’s a classic straw man fallacy. Apparently Mr. Lind is not able to argue against the claim so he has created a much easier caricature to argue against.

Most anarchists, myself included, are not utopian. We don’t claim that a stateless society will be perfect. There will always been some amount of theft, rape, murder, and other acts of violence. Likewise, fraud and other nonviolent transgressions will almost certainly be ever present in human society.

What we do argue is that statism, being a system based on violence, is worse than a system based on mutual cooperation. In my previous post I provided several examples of societies that succeeded without a state, one of which still exists today. The fact that such societies have existed and continue to exist today demonstrates that statelessness isn’t an impossible reality that can be dismissed without argument. If Mr. Lind doesn’t believe anarchism can succeed he needs to provide some argumentation to backup his claim. Simply labeling anarchists as utopians doesn’t count since most of us aren’t utopians.

Seeing Mr. Lind’s dismissal of anarchism also raises a question, why does he think statism is the best foundation to base a society on? Why is a society that has one group of individuals ruling over everybody else better than a society where nobody rules of anybody else better? I could never find a satisfactory answer to those questions, which is why I eventually became an anarchist.

Cultural Deterioration

America is advertised as the land of the free and the home of the brave. That may be true at one time but that isn’t true now. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center demonstrates that America is screwed:

A majority of Americans – 56% – say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism, though a substantial minority – 41% – say it is unacceptable. And while the public is more evenly divided over the government’s monitoring of email and other online activities to prevent possible terrorism, these views are largely unchanged since 2002, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

I’ve been trying to find a descriptive label for the deterioration of American society and I think cultural deterioration is appropriate. At one time the American culture was known for fierce independence, a general distrust of government, and a strong work ethic. Today the American culture is known for dependence, a complete obedience to government, and a lackluster work ethic. How did we get here? I think there are too many factors involved to list them all but, in my opinion, the overall attitude of expecting the government to care for those in need instead of taking direct action to help those in need played a major part. When a society relies on the government to care for those in need it leaves the door wide open for the government to crack down more and more on society at large.

I discussed the failure of relying on the government to provide for those in need a couple of months ago. The primary weakness of such a system is that the state, being an agent of expropriation, has no interest in investing the wealth is as stolen from the general population on people who have nothing to steal. In the eye’s of the government we’re cattle. It wants to extract as much milk from us as possible. That means it will provide some care for people who produce milk but will take the people who don’t produce milk out back and shoot them. The state isn’t going to invest more resources into a cow then it believes can be extracted from it. Besides having no motivation to help cattle that don’t produce milk the government also wants to avoid sinking resources into cattle that do produce milk. This is where nanny state laws come from.

Why is it so difficult to buy and consume raw milk? Because the risks of getting sick by consuming raw milk are higher that the risks of getting sick by consume pasteurized and homogenized milk. Since the government has been tasked with covering the healthcare costs of those who have no insurance it wants to prohibit anything that could make somebody sick. It’s a way of reducing the amount of resources it has to spend on its herd.

What makes this matter worse is that the cattle become dependent on the government and even begin to see the government as a benevolent entity. American cattle have come to rely on the government for many things including safety. Most of the cattle see the government as the only thing between themselves and the wolves and coyotes. The fear of death is a powerful motivator, which makes it a prime target for exploitation by the government. We’re being told that the wolves and coyotes will get us if our every communication isn’t monitored. Most of the cattle have given their consent because they’re afraid of the alternative.

I don’t believe there is any way to salvage this country. Too many people are tied too tightly to the government for any hope of reclaiming liberty to exist. It’s probably time for those of us who actually enjoy liberty to find somewhere else to live. The world is a gigantic place that is full of untold wonders. At this point sticking around here, in my opinion, is a liability because the culture has deteriorated to a point that all hope of salvation is likely gone.

The Difference Between Libertarianism and Authoritarianism

A lot can be said about social and political philosophies by looking at the solutions proposed by their advocates. Authoritarians tend to advocate violent revolution so the existing power structure can be replaced with a new power structure. Libertarians tend to advocate for nonviolent solutions, often seeing flight as a better solution than fight. Consider seasteading, the idea of building a libertarian city in international water. Ephemerisle, a floating celebration where participants create a small floating village, was recently the subject of story on n+1.

Seasteading really epitomizes libertarianism in my opinion. Seasteaders are so desperate to find liberty, and so unwilling to use violent tactics, that they’re willing to invest the tremendous resources required to build a floating city. While the authoritarians are discussing revolution to force everybody to submit to their will the libertarians are moving to the frontier to found a new society that people can come to voluntarily. The difference speaks volumes in my opinion.

I May Have to Begin Learning Icelandic

Now that we know the identify of the person who leaked the National Security Agency’s (NSA) PowerPoint presentation on their surveillance operations the only question that remains is, what will happen to him? Hong Kong was likely the best option out of a series of bad options for Mr. Snowden to flee to but, being a country that signed an extradition treaty with the United States, it’s not a viable long-term solution.

Where could Mr. Snowden possibly run? As it turns out, he may be able to find asylum in Iceland:

On Sunday evening Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir and Smari McCarthy, executive director of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, issued a statement of support for Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton staffer who identified himself to the Guardian newspaper as the source of a series of top secret documents outlining the NSA’s massive surveillance of foreigners and Americans.

“Whereas IMMI is based in Iceland, and has worked on protections of privacy, furtherance of government transparency, and the protection of whistleblowers, we feel it is our duty to offer to assist and advise Mr. Snowden to the greatest of our ability,” their statement reads. “We are already working on detailing the legal protocols required to apply for asylum, and will over the course of the week be seeking a meeting with the newly appointed interior minister of Iceland, Mrs. Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir, to discuss whether an asylum request can be processed in a swift manner, should such an application be made.”

A couple of years ago Iceland passed laws to protect investigative journalists from other states. Normally I would be very skeptical about such laws but WikiLeaks was involved in the drafting and Iceland told the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to go fuck itself when it was investigating WikiLeaks so the island’s actions do backup its claims. Couple its journalist protection laws with its willingness to persecute corrupt bankers and you have a place that sounds like a great destination to expatriate to.

As far as I’m concerned the United States is a lost cause. The only salvation this police state has is a reset, which can only be accomplished by a complete collapse. After a collapse the nation could be rebuilt into a beacon of liberty but I believe that time is a long ways off and, frankly, I don’t want to be here when the worst of the economic and state collapse hit. I’ve been looking for nations to flee to and Iceland is sounding pretty nice. You have to love a nation that elects a self-proclaimed anarchic clown as the mayor of its capital city.

The Purge: An Absurd Idea that’s Fun to Play With

Many of my friends have been discussing the movie The Purge. I haven’t seen it yet because I’m not a fan of siege movies (unless it’s Judge Dredd performing the siege because, well, he’s fucking Judge Dredd) but I’ve been informed about the concept. The Purge plays with the idea of a society where all laws are suspended for a 12-hour period. Several people have noted that the movie demonstrates why anarchism can’t work. Setting aside the fact that people are using a fictional movie to argue against a real societal philosophy we’re still left with the fact that the idea of The Purge, that a period of lawlessness will result in unimaginable violent crime for that entire period, is absurd.

Judging by the movie’s preview and statements my friends have made about the movie, I’m lead to believe weapons are no prohibited The Purge’s version of the United States. In fact it appears as though prohibitions against weapon ownership are nonexistent, at least for the 12-hour period where all law is suspended. Knowing that an annual purge takes place I’m also lead to believe that most people would acquire weaponry to defend themselves, which would likely mean the cost of violence would increase greatly.

Today the cost of performing violent acts in the United States is pretty low. Most people don’t carry weapons on their person and many people either own no weapons or are prohibited from possessing them. In addition to that the general attitude towards violent crime held in America is to let the police deal with it. We’re told not to intervene when we encounter a violent crime and can actually face legal repercussions for doing so. Such an attitude gives violent criminals a good sized window of time to commit their violent act, before dealing with possible resistance (because the police can’t teleport to a location instantly). In a society where all law was suspended for a 12-hour period every year, people would likely arm themselves so they could defend their lives during the lawless period. The cost of violence would increase, which would have the likely affect of discouraging violent crime. Violent criminals generally exploit the fact that they are unlikely to encounter notable resistance while committing a violent crime. When they chances of notable resistance increases it discourages violent criminals from performing violent crimes.

In addition to the likely increase in arms that would occur in a society where no laws were enforced for a 12-hour period there is also the social roadblocks between criminals and crimes. Humans are generally social creatures. We form relationships and those relationships influence our actions. For example, friends and families are likely to help one another. How many people would stand idly by while somebody attempts to murder their mother, father, sister, or brother? How many people would look the other way while one of their friends was killed? In most cases the family member of friend would intervene because they have a vested interest in defending the would-be victim.

If a period of lawlessness was declared by the state, local communities would ban together to defend each other. My claim isn’t unprecedented. The Los Angeles riots were, effectively, a period of lawlessness. During that time period members of the community referred to as Koreatown banned together, loaded their rifles, and defended their community from marauding rioters.

Many people believe that the state is the only thing that separates society from complete collapse but those people are ignorant of history. Consider the American Old West. Hollywood portrays the time period as one of great violence but the actual Old West was notable for two things. First, the state was absent [PDF]. Second, there was a very low rate of violent crime. Medieval Iceland is another example of a society that enjoyed freedom from a state and a low rate of violence. Unlike much of Europe during the time period between the years 1000 and 1300, Iceland had no civil wars because its society was based primarily on arbitration. Violence wasn’t absent but it was mostly ritualized, which helped keep it under control compared to many other societies of the time.

What makes society possible is the general tendency of humans to form communities. Though that tendency we choose mutual cooperation of exploitation most of the time. If the state declared a period of lawlessness communities would simply take responsibility for enforcing laws against violent crime themselves. A realistic version of The Purge would likely involve an increase in cannabis smoking for a 12-hour period followed by run on the local grocery stores to buy up all the Doritos. I would even predict that violent crime would decrease since the police would be roaming the streets and initiation violence against nonviolent individuals.

Edit: 2013-06-11: 20:39: Corrected a few grammatical mistakes graciously pointed out by Steven.

Why There are No Libertarian Countries

This article has been making the rounds in libertarian circles for the last few days. In it Salon author Michael Lind believes he has finally found the argument that discredits libertarianism in its entirety. His argument is that the complete lack of libertarian countries demonstrates that libertarianism can’t succeed:

Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?

It’s not as though there were a shortage of countries to experiment with libertarianism. There are 193 sovereign state members of the United Nations—195, if you count the Vatican and Palestine, which have been granted observer status by the world organization. If libertarianism was a good idea, wouldn’t at least one country have tried it? Wouldn’t there be at least one country, out of nearly two hundred, with minimal government, free trade, open borders, decriminalized drugs, no welfare state and no public education system?

Before I continue I should note that Mr. Lind has some criteria that determine whether or not a country qualifies as a real country:

But this isn’t an adequate response. Libertarian theorists have the luxury of mixing and matching policies to create an imaginary utopia. A real country must function simultaneously in different realms—defense and the economy, law enforcement and some kind of system of support for the poor. Being able to point to one truly libertarian country would provide at least some evidence that libertarianism can work in the real world.

In order to be a real country there must be some kind of entity providing defense, an unspecified amount of interference in the economy, law enforcement, and some system of support for the poor. Based on Mr. Lind’s previous writings and the tone of this article I am lead to believe that he thinks the state should provide those services and therein lies the problem. Based on Mr. Lind’s criteria there can never be a libertarian country because a libertarian country, by definition, wouldn’t have a state providing those services, they would be provided through voluntary means.

With that said it is now time to jump into the meat of my rebuttal. Although libertarianism is often seen as a political philosophy it is more accurately a philosophy regarding human interaction. Most branches of libertarianism build off of the non-aggression principle, which is a principle that simply states initiating aggression is wrong. Theft, rape, and murder are acts of initiated aggression and are therefore seen as wrong under libertarianism whereas self-defense is seen as a response to aggression and is therefore right. The insidious part about libertarianism is that we live it every day without realizing it. Every time you go to a restaurant and decided to buy your food instead of stealing it you are performing a libertarian act. Voluntary interactions are, by definition, libertarian in nature.

States are the opposite of libertarianism, they are entities built on initiating aggression. The state raises wealth through expropriation. Taxes and fines are both examples of theft because the state is giving the people an ultimatum: pay taxes and fines or face kidnapping, detainment, or death. In fact every law declared by the state has the same ultimatum: obey or be enslaved or killed. Something as minor as a parking ticket can lead to your death. Most people scoff at that claim because they’ve never heard of somebody actually being killed. The reason people aren’t killed over parking tickets isn’t because of the state’s benevolence, it’s because most people perform a cost-benefit analysis and decide paying the ticket offers a greater benefit than a standoff with a state thug. However, if you failed to pay a parking ticket you will likely be kidnapped by a cop who will put you in a cage. After spending some time in a cage you’ll likely be brought before a man in a robe who will order you to pay the ticket. If you don’t pay the ticket that robed man will decided to either put you back in a cage or garnish your wages. The latter option may lead you to work underground so you have no visible income for the state to take and then the state will come after you for not paying income tax. Eventually the only option that will be given to you is a cage and if you refuse to go into the cage you will be forced into it. If you refuse to go quietly, that is to say if you defend yourself, you will be killed. That’s how the state works.

Countries, by definition, are entities recognized by other entities. In our world an entity is recognized as a country if it is ruled by a state. This criteria for recognition isn’t surprising since it’s usually other states that decide whether or not another state is a valid country. The reason there are no libertarian countries is because libertarianism is the opposite of statism and in our modern vernacular the word country is synonymous with state.

Libertarian societies have existed and still exist. Medieval Ireland [PDF], medieval Iceland, the American West, and Neutral Moresnet were all historical examples of, what could be properly referred to say, libertarian societies. Today the region referred to as Zomia still exists as a libertarian society. In the case of Zombia many states claim jurisdiction over the area but none have any actual authority over the people living there because those people refuse to bow down. Instead, for the past 2,000 years, they have preferred a voluntary society based on cooperation, ritual, and tradition instead of coercion.

There are no libertarian countries but there are libertarian societies and each and every one of us lives most of our lives in a libertarian manner. Those who live outside of libertarian manners generally end up in a cage, dead, employes as cops, or politicians.