The courts in Sweden are highly politicized. As is common in civil law countries (like most Western non-anglo-saxon countries), the Swedish court system is not based on principles such as the courts or judges discovering law (which is, originally, the case in common law countries) – they but enforce the law as decided by The Ruler, be he king or a faceless parliament – and trial by peers (the jury system).

The courts do, however, have a pseudo-jury system where a judge runs the show but a number of people are chosen to assist the judge in finding the defendant guilty or not guilty of crime. These people are appointed by the political parties with representation in the parliament. In other words, there is a kind of political jury system where the political elite gets to appoint who will make sure justice is upheld. That the same elite enacts the law that is tried in the courts is not a problem to most Swedes, it seems.

In this particular trial, a high-profile trial with international coverage, the politicization of the Swedish courts is extra troublesome. The road to the trial has been paved with scandals, where the entertainment industry’s organization Antipiratbyrån not only has done the police’s job at raides against private web hosting firms, but they have worked closelly with the police investigators and even hired or paid a number of them. Furthermore, the U.S. government has pressured the Swedish government into taking a number of actions that are not necessarily allowed in the Swedish system of “justice” – sometimes even outright prohibited. 

This has not stopped the investigation, however, which is still partly based on what was found or interpretations made based on the illegal investigations. The propaganda war is also an important part of the story, where the public obviously supports and engages in file sharing (both the legal and the copyright-violating kinds) while the political elite is whole-heartedly on the side of the industry. In fact, the political elite has been enacting a number of laws significantly reducing the rights and privacy of Swedish citizens only to get to the small number of illegal file-sharers.

It is in this context that a trial with a judge and politically appointed judge assistants (nämndemän) is highly problematic. But, as I have already mentioned, this seems to not be a big problem in the Swedish public debate. The special interest owns the political elite, and the political elite both enacts and enforces the law.

Furthermore, the trial has been tragicomic. The defendants’ lawyers have very frequently objected to the prosecutor’s use of evidence not previously shown to the court. There are transcripts from the courts showing how one of the defendant’s lawyer objects saying the prosecutor is “doing it again” and that he “did it yesterday” and “will you never learn?” The court never disallowed the evidence even though the defendants had to react without any preparation whatsoever.

Also, the court has consistently misunderstood what the technology does. The prosecutor has repeatedly made statements about the “copyrighted files on the Pirate Bay server,” whereas anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the bit torrent technology knows that there should be no such files. The Pirate Bay had only a torrent library – a type of links that any search engine also has (but torrent/file links, not web links).

These problems set aside, what has caused a debate after the conviction is that new information about the judge has surfaced. Not only is he ignorant of this particular technology and allowed the prosecutor’s consistent use of procedurally prohibited conduct. He is also a member of the Swedish Organization for Copyright. In other words, he is a member of the organization that promotes copyrights and has done so since 1954.

Does this mean the trial is dismissed and needs to be done all over again? Not necessarily – the court could decide that his membership further his knowledge of the issue rather than makes him biased. And it is likely that the request for appeal from the defendants will generate exactly this assessment. 

How, then, would the appeals court assess the fact that this same judge asked (asked, not ordered) one of the politically appointed assistants to step down and leave the court due to probable bias because he was a musician and member of the same organization? It would probably think this is a separate issue and that it was the correct call by the judge…

The fact is that this is a minor issue considering what has been going on for a long time during the investigations. Police investigators have been contracted by the Antipiratbyrån and then, when/if fired from the police, hired by them. The Antipiratbyrån folks have been assisting the police during raides even though it is strictly illegal to do so – yet the politicized system of “justice” has not reacted. The Swedish government has broken its own laws to please the U.S. government and a U.S.-based industry that is way off track and unwilling to change its business strategies despite the technological advances. And the entertainment industry has received legal privileges to take actions that not even the police has the right to take.

There are simply so many strange things going on that undermine the court system, the government legal system, the legitimacy of enactment and enforcement of laws for the sake of protecting a relic of intellectual property, that this doubtlessly will be known to future generations as something to be truly ashamed about. That is, if you are a statist. If you are not, then this was expected; what was not expected is that this has been going on without even trying to cover it up.

It is true that agorists in general do not fancy “organization, hierarchy, leaders and followers, etc.”, which is a common preference among anarchists of all varieties. Rothbard (and Klein) is right in that there is not necessarily anything wrong with voluntary organization or voluntary “membership” in hierarchical structures where one is subjected to the rule of majority vote or the whims of a ruler. But as good economists both Rothbard and Klein seem to assume too much: there is nothing wrong with making an informed decision to take a low-level position in a hierarchy ceteris paribus.

Ceteris paribus should here be understood as choosing in a situation where the only thing that distinguishes the hierarchical position from the non-hierarchical is hierarchy. But this is hardly ever the case in State society. Rather, individuals have to choose (if at all) from a very limited set of alternatives, where hierarchy and submission is part of all or most of the alternatives. Vietnamese children working in a Nike sweatshop are better off than as child prostitutes, ceteris paribus. But one cannot take the choices as exogenous to the political situation in the area, the region, the country, or the world. A political theory such as agorism needs to take into account the effect of political rule in the choices people make.

Agorists do just that: they realize that the limited options for a child, i.e. working in a sweat shop or becoming a prostitute, are not the result of the market but of political institutions. The choice in itself may be easy, but the context certainly isn’t. The person making the choice is subjected to political oppression through the unavailability of choices due to political regulation, rule, and coercive institutions.

This is not the same as making choices “subject to” alternatives made available in a free(d) market. The market measures costs to benefits and awards individuals with alternatives to the extent economically feasible. Political rule, however, causes imbalances in the marketplace which forcefully (directly or indirectly) removes alternatives that should have existed were it not for political oppressive rule. The choice between a sweat shop and prostitution is a choice only because of politics; it is not a “real” choice set, since it is forcefully limited.

The same is true with any choices we make today, and agorists, compared to other anarcho-capitalists, tend to put more weight on the choices that have been forcefully taken away from us. While many libertarians would compare a choice to status quo, an agorist would compare the choice situation with that which should obviously have been real in a free market. It is not an economic analysis, it is a political analysis based on a radical passion for justice.

This is relevant to the debate on organization, since agorists have a slightly different perspective than anarcho-capitalists, especially economist anarcho-capitalists. There is of course nothing supporting any counter-factual view on what would have been the case under different circumstances. But it is reasonable to draw some conclusions: the child would have more alternatives in a free market than sweat shop work and prostitution, of which some would likely have been better than both.

Only the better alternatives are important to our analysis, but it is safe to say that we can remain fairly confident that such better alternatives (subjectively identified and valued) would exist. State oppression has therefore deprived the child (in this case) from the choice he or she would have made were it not for State oppression. An economic analysis, at least using the tools commonly taught in academia, is too limited: it does not take into account the fundamental and far-reaching effect of the State on institutions and individual as well as collective behavior.

From this perspective, it is not necessarily the case that people in a freed setting would organize the way the presently choose to. It could be the case that people organize in large corporations, but it is unlikely. Why? Because people in general tend to dislike being “bossed around” by others, and they tend to very often dislike management because it is management or because they believe management’s decisions are incorrect or improper. Ask yourself: in a free(d) market, would more or fewer people choose to work in large structures where their actions are subjected to the decisions/management by others?

The answer isn’t necessarily obvious, but considering the multitude of organizational solutions that would be available were it not for the State, as well as the cost of e.g. corporation-like limited liability if fully internalized by the individual actor/organization, the answer becomes clearer. Agorists don’t despise or dislike organization per se, but I believe it is reasonable to say their analysis takes more facts into account. In quantitative economics lingo, agorists tend to control for many more variables.

So how does this relate to Klein’s post and the Rothbard quote? It provides the reason agorists, on average, are more skeptical than other libertarians to contemporary organizational structures. Agorist theory does not dismiss organization, but agorist class theory identifies, comparatively speaking, a great many more State-caused and State-inflicted problems with severe effects on the very bases on which choices are made. This makes agorists more skeptical towards organizational choices in contemporary State society.

If it were indeed the case that agorists were opposed to organization in and of itself, they would abstain from organize themselves. But this is not the case: agorists organize their efforts in the Molinari Institute as well as the Center for a Stateless Society and the Agorist Action Alliance.

Furthermore, agorists are strong proponents of voluntary organizing of free markets to create individual wealth while withdrawing support for the state to the greatest degree possible and providing real and viable free alternatives to State-controlled institutions. Agorism provides a theory for how to set the world free through liberating yourself and thereby fully take advantage of the economic incentives naturally provided in a free society. So-called counter-economics is a cornerstone in agorist theory and practice, and arranging or joining a counter-economy is voluntary in a sense no choice made in the State sanctioned market ever is. This is perhaps what distinguishes agorists from anarcho-capitalists the most: that they define “voluntary” in a much more absolutist sense.

Cross posted as a comment to Klein’s blog post. For more information, see my articles Saving the World through Saving Yourself, A Strategy for Forcing the State Back, and my previous blog post The Savior Complex.

What I am referring to is the scientific world view. This is not the scientific drive, i.e. the motivation to find the truth and to learn about the world, but the overly scientific anti-identification of that which is studied. It is as prevalent in the social sciences as it is in politics and buesiness management. There are no people around anymore, there’s only statistics and faceless aggregates.

In economics this is very obvious – the study of human action is almost completely reduced to discussions on how to mitigate biases and avoid multicollinearity in econometric functions. Now, in what sense would you gain understanding of why people act in certain ways through tweaking regression models? The obvious answer – and it is so obvious most economists simply don’t see it – is that you don’t. You don’t gain any knowledge whatsoever of why people acted a certain way through running tests of heteroskedasticity and deciding whether or not to use “White’s estimator.”

Economics is the most obvious victim of what I would like to call scientism, the belief that anything that uses aggregates and that is seemingly universal – through (at any price) avoiding to acknowledge the identity or personality of the individuals studied – is more valuable as a science. Actually, the common view is that as long as you can hide the fact that there are individuals in “the data” any conclusions you might draw are generally applicable.

In a recent discussion with a fellow student, I claimed that the empirical study of people is totally worthless unless your aim is to understand why exactly those individuals acted in that exact way in that exact situation. My point was that if the “experiment” would be repeated with the same people (as “data”) the outcome would be completely different because people learn. And if it would be repeated, and the situation could be set up exactly the same way, but the “data” (the people) would be different individuals the outcome would still be different – simply because they are different people and therefore react differently in a number of ways.

And on top of it all, these examples are still ridiculous – it simply isn’t possible to create the exact same situation again and expose people to it. Even if the setting (or framework) would be the same, the people would have different subjective experiences (no matter if they are “the same” or “others”), which would affect the results.

One could argue that this is why we have confidence intervals and standard deviations. But that implies that people act in such a way that the outcome of everybody’s actions are nicely distributed in a bell-shaped curve. How often would you say that happens? That would depend on what kind of people you happen to have in your sample, wouldn’t it? The point is that one cannot study people the way one studies dead matter, simply because people are people, i.e. thinking creatures that learn from experience and that aren’t reducible to a “nature” the same way a rock would be.

This “scientism” is not only prevalent in the [social] sciences – it is a cornerstone of modern politics as well as business management. In politics there is no such thing as an individual; it simply doesn’t happen that politicians discuss a certain individual. And if they happen to use the word “individual” they use it as a stereotypical “nature” of the items in the population they rule. In my ten years in party politics, I haven’t heard one politician discuss how decisions or policies affect individuals – the best I’ve heard is the use of stereotypical examples of “the average family” or “the single mom.” But never did anyone care to add flesh and blood to their dead skeletons.

There is a reason for this, even though politicians are usually too stupid to understand it. It simply isn’t possible to propose or support policies that affect people’s lives unless you make sure to forget that they are real people. Even cold-hearted, ignorant, and self-centered politicians wouldn’t have the guts nor morality to put hundreds or thousands of people in misery through pushing a button. Most people simply don’t have it in them to coldly calculate plusses and minuses while radically and forcefully change the lives of a great number of people with the stroke of a pen.

The lesson to learn is this: would there really be wars if those waging wars would see each and every person they would have to send to their deaths? It is unlikely, even though there are some really, really disturbed people out there.

The same is the case in large corporations, where the CEO or president usually has no clue about the people working for him (or her). Of course, the nature of a corporation is distinctly different from that of a state – the corporation gives, and any punishment from a corporation is to “not give”; a state takes, and any punishment is to “take more” or “kill” whereas every “reward” consists of “taking less” away from that person. Corporations can no doubt be horrible, but they are not a state.

The problem we have here is the “scientific” way of approaching one’s work: scientists who have no idea that the statistics they’re using are really people, won’t mind drawing horrible conclusions; politicians not understanding there are individuals and individual suffering as a result of every decision they make, don’t have a problem with “redistributing” from some to some or killing off some for the benefit of others; and business managers can take irresponsible risks when they can “simply”, if something goes wrong, cut the corporation’s employment with “10%” rather than, which is equally true, throw hundreds of families into unemployment and misery.

Scientism is the problem, and it arises as an effect of centralization. Centralization calls for stereotypes and grouping, for one-policy-fits-all kind of decisions, and cold-hearted leadership for some unidentified aim. What this world so desperately needs is radical decentralization. The problem with our society is not only that there is a huge parasitic cancer tumor feeding off our lives and liberties (i.e., the State), but that it is too large-scale and too centralized. Not only must the State go, but we need to get back to seeing people as people.

Seeing people as people is what so many individuals in our world have forgotten. Be they scientists, politicians or corporate managers – they all share the same fallacy in thinking that scale is a good thing, that personal ties are “in the way” and a problem for efficiency or whatever.

I am a person and I intend to continue being one. You better start seeing me as one.

Since this, for political activists holding post-enlightenment individual rights dearly,  is a battle that has to be fought on many [political] levels, the discussion sometimes seems a bit irritated or frustrated. And properly so, there is no way a discussion limited to the blogosphere can change political discussions unless they manage to mobilize large numbers of people to protest the decisions. They are indeed trying and trying, but failing.

One method that is used by the activists trying to push government back through stopping the mass surveillance propositions, and one that is very often used by political interests and interest groups as well as (I presume) lobbyists, is the power of individual contact with the people’s representatives in the regional, national, or supernational parliaments. Politicians, as we know, tend to seek the path of least resistance. If too many people complain and ask the politicians to stop doing whatever it is they’re doing, they often choose to not do it. After all, they tend to believe that they are the representatives of the people, but as such they are also subject to the popular vote – and making enemies might mean losing office.

The method is presumed to be effective, since politicians want to stay in power and supposedly tend to listen if a large number of people state that they reject a certain policy. Most of the frequent political power-grabs are done without anyone at all finding out (at least, not until it is way too late), but when politicians have the great unfortune of people finding out what they are up to they do [pre]tend to listen.

But is this really an effective means to change politics and to push back the State’s continuous attempts to feed of yet a few of our liberties? First of all, anyone realizes that the method has an inherent problem: it is dependent on a sufficient number of people caring enought to actually do something to stop it, and this in turn requires organization to make it happen. Reaching out and then making sure people do what they are supposed to is, it seems, almost always a too great obstacle to overcome. So most attempts fail.

The failures to make use of the method should not, however, affect our analysis of whether it is an effective method (if used properly). That a lot of attempts do fail is a problem of organization and should make most groups reconsider and perhaps choose a different method for whatever political aim they may have, but it does not mean the method is inherently bad.

Also, the illusion – and it is an illusion – that politicians actually listen to the electorate is at best quite naive, but it also most seriously affects the effectiveness of this method. Politicians have no reason to listen to the electorate simply because they have the power and can hide behind not being accountable – their actions are almost never individual actions but group actions, and as such it is both difficult to identify who is responsible for what. And even if this were the case, there is almost never only one or a few politicians responsible for a decision: they voted as they did because of log rolling, their “hands were tied” (which is not true, but I certainly wish this was the case), or “one has to choose one’s battles,” and there are most certainly other ways of seeing it so that the individual politician “tried his best.”

Furthermore, and this is an important point, the attempt to make politicians listen to the electorate through contacting them about a certain issue presumes the democratic system works the way we’re taught that democracies work. This is literally never the case: democratic States are not “of the people, by the people, for the people” but of the ruling class, by the ruling class and for the ruling class – at the expense of the people.

But there are other reasons why this is an inherently bad method.

Contacting politicians trying to make them change their minds about something is the same as sucking up to them. Being utterly despicable people who are so insignificant and rotten that have no other way of achieving a sense of greatness but by using hired muscles to push idiotic policies down people’s throats, and this is what politicians are, they are in office mainly for people to suck up to them. Politicians like to be treated the way they demand to be treated: as a post-feudalism class of kings and masters.

The reason politicians “listen” to the electorate is not that they serve those who vote, but because they are so fundamentally worthless in the marketplace for products and services that they are terrified of not being reelected. And they are so utterly small-minded that they cannot even imagine a life where they are not rulers with serfs, where they do not enjoy the illusion of being a just ruling class “to serve others.”

In the freed market, where people may lead their lives as they see fit, you truly serve others – you make a living and profits through making other people’s lives better in a number of ways. This is, in essence, what politicians try to achieve without doing the work necessary: they want to be both “of service” and through it enjoy people’s gratitude and not put in a cent’s worth of labor. They want to free-ride on everybody else only to balance the fact that they are truly insignificant and couldn’t ever be successful in actually helping people.

In fact, politicians want to enjoy the might and glory of absolutist royalty.

The democratic State is but the extension of the feudal system. The difference is that the democratic State allows for some mobility (you can join the ruling class, and you can be thrown out of the palace) but also demands and requires the illusion of legitimacy. Feudalism was never legitimate and never asked for legitimacy – it was a system based solely on violent force. But the “modern” power of the democratic State is one that thrives only when it is considered legitimate in the minds of its slaves; it is, therefore, more devilishly evil in how it has solved the problem of keeping slaves in line, but at the same time vulnerable. There is a reason why democratic States find it necessary to have public schooling, public day care centers for children, an dpublicly financed science. Without the brain washing, the State would evaporate.

This is why contacting “one’s representative” in whatever parliament is such a bad method: it only strengthens the legitimacy of their rule, increases their power, while reinforcing your statist mindset. Not only do politicians like it, they are dependent on it. And they play the game of “listening” to voters simply because that is how they best play the game – changing their vote for a future policy when people seem to want it is but to strengthen the foundation of political power.

As the political activists working so hard to force government back (if only stopping its one small step forward) should realize every time they are “successful,” the policy will still be enacted as law. The only difference, except for perhaps the wording of the proposition, is that it may be postponed a little bit. And at the same time, political power as an [oppressive] institution has been reinforced so that it will last yet another set of years.

So when you engage in writing letters to politicians, what exactly would you expect to accomplish? You are the slave pleading to your masters, where the masters thrive off your crawling in the mud at their feet: they still get to say whether or not and you have to abide by their wishes.

I say get upp from where you are kneeling; stop the groveling. You are a slave but there is no reason for you to encourage and cherish your masters. It is better to stand tall and proud than to kneel to the ugliest power seen by man; I would rather let them be and take the pain than fight them in their game played in their backyard and according to their rules – where winning is possibly only through further subjection.

I choose to fight them through refusing to grant them legitimacy, not through accepting their fake sense of rightousness and pleading to their “good will.” They have no good will – they claim us as slaves and long to be our masters. It is only through peaceful non-compliance that the oppressive bluff can be called; only though refusing to play along can the true face of the system be seen.

Do you think submission to your masters is an effective way of bringing about change?

Of course, this doesn’t make much sense. Why would anyone blow himself up only because someone else is free? And are there thousands or millions of people like that? There could very well be some people who would consider dying for restricting others’ freedoms – at least, we know there are people willing to send others to die for this cause. After all, politicians and kings have acted in exactly this way for centuries. So the threat could be real.

But why is the threat limited to a certain ethnic group (Arabs) living in a certain region (the Middle East) and belonging to a certain religion (Islam)? There should be quite a few old-style Soviet Russians who would die to (even literally) see the old arch enemy the United States tremble with fear. And we know that anti-Americanism is a prevalent phenomenon in places like Europe and Latin America. Yet the warmongering politicians on Capitol Hill point only at Muslim Arabs living in the Middle East (and to some degree Muslim Arabs in the United States). This doesn’t make any sense.

Sense or nonsense, let’s play with the thought that the hatred towards freedom is ethnically, geographically, and religiously conditioned, i.e. that the political rascals are right. Then it wouldn’t make any sense to attack Iraq and Afghanistan while partnering with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and even subsidize the regimes in the latter countries. If these people really hate “us” because we are free and this hatred is an effect of them being Muslim Arabs living in the Middle East, then why are some our allies and others our enemies?

After all, the official version of the Iraq war is that the Iraqi people has been liberated and that a new, democratically elected government shall take over and rule the land. Why would such a government have any effect on the people’s hatred? Wouldn’t it be better to occupy the country and have American politicians directly rule the Iraqi people through a government loyal to Washington, D.C., and populated by non-Arab, non-Muslim, non-Middle Eastern people? Attacking Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein and terrorism while handing over power to a people that according to the official propaganda “hates us” simply “because we are free” doesn’t make any sense.

But let’s assume that it does make sense, i.e. that their hatred is ethnically, geographically, and religiously based but that they can easily be taught not to hate if they can rule themselves through democratic process. And let’s assume this hatred is limited only to groups in the countries currently occupied by the United States as well as Iran but not its allies (forget about Usama bin Laden being Saudi and the Al Qaida camps in Pakistan for a minute). Then what?

The most important task for the United States government is pretty obvious: hunt the “haters” down in order to preserve the freedoms they hate so much and are willing to die to see us lose.

I’ll readily admit that the US government is doing the hunting, even though they are obviously pretty darn bad at it. Or did the CIA train Usama (oops…) so well that he now can so totally fool his former teachers? In either case, the hunting for this man and his fellow terrorists goes on seven years after the terrible events on 9/11 that literally shocked the whole world.

But what about our freedoms? They have carefully been dismantled by the same government that is now in the Middle East spending our money to kill the people who are threats to those very freedoms. The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and a whole set of new laws have given the United States government enormous powers (read: removed formal paper-barriers) to listen in on people’s phone calls, steal their properties, throw them in jail, torture and even kill them – without any restrictions or individual rights at all.

This doesn’t make any sense at all, unless the government is very, very serious about removing the threat at any cost. Hunting down the terrorists while stripping Americans of all their freedoms would certainly thwart all threats to those now forever lost freedoms: there will be no one to hate us, and nothing to hate. But is the cost worth it? Is the government, presumably instituted among men to protect our “inalienable” rights, really representing us when it strips us of those rights in order to “protect” us?

We can only conclude that even if we accept a lot of the political BS we’re fed as truths, the argument still doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense at all.

Yet many seem to fall for it.

Of course, in our modern and civilized society, at least in the so-called West, there’s almost no reason to quickly devour the food. There’s plenty of food and plenty of time to eat it, and eating too fast is usually a bad thing – our bodies tell us to slow down. But the instinct is hard to overcome, since it is and has been so fundamental for our survival as species for three million years.

So when we’re really hungry and are served food we basically give in to the caveman withing – we forget everything that is civilized and expected of us only to get those calories our bodies need to continue functioning.

The same seems to have been the case in politics in this century. Just like people used to eating a lot easier get hungry, politicians learned in the 20th century that they had a lot of power within their grasp. In fact, their powers increased greatly during the last centry, often as a product of unnecessary (the propaganda somehow left out the “un” of the word) wars fought only to increase the powers of the State. With such an appetite built up by the political class, we’re bound to see a quickly growing State – and thus to see our liberties being quickly undermined and taken away.

Then came the crises in the 1970s and the following credit-based “glorious” 1980s, and with them came a change that the statists on the left are still talking about: the so-called revolutions of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. These were not regimes as great for individual liberty as statists on the right often claim they were, but they nevertheless to some degree forced back the State in certain areas. In other words: political power was forcefully decreased – mostly in rhetoric, but also to some degree in reality. A new trend was seen in the Western world, where the State was slightly pushed back in order to utilize the enormous wealth producing potential of the market.

Politicians, often in the statist left, loudly complained about sometimes fictional and sometimes obvious injustices caused by these new economy-supporting (big business fascist) polices. The so-called globalization that this caused has since been a bad word for leftist statists.

Politicians on the statist right enjoyed their time in the sun, since they rhetorically are advocates of a less restricted economy and therefore in the minds of people were the creators of the new economy and the great prosperity it generated. (How politicians can be thought of as creators of something good in any normal sense of the word is completely incomprehensible – they are at best relatively harmless parasites.) But the statist right soon found that a somewhat liberated people and economy is much more difficult to command – while they had gained and strengthened their power as the economy seemed to be booming (in pre-inflation numbers, of course) they were losing power at a fast rate as people got richer.

In some sense, but hardly in general terms, the powers of the State were somewhat more restricted compared to what it had been before. Or rather: the steady and ever increasing rate of bigger government in the Western world throughout the 20th century had somewhat declined. And, as we know, with a learned habit to consume large volumes of wealth comes a great appetite. This appetite could not be satisfied, and so the politicians suffered.

It was not until the terrible events on 9/11 that the trend could be reversed. President Bush and his hungry lackees quickly seized the opportunity and played on people’s fears to gain support for radically strip Americans of their rights and freedoms while starting wars in order to further keep the people in the dark and make them agree to support “temporarily” established torture champers, to not mind thousands of dead soldiers in foreign lands, to approve of increased taxes (mostly indirectly through government debt), and to accept the “need” for government to seize totalitarianism powers domestically.

Bush and his league of starved, power-craving parasites took advantage of the situation and did what any starving caveman would at a table filled with foods: they devoured anything they could get their hands on, and they did it quickly – possibly (hopefully) more quickly than they should’ve.

As soon as cavemen (politicians) around the world learned of this opportunity they set out to do the same thing. After all, they too were starving for greater powers and unrestricted possibilities of growing their supply of it. And so countries all over the world have adopted the “anti-terrorism” laws that fundamentally restrict the domestic populations and strip them of any rights against the government that they supposedly used to enjoy. That these laws do not target terrorists or even people the State would consider terrorists (i.e., people not paying “enough” taxes) to the same degree they are all directed towards the domestic population.

Surveillance and control hardly ever target such things terrorists would be likely to use (the government doesn’t have such great imagination); they only target what most people use or do most of the time. We now have large-scale phone and e-mail surveillance, video-monitored public places, and a large number of authorities that need to approve of our intention to do certain things. Who can truthfully say they believe politicians sincerely thing they will stifle terrorism through listening in on your aunt’s phone calls or monitor her actions while riding the subway or buying groceries?

The new powers established by and for the State are even more ridiculous considering where these measures have been taken. For instance, Sweden will shortly allow its military to routinely save and catalogue all e-mail and phone traffic at any point transmitted across the national border. Now who would’ve thought that Sweden, the cowardly State not even brave enough to take a stand as the Allies were winning WWII, would be a target for terrorists? The fact that all parties unreservedly support this large-scale surveillance should tell us something – it is so obviously in the political powers’ interest to have this infrastructure of surveillance that they don’t even bother to make it seem like there are differences between the parties.

What we’re seeing is simply starving politicians devouring everything they can get their hands on. And they will be at it for as long as people let them, since there are of course no real restrictions on government. They are in power and they make the restrictions; they can at any time repeal or ignore these restrictions if it is in their interest.

I, for one, hope they devour our liberties so fast they choke to death – or at least get a really bad stomach ache.

Ron Paul, even though his ideology and political agenda is a whole lot better than the alternatives, is still a politician and as such he is necessarily the enemy of liberty. In previous posts (see links below) I predicted what would happen if the Paul campaign was successful, e.g. that Ron Paul might cause a divide in the libertarian movement and make people more strongly embrace party politics as a way forward (or – even worse – make people who have been “properly disillusioned” go back to politics). Most of my predictions have turned out to be true, even though the libertarian divide between pro-politics and anti-politics libertarians is not as obvious as I feared. (The libertarian party is doing a better job than Ron Paul in creating this divide.)

I was sad to see that so many anarchist libertarians so wholeheartedly embraced his campaign and spent both time, energy, and money to support his candidature and campaign. Whether he has a chance to win or not is of little relevance when you give up your principles.

Even though I would never endorse, and even less vote for, Ron Paul, I have followed his campaign and been overwhelmed (in a good way) by the enormous crowds attracted by his sincere message of less government. There was indeed a small-government remnant both within and without the republican party; they are politics-embracing libertarians (which is no doubt an evil union that has to be undone), but still in many ways libertarians. These people may potentially change the political scene in the United States, at least temporarily, but I doubt we will notice it much. Politics is not a means for liberty, it is a means only for taking liberty away from people.

But despite the problems and evils born and strengthened by Ron Paul’s campaign, there are a few things for which he and his “movement” deserve my and other anti-politics libertarians’ gratitude. I am not referring to the huge crowds of people who now might have learned about libertarian ideals and ideas, and possibly begin calling themselves libertarians – they may still be a problem, even though many of these people may also potentially become principled anti-state libertarians.

The most important contribution of Ron Paul’s campaign lies in the republican party and how the party has reacted to his supporters. The republican party, with its roots in a somewhat libertarian idea (the “Old Right”), have been seen as a natural ally in party politics by many statist libertarians. Their continuous talk of free markets and small government, even though they never do what they say, seems to attract libertarians who have a hard time getting rid of their belief in politics as a means for liberty.

But the republican party has shown its true face and should attract these people no more.

Wherever Ron Paul’s supporters have attended conventions and caucuses, the party has reacted by breaking its own rules and bylaws to keep them out. Some meetings were forcefully shut down as soon as the state party’s Politburo realized the “status quoers” weren’t in majority (read: Nevada); in others, the party elite simply broke their own rules in desperate attempts to keep “Paulians” off the list of delegates to the national convention (read: Minnesota).

I don’t find this behavior at all surprising, but I am pretty sure many partyarchs do. The political elite in the republican party, just like in any party, have invested all they have in the status quo and can only benefit from there being no challenges to it. They will of course do whatever it takes to oppose and eliminate attempts to change the state of things. Not only are these leaders potential future leaders in the federal mafia (a.k.a. government), but they are also part of the national mafia network which so fundamentally depends on status quo.

Only naive people would have expected the party elite to play by the rules and accept any attempts to change the party playing by the book. There is no such thing as a party elite open for change; there is no such thing as a party elite embracing the free and open struggle of ideas in respectful discussion leading to a synthesis of ideas in a new party program. Some may claim to embrace such change, but in reality they only do as long as the change is marginal and doesn’t affect core policies.

In the party of war, one cannot be allowed to speak of peace.

Ron Paul’s campaign has made it obvious that the republican party is like any other party – that it does not and cannot embrace ideas of freedom (lesser government, more peace, etc.). It is an organization primarily for the purpose of gaining, keeping, and using power. There is no point in having power if you do not wish to use it; parties may be founded on glorious principles, but they always degenerate to the basic function of a political party: a collective body of people aiming for power.

It is in this sense I am grateful for Ron Paul’s campaign; he has made it obvious that the republican party is not a refuge for freedom-lovers (even statist such) – the actions of the power elite in the party make that all too clear. There is no reason to assume these are unique events or triggered by a few corrupt individuals; the potential for this type of behavior is inherent in any political body, and the republican party is not an exception to this rule.

A party is a party is a party, and this is now more obvious than ever. For this I thank Ron Paul.

For more on Ron Paul on this blog, see Revenge of the Old Right? and On the “Ron Paul Problem”, and my articles Let’s Join Forces for Liberty and The Ron Paul Problem. See also the article Ron Paul–en republikan att ta på allvar? published in Swedish.

It actually makes sense even for an anti-government libertarian to celebrate Memorial Day. It is a day for remembering all the pointless wars fought by the State only to have people killed. These wars, like any war no matter if they were directed against “our own” or people from far away places, served their purpose: they caused destruction, suffering, and death. As a libertarian, I mourn the people who were enslaved by the State and their lives sacrificed for the “glory” of it. They died in vain, literally pushed to their deaths, and their deaths are nothing but proofs of the brutal and literally anti-life nature of the State.

From this libertarian position, however, I also feel a need to make a distinction between soldiers. It should be obvious that there are two distinctly different kinds of people who are enlisted for State-sanctioned murder: there are those who do not have a choice, who are forcefully and brutally enslaved – “drafted” – and cannot escape their being “hired” murderers no matter how desperately they want to. And there is also the kind that voluntarily sign up to “pay their dues” and “do the right thing” for “their country.”

I mourn the former and dedicate Memorial Day to these people – no matter their nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, or whatever – who were ruthlessly sent to their deaths by an untouchable class of political “leaders” who cared not for them, their lives, or their struggles. All wars have been waged for petty reasons; in each and every case a war has been fought to further the power of the ruling class (domestically or internationally), or for the prestige or the “need” for the “leaders” to “save face.” The wars have never been fought because they were necessary; the necessity of war is and has always been a lie, part of the propaganda the populations have been force-fed by their rulers in order to accept death in an inhumane struggle to see other people dead.

I do not mourn the latter, who have chosen to enlist according to the myth of the glory of the State that they have chosen to believe. There is no doubt in my mind that many of these young men and women who willingly put on the uniform and pull the trigger think they are doing the right thing, and there is also no doubt in my mind that many of them think so in utter ignorance. They are, indeed, victims of hundreds of years of government propaganda, of false and empty statements of honor and glory and freedom often repeated by close friends and relatives. How honorable and glorious and free are they not now that they have died in foreign lands while pursuing their quest to kill fellow human beings and destroy the results of human creation?

I do, however, mourn the fact that so many so willingly and eagerly choose to be killers with the State’s sanction. These soldiers are victims too, victims of their own ignorance and the social pressure of their gullible peers, friends and family. These were people who were falsely advised to take employment as murderers for the State thinking it is a glorious career, despite the fact that all people doing exactly so throughout history for losing States have always been condemned as nothing but murderers.

Only murderers on the winning “team” will see their horrible deeds forgiven and even hailed by the deceived and defrauded masses. This is a truth that we are taught in history books if we choose to think rather than just be fed opinions – the loser-killers were always to be loathed villains while the winner-killers would be celebrated heroes. Only ignorance can make you see the latter but not the former; only ignorance can make you believe you will be celebrated and not loathed.

I think about these willing murderers in a way that is very different from how I mourn their drafted colleagues; I pity them because they died for nothing, believing nothing was everything. They chose to believe in and live a lie, while the facts were readily at hand; they chose falsehood before righteousness, justice, and peace.

Memorial Day is a day for remembrance of the horrors of the State and the people executing its orders. It is a day to remember the millions who died for nothing, either ruthlessly enslaved or lured by the State to carry out its horrible deeds. This is a day to remember that the ruling class never have and never will care about the people, and that they consider us all as pawns in a game for power. They are never willing risk their lives or even their properties, but they eagerly send thousands, if not millions, of other people to their deaths only to better their reputation or reestablish the myth of glory for the leaders of the State.

This day is a day to remember those who perished under the yoke of the State and those who so eagerly sent so many to their deaths. Memorial Day should be celebrated to remember the ruthlessness of our rulers, be they claimed to be appointed by god, the people, or themselves.

This is sadly true of many minarchist libertarians, who tend to somewhere deep down believe that government is a just entity, that it in some sense is rational and in the interest of the people. Therefore it comes as a horrid surprise when government does its deeds and “breaks the law” or acts in such a way that it

violates contracts it has entered. So we see comments such as this:

The dispensary’s manager [...] told me that a group of federal thugs agents smashed not only the ten-foot window you see above, but also over twenty glass display cases inside. They then proceeded to steal all the medicine. This isn’t the first raid, either. [...]

Remember, this is a state certified business. It is legally entitled to operate in every way under California law and was doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Here we have a conflict between a state government, which allows a certain act (selling medical marijuana) that the federal government doesn’t like. The effect? At least one of the governments will act to the detriment and cost of the business owner. And at least one government will not do much at all, at least not to protect the business owner.

We have to realize that government does not act to protect us, it acts to primarily protect itself and its interests. And it is usually the case that what is in the interest of the State is not in our interest. Actually, it is usually the very opposite: we would rather not have it, and would even be willing to fight not to get it. I’m of course talking about surveillance, control, taxation (theft), and imprisonment. We could do without these things, and we would probably do a whole lot better without them than with them.

But it is in the State’s interest to keep us under surveillance, to keep us under control, to tax us and imprison us. So the State does exactly those things.

In the case of the business owner in the quote above, he’s acting under the laws enacted and “enforced” (note how our negative rights are often neglected, whereas the State’s self-granted privileges are often hastily enforced) by the State of California but against he policies of the federal agency DEA. There’s a reason he stands unprotected from a federal agency while the protection of his rights by the State of California simply isn’t to find.

The reason for this also lies in the nature of the State: it acts in its own interests, and it strives to centralize power. The State builds and consists of hierarchy, and the higher the levels the better. Power is always pushed upwards, away from the people so that it cannot be taken back or reached by members of the populace. This the exact opposite of how liberty works, which is why the idea of minarchism is at best a bad joke.

Liberty is decentralizing. Liberty can always and only be enjoyed on the lowest level – when there are no hierarchies. Liberty requires, in this sense, equality – without the equal right to liberty there is no liberty. Also, there can be no arbitrary restrictions to liberty – if anyone assumes the right to set the limits of someone else’s liberty, he has claimed the power to rule that individual. And Liberty is immediately lost – for both. Liberty is extremely volatile and tender.

It is therefore impossible to have both government and freedom, both a State and liberty. They are each others’ very opposites and contradict each other. Where there is a State there can be no liberty, and where there is liberty there can be no State.

I have touched on this nature of politics, force, coercion, aggression etc in a previous article, but it is important to repeat this fundamental truth as were it a dogma.

The problem the aforementioned business owner is experiencing, even though he is “not breaking the law” and has “the right” (a.k.a. the State’s permission), is a result of the centralizing process of political power: the State. Whereas the State of California has granted him the right to sell certain substances, the federal government – which is higher in the hierarchy of power – has outlawed it. It is “legally” the case that the State of California still enjoys the “right” to legislate in such issues, but can easily be directly derived from the nature of the State that this “right” is soon to be assumed by the higher level: the “federal” government.

This is a conflict between levels, even though neither of the levels have engaged in direct conflict with the other (rather, they leave each other alone, and let the business owner bear the costs). The natural outcome of the conflict is that the State of California is further stripped of its “powers” to the benefit of the federal government, just like the nature of the State calls for the establishment of a world government to one day take over powers from the federal government.

The power moves further away from the people ruled by it. Just like it is meant to be.

The only alternative is to reinstate liberty and to do so completely. Going half-way to liberty will only leave the State still striving for higher levels of authority and power, and liberty will once again – step by step – be rolled back, limited, restricted, and undermined. The powers of the State cannot be restricted since the State by its very nature must always be growing – it is as possible to have a stable, non-growing State as it is to establish “restricted liberty.”

I discuss this topic further in my latest column on Strike the Root: Should we Hope for Civil War? The column is available here.

For more on decentralization as a way towards liberty, see Freedom Is Never Up.

The free market logic is usually based on the concept of voluntarism, in essence it is argued that whatever is voluntary goes. In a free market, i.e. a market without a huge regulatory state, without taxation, without corporatist and political powers, and without privileges for any class, whatever is voluntary is right. The reason for this is that in a free market each and every individual, individually or collectively, has the right to make all decisions of how, when, and where to act. If this is the case, one can truly and legitimately claim the individual is indeed responsible for his or her choices.

In such a case, if someone would choose to work for someone else at a very bad pay it is a choice. The freed market does not provide barriers of entry or require registration of business entities, and it also may not allow for vast properties in land without its use (depending on who you ask), which means that the individual would always have alternatives. In the freed market, therefore, whatever is the outcome of one’s actions is an effect of choice.

How can one truthfully say that anything is a matter of choice? The reason for this is not that risk and uncertainty do not exist in a free market – they do. All choices are subject to risk and (presumably) uncertainty, but that is the nature of life. Some things don’t turn out exactly as we thought/hoped, but they also might not turn out as bad as we would expect. The action itself is however still the full responsibility of the individual, since it is the effect of a conscious choice.

In the freed market one could easily argue that there would be no desperation or limitations of choices. This There is plentiful of desperation and limitations of choices in contemporary society, which is almost always a result of the state regulating, stealing, and assaulting people. The reason this statement can be made is not that the freed market is necessarily a Garden of Eden where everything is always available at arm length (even though some people seem to think everything would be free), but because the individual’s now is in every sense a result of his past choices just like his future will be a product of his choices now.

This is not the case in the world today, even though some people are desperate to argue this is the case. The reason for this is that most alternatives are forcefully restricted and therefore made not available for the individual. The choices made are made out of a monstrously restricted set of alternatives, where the restriction consists of state regulation, force, and privilege rather than possibly causing other people harm.

In a freed market your choices will be evaluated by what they effectuate: if you choose to act in a certain way to achieve an aim but something goes wrong and you end up hurting someone (or, a hundred times worse, if you aim to hurt someone) you will have to take the consequences. No one will be there to pick up your bill unless you have a special friend that is your personal angel (and people don’t usually have such). So if you cause harm you will have to pay for it in whatever way undoes the harm you caused.

This is to some extent true today too, since it is incorporated in [some] state laws; states usually outlaw murder and theft, at least if done by common people. As Voltaire wrote, “[i]t is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” This is as true today as it was a couple of hundred years ago.

But most of the harm caused to other people are the effect of the state’s actions or choices made by individuals sanctioned by the state. War and taxation are the obvious examples of the state’s terrible impact on people’s lives. If there were no wars (and wars are only fought by or on states) and no taxation, the possible alternatives for people would be much more numerous.

Choices are however also limited in other ways: certain thoughts are not allowed to be uttered, certain ideas cannot be made into goods and services, certain beneficial relationships are prohibited. Freedom of speech is limited, which means there is a constant constraint put on individuals in their actions and discussions, which in turn leaves a lot of great ideas unthought; a great many fantastic goods and services are never thought of or tested “thanks” to intellectual property privileges, “health” restrictions, and the prohibition of certain substances no matter how they are used or what they might entail; people may not sell or rent their bodies or futures, they may not marry unless granted by the state, they may not write contracts unless the contents thereof are explicitly allowed by government.

Add to this the fact that there is a ruling class of people – politicians – who do not produce anything at all of value, while they use the powers they have taken to restrict people’s lives and consume the values created by others. Politicians are no doubt the scum of the earth, not only because they are usually the dumbest people of society – but because they add absolutely nothing to the wealth of the people. They are parasites and the effect of having them around is the effect of any parasite: they restrict your actions and feed off of your health and wealth.

There is also a class of people who benefit greatly from the political class and its infringements on people’s lives and liberties. This class works very closely to politicians and they support each other in a system often referred to as corporatism (sometimes capitalism, not however the free market kind). While politicians are generally stupid, they do realize that they gain from cooperating with the wealthy – the wealthy, who have almost without exception gained their wealth through the exploitation of market opportunities created by government-granted privileges (read: patents, barriers to entry, etc), support politicians and the political system and get privileges in return; politicians enrich themselves through the help of the wealthy, and make sure their powers are kept intact and increased through the horse-trading with the privileged class.

Whatever is left untouched when these two classes have taken what they desire is what constitutes other people’s possible choices. Individuals cannot find opportunity to accumulate wealth simply because wage laws and regulations make sure that establishing a business entity is difficult and costly, while wages when working for others are kept at a low level. What this means is that people suffer while some get rich because they can yield the power of the state.

In such a setting it is not possible to claim that a decision to go for one of the few existing alternatives is necessarily the individual’s choice. It might very well be the case that there are tens, hundreds, or even thousands of preferred choices that are prohibited or otherwise made unattainable by government and its partners in crime. Working for a sweat shop is undoubtedly much better than the available alternatives for a lot of poor people in Southeast Asia (the alternatives could be starvation or prostitution), but it may not be better than (or even as good as) the choices these people would be able to make without the state strangle holding the market.

Could you then say that these people made a voluntary choice and that they are, as is the free market logic, in the best situation they could be? No, because there is nothing voluntary about it. Just like someone in chains may be offered a choice of execution method, people acting in the regulated market today are on a daily basis choosing but the lesser of evils after political and privileged classes have forcefully taken “their” share. We would not say the person held in chains against his will chose to be killed (e.g., by hanging) if he were offered two alternatives and was forced to choose one of them. It seems much more likely that the person in this example would choose to be freed from the chains rather than killed.

In the same way, a lot of the choices made today are forced: literally millions of people are forced to work for wages they would not except otherwise simply because state society requires that they have a monetary income – to pay taxes. In most of the western world it isn’t possible to have a piece of land and live only off what it produces – one has to sell parts of the produce in order to pay property and other taxes as well as a number of licenses and other controls by government. The alternative is confiscation of one’s property and imprisonment.

Is it then a choice for the small-scale farming family to work hard in order to produce goods that can be sold so that the profits thereof can be used to pay dues to government? Or would the choice rather be to work less, spend more time caring for family and animals, and perhaps reading and writing?

Even though most people refuse to think about it this way, the fact that there is a state means a lot of our choices are already made for us. We do not have the freedom to lead our own lives, we have but the freedom to pick one of the few alternatives made available to us – so that we can serve the privileged classes. We are in this sense nothing less than slaves, even though we are indeed granted some freedoms and a life that is not directly and in detail (but indirectly) ruled by others.

The greatest achievement of a slave owner is not that the slaves work, but that the slaves work and believe that they are doing it for themselves. Because if they do, they will work harder, better, and be more efficient. They will indeed make choices – and often the “right” choices – but only in the controlled setting, within the boundaries of what liberty they have been granted by their master.

So if people had to choose from all the possible alternatives that would be available to them, would they then be where they now are? If the answer is no, then free market logic is not applicable. If the answer is yes, then you are obviously missing something.

Hat tip to Jeremy at the Social Memory Complex for this excellent introduction to vulgar libertarianism: