Per Bylund

In a previous post I discussed the well-known fact that economists’ predictions are always wrong, and why they always are. But one obvious problem with predictions was left out of the discussion, and I would like to discuss this problem in a separate post. In contrast to the previous post, which was quite general in tone and content, this issue is mainly methodological and somewhat philosophical.

The previous post discussed the problems of measurement and the very problematic assumption that “people are like rocks,” i.e. that individuals share a fixed and observable nature in the same way that rocks have common simple properties. I also stretched the discussion to cover the ever present tension between the Weberian concepts of erklären and verstehen.

The former kind of science strictly emphasizes explaining facts and establishing simple causal relationships that can be derived from the observable properties of the entity. The latter stresses the subjective understanding of what is going on, and finding a way of rationally establishing a way to “see” how things work and are related. Weber explicitly states that erklären is the purpose and method unique for the natural sciences whereas the social sciences need to have a verstehen-based perspective. Predictions, hence, are possible only in sciences based on the erklären methodology and this is the conflict in economics: a fundamentally social science attempting to make use of primarily (only?) the methods and methodology of the natural sciences.

But predictions are problematic in and of themselves even if we ignore the tension arising from using erklären methodology studying verstehen phenomena. The very nature of predictions imply the usage of historic data to say something about the future. As we know, and have known at least since the days of the Ancient Greeks, it does not follow from the fact that the sun has risen every morning for centuries that it will continue to do so. History and future are not the same and may even be very different. What makes the future so troublesome is that it is fundamentally uncertain and we cannot use the certain facts of history to create knowledge about it.

As was stressed in the previous post, extrapolating doesn’t necessarily make sense. Doing the same maneuver for predictions about the future from data about historical events makes even less sense. Tomorrow will not be exactly like yesterday, which is a fact everybody knows and should know. This fact is true for details as well. That a rock falls to the ground if dropped today does not mean it will do so tomorrow.

However, we can conclude that a rock will fall to the ground if dropped tomorrow if we can show what makes it drop and we can rely on the properties of these causes being the same tomorrow. A rock has a fixed nature with certain properties and these do not change. We have been able to establish that a rock is dead matter that responds to exogenous forces in a very reliable and predictable way – we know that a rock is a rock is a rock and that this means something in terms of its nature.

It may be the case that tomorrow does not have gravity or that all rocks have turned into lollipops, but that doesn’t change the fact that rocks, according to our defintion, are rocks and that they respond to different forces in certain ways. We cannot with complete certainty say that everything will be the same tomorrow, but we can make general statements that will hold true for the things, forces, and properties we have specified (if we have done a good job specifying them). 

Now try the same thing with a human being. An individual is an individual is an individual. If this is true in the same sense as a rock is a rock, then we should be able to establish if one and every individual likes ice cream, responds the same way to stimuli like heat and cold, reacts to a certain situation the same way with a high level of certainty. 

Try the latter and compare a rock with an individual. Expose the rock to exogenous forces and observe its “behavior” and what happens to it. Then expose an individual to some stimuli and observe the behavior. Repeat it and observe the behavior – is it exactly the same? You will find that different individuals react in different ways to stimuli – and that one individual’s reactions will change over time as he or she learns. The rock never learns.

So even if the way a rock is affected by certain experiments is not purely certain for the future, it is very much predictable. The way John Doe reacts to, e.g., a speeding car about to hit him is different every time – and may not [ever] be the same as how Jane Doe reacts. It is not predictable; we cannot know what will happen (i.e. how the individual will react). 

So how will people react to lower prices in a certain good? We can attempt to predict that tomorrow, if the price for widgets is 10% lower, people will purchase 500,000 more widgets. But that doesn’t make sense. If the price is indeed lower it does not follow that the people who bought a widget yesterday at the higher price are more likely to buy a widget again. It also doesn’t follow that people in general value the widget in the same way. 

The only thing we can say is that ceteris paribus people will tend to purchase more of the cheaper good, at least for as long as they subjectively expect to be better off through purchasing one [more]. People want to be better off (which follows from the definition of better) and therefore make choices to improve their situation – to the best of their ability. But their preferences change and their ranking of those preferences change – as do their needs, perspectives, experience, knowledge, etc. An individual is not an individual is not an individual, at least not the same way a rock is a rock is a rock.

The problem of induction is problematic in natural science where dead matter is studied, even though the deathness of matter makes its properties reliable and effects predictable. Add life to the equation and the problem of induction becomes insurmountable and obviously so. 

Some things do seem to be repeated over time and the saying that “history repeats itself” may be thought to disprove the point I am making. But it doesn’t. It may be true that history tends to repeat itself if we do not learn from it, but the problem is that there is no “we” in the sense that there is a “rocks.” Individuals are different from each other and they change over time; humankind may not learn from the lessons of history, but it is equally true that situations do not repeat themselves – only man-made abstractions of them do. It is rational to learn from the essence of a situation not to repeat it or its negative consequences, but it is equally rational to say that things have changed and therefore the outcomes may do so too.

The lesson to be learned is that collectivism doesn’t work when we speak of human behavior simply because human behavior is not as tightly bound to the properties of “human” as the effects on a rock are to its properties. The reason is that human consciousness is not necessarily the same as the human body – one could possibly predict the effects of stimuli in medicine, but not in economics. Medicine works with the properties of the human body, i.e. its constitution and chemical and biological relationships (however complex); economics studies human behavior, where one individual’s choice to act is not based on the same facts as another’s, and a specific individual tends to learn – and change – from experience.

In a previous post I discussed the well-known fact that economists’ predictions are always wrong, and why they always are. But one obvious problem with predictions was left out of...

Peter Klein wrote a blog post yesterday on the Mises Economics blog continuing the agorist vs. anarcho-capitalist discussion on organization. In his post, Klein summarized his contribution to the discussion followed by a quoting Rothbard’s assessment of agorists view on organization. But both Klein and Rothbard make unsupported general conclusions that they seem to base on some agorists’ personal preferences rather than agorist theory.

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.

Peter Klein wrote a blog post yesterday on the Mises Economics blog continuing the agorist vs. anarcho-capitalist discussion on organization. In his post, Klein summarized his contribution to the discussion...

As a student of economics I am exposed to idiotic statements more or less daily. What is so moronically stupid about these statements is not that they have to do with economics or that they are uttered by stupid people. On the contrary, the problem seems to permeat our postmodern society and most bright people are totally lost in “the way it is.”

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.

As a student of economics I am exposed to idiotic statements more or less daily. What is so moronically stupid about these statements is not that they have to do...

I’ve at the time of writing this post spent over a year in an American graduate program (doctorate) and there are some things I want to share with you. It is of course the case that most things taught are so-called mainstream science and as such it is as blindly fixed on empiricism and technical details as it is ignorant of the unreasonableness of the often contradictory underlying assumptions and premises. It has also, at least in my case as a graduate student in economics, evident that the science itself have to a large extent adopted statism in order to “fit” in the overall government command of education and research.

But it is not these problems, however important, that I want to discuss in this post. Instead, I want to discuss the structure of the education I’m getting and what it seems to focus. Herein lies an important lesson to be learned about education in general and especially how students are treated. It is obvious that many professors seem to struggle with understanding how to treat graduate students, which means they sometimes fall into the “undergrad trap” and talk to us like were we at the very beginning of our studies on a higher level.

An even more obvious fact is that professors seem to lack an understanding for the greater issues. Someone has told me that students tend to focus on theory and theoretical reasoning because “it is easier” than “real” empirical research. I strongly disagree with this view; I find it ignorant and, frankly, stupid. It is not easier to develop a good theory than, as is supposedly “more difficult,” to grab a data set, run [standardized] regressions and then claim to have found The Truth. Such a statement makes me lose whatever respect I had for the person making it; they deserve no respect – rather, they deserve to be despised.

Even though most professors do not share (or at least not state) this view, misunderstanding or non-understanding is common. Often the problems I identify with premises for published papers that we’re reading are ignored, probably because they require a philosophical mindset. I’m not saying I’m a prodigy or hyper-intelligent and that “all professors” are stupid; on the contrary, my experience in both the Swedish master programs and the American PhD program is that the professors are usually highly intelligent people. However, they are not scholars and therefore cannot grasp the essence of discussions on a purely conceptual or theoretical level. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but they are not many.

Professors have chosen to (in some cases been forced to) focus on details for so long that they have more or less forgotten what they’re doing is all about. They no longer have an interest in finding Knoledge or Truth (if this ever was the case), but are more interested in specific “cool” details of theoretical-empirical papers that have, for some reason, become famous. It is no doubt the case that details can be interesting – and even very interesting – but a detail or sub-reasoning can only be interesting if the overall theoretical framework is a reasonable construct upon a basis of sound premises. This is, I’m afraid, not often the case. Papers are very often empirical or try to develop a theory from a semi-inductive approach to knowledging, and as such it seems the authors have not spent much time thinking through the foundation of the theory developed.

It is a sad truth that even academic researchers doing theoretical work have been so “empiricized” by the pressure of mainstream that have lost touch with the real world as well as interest in and understanding for the importance of premises and assumptions.

This brain washing (to use my adviser’s words) begins early in people’s academic careers. Graduate school is supposed to create a basis of knowledge while teaching the student how to think critically, but the real nature of the programs is that they aim for the streamlining of thought rather than encouragement for individual, unique, pioneering thought. It is true that all programs pay lip service to the dogma that students must learn critical thinking and that they must engage in research on their own even if they are taking a heavy course load. But the truth is that as little time as possible is left for the student to actually engage in such activities.

My own experience is that advanced studies are not very difficult; there are of course problems of notation, language and concepts one has never encountered before, but the level of difficulty is not unsurmountable. It appears to be difficult simply because there is so much work involved with learning what is taught in the course, but the work is not primarily time and effort spent tryting to wrestle complex concepts or advanced reasoning. Most courses cover fairly intuitive concepts.

I realize that I sound like someone who believes he is a Nietzschean übermensch, but that is not at all what I try to say. I have struggled quite a bit with the courses I’ve taken; it is only after finishing the course work that I have realized that the level of difficulty was not as high as I thought. And it has nothing to do with my “understanding what I [now] know.” The problem i have with the structure of the courses is that they seem to focus so much on details and technicalities that students cannot grasp what the professor is trying to say.

Take, for instance, a course I took in advanced micro economic theory. The theory itself, and especially the concepts behind it, is relatively simple – if you know anything about economics you should understand what make actors demand or supply goods and services on the market. But that is not what the course is about. Instead, the course barges into a jungle of calculus where the student struggles with finding first and second order conditions of abstract functions supposedly symbolizing a person’s “utility function” or a firm’s “production function.”

Of course, in the real world there is no such thing as a production function – a firm has assets and produces output using the resources and assets at hand in the best way possible. They are not making a generic function of their business processes and then taking derivatives to find the “optimal point.” And there is even less of a utility function (a somewhat humorous concept, I might add).

The details and technicalities are what is important and the understanding for what is really going on – or why the discipline ended up with these functions and conditions in the first place – is not only left out, it is ignored, dismissed, and considered “unimportant.”

As an analogy, imagine an automobile manufacturer where the engineers are hired to focus on making components as efficiently as possible without thinking of their use in the whole. If no one thinks of what the automobile is supposed to do – or how to put it together – there will be no automobile. Just like experts in economics (which is my field) can talk of “properties” of functions for ages without ever mentioning or even considering what the functions are for, where they come from, or what they try to explain.

What is the importance of the generic, differentiable, mathematical function to how people act in a market?

Academia is so consumed by discussing the details that nobody has time for or ever considers the so-called “whole picture.” Even in “softer” courses it is the case that students need to read as many articles as possible on certain details and technical matters that there simply is no time for reflection. After reading a couple of dozen articles – in a short time period – that all discuss the same technicality, how many students would you think are able to take a step back and reflect on the importance of the technicality qua technicality? Not very many.

It is therefore the case that academic education of today bears no resemblance whatsoever with the classical education of Ancient Athens (such as Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum) or even the education in the modern era. For instance, when German philosopher Immanuel Kant taught courses he discussed problems of morality and let the students consider his own theory and comment on it. I am not saying that the education of that time was unstructured or that it was some kind of dopey discourse post-modern style, but that there was a fundamental interest in ideas.

It may be unfair to compare the modern “hard” science of economics with the soft philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. But the thing is that Aristotle, for example, spent a lot of time on explaining natural phenomena and did so systematically and in an as structured and scientific way possible in that time and age. Yet his aim was not to dissect a detail of a small part of that which he found – he strived to understand and explain the world around him.

A criticism to my comparison of modern economics and the natural science research of Aristotle is that today’s society – as well as our knowledge – is way too advanced to use Aristotles methods. This may be true to some degree, but do not kid yourself – we are not as advanced compared to previous times as you would like to think. In terms of knowledge, we’re to a large extent in the process of rediscovering what scientists hundreds of years before us discovered, described, explained, and understood.

As a matter of fact, we have forgotten the reason for doing scientific work and research. We have to rediscover the purpose of what we are doing, but so far we are so focused on the details and technicalities that we haven’t even started acknowledging that we’re missing the whole picture and even parts of it through staring at one stroke of the pen.

Science is literally worthless if we cannot allow us to reflect on it and make it useful on a higher level of  abstraction; we are so busy doing scientific research that we have forgotten what the research is for.

So it is not surprising that that the [few] questions I [find it worthwhile to] ask aren’t understood. I am no Cicero, so perhaps my questions could be much more clearly articulated. But I doubt that the problem is primarily my inability to phrase the questions clearly enough – the problem, I maintain, is that they are of another nature than what science is thought to be all about. I cannot help finding similarities between theories, conflicts in implicit underlying assumptions, and problems in the questions being asked (rather in how they are answered). I am not interested in the technicalities or detailed answers; I am interested in the questions.

Perhaps you say that it is sad that I was not born a few hundred years ago, in a time where people still thought the way I think and were interested in the kind of things I am interested in. That is, in a time before the sciences were divided into separate disciplines and before the quantification of knowledge-seeking. And you may be right – I was born too late.

But on the other hand, science has lost its way and is maundering without compass or aim. I am certain that we will soon discover that we are not asking the right questions – and that we aren’t really asking questions at all. The recent interest for so-called “interdisciplinary research” is definitely a step in the right direction, even though it is a very small step. Science, I believe, will once again find a way back to the path of knowledge discovery; it is a matter of when not if.

From this perspective, I’d like to think that I was not born a few hundred years too late. Rather, I was born too soon. Or perhaps I can help science find its way back to its roots and purpose; that is, find the way home.

I’ve at the time of writing this post spent over a year in an American graduate program (doctorate) and there are some things I want to share with you. It...

The increase in mechanisms of government mass surveillance of the peoples of Europe, which is of a magnitude that cannot be exaggerated, is finally causing critical discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere. In one of the European countries that is so far most affected by this unprecedented power-grab by governments (including super-governments such as the European Union) and politicians, Sweden, the discussion is successfully being limited to the blogosphere even though the media is beginning to feel it necessary to do some reporting.

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?

The increase in mechanisms of government mass surveillance of the peoples of Europe, which is of a magnitude that cannot be exaggerated, is finally causing critical discussion in the blogosphere...

In this day and age, science is considered a field for empirical study. The word “science” is almost synonymous with “empirical.” Actually, it runs deeper than that: whatever is not explicitly empirical is automatically dismissed as unscientific, ideological storytelling or masturbation dressed in scientific wording. This was not always the case, but that is not the point I wish to make here. What I would like to do is discuss the implications of empirical science and why its adoption as The True Science is so dangerous.

There are problems with empirical science, and I would even go so far as to claim the implications of a distincly empirical science are a lot more problematic than the “storytelling” of scientific methods not primarily empirical. The reason for the problem of empiricism is partly due to the well-known induction problem. Just because something has happened in a certain way in the past doesn’t mean it will happen the same way in the future. The likelihood of future phenomena being like they were in the past may be greater for the natural sciences than in the social sciences; but even if the small step from past to future in the social sciences is more of a giant leap than a step, it is still fundamentally problematic even in the natural sciences to use historical empirical data to “foresee” the future.

The reason for this is that there is seldom the case that one simple rule is applicable on a phenomenon without influence from other, probably unknown, parameters. It is almost never the case that a phenomenon tomorrow will take place under the exact same circumstances as an event tomorrow. We may think this is the case, but concluding that we know this is the case – even in a controled laboratory – is a bit premature (or, rather, ignorant).

Some “laws” in the natural sciences seem to be applicable on certain phenomenon and have been “verified” in a number of cases already. But what this means is not that the law is necessarily correct, only that the law comes close enough to explaining what is really going on. There is no way we can tell with 100% certainty that we have found the true explanation, even if it were the case that the theory has been verified a billion times. Or even if it hasn’t been falsified.

But this is not to say that we cannot know anything, which seems to be a popular belief nowadays in fields adopting e.g. postmodernist “theory.”

My concern is not the natural sciences, even though empiricism in such “law-based” sciences is problematic. My main concern is the social sciences, in which empirical research as the hegemonic view of science is literally killing the accumulation and creation of new knowledge. Economics is no doubt the field that has come furthest of the social sciences, and  it is therefore in worse shape than the other disciplines.

The reason empirical research worries me is that it tends to be without aim. A scientist conducting empirical research is a slave to the data collected; he can not come to any conclusion that does not fit the data and he also cannot verify that the conclusion drawn based on the data is correct.

Imagine a physicist conducting an every-day experiment when teaching a class the rules of gravity. He drops his pen and expects it to fall to the floor. But imagine the pen instead floats in the air for a while before it rushes to the floor. This would seem to falsify the law of gravity, and the whole class could see it. But the explanation may be as simple as the class on the next floor is doing an experiement with powerful magnets. The problem with blind empirical research is that there is no way of saying that the data is wrong or that there is another explanation.

The example of the pen may seem ridiculous, but it is important and can be applied on basically any experiment or study. What we do not anticipate and control for is hardly ever noticed, and so the data we have collected – even if the data is itself correct – may lead us astray. Induction, which is the same as purely empirical research, leaves us clueless of whether there was something wrong in data collection or data handling. What we don’t know can totally change the outcome of empirical research; actually, empirical research presupposes that we do not know and that we try to control for our “biases” as far possible. What the scientist believes, thinks, etc is supposed to not affect the data.

Then apply this on a social science such as economics, where that which is studied consists of people. Studying a simple market transaction, say the purchase of gum, and collecting all the data we possibly can could tell us something. For instance, we might find out that in a certain neighborhood gum is sold to 10% of customers at a price of $1.25 whereas in an adjacent neighborhood the same kind of gum in the same kind of convenient store is sold to 20% of customers at a price of $1.65. Adding another store, a little further down the road, we find that 25% of customers buy that same type of gum for $1.99.

With the customers being basically the same, and the stores are the same as is the gum, we must conclude that the higher the price the more people buy gum. This doesn’t make sense at all, so most of us would discard the findings and claim that there is something wrong with the data. Perhaps the stores are all along a route to a small airport where people usually buy gum to chew during take-off to avoid discomfort due to rapidly changing cabin pressure, and that could explain the strange findings?

If economics were empirical we couldn’t tell that something ought to be wrong. Imagine a number of empirical studies such as this one, and we suddenly have a verified false theory. Or, even worse, we have a number of conflicting results and have to way of knowing what is the right explanation. Economics, just as any social (and natural) science, is dependent on knowing what to look for, how to look for it, and what to expect from the data. Without such theories of what should be the case we are blind and do not know where we are heading or whether we are going in the right direction.

This is partly what is happening in the social sciences today, where the different disciplines increasingly overlap and study the same things. But they come up with different results even though the studied phenomenon is the same. The reason conclusions in e.g. sociology, economics, and political science can be different even if the same phenomenon is studied depends on the perspectives and theories prevailing in the respective fields. This fact would be used by an empiricist as an argument for the pure empirical research – to let the data tell the story without human bias. But what this shows is exactly the opposite.

The reason they reach different conclusions is that they are guided by perspectives and theories that are all wrong – but they are wrong in different ways. Only through studying the same phenomenon from different perspectives trying to explain what is going on, and through inter-disciplinary research, can the truth be found. Empirical research can never tell us what is going on, but only what we were able to record at a certain moment or time period.

The empirical researcher might say that empirical research is not totally without theory, which means that it is guided by theory – but that theory can be tested empirically and that theories that don’t fit the data should be discarded or at least modified. But this presumes that we can control the setting fully and that we know that what we find is everything and correct – it presumes the researcher is God.

The researcher is not God, and that is the very reason research must make errors and mistakes. Because we are not omniscient we must be allowed to make mistakes yet learn from them. This goes as much for a five-year-old growing up as it goes for the scientific community. We know that whatever facts we have established empirically can be wrong; we know that we might have overlooked something. The results of science must make sense, and science makes sense only if we begin with theory. The pen floating in the air for a minute doesn’t make us wonder what happened to gravity, but what – at that very moment – we’re not seeing because a pen floating in the air doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense because we know that things tend to fall to the floor rather than float in the air, and we know all other things in the room are indeed “behaving” the way we expect them to. So the pen doesn’t falsify our understanding of gravity – it is the result of some phenomenon/parameter we are not seeing.

The same is true, and even more so, for social sciences, where we study human behavior. In the case of the convenient stores we know, a priori, that no human being would buy gum unless that which he gives up to get the gum is worth less than the value he places in the gum. So the fact that gum is sold at greater volumes in one store at a greater price than in other stores means there must be a reason why customers in the former value gum more. Maybe they have more money? Maybe they expect greater utility from the gum for some reason? Our not knowing means there is something we need to find out. If we were looking at the data without a theory to interpret and assess what we find, we would have to discard what we know is right. We know that people cannot give up something that is of value to them for something that is of less value to them – unless there is something making them act irrationally.

The “storytelling” of non-empirical sciences may indeed be incorrect, but so can any conclusion – because the researcher is not God (and if the researcher was God, of what use would doing research be?). But non-empirical research can still tell us about the true state of the world without necessarily being verified by data. Non-empirical knowledge is the starting point, and empirical research may show us that we are unknowingly omitting something important – if we don’t see what we expect to see there obviously must be something missing: either our expectations are based on a false understanding of the world, or there was something making the data unreliable (collection or registration errors, or some other phenomenon taking place at the same time that we didn’t foresee and “control for”).

The truth is that empirical research cannot take us forward – it can only provide data of the past. Empirical research cannot even tell us about the past without interpretation which necessarily makes use of the imagination of the researcher – that which he already knows and understands. The researcher’s understanding is the key to making new knowledge, whereas the data can only strengthen the researcher’s case through making the explanation convincing to others.

There is a reason most contemporary disciplines have been further fragmented into sub disciplines, e.g. economics into micro economics, macro economics, etc. There is also reason why these sub disciplines generally don’t mix. The reason is not that they are on different levels or study different phenomena, but that economics as a primarily empirical research has lost its understanding of the human being. Through endless simplifications and idealizations (in the Weberian sense) micro economics have gone its own way in the study of certain phenomena, guided by data alone; macro economics has taken the same methodological path, but has ended up somewhere else. They are no longer compatible, which causes friction and frustration and therefore makes it necessary to keep them apart.

But are micro and macro economics different “sciences”? No, they both study economic phenomena resulting from human [inter]action and should therefore be fully compatible; if they were true, they would offer the same kind of explanations to the studied phenomena and be able to provide a greater understanding for how human beings interact and what to expect from future interactions. Instead, we should expect to see further fragmentation as research conducted in micro economics will show “great divides” between economists researching somewhat different phenomena or using different techniques.

With an empirically based research agenda scientists will soon find that their findings don’t go well together with other scientists’. Since “data don’t lie” researchers of the same type will create sub groups with different “proven” theories in each group explaining the same kind of phenomena. This fragmentation will, theoretically, go on until each individual researcher has his own discipline in which his own understanding, based on the data, is “law.”

Economics doesn’t need more unguided empirical research (I’m exaggerating somewhat here), but a general understanding for what it studies and what to expect from future empirical research. Such understanding cannot be provided by data, but must be the result of introspection and reasoning based on experience and supported by observation. Data is a means to strengthen one’s theory or understanding and a way of showing others interested in the same kind of phenomena the benefits of your explanation.

Data and statistics can presumably show what really happened, but only to the extent that we had already tried to explain the phenomenon – our understanding of the world is crucial in the selection, collection and interpretation of data. Statistical analysis can at best tell us that we’re missing something, but it cannot tell us what is missing, what we don’t understand, or what to expect from this kind of phenomenon in the future. It is but a tool we can use to make sure we haven’t overlooked something.

In this day and age, science is considered a field for empirical study. The word “science” is almost synonymous with “empirical.” Actually, it runs deeper than that: whatever is not...

A well-known problem in philosophy and political economy since the time of Thucydides and Aristotle, and in modern economics since 1968, is what Garrett Hardin termed the “tragedy of the commons.” The classic example is that of an “open” village pasture equally available to shepherds. It is, unless the villagers somehow agree to regulate the use for the sake of their common good, inevitable that the pasture will be destroyed and that the destruction process will begin almost immediately.

The reason for this is that each herder will recognize that the cost of adding one more animal to the pasture is zero to the individual herder, whereas the benefit is great. He will also realize that if he does not take the opportunity to put the additional animal on the pasture someone else will. The benefit will thus be reaped by someone, the question is but by whom.

So in order not to be beaten to it by the others, each herder will rush to maximize their benefits through adding as many animals as possible to the pasture. This will soon degrade the land and make it unusable due to the excessive overuse caused by the rational benefit-seeking herders. The more obvious the profit, the faster and more devastating will be the overuse.

The same type of problem is haunting the Internet, since the Internet technology makes a number of activities almost or totally free. The very structure of Internet builds on the free transmission of data on any suppliers’ networks, which means it is an easy target for anyone who can make a profit out of its use.

Spamming is the most obvious “tragedy of the commons” problem. Since e-mailing is virtually free, anyone can contact anyone else with an e-mail account at no cost – and it does not cost more to send one million e-mails than it costs to send only one or two. Radically increasing the volume is therefore “free,” which means that anyone who can make money out of sending e-mails will tend to do so. This is why so many spend hours of their potentially productive time clearing their inboxes of numerous unsolicited and anonymous e-mails with misspelled offers of Viagra, penis enlargements, and women “for sale.”

The problem of spamming is further increased by the Internet making it possible – indeed, even easy – to send such e-mails anonymously. The structure of the Internet allows for far-reaching privacy through hiding one’s whereabouts, and it is also an open system, which makes it easy to pretend to be someone else. The result of a commons that allows its users anonymity is obvious: it will suffer from hyper overuse.

Another problem on the Internet, which is not as commonly identified, is so-called trolling. This phenomenon is often described as people using commons such as Internet discussion forums to post irrelevant, offensive, and possibly harmful messages in great quantities. The obvious reason for such anti-social behavior is to disrupt and destroy the discussions (or the web site), but it is also the case that these so-called “trolls” find pleasure in being seen (however anonymously so).

Trolls haunt practically any setting on the Internet that supplies a costless framework for discussion or sharing, and since the Internet is built on the principles of freedom, gratis, and anonymity it has proven very difficult to be successful in charging for such services. Thus: discussion forums and other such “collective” free services develop different methods to keep trolls in check and minimize their damage. Such methods include anything from moderating and surveillance to blocking of IP addresses and users. But since it is easy for a troll to, e.g., simply create a free e-mail account and re-register, most measures taken to get rid of trolls are rather ineffective.

The trolling problem is increasing all over the Internet and it has lately become a rather great problem with the world’s largest encyclopedia: Wikipedia. With its success it has become increasingly important for the organizations and people with “articles” on Wikipedia to make sure they look good and that the articles do not give them bad will. In other words, it has been noted that e.g. the CIA has routinely edited articles that are of interest for the United States government – the government wants to keep sensitive information (about its illegal and oppressive policies) out of the Wikipedia and far from common people’s knowledge. Also, it has been discovered that the Vatican is also editing Wikipedia entries in order to hide not-so-beneficial details of its past and present.

Of course, big business has also recognized that they can lose a lot of the goodwill they might have in the market place through letting people write “anything” in “their” Wikipedia entries.

Part of the negative information added to the Wikipedia articles might not be true and some might even be slanderous. Since the Wikipedia allows anyone to update and edit articles, one would think that the positive and negative extremes would even out so that most information in the articles are true or mostly true. This is however not the case, partly because of the commons problem, which is why the Wikipedia has appointed volunteer editors and even hired people to check the quality of entries.

But the problem with Wikipedia is greater than a lack of quality. It is easily targeted for campaigns due to its nature of being a “commons.” There are a great many trolls out there, and they seem to have a lot of time on their hands.

For instance, it has been noted that pro-global warming trolls are very active in changing Wikipedia entries on scientists who are skeptical towards the “imminent man-made catastrophe” scenarios. They therefore edit entries as part of their campaigns or even delete entries they are not very fond of. The National Post wrote about the scientist Fred Singer who, the Wikipedia entry said, believed in Martians.

The NP writes, for example, on U.K. scientist Benny Peiser:

Wikipedia refused to accept Peiser’s critique, or his interpretation ofhis own views, or an account of his views that he had provided to me, or an account of his views published in a peer-reviewed journal, or an account of his views published in The Wall Street Journal, or an account of his views published by the U.S. Senate committee on environment and public works.

Instead, the Wikipedia trollers insisted that all of the above sources were disqualified or irrelevant under Wikipedia rules, and that the trollers’ own understanding of Peiser’s views trumped all others.

The trolls are numerous and they are always there, which makes it very difficult to make sure the truth is kept for long in the articles. This is a problem for a great many people who are slandered on Wikipedia and cannot seem to have the slanderous remarks removed. Others have entries added only to see them be deleted over and over again even though they seem to comply with Wikipedia policies.

In this case, scientifically proven truths are tested by popular vote. If a sufficient number of people editing Wikipedia consider it important to have only one view on global warming on Wikipedia, then it seems this will be the case. But scientific truths aren’t subject to popular vote; on the contrary, it is science that is supposed to challenge our faulty world views through offering new theories and empirical proof that we are, indeed, wrong.

After all, if science was subject to popular vote, then we still wouldn’t have begun using the wheel and we certainly wouldn’t have adopted the view that the Earth is round – not flat. Popular belief 500 years ago was that the world was the center of the universe and that it was flat – that one could fall off if traveling too far in one direction. Was the discovery that the earth is indeed round a step forward, or would we be better off with the popular view?

I am myself a victim for such a trolls’ campaign on Wikipedia as described above. The last few years there has been an article on me emphasizing my anarchist views and political writings. But beginning the summer of 2007 there were constant “flags” on the article stating that it was up for deletion. The reason? I’m not “notable” enough. This may be true, I don’t know, but it seems strange to me that I was notable for three years or so before anyone questioned my notability – and that notability became an issue only after I had become somewhat known for my writings. Or was it an issue because I had become “notable”?

I tend to think the latter, since my views are hardly respected by most – and I have even received quite a few death threats, which would prove that some people aren’t too accepting of my views.

I’m personally not very interested in whether I’m on Wikipedia, but it was fun to see how the article evolved. It is not allowed for the person to edit articles on him-/herself, so I stayed away – but I checked it a little now and then and was amazed about how people could keep track of my views, my background, my whereabouts, and my ideological evolution. Most of it, I must say, was absolutely correct – even dates and places were correctly noted in the article.

An article was also added on the web site I started back in 1999 (or was it 1998?), Anarchism.net. But as soon as the article on Per Bylund was flagged or deletion, so was the article on Anarchism.net. A debate followed on the Wikitalk pages, and it was repeatedly decided that the article on me should not be deleted. But just like it isn’t possible to keep politicians at bay through clearly advising them against their wishes in a referendum (have you noticed how they always seem to hold another referendum soon after the first one if they aren’t pleased with the outcome?), one cannot beat trolls in a democratic vote.

The article on Per Bylund was kept the first, the second, and – I think – the third times it was up for deletion. Between each “flagging” it was updated by people who had more references and information, so the article quickly grew. This was not enough, however. The trolls finally won the battle through being more persistent than the anti-trollers, and both the articles on Per Bylund and Anarchism.net are now deleted from Wikipedia.

The interesting thing in this “war” on Wikipedia was that as soon as a deletion “flag” had been removed, another one was added. And there were only two or three people adding the deletion flags every time, at least one of them being a Wikipedia editor (with rights to make the final call to delete or keep). They obviously had a strong interest in not having these articles on Wikipedia. One would think nobody should think it important whether there would be an article on Per Bylund on Wikipedia, but obviously a couple of people thought it extremely important not to have it there.

I was continuously updated on what was going on by people with an interest in editing articles on Wikipedia. It was an interesting experience, to see how some people so eagerly invest such enormous amounts of time into having an article on someone so insignificant as myself removed from a free, online encyclopedia. I hope their gain, which I suspect is at best “feel-good,” was worth the trouble.

These are just a couple of examples, on that I experienced first-hand, of the tragedy of the commons problems on Wikipedia. The solution for Wikipedia is of course the same as for any such problem: adding cost to the use (and especially abuse) of the resource. Paying as little as 1/10 cent for editing a page would keep all or almost all trolls away. They are, after all, only doing it because it is at the expense solely of others.

In a sense, these trolls are unsuccessful politicians. Whereas politicians manage to get their hands on power and enrich themselves through making use of the that great [force-based] commons called the State, the trolls on Wikipedia and elsewhere don’t get further than their personal computer. But they have a lot in common – both thrive off the use of commons and eagerly invest in other people’s misery.

A well-known problem in philosophy and political economy since the time of Thucydides and Aristotle, and in modern economics since 1968, is what Garrett Hardin termed the “tragedy of the...

I have written a number of articles on the Carsonian concept of vulgar libertarianism, libertarians who mistakenly identify the current state regulated market as a “free market” and that therefore apply free market logic in defending e.g. sweatshops in Southeast Asia. The problem with this view is of course that there is no such thing as a free market – and therefore free market logic cannot necessarily be applied to defend what exists in this unfree market.

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:

I have written a number of articles on the Carsonian concept of vulgar libertarianism, libertarians who mistakenly identify the current state regulated market as a “free market” and that therefore...

I usually stay out of discussions about rights, whether they exist and which ones are “real.” Part of the reason for this is that I find it rather boring to discuss whether philosophical constructs exist or not (it should be fairly obvious that they don’t in any normal sense of the word), and partly it is because such discussions never lead anywhere. At all.

There seem to be so many misconceptions and misunderstandings about rights that discussions start and end in the same manner: with people dogmatically claiming their specific position is right, from which follows that everybody else is wrong. Mostly, the arguments consist of repeating the same thing over and over again rather than arguing a point of view, often with the sole purpose of showing that the author who originally said it is right. (Objectivists are very good at this.)

On rare occasions it happens that people from radically different points of view start discussing rights. This has happened quite a few times on the rapidly growing web forum of Anarchism.net, a site I run with the sole purpose of letting anarchists of different colors find out that their views aren’t very different from other anarchists’ (and that there is plenty of reason to start a unified anarchism movement rather than fight endless faction wars).

Imagine anarchists from different political traditions discussing rights. It should be fairly obvious that such a discussion should strike at the very core of rights, whereas statists (from minarchists to communists) discussing rights really discuss what rights the State is supposed to impose on people. Sorry, I mean what rights the State is supposed to protect. The common ground for anarchists is that they want no State, so their view of rights should be pretty interesting from a political and/or philosophical point of view, right?

Wrong.

Anarchists tend to fall into the same traps as statists always do – they discuss which set of rights is “better” and which right has the best outcome. Even though I usually find the discussions quite simple at times, this fact of discussing outcomes rather than what the rights are is interesting. Rights are usually something that is philosophically constructed from a statement of fact; for instance, the negative right to life is based in the fact that individuals are individuals and that they, even if they are social creatures and think collectivist thoughts, necessarily act as individuals. The right doesn’t say that this or that should happen so that people get to be individuals – it states that people are individuals and that they have an equal right to be individuals, and that therefore no one else has a right to force others to obey their orders.

This kind of right should be pretty interesting to anarchists, don’t you think? And it necessarily is, even though discussions on rights usually don’t start and never begin with such a right.

What I find both interesting and troublesome is this focus on the effect of rights rather than their meaning. In a discussion between proponents of negative and positive rights, focusing on the outcomes totally misses the point. Rights aren’t production processes that need to be streamlined and/or optimize – rights are basic rules of thumb for what is right and what is wrong.

Think about what the effect of evaluating the freedom of speech by the effects. What are the effects of freedom of speech? Well, except for the obvious feeling of not having to be scared to say the wrong things and the positive effects of scientists in different fields having the right to criticize what they believe is wrong, the effects are mostly negative. After all, your right to say whatever you want can and will hurt people.

This is especially true if we include different sorts of mystic beliefs people tend to cling to (religion and other superstitions). Saying that “Jesus was an ass, and Muhammed liked to put his dick in it” would probably make quite a few people in this world upset. The negative outcomes of free speech are much greater than the positive if we attempt to estimate the total amounts of “utility” and “disutility” through calculating the number of people in each category.

Then think about the effect of the right mentioned above: the right to be an individual, to be unrestricted in your thoughts, aims, and actions by everything but the equal rights of other individuals. What does this mean? It means you can literally hurt thousands of people, and you will definitely make a lot of people despise you and your views no matter what you do. How many people are positively affected by your having this right? Maybe your loved ones, a few friends, perhaps someone you choose to help. But it would probably be better for most people if you didn’t have this right – actually, it would be better if you didn’t act at all since that would mean that you wouldn’t hurt anyone.

And consider the right not to starve or, even better, the right to three meals every day. Now, the obvious effect of this right is that nobody would starve. Wouldn’t this be great? And everybody would be equal, since we’re all getting three meals every day. No more starvation and probably no more obesity. There would be food for everybody, which would mean there would be a whole lot less cause of conflict. The most fundamental human need is satisfied.

Let’s take one step up to the next level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and add safety as a right. This would be great, wouldn’t it? There’s no need to worry anymore, since everybody would have the security of body, employment, resources, family, etc. Suddenly six billion people would not be victims of uncertainty anymore, since we would all be able to trust that what we have we will always have for as long as we want it.

Wait a minute… no more uncertainty? Yes, that is basically what it means to have the right to safety. And I agree that it is absurd to establish a right to escape uncertainty. How do you do that? It is literally impossible.

Why is it impossible? Because we have failed to ask where these rights come from. Philosophers know that rights don’t come without duties, but that important piece of information seems to have escaped most people discussing rights. A rights discussion is more of a war of “who can say they want most” than actually arguing – and even less proving – anything.

Let’s recapitulate the rights above and see what duties they require, that is, what they necessarily mean in a world like ours. The first right, to free speech would mean there is a duty on everyone not to stop someone from talking. This is not a very heavy burden, even though sometimes we are indeed desperate not to hear what someone is about to say. (This is probably the case for some people with this post on rights…) What about listening to what is said? No, there is no such duty. There is a right to freedom to speech, but not a right to have people listen. There isn’t even a right to have someone pass on what you say – you only have a right to say it.

Then there is the right to be an individual. I guess this is something that is something that is very difficult to escape. After all, all of us are individuals (however, not necessarily individualists). What does that mean? What duty is there that makes this so? I really can’t think of any such duty, since this is rather a statement of fact than a normative claim.

But with the claim that this is a right that is limited by all others having the exact same, equal right – then we have a duty. It follows that it is everybody’s duty to not act to undo individuals, in other words that we all have the duty not to enslave people, kill them, or in any other way force them to give up their individuality (whatever it may be). This too doesn’t seem too cumbersome. At least, I don’t think it is a problem to not be able to forcefully enslave people.

Now consider a right to three meals a day. It sounds like a pretty good idea to me, because even though I can afford to eat every day I sometimes don’t have the time to eat or interest to cook. It would be so much better if I could just go somewhere and get a meal. Even better – what if I could have the meal come to me? Actually, if I have a right to three meals a day, nobody can claim I need to go somewhere to get it – I have a right to three meals, not a right to go to a specific place at certain times to pick up three meals. So I could sit in my office and just expect three meals, just like I should be able to wake up in the morning and get breakfast.

Now you might ask, where does these meals come from? That’s a good question. If everybody had a right to three meals a day I would sincerely doubt a lot of people would work in restaurants – if there would be such things at all. If everybody has a right to three meals a day, then why the hell would anybody want to start a business to sell what everybody gets for free? That would be just stupid.

But the problem is still there: where do the meals come from? Who provides the meals? Who delivers? Who is held responsible if I would not get my meals? The right to three meals means a duty for someone or something to provide the meals, but it doesn’t say who has that duty. So we need to figure something out. Either we pay someone to cook three meals a day for six billion people, or we force someone to do it. I, for one, certainly don’t believe that angels would fly down from the heavens carrying food for all of us.

And what about the food? I don’t only want three meals per day, I want three good meals. I want food that I like and food that is good, healthy, and varied. Is that included in the right to three meals, or do I have to live for the rest of my life eating three meals of cabbage soup every day…?

It is easy to see there is a problem here; three meals per day for everybody don’t just appear because we say this is a right. The food has to come from somewhere – from someone. And that someone has a right to have three meals just like everybody else. Does this mean we all have to cook for someone else, and that we then pass the food along – it is almost noon, everybody pass one meal to the person on your right in three, two, one… now!

This doesn’t sound quite as good as “eliminating starvation.”

What about the fourth right, the right to safety and security? The same applies there – we’re not safe and secure unless someone provides us with it. This is very obvious with the security of employment and resources. Who will provide you with a job, and where do the resources come from?

It should be pretty obvious that there is something wrong with these rights. The first two could easily be satisfied through everybody having a duty to not do horrible things. There was no force involved, no one was forced to do anything against his or her will. The latter two create a great void of legitimate claims – everybody has a right to something that no one knows who will provide. All we know is that we can demand to have something, but we don’t know who should give it to us. Unless we live in the Garden of Eden, where everything is always available, these two rights call for either enslavement of some for the benefit of others or enslavement of all.

It is great to have a right to three meals a day if you are on the receiving side, but someone has to be on the supplying side – and that can’t be too great. After all, everybody will require three meals a day and they will have a right to it. If you are on the supplying side you are fundamentally screwed. Want a day off? Don’t think so. Vacation? That’s impossible. Retirement? No way. You are a true slave.

A professor in a political science class I once took briefly touched on rights as negative and positive, with the former being a right to not have others impose anything on you (like the first two) and the latter being a right to something specific. I remember saying these rights are necessarily contradictory – if you (and everybody) have a right to be an individual, to lead your life as you see fit as long as you let others lead theirs as they wish, you cannot also let some have the right to something. If you do, then you necessarily say that someone has to supply this something – and that contradicts the right to live your own life.

The professor answered that this was a common misunderstanding, and that there is only a contradiction if we first accept a certain set of morals. He never told me exactly what set of morals we need to accept or what the other view would be. Something tells me he couldn’t, since a universal right to not be a slave and a universal right to have a slave don’t go together. Unless we stop believing people are people and adopt the [faulty] view that some people are better than others – or that some people simply don’t count.

I usually stay out of discussions about rights, whether they exist and which ones are “real.” Part of the reason for this is that I find it rather boring to...

As I stated clearly in a previous blog entry, the topic for my article Blame Anarchism? on Strike the Root was not new; I have written on it before. So I was very surprised that this article stirred up such a debate – it seems I really touched a nerve among many anarchists. Sadly, most of the “comments” on the article are personal attacks on myself and my character (and how I dress in a certain picture), rather than on what I write in the article.

Despite the personal attacks, it is easy to see why people find the article so disturbing. Most of the negative comments (there are but a few positive) try to defend the destruction of property and even the attacks on people, saying it is self defense to destroy corporations’ property since corporations exploit humankind through wage slavery. I do not say such exploitation does not exist, nor that wage slavery is but a fiction, but I do have a hard time understanding the self defense argument (especially when it is indirect and directed towards things).

I have discussed the issue of self defense numerous times before (see my library of writings and the blog entry on my take on pacifism) and don’t intend to repeat the arguments in this post. But I do wish to discuss the issue of destruction and attacking people as part of a “strategy” to bring about freedom.

Those commenting on the article claim I am literally attacking a great part of anarchism and a fundamental anarchist strategy, the so-called “black bloc” protests. Even though anarchists are plenty in such protests I fail to see how black bloc is synonymous with anarchism, or why anarchists necessarily have to support black bloc protesting. I personally support some of the views advocated among people taking part in these protests – e.g. anti-corporatism – but I don’t support destruction as a means more than I support violence. I don’t see how such means can ever be just, and neither can I see how they can ever be effective in trying to achieve something (unless the goal is destruction per se).

But the article I’m discussing here doesn’t speak of the tactic of the black bloc – it discusses anarchism in general terms. Actually, the article doesn’t discuss such corporate property vandalized by the black bloc at all – it discusses destruction of people’s “belongings.” I was, when writing the article, very careful not to mention the word “property,” simply because I know anarchists in general are opposed to the concept and equate it with government privilege and exploitation. My article isn’t about that.

Yet so far I haven’t seen one negative comment that doesn’t miss the point in the article; they all seem to go for the kill against some poor straw man. I do mention McDonald’s in the first paragraph, which was obviously a mistake – this one trademark obviously blinded most of the readers to such a degree that they were utterly unable to understand the rest of the article.

The article is about anarchism and “anarchism,” the latter being a number of people taking the “chaos and destruction” definition of anarchy to heart thinking they can enforce anarchism. Doing this, I claim, means accepting the statists’ agenda and allowing the state and its advocates set the rules for anarchism. This is very different from the old philosophy- and theory-based movement of anarchism, which was definitely not about destruction of anything but the state and its hierarchies, privileges, and structures of forced subjection.

I don’t even discuss the tactics of anarchists in the article; I know anarchists advocate a number of very different types of tactics, black bloc being one of them (even though I don’t support this particular “tactic” to the degree it is violent). The purpose of the article wasn’t in any sense to attack anarchists or the anarchist movement – it was to show that there is a difference between being anarchist and being destruction-loving. So I left corporate and state property aside, and talked only about destruction of individuals’ belongings and attacks on “innocent passers-by.”

Please enlighten me, since when are attacks on innocent people who happen to pass by, and the destruction of people’s belongings, parts of an anarchist tactic?

I happen to personally dislike violence of all types, even if directed at government employees and government property, but I can understand the frustration and hatred causing some anarchists to accept violence as a means. (To me, however, it is contradictory to claim “no one has the right to subject me to their wishes” and then violently subject other individuals because they perhaps work for the faceless organization requesting everybody’s allegiance.)

But I understand it only, however not fully, when directed towards the State or its agencies. Not when directed at people – even though people working for and supporting the State (through e.g. being public servants or voting) are indeed criminals. Assaulting a criminal doesn’t lessen the crime, and it certainly doesn’t undo the crime. It is as effective as the State’s locking people up to undo their crimes; it not only doesn’t work, it is illegitimate and wrong. If nobody has the right to use violence, then certainly you don’t have that right either – even if you are using violence against someone who used violence.

The latter could easily become an endless chain of people using violence on people who used violence on people who used violence on people who used violence.

After all, killing a murderer is still murder (under most circumstances), just like stealing from a thief is theft. It is, however, different if you are “stealing” that which was stolen from you – then it is merely taking back your stuff. But in what way is this the same as destroying people’s belongings as a means of “getting even” at the State? It isn’t. You may have the right to destroy your belongings, but how do you identify that which is yours among the vast properties of the faceless State? More importantly: how do you destroy that which belongs to you without illicitly destroying someone else’s [stolen] belongings too?

The problem of belongings is a tough one, but it is more interesting to discuss the assaults on “innocent passers-by.” How about attacking them, is that a legitimate means? Violence cannot be a means to voluntaryism just like destruction is no means to creation, statism is no means to freedom, and war is no means to peace. Laying your hand on another person, unless it is in direct self-defense, is in every sense statist – you are acting exactly like the State, while – calling yourself anarchist – claiming you are opposed to the State.

I believe anarchism is not only possible but also within reach, but it can only be realized through setting great examples. If we claim society can work without power structures and privileges, then how do we prove this through using power and taking the privilege to destroy and do harm?

The State will fall by itself sooner or later, but it will fall because it is a monstrous creation that is inherently destructive and dangerous to humankind as well as human accomplishments. It will fall when people finally realize the truth about the State and therefore withdraw their passive support. This can be achieved through the setting of examples and showing the other path; indeed, when the State finally is about to fall we need to stand firm and educated, and show people the way. The effect of shouting “anarchy” while attacking people in the streets and burning stuff to the ground does not make people appreciate anarchy – it makes them embrace the State even tighter, and ask for its support and protection. Protection against anarchists.

As I stated clearly in a previous blog entry, the topic for my article Blame Anarchism? on Strike the Root was not new; I have written on it before. So...