Per Bylund

Business Scholarship with a Swedish-Austrian Twist

Per Bylund

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Arguing for War

[ad#righthandside]In times like these, a lot of very strange thoughts emerge and are rediscovered. Just as we are forgetting the horrors of the latest world war (the second, that is) some are arguing for the great benefits of war. As should be expected, some are arguing wars should be waged for the sake of economy. Expected? Yes. If we have forgotten all about the horrors of war, then surely we must have forgotten everything about Frédéric Bastiat’s famous essay on the “Broken Window” fallacy from 1850 (see That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen). Even some economists seem stupid enough to claim a little killing and destroying is a great plan for getting the economy going.

But the real argument at times like these is the argument of preeminent attacks for the sake of safety. Even a lot of libertarians, who supposedly advocate the non-aggression principle and oppose the State, seem to embrace the state in “times like these” and argue for war. For these people negating two fundamental principles must, just like two negatives in math, generate a positive. Rather than opposing the killing of people and the stealing from other people to finance the killings, they support and sometimes even argue for more killings. In common libertarian terminology, this would translate to supporting more looting of innocent people to finance the brutal killing of more innocents. And the State gets to increase its powers too.

I have come to realize that this issue usually isn’t something people are willing to debate. There are no real arguments involved – only feelings of fear and helplessness. However, I cannot resist doing so. To me, claiming to be libertarian or freedom-loving while advocating war is so preposterous I get physically sick just thinking about it. The contradiction should be obvious, but for some reason these people are unable to see it no matter how clearly it is spelled out for them.

One of my fellow students has these views and said something interesting the other day, which is why I once again touch on the subject liberty vs. war. He is not a libertarian and certainly not anarchist, but he seems to be very close to it even though he has accepted the myths of democratic rule as a “free” society. The reason I found his views interesting is how he commented on politics: he would love to see an “army” (no pun intended) of Ron Paul people elected for Congress, but he would absolutely hate to have one of them (maybe Ron Paul himself) in the White House.

This might seem quite strange, especially since we know that the Constitution of the United States allows only Congress to wage and declare wars – the President “only” carries out the order. However, as things are nowadays, with the enormous recent power grabs of the executive branch under the Bushian regime, it might not be strange to utter such a thought. If the executive branch of government is the one working to ensure safety of the nation and Congress is to rule the nation itself, this comment would make more sense.

The reason for this statement was that this person would like to see government radically pushed back and liberty restored, both economic and social such. But at the same time, he would like to see a strong defense and an active role of the United States government in the world in order to stop possible threats to the nation. What this boils down to is that this person, like so many people of a somewhat libertarian streak, like most of the polices of Ron Paul – but not his foreign policy.

They have no problem with cutting on spending, rolling back government, restoring liberty and literally free the people and the economy from the chains of government. But they do not wish to do it at the cost of sacrificing security – they see the world as a threat that has to be “managed,” while the management of the nation is illegitimate, immoral, offensive, inefficient, and wrong.

A nation, these people claim, has a right to rule itself and it has a inviolate right to self defense. If the threat is big enough, a preeminent strike could very well be justified. In our day and age, and with all the emerging threats from the far sides of the world, government must be both active and present in order to protect the nation and its people. At the same time, the argument for government per se is to protect the nation’s liberty, without which it loses its soul. Government is a necessary evil that has recently become a little more necessary.

Benjamin Franklin’s famous words that “[a]ny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both,” come to mind.

Trying to learn more about this strange way of thinking, I ask further questions on what would be “okay” or “necessary.” If “America” (for some reason, the people advocating war tend to avoid using the word “government”) has the right to “protect itself” through murdering people in other countries, thereby violating other state’s “rights” to sovereignty, doesn’t this equally apply to other countries seeing “America” as a threat?

Yes, is the answer. Every nation has a right to defend itself, not only “America.” So I ask what he thinks about having other countries coming here to kill people and bomb cities as soon as they see the Bushian Empire as a threat. The answer?

“Ha! Let them try.”

Even though this comment was part joke, it strikes at the very heart of the argument: the United States government has a right to go anywhere to kill anyone simply because they can. A nation’s right to protect itself is in effect synonymous with might makes right. Other countries’ governments have the full right to cross the Atlantic or Pacific oceans to kill people on American soil, but the can’t and won’t because America is stronger. So even if the US government goes all around the world to intervene in domestic business – even killing people – for some distant and absurd interpretation of “protecting” America, and this should likely make someone somewhere consider the US government a threat, it is nothing we need to care about. Because “we’re stronger.”

This is an interesting logic that has led even many wise men astray. What it really translates to is that “we” can do what we want because no one else has the power to touch us, even though it is often mentioned in rationalizing terms like “just” or “legitimate” wars fought for the sake of “security” and to do away with threats.

As with any logical argument its validity can easily be tested. Think of yourself as a citizen of Kuwait in 1990 and apply the same logic. Could the state of Iraq in any way see Kuwait as a threat, which would then give them the right to attack and occupy it? The answer would probably be no, especially since we have learned through history that the United States government and 33 other governments, under UN flag, condemned the attack and forcefully removed Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwaiti territory. The so-called international community considered the Iraqi attack so unjust and unwarranted that they in turn occupied and enforced rules on Iraqi territory.

So obviously Iraq did not have the right to attack Kuwait. (Did you notice, by the way, how individuals suddenly disappeared from the argument? We are only talking about faceless abstractions and have totally forgotten about all the people getting hurt – and killed – while we try to establish which abstraction has a “right” and which does not.)

The question is then: what gives you the right? Weapons of mass destruction has been claimed as an argument. The housing of terrorists too. After all, both of these – even though they turned out to be lies rather than misinformation – were arguments for the US attack on Iraq and the killing of Saddam Hussein (a former ally who was trained by and gained power thanks to the CIA). Being a non-ally and mentioning nuclear weapons – like Iran – also seems sufficient argument for a preeminent attack according to some.

What we need to ask at this moment, after having rejected the idea of Iraq seeing Kuwait as a threat in 1990, is whether the Iraqi government possibly could have made up lies about Kuwait having weapons of mass destruction or housing terrorists or thinking of developing nukes only to legitimize an attack. Yes or no?

If your answer is “no” then you are saying that the government of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, really, a brute and madman trained by the CIA, couldn’t possibly have made something up and lied only to support his own views? I say you would probably be a lot better off lobotomized; your views are so absurd that you must be insane.

On the other hand, if your answer is “yes,” then we need to ask ourselves if the international community would have waged war on Iraq in 1990 even if Saddam Hussein would have claimed “but they might be thinking of building a bomb.” The answer is pretty obvious: of course they would. And the people advocating the ongoing war on Iraq and a future strike on Iran always – I yet have to find one exception – support the first Gulf War and how the UN and US acted in it. And they always claim it was right. So much for the argument that every nation has a right to protect itself. Unless it can be argued that an Iraqi attack on Kuwait was a serious threat to the US and UK and the 32 other nations (and I bet someone is willing to argue this).

What it boils down to is that “might is right,” at least when the mighty agrees with the person doing the arguing. After all, might is right when the US government goes overseas to kill people – but it is not right when the same government steals from and abuses people at home. The same entity doing the same thing is therefore both right and wrong – depending on who is the victim.

So put people like Ron Paul in Congress to keep government off our backs. We cannot trust government and we have a right to liberty, so government should be held at a tight leash. But only domestically. We need a warmongering idiot in the White House with the “right” to kill foreign people and – literally – bomb the shit out of them any time he (or she) for some reason thinks there might be, or could arise, a threat.

No wonder people advocating this aren’t willing to take part in civilized debates on the issues. I sure wouldn’t if I had these views – it would just make it obvious to everybody what a complete idiot I am.

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Rights: Positive, Negative, and Their Duties

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.

[ad#righthandside-tall]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.

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TV Addicts, America’s Elite Thank You

There’s something that has been troubling me lately. Most people in the PhD program that I attend are of course well educated people, and they are getting even more so as time goes by, but one of their main interests outside of the department and their classes seems to be television (possibly because they need some non-demanding relaxation after their hard seven-days-a-week work as soon-to-be “real” researchers). And when discussing with non-academics it seems everything is about television.

Not only do people have their favorite TV shows or series that they follow slavishly, they seem to prefer spending a couple of hours more zapping to social interaction. Some people go home, even though they are having a great time with friends, just to make sure not to miss out on whatever is on the hundreds of channels they have. And if they miss the weekly episode of their favorite series – life crisis.

[ad#righthandside-tall]The television series Lost seems to have this effect on people. I watched the first two seasons on the ABC web site just to see what it was all about. It is a strange series consisting of numerous flashbacks to weird people’s lives prior to the crash of their plane on some deserted island, that became increasingly horrible as I watched episode after episode. The reason it was horrible was not that the story is made in such a way that you feel you “need” to see the next episode (which is always the case), but the underlying philosophy.

The last episode of the second season ends with a between-the-lines philosophical punch in the stomach: things are found and understood thanks to the drug-lord-became-fake-priest “Mr. Echo” seeing his dead brother running around in the bushes and giving Echo advice. And John Locke, who has stopped believing, saves the day thanks to giving up whatever reason and rationality there is in him – to believe again.

In what does he believe? It is not in God or anything like that – it is a belief in reason being unreasonable. His belief consists of him and everything being destined to do certain things and follow whatever signs that can be identified. I guess we’re all just blind in the dark and need to be taught that we cannot trust ourselves or our intelligence. Things are always incomprehensible and we should just “go with the flow”…follow any whim or impulse and you will come out on top of things.

What are we supposed to learn from the show Lost? Obviously that your brain is not for using – there is no reason in the world that can save you if you don’t believe in the impossible and totally outrageous. Kind of the “hip” anti-enlightenment sentiment of the 20th century turning to a hyper-anti-thinking-ideal.

Lost is for sure not the only show preaching the same message; most TV productions have some degree of anti-reason mysti-glorifying hidden agenda.

But even if we don’t accept this rather obvious fact, perhaps because we regularly watch the crap and have already accepted some of the broadcast morality, there are reasons to quit watching whatever happens to be on for the moment.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, even well educated people turn on their television sets when they get home at night – and they slavishly follow some series or show. TV is the main source of information and understanding of the world as it is today, which means television has gained enormous powers. Even Internet, which is often mentioned as a popular and revolutionizing means to consume non-mainstream news and reporting, is used to watch TV shows that you’ve missed. So Internet seems to function partly as a next generation VCR, with which you can watch the shows that you missed – and that gives you an opportunity to preview future shows (legally or illegally).

The ongoing primaries in the republicrat party shows clearly what impact television has on people’s thinking: whoever is on television most wins. The media, or whoever controls it, has thereby the power to choose a candidate through deciding who gets to be seen and who doesn’t.

Even the news are streamlined to not upset anyone and to paint a picture of some things being a whole lot better than they are, and some things being terribly bad (even though they’re not). The sad truth is that people’s beliefs depend on television – whatever is on decides how you think, what you think, and when to think it.

Lost is just one of the examples of a show that very clearly expresses what is going on. You have to believe; if you think freely, independently, and without “guidance” you are or will get in trouble. Don’t criticize or think about what it is you are watching and whether it makes sense – just sit back, relax, and “enjoy.”

Television is the perfect means for brain washing a population – because it is one-way only. It may offer some interactive features (like changing channels), but what is broadcast is produced in a protected environment and fully controlled by the people producing it. It is not a substitute for a good conversation with an intellectual person, or even taking part in a discussion forum on some web site – it is the very opposite.

A discussion with other people is non-controllable and non-foreseeable; you have to always pay attention to not lose touch with the discussion. And the most important thing about a conversation is: you don’t want to be just a recipient of “truths.” In a conversation, for it to be a good conversation (or even a conversation at all) you need to take part. And you won’t accept someone else’s views just because “he says so,” for the outcome of the discussion – whether you like it or not – is the result partly of your doing (so why give it up?). It might be upsetting, disturbing, or someone might even be lying – but somehow you won’t settle for anyone’s opinions just because they are worded. You feel obligated to criticize and think yourself.

TV works the other way. It is supposed to be entertainment and therefore it delivers nothing that makes you upset, and whatever is broadcast is made as easy to swallow as possible. Just sit back, relax, and let yourself be fed the entertainment.

Have a look at the news – it too is entertainment. News reports are made shorter and shorter, so that you can go back to seeing your favorite show sooner. And still the news reports have gone through numerous layers of mainstreaming (censoring) so that whatever is reported is thoroughly controlled. There’s no room for surprises and no reports that tease your brain to start producing its own thoughts or penetrating lies. Sometimes they make you react to them, but trust me – the way you react is a result of how the report is put together, not of your independent assessment of the facts.

Imagine if you were the ruler of the land – what would you do to keep such a mass of people in check? You need to make them believe in you and the system, otherwise they might challenge it. How do you do that? You make them think everything is alright, that someone else is making the tough decisions – that someone else is answering the “red phone” in the middle of the night so that you can relax and continue to let yourself be entertained.

There’s a reason TV programming is broadcast almost exclusively by mammoth networks. It is easier to control a few huge networks, or to form alliances with them, and then “protect” the “competition” in the market for TV entertainment through setting up barriers to “hostile” competitors. Who gets to “entertain” the populace is not a result of providing the best programming, it is a result of getting the right permits.

Have you ever wondered about this obsession about television in this country? Ever wondered why people stay at home passively letting themselves be showered by the “boob tube” instead of going out to meet people? We’re programmed through evolution to save our energy, so TV fits us perfectly: there’s no need to go anywhere, we don’t need to socially interact (which could be both stressful and energy-consuming), and we don’t even have to think. Just keep those eyes open and let the brain get soaked with whatever “is on.” So television seems to be the perfect tool for keeping us satisfied at the lowest possible level, while keeping us from the truth and life itself.

Am I wrong? Then consider a normal conversation between friends in almost any setting. What do you usually talk about with people? Television, and perhaps also the latest neighborhood gossip, and the weather. Nothing that really means anything or that keeps your intellect alert. Your brain turns to mush while you are letting yourself be passively entertained, spending hours in your favorite armchair with a deadish, fixed smile on your lips.

The truth is that any “normal” conversation today is always about television: “Did you see that show last night about [whatever]?” – “No, did you really miss the latest episode of [fill in the blank]? It was sooo cool, I wonder what’s going to happen next…” – “Do you remember that move about the guy who did that thing? What was it called…? Yes, that one – have you seen it too? That was awesome.” And so on.

Where does this fascination come from? I don’t know, but I do know that people are fascinated and they spend hours in front of their television sets watching shows they don’t really like. How often don’t you hear people claim there’s “only crap” on? Yet they don’t turn the television set off – they cannot, because what would they do if they didn’t have a distraction to passively stimulate the irises?

Have you ever wondered what you would do without television? Does the thought terrify you? The fact that the thought of living without television terrifies you is indeed terrifying. Who knows what kind of baloney you’re fed – and what it makes you believe. Aren’t you afraid of what television makes you?

Imagine a land where everybody is fixed to watching television. Do you sincerely believe that such a population could not be subject to some kind of propaganda? Imagine if one of the “great” dictators of history had had a population addicted to television – it would not have made their ends harder to accomplish. Television serves as both a great “teaching” device and as a distraction – if you are watching you cannot know what is going on around you.

If someone, with or without uniform, would break into your neighbor’s house and pull them out of there kicking and screaming. Would you then turn off your television set and go outside to see for yourself what is going on – and help the people you know?

Or would you have a quick look and then continue zapping…or perhaps just turn up the volume…?

For more on this topic, see The Media and Power and Rejecting Television.

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Positive Aspects of the Police State

[ad]There should be no question about the horrors of the emerging police states in North America and Europe, and that I oppose the state in any form – especially in the outright oppressive shape of a police and surveillance state. So please don’t misunderstand when I say that there are, in my view, some positive aspects of this development towards total power and Hitlerian oppression in so-called liberal democracies.

This positive development lies only within the anarchism movement, and specifically in a small part of it. I am talking about the different forms of anarchism sometimes described as market anarchism, including mutualism, individualist anarchism, and anarcho-capitalism. Especially within the latter, there is a constant problem of vulgar libertarianism among proponents.

As Kevin Carson, who coined the term, writes in his Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, chapter four:

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because “that’s not how the free market works”–implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of “free market principles.”

I claim the problem with anarcho-capitalism lies in its historical roots. The reason it doesn’t fit with the other anarchisms is that anarcho-capitalism uses a rather “right-wing” terminology whereas the rest of the anarchist movement in general uses the “left-wing” counterpart. This makes anarcho-capitalism sound very different from other anarchisms, even though it, in essence, is not. When an anarcho-capitalist says capitalism he refers to the free market and how things are arranged without state or other oppression – basically what an individualist anarchist would term socialism. And with socialism the anarcho-capitalist refers to the regulated market, state power, and oppressive measures and privileges – what in individualist anarchist lingo would be labeled capitalism.

Anarcho-capitalism thus “enjoys” problems of being accepted by other anarchist branches simpl because they refuse to understand each other. But anarcho-capitalism should be seen as a great opportunity for anarchism to reach people of a somewhat “rightist” bend, which is something that the anarchism movement dogmatically refuses to do. People who haven’t adopted the labor movement terminology can also be anarchists, and they sometimes are, but they are turned off by the common anarchist use of language while they would gladly adopt the ideas and values if they could see through the words used.

What we have is a problem arising from people of the left and right both being too dogmatic to join forces – even when they essentially agree with each other. (I’m not saying the anarchism movement should embrace anyone on the right – only that there are quite a few anarchists on the right who don’t join the movement for the same reasons many anarchists reject anarcho-capitalism.)

The problem for the movement is thus dogmatism in terminology rather than substantive ideas or values. And here anarcho-capitalism, especially in its agorist form, could play a very important part in making the movement bigger and stronger.

The problem for anarcho-capitalism is however not the petty problem of people choosing a dogmatic language. The problem is that the rightist language and the “rightist outreach” sometimes make people adopt some of the anarchist views while clinging to a rightist knee-jerk defense of corporations and big business. This is the vulgar libertarianism Carson speaks of, and it is a problem with the anarcho-capitalist movement that vulgar libertarians aren’t shown the contradiction in their views and that their views are gladly accepted by the rest of the movement (whereas “leftist” anarchist views may not be).

Anarcho-capitalism isn’t itself vulgar in the Carsonian sense, but many anarcho-capitalists tend to be.

This is where the police state could have a positive effect. While vulgar libertarians tend to defend business interests (without ever questioning those interests) against state regulation, they do not only support business but oppose the state. The police state, making its horrible powers and oppressive machinery obvious, makes vulgar libertarians embrace both sides when they are obviously contradictory.

I have yet to see a vulgar libertarian defend corporations such as Blackwater USA (I really don’t think that will ever happen). This corporation is far too much entangled with the federal government to be considered private, “private” being a key word in the vulgar libertarian defense for corporations. But as the police state grows, more private corporations will make a business out of the state’s demand for more efficient technologies to subdue and control the populace. Clearly, the distinction between government oppression and business seems to fade away as private corporations produce and sell the tools of torture to our oppressive governments.

Vulgar libertarians would gladly defend Microsoft against more state regulation. A worthy cause, perhaps (all state regulation is bad), but Microsoft is not only crippled by regulation – it feeds of state-enforced and state-invented monopoly rights such as “intellectual property.” But there has not, to my knowledge, been an attempt by vulgar libertarians to defend the company TASER, which produces and sells the stun guns used in numerous police “incidents” (such as brutal attacks and even killings of peaceful people who committed no serious crimes).

I claim there is a reason vulgar libertarians defend Microsoft while not doing the same for TASER. The former may feed off government-enforced privileges, but it produces products that are meant for the general public and that would probably be supplied in a free market. There is no reason to assume there wouldn’t be operating systems and word processors if the state was abolished. But TASER has one main market: the State. And the products are sold/purchased and used for the sole purpose of aggressing on people – the stun gun is supposed to make people immovable so that they can be apprehended by police officers, and they are not generally for use by the public (if at all allowed).

My prediction is that vulgar libertarians will continue to defend Microsoft, but only for as long as they do not actively develop software for e.g. face recognition or Internet traffic control to be used mainly or exclusively by government (and make this a great part of their business). If the connection between a corporation and oppressive measures taken by government is too obvious, vulgar libertarians tend to draw the right conclusions. They oppose the State and therefore a corporation working purposefully to assist the State in its illegitimate oppression and control of citizens do not get to be defended by vulgar libertarians.

It would thus be very surprising to see a vulgar libertarian defense for the company making the “EMD Safety Bracelet”:

The police state thus provides the means to unify anarchism to a degree not before possible, and it provides a context in which vulgar libertarians will begin to realize that the defense of big business might not be a good idea. At least, it does not fit at all with their other view: anti-statism. This is therefore, in a sense, a positive aspect (or effect) of the police state, even though the police state itself – just like the State per se – is a brutal, oppressive beast to the detriment of us all.

This is an opportunity to be recognized and taken advantage of. After all, we need more allies and less internal conflicts if we are to ever achieve a free society.

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Are All Capitalists Communists?

[ad]I have followed the discussion on the Federal Reserve lately, not only how it is meddling with the currency and thereby trying to push the market in one direction or another. My interest has been mainly in the arguments for and against “the Fed,” i.e. reasons it exists and results of its existence (and meddling).

The proponents of a central bank claim there is a general need for a centralized power to create stability in the market and counteract the boom and bust cycles that we’re experiencing. The proponents of a market freed from a central bank claim the exact opposite: that the Fed through its meddling with the currency and interest rates create the boom and bust cycles. So how are we to find out which of these parties has got this right and which is utterly confused?

One way is to think about it for a minute or two. It isn’t too hard to realize what underlying philosophies make people take these two positions. In the former case, the market itself is unstable and needs to be corrected. So it is saying that there is some kind of friction or instability in the market that it cannot sort out itself, and therefore we need political instruments to take care of it. Sounds like a reasonable conclusion given that the premises are correct.

So let’s have a look at the premises. Why does the market fluctuate in big wave-like motions up and down, in which everybody frantically collectively buy everything or sell everything? Marx claimed it was the underlying contradiction in capitalism that caused these booms and busts. Because of oppression and the ongoing class conflict between the propertied and unpropertied (proletarian) classes there is tension, and the exploitation of labor workers makes capitalists literally go “wild,” which in turn makes the market unstable. (This is a very simplified version of Marxian business cycle theory, of course.)

What these booms and busts really mean is that people tend to act “like one” and therefore when someone starts buying everybody starts buying – and when someone starts selling everybody starts selling. This might seem intuitive, but since we know everybody in the market is trying to make a profit this simply cannot be the case. There are panics, of course, when the market is already going up or down very rapidly. When you realize something strange is going on and that you are about to lose all your money, you might panic. But that still doesn’t explain why the market goes down before people panic.

Let’s think about it, when the market is going up at a modest rate, why in the world would a lot of people suddenly sell all they have and leave the market? If the market is going up we would of course have some people selling to realize their profits, but there is no reason to not invest more or stay in the market with some investments when it is going up. It simply doesn’t make sense for everybody to collectively sell everything they have and put the money in a bank account instead of taking advantage of the economic growth.

The same thing is true for the opposite situation. In a market with falling indexes there is no reason for everybody to collectively and suddenly start buying and thereby change the direction of how the market develops. If people really did collectively make a decision – wouldn’t we know of it? Wouldn’t we have a huge information problem to solve first? And if everybody follows a leader, wouldn’t we know who that leader is? Wouldn’t we be able to identify him or her? (After all, we are parts of the market.)

No one working in the financial markets will tell you they are but sheep following a leader or that they are acting collectively on some kind of invisible command. They might tell you that they could panic in certain situations and at that time act like sheep or follow someone’s lead. But then we’re back at the same problem again: the panic doesn’t arise out of thin air, it is caused by something – and it is usually caused by drastic change in the markets. Now, if everybody is acting on drastic change – where the hell does the change come from? “The market,” after all, is but an abstraction of all the people and transactions out there – drastic change cannot happen in the market before people act [on it], because such a change is the result of their actions.

This cause of the problem is what Marx tried to explain with the “inherent contradiction” in capitalism, even though I don’t think he did a very good job (at least not if this theory is applied to the concept of the market in general). However, most people working in the financial markets have adopted this Marxian view of what they are doing. This is evident from how they view the Federal Reserve: most financial analysts claim, and they do so sincerely, that the Fed is necessary to counteract the booms and busts. So they seem to believe that they aren’t able to trade with each other using reason and acting upon it – they can only act collectively and irrationally, and therefore they are doomed to create these booms and busts.

I doubt anyone working in and with the markets would choose to tell you they are all brainless drones acting collectively without ever thinking of what they are doing. On the contrary, many of them spend most of their time analyzing facts trying to make as fact-based and rational decisions as possible.

Now, even if Marx was wrong – this is surely a contradiction. These people claim there is a need for a centralized power counteracting the effects of their collective and irrational actions in the market place whereas they also claim to invest based on as thorough rational analysis as is possible given the ever existing constraints in supply of time and money. We can only conclude these people are wrong in one of these claims: either they are just trying to cover up their “sheepness” through faking analysis, or they are not normally acting like sheep.

The proponents of a market free from the Fed and its meddling with the currency and interest rates claim there are no natural boom and bust cycles in the market. People do panic when the market suddenly and drastically changes, but these sudden and drastic changes are in turn caused by over- and underinvestment triggered by attempts to artificially make capital cheaper and more expensive through meddling with currency and interest rates. What they are saying (and my use of the word “meddling” should give me a way as one of them) is that the boom and bust cycles were originally caused by the central bank trying to politically increase (politicians hardly ever want to decrease) growth through artificial measures.

They lowered interest rates (the price of capital) to spur investment or printed more money in order to “invest” in wars or welfare systems and other benefits to get re-elected. What would such a shock to the market system result in? The obvious answer is that when the price of capital suddenly and somewhat drastically goes down a lot of business people act on this incentive – they get their hands to this money and make investments they otherwise wouldn’t make. Why wouldn’t they make these investments otherwise? Because they make the investments they can afford, and they choose the ones they believe are most profitable – when the price of capital is artificially lowered they can suddenly afford the more risky and less “safe” investments and do so in order to maximize profits.

You can’t really blame people acting in their own interest and acting as they have always act. The reason they make these extra risky investments is because someone lowered interest rates to a level the market itself doesn’t consider reasonable.

The extra investments cause a boom, of course, since investments increase dramatically. And the extra investments, since they are riskier, tend to be bad investments much more often than the investments that were made with capital at market price. It is also important to realize that this “stimulation” of the market usually is a one-time thing – the state does not have any reason to always keep interest rates low (which is very costly – for everybody), they only do this as a way to win the election.

So what happens when the investments start failing (and a lot of them will)? The market is pushed downward at a rate not possible were it not for the artificially cheap investment capital that a lot of people took advantage of. After having spent all money available on investments people tend to underinvest – they have already invested as much as they dare (even considering the cheaper capital). So they start to cut back, especially when they realize some of the extra investments were in fact not very good. So we have a recoil to the artificial boom – a bust.

How does the state, through the Fed, react to these cycles? Just like they react right now: “oh my god, there is a lot of bad investments out there, a recession is coming – we need to lower interest rates to get the market going again.” Well, this might work a couple of times – but it creates but another boom before another bust, and each time the Fed needs to use more drastic measures (i.e., lower the interest rate more or print even more money) to really change things.

Anybody see an evil circle? Anybody see who’s the culprit? Yep, the Fed.

So we have these two positions, and they both are available in a number of different versions, that either the Fed helps a market that cannot take care of itself or it causes the problems it claims to fix.

One can only ask: how come anyone survived before the Fed was founded in 1913? The history books should be brimful with depressions much worse than the one starting in 1929. After all, in 1929 we had the Fed to save us.

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Communicating the War on Drugs

[ad#righthandside-tall]Something that has bothered me for quite a while is how libertarians, when they are right, fail to communicate effectively the problems they correctly identify. It is definitely the case that contemporary society is far more statist than “marketist” and that most problems therefore should, even if it cannot be proved, statistically be a product of the state rather than the market. It is also true that a lot of the problems often blamed on the non-existent free market are products of the state, state power, and state aggression.

An example of such a problem is the so-called War on Drugs, which causes a huge number of deaths every year. Most people who die are completely innocent of any crime and they are in no way guilty of ever aggressing on another’s person or property. So what did they wrong? They smoked or drank or inhaled or injected the wrong thing – if it isn’t licensed by the state it could cost you your life. Not because the substance is dangerous, but because the state will kill you or at least lock you up for not obeying orders. And before you’re killed or locked up, or if you happen to not be one of the millions in these categories, you are forced to finance this unnecessary and outrageous slaughter. This is the sad truth.

The War on Drugs, just like any war, is to the detriment of common people and is fought at the cost of the very same. The only people who benefit are the ones starting and carrying out the war, i.e. politicians/dictators and the military and its suppliers. This is a general fact of war, which is hardly ever discussed when the state wages war on something that is considered a public bad: drugs, poverty, terrorism, or whatever.

But it is not these general truths I would like to discuss in this blog post. My writing this is a direct result of an article I read recently on Reason Online: Another Drug Raid Nightmare: The railroading of Ryan Frederick. I couldn’t agree more with the author of this article; this is a sad story of an innocent guy who is literally attacked in the middle of the night by the local police. As anyone in his situation, he fears for his life and defends himself – and kills a police. He is now facing a lifetime sentence or possible death, which is a quite common result of defending yourself when attacked by the state. And it is an increasingly common problem.

Remember, when you are attacked by another person and defend yourself, the perpetrator either goes free or is locked up in some state indoctrination institution at the cost of you as taxpayer. But if you defend yourself against an attack by the people who have sworn to serve and protect [the state] you will be punished according to the age-old law of “eye for an eye” – or worse.

The guy in this Reason Online article, Ryan Frederick, is not, as far as we can tell, guilty of the crime the police officers were to apprehend him for. But that does not matter; guilty or not, you do not have the right to defend yourself, no matter the circumstances, if you are aggressed by a state kommissar.

What the author of this Reason Online piece wants to communicate is exactly this: that the police can make terrible mistakes, but that you will be held guilty for any consequences. What should be read between the lines is this: someone has to do something about this, this can’t go on.

But this, I believe, is not what most people would see when reading the article. Let’s have a look at a few paragraphs from the article. It begins like this:

Imagine you’re home alone.

It’s 8 p.m. You work an early shift and need to be out the door before sunrise, so you’re already in bed. Your nerves are a bit frazzled, because earlier in the week someone broke into your home. Oddly, they didn’t take anything; they just rifled through your belongings.

But the violation weighs on your mind. At about the time you drift off, you’re awakened by fierce barking from your two large dogs. You hear someone crashing into your front door, as if he’s trying to separate it from its hinges. You grab the gun you keep for home defense and leave your room to investigate.

This past January that scenario played out at the Chesapeake, Virginia, home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick, a slight man of little more than 100 pounds. According to interviews since the incident, Frederick says when he looked toward his front door, he saw an intruder trying to enter through one of the lower door panels. So Frederick fired his gun.

The intruders were from the Chesapeake Police Department. They had come to serve a drug warrant. Frederick’s bullet struck Detective Jarrod Shivers in the side, killing him. Frederick was arrested and has spent the last six weeks in a Chesapeake jail.

He has been charged with first degree murder.

Most, if not all, libertarians are at this point outraged – what do you mean charged with first degree murder? It was self defense! I agree, of course. This poor guy was simply trying to defend himself and his property against an attacker who happened to be a police officer – but there is no way Mr. Frederick could know that, since the police officer chose to break down the door in the middle of the night and climb right in. If he had knocked on the door closer to business hours and identified himself, this would all have ended very differently – but he had to play Clint Eastwood protected by a state “right to kill” badge.

To any libertarian, even though killing the guy is probably a little off the principle of proportionality, the bad guy in this story is no doubt the police officer. This is not the case because libertarians dislike, to put it very mildly, state officers – the police officer is the bad guy because he is the attacker and Mr. Frederick had every right to defend himself and his property.

This is not the way the state sees it, of course:

Paul Ebert, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, has indicated he may elevate the charge to capital murder, which would enable the state to seek the death penalty.

Outrageous!

But leaving the prosecutor aside, what does the Reason Online article accomplish? The first answer is of course that a lot of libertarian readers are literally pissed off with this injustice for one reason or the other (no pun intended). But what about non-libertarians? I suspect a lot of libertarians forward this article, and many like it, to friends and family showing them the horrors of the state and the state force of aggression (a.k.a. the police).

I am pretty sure most people would not be outraged by how the police acted in this case, even though libertarians probably assume everybody will react the exact same way they do. Rather, the “normal” responses to the above quoted paragraphs are probably along these lines:

  • “Well, if he hadn’t had a gun he would not be in the kind of trouble he is. Why would he need a gun anyway?”
  • “He can’t be innocent – if the police were there he must have done something wrong. So he has earned his time in jail anyhow.”
  • “What about that poor police officer – and what about his family? He was just doing his job when that pot-smoking thug shot him down. And the killer was probably on drugs anyway.”

This is the common response, I think, to such an article as the one published on Reason Online. Why? Well, if we knew that we would already have done something about it, wouldn’t we? What’s important here is to realize that most people probably don’t react to the story as the average libertarian does – they are educated to automatically take the state’s side with justifications such as sweeping statements like “if the police was there he must have done something wrong.”

Forwarding this article, like any other such article, to non-libertarians simply doesn’t do the trick. I claim people aren’t convinced of the state’s evil by reading such articles; they are more likely to take a defensive stance to protect their belief in status quo from challenging thoughts.

So the article does not change anything – it confirms the views of the reader, no matter what the reader’s views are. Libertarians read the article and are outraged by the police brutality and how the state treats the poor Mr. Frederick who was so brutally attacked. Non-libertarians see yet another proof that there are dangerous people out there with both drugs and guns – and that not even police officers are safe.

I don’t know the purpose of the article, and since it is published by Reason I suspect it is aimed for a libertarian audience. As such, it is good reading and is in a way preaching to the choir. But if the purpose, at least to some extent, is to convince non-libertarians of how “our” police state treats people “like us” it is way off target. It does not matter how clear it is to libertarian readers – the article doesn’t clearly show that Mr. Frederick was an ordinary citizen and that this could happen to anyone including you.

The kind of stories told in this Reason Online article is often part of libertarians’ arsenal in trying to make the general public understand the facts of the War on Drugs. But such attempts are destined to fail and possibly make things worse. In order to sell the facts of the War on Drugs we need to realize that the opinions on the War on Drugs aren’t primarily about the facts but about feelings. Talking of drugs and guns, people generally think of the mafia and ruthless Hollywood-style drug lords killing just for the fun of it. They don’t think of poor individuals whose lives are brutally destroyed by a state that doesn’t care about them, the drugs, or justice.

What we should try try to do is not show the facts, but to sell the idea that the War on Drugs first and foremost is wrong and, secondly, that it has disastrous consequences. As is the case in any sale, we need to know who the potential customer is and approach him or her in a way that suits him or her. Using our own terminology and drawing our own conclusions while asking people to read a number of books and articles doesn’t sell our ideas at all.

We’re in the business of selling ideas, and therefore we must act as if we actually have something to sell – and that it is good for the potential customer. The sad truth is that we’re such poor sales people.

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More on “Blame Anarchism?”

[ad]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.

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The War and International Tax Payers

[ad]I have been following the discussions on the economy lately, especially the discussions on the larger TV networks such as CNN. What is striking about the commentary and “analysis” is the total lack of understanding (or should I say ignorance?) for what is going on. Most analysts and experts seem to blame recession for the weakening dollar and inflation in prices, as were it some kind of natural market flaw.

We’re told recession is something that “just happens” in the market; something that we cannot get around and that we cannot really understand. They don’t say the wave-like ups and downs in the market are results of what Marx called inherent conflicts in capitalism, but they sure seem to mean exactly that. The experts don’t know why, but the market seems to go up and down in periods – in general boom and bust cycles.

As gold hits and passes $1,000 per ounce, and oil reaches beyond $110 per barrel, we are destined to see a weakening dollar as a result of the overall recession. The fact that the Fed is frequently pushing out more dollars in the international market system, sometimes as loans and sometimes as alms, to cover the massive costs for the ongoing war in Iraq and Afghanistan, is something that isn’t mentioned at all.

Where does all this money come from? If the Fed decides to offer another loan to the market or hand out treasury bonds, where is the reserve of value from which this money is taken? The sad truth is that there is none, which means any such action by the Fed is adding more of the fiat currency to the market without any kind of value backing.

But judging from the “experts” on TV, I guess the number of dollars “out there” has no effect on the value of the currency. Prices of any goods that have heavily increased supply go down – that is something any economist knows for sure. But this reasoning seems to not affect money. After all, money is money and has nothing to do with other things people trade with?

The falling dollar has in only seven months cost me more than 10% of the value of my annual salary as a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Missouri measured in my “home currency” Swedish Kronas (see August 15 vs. March 14). This is not because the Krona is unbelievably strong; on the contrary, the Krona is – like any other fiat currency – inflated, but it is so at a much lower rate than the American dollar.

How much has the dollar fallen? (Or, in more correct language: how much poorer have Americans become “thanks” to their politicians?) Let’s have a look at the exchange rate five years ago, on March 14, 2003, about the time when the war began. The dollar has fallen almost 29 % since then as compared to that small, insignificant country‘s fiat currency.

Theoretically, this should mean American products are a helluvalot cheaper now than five years ago, which should be good for exports and for countries importing American goods. So the problem of the dollar shouldn’t be anybody else’s problem.

Even considering that the dollar is a “world currency” (whatever that means), and that a lot of companies and corporations have signed contracts in dollars, shouldn’t affect e.g. European countries too much. At least not in the long term – such losses are nothing but temporary and should therefore be covered by temporary measures or productivity increases.

The reason the world is so closely following what is happening with the dollar exchange rate (but no one is of course asking why this is happening) is that the international system of trade is 100 % political. It is managed by political organizations that enforce political rule; it is traded through political channels with political favors and with politically controlled currencies; and the corporations acting in the system are almost without exception heavily subsidized by “its” country’s political government.

This is the reason politicians around the world are now aiming to collectively save the dollar (link in Swedish). The natural thing to do in a time of crises would of course be to take whatever measures to strengthen one’s own nest, to make sure the “home market” is strong enough to survive a dollar crisis. Which can only be done through massive deregulation and depoliticization of the market (broadly defined). This is, of course, not in the interest of politicians and political power – even though it is definitely in the interest of people and firms everywhere.

Instead of taking advantage of the situation, politicians around the world get together to do what they do best: make things even worse. The dollar is to be saved only so that status quo is unaffected by the problems caused by political meddling with the economy – and this can only be achieved through intervention in support of the dollar.

What we are about to see is therefore a collective effort by politicians worldwide to make their central banks spend enormous amounts of tax payers’ money to buy paper dollars so that the supply in the market is limited (or decreased), which will make the dollar regain some of the illusion of value. This may seem like another one of politicians’ stupid ideas to try to do something about something they are utterly ignorant about.

But let me assure you it is worse than that.

The reason the dollar is crashing is because there is a war going on in Iraq and Afghanistan (and there might soon be another one in Iran). Wars are costly and they certainly cannot be financed through regular taxation – the Iraq war will cost as much as the U.S. federal income tax for two full years according to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. It is obvious that such costs cannot fit in the budget; it is also impossible to “temporarily” raise taxes to cover for such costs.

In other words, costs have to be covered in other ways than direct taxation. When a thief cannot steal enough to cover his costs, what does he do? He starts another lucrative business: counterfeiting. The Fed is literally pumping billions of dollars into the market to cover the costs of the war, which causes the dollar to fall. And then politicians all over the world take tax payers’ hard earned money to “rescue” the dollar from collapse.

So when people work hard in Europe and Japan to make a living, their politicians are taking their money and literally sending them to Washington D.C. to be spent on killing more people in Iraq.

What a wonderful world.

Update: The Financial Times is now writing on how non-American central banks will bail out the United States financial problems. They don’t mention what it means, of course, but they report on what is about to happen.

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Soon to be Resurrected?

My apologies to all the readers of this blog. The last couple of weeks have been awfully busy, which is why I haven’t been able to post any blog entries. I have, however, a number of drafts that need only a little work before they can be submitted. So bear with me; there will be new entries posted by the end of this week.

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More on the Recycling Myth

[ad]In a recent post I covered and elaborated on some of the points in an article I had published on mises.org February 4th discussing the Swedish recycling scheme. This kind of article is obviously scarce in the market for environmental discussion – it immediately became the third most Digged article in Digg’s environment category. And it has been a reason for discussion on numerous discussion forums, and the object of commentaries on blogs and ezines. I have also received plenty of comments by e-mail.

What strikes me about almost all of these comments is the total lack of interest in what I am trying to say. Rather than attacking the main point in my article, that recycling schemes based on force and power don’t work and that they are generally very bad ideas (for multiple reasons), most commenters seem to conclude that I am against recycling or against the environment.

It thus seems my article created quite a big market for straw men.

I readily admit that the point about coercive systems might not be very clear for anyone reading the article. The reason for this is not my inability to express myself using English (which has been insinuated), even though it is my second language, as it is a conscious choice. The article was written for publication by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The institute is very clearly pro-freed markets and anti-government; in other words, the audience is already aware of the moral problems of government and would not be interested in an introductory course in the moral costs of coercion.

The article therefore doesn’t focus on this fundamental statement as much as it describes the Swedish government-enforced system for recycling to further elaborate on the general point that coercion is wrong.

This is probably one of the reasons so many seem to just not get what it is I am saying. But I suspect it isn’t even half of the reason; environmentalism is more of a religion than it is a science – if you do not whole-heartedly believe in all governmental measures to protect the environment, you simply don’t care about the environment. I do not need to elaborate on the philosophical fallacies in drawing such conclusions. Let us instead have a look at one of the most outrageous statements on my “opinions” about the environment.

I don’t intend to discuss statements such as “Bylund is against recycling” or “Bylund doesn’t care for the environment” (usually expressed in terms of “Bylund wants everybody to destroy the environment”). Such statements are nothing but stupid, and when reading the article without the intent to find support for one’s bias, it should be pretty obvious that they are totally groundless. Instead, I would like to address a very interesting anti-market argument that has been expressed in different forms in a number of places. I’ll quote one of the more clearly articulated commenters:

The Swedish recycling policies, as Bylund describes them, place responsibility on the individual for their waste products. He maintains that such a system of personal responsibility is extremely socialist and bad for the market: “Imagine a whole population spending time and money cleaning their garbage and driving it around the neighborhood rather than working or investing in a productive market!”

So personal responsibility equals socialism, because the government is making Swedes assume responsibility.

I find this comment interesting in many ways, partly because of the masterful use of contradiction to “prove” that my opinion (as it is described here) is… well, crazy. I call it “masterful” because I think it is: it is completely unfounded and obviously based in total ignorance of who I am and what I stand for, but it is so simple and clear a critique that anyone can see what a nut job I am.

It is also interesting in how it turns most of the concepts on their heads, calling it “personal responsibility” to be forced at the barrel of a gun to do something and saying that I think it is [state] socialism to take responsibility. In a sense, the comment is totally correct while being totally wrong and at the same completely miss the point of the article. It is right in the sense that I do consider the current Swedish recycling scheme [state] socialism and that I am totally against any such (i.e., [state] socialist) schemes.

But it is totally off the scale in claiming that to be forced to do something is the same as assuming responsibility. As a matter of fact, I am strongly in favor of private and personal responsibility and there is no doubt in my mind that people would have to take full responsibility for their trash in a free market (and I am for that too).

In a freed market (call it a free society, if you will) there simply wouldn’t be anywhere to put your trash except for in your own garden, and people definitely don’t want to live in a dump. So they would want to get rid of the trash, and for such a service they would have to pay – and such services would likely be cheaper the more efficient the garbage collector would be in taking care of the “problem.” And the more can be turned around and sold in the market, the more profitable the business would be.

But to get to this point you need to understand how the market works and reason in multiple steps. Most bloggers and commenters “out there” lack both of these qualities. Instead, they tend to apply their faulty statist logic on my reasoning (if you don’t have a clue, go with what you know…): if I am against a state-enforced, coercive system for recycling it is concluded that I am against recycling; if I am against government force used to make people take care of their trash in a certain way, it is concluded that I am against people taking care of their trash.

Being convinced by fallacies being truth, most seem to conclude the opposite is also true. Their conclusion that I am against recycling per se means I would like to see the environment destroyed; the conclusion that I am against people taking care of their trash means I want people to be able to (indeed, they should) throw their trash wherever they see fit, without any thought of consequences. My being convinced that the guns of government cannot be used productively, interpreted as my disbelief in private responsibility, leads to the conclusion that I want everybody to be able to act without ever having to take responsibility or face the consequences of their actions.

This would be as far from my real views as one can get. Actually, this latter statement is similar to the actual state of affairs in the Soviet Union (in other words, a lot of government) just before it collapsed under its own weight, rather than any market I am aware of. As a matter of fact, the beauty of the freed market is that it is based on each individual acting and making the choice to act – and with each individual having the same right to act, there is no way of avoiding the consequences of one’s actions. Personal responsibility is absolute in a freed market; it is only possible to avoid taking the consequences of one’s actions through directly making someone else take on the costs. That would mean force, which, in turn, would call for a counter-action and increased costs as a result – perhaps even destroyed reputation and therefore increased costs for acting in the future.

As a market anarchist, with political, philosophical, economic, and moral views somewhere between agorism and mutualism, such a system of total personal responsibility for one’s actions is the very basis of any sound and moral society. However people voluntarily agree on cooperating to distribute or assume collective responsibility is fine; the only thing that isn’t fine is forcing someone else to bear the costs of one’s actions. And this is exactly what the government does. On a daily basis.

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