an angry anarchist

Why Marx was wrong

2012-04-21T02:05:00.001-07:00

http://iambinarymind.tumblr.com/post/21436905421

Communism as freedom from natural market forces.

Marx and engels thought (collective) 'Man' could and should control these natural forces that had historically controlled him. They foresaw no problems of coordination, calculation or information. Contemporaries such as bakunin predicted the monstrous totalitarian tyranny this impossible dream would necessitate and enable. Futhermore this economic ignorance spread fast, wide and deep into the worlds intellectuals precisely because of this new quest for total power. Hegelian Marxism and in particular leninism called for a strong state to be created by and operated by these same intellectuals. An ideology that promised total power to those who worked in the dissemination of ideas was bound to infect every 'thinker'. Marxism was created in the 'modern' period and Marx reflected this with his revolutionary 'scientific' doctrine. His was an ideology of man's conquest over the vagaries of nature - if we built structures to harness and avoid the elements then we should also control the natural forces of human action that Marx felt to be degrading. A fundamental misunderstanding, whether through ignorance or deception, of these natural forces led Marx to believe they were not only undesirable but could be controlled. This misunderstanding is due to both religion and the states of his time. Religion because that is the source of Adam Smith's just price theory of labour taken by Ricardo and then Marx. And the state because anti capitalist Marxism was concerned with a particular type of dominant landlords and industrialists only made possible by the collective state itself. Like todays 'geo-libertarians' whose ideology is based on 19th century conceptions of landowners, similarly Marx would not recognise the more widely and naturally dispersed economy of today. What would he make of the self employed capitalist plumber? Who is exploiting him? The world of economic power that both Marx and George reacted against was not a world of natural property. The despotic capitalists and land lords these two influential thinkers so despised were only made possible by the vestiges of the old monarchical near feudal system that capitalism itself was soon to brush aside completely. When George spoke of extortionate land owners he referred to individuals who owned whole counties. Such arrangements were entirely dependent upon state granted privilege. todays 'geo-libertarians' take his words without any consideration for this historical context and use them to advocate coercion against property owners on todays scale of a small suburban semi. Likewise when Marx referred to the evil capitalist exploiting the workers he was speaking of individuals granted similar monopoly privileges to those of the aristocratic landlord. It was only through state granted privileges that 19th century capitalists were able to amass the economic dominance that Marx reviled. It is state interference as justified by Marxist socialism that continues to tilt freedom away from his masses and toward those capitalists he so maligned.

2012-04-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

back when i was foolish enough to be registered in facebook I caught an exchange between a friend's girlfirend and her mates. they were reacting to the video below (warning contains nudity etc not safe for work etc)

Pants prank - Watch MoreFunny Videos

One of the girls commented that as a result of viewing such assaults she wanted to get a pistol. Which is the whole point of weaponry - defensive advantage. The women cannot Chase their male attackers as they are physiologically too slow and you can see the moment that each of them realise they are incapable of doing anything even if they could catch their assailants.
Even stateless legal systems, private streets and private security forces will not be perfectly able to prevent or deter 100% of such problems. (obviously they would be many times more effective than statist attempts).
This is where the final resort is the autonomy of the individual. You can always outsource duties such as food and security but no matter how good your local takeaway it would be irresponsible not to be able to cook just incase the taj Mahal was shut. Equally it would be irresponsible to be completely reliant on 3rd party protection. Freedom and responsibility - two sides of the same coin. A free individual should have at least some small degree of defensive autonomy.
As with the food example, it would be irrational to expect one to prepare food without the necessary tools or to take advantage of the most developed means available if they wished to do so. Who cooks with nothing but their bare hands? One can laboriously chop vegetables the same way humans have done for thousands of years or you could make a much finer salsa or sofrito with much less time and effort by using a blender.
This logic can, should and must be applied to self defense.
Rights are nothing if they cannot be acted upon. The right to self defense is nothing if one cannot act upon it and do so with the tools for the job.
I am talking of course about guns. Simply tools for the job of defense and nothing more. Like a chainsaw, a chisel or a cheese knife they can be abused as offensive weapons - this is no justification for coercively limiting their use, manufacture, sale, distribution or possession. If it were then logically such coercions should be applied to cutlery.
If we return to the video how would such situations be different if the victims had not been disarmed? Would such acts of aggression even be likely to occur? The opportunity costs for these pranksters/criminals are next to nothing under the state. Zero police presence and coercively disarmed victims. The opportunity costs of assault in an armed society rocket to the value the assailant places on his own life. Much less attractive odds.
Women should be the keenest advocates for effective defensive equipment (guns not aerosols of close range seasoning!). Power tools remove crude physical advantage. A tractor driver no longer must suffer the ardour of his scythe wielding forebears. Likewise a diminutive female with an effective mechanised range weapon is on an equal footing with a male cage fighter.
Watch the awesome libertarian film 'The Blindside'. In it you can see tiny Sandra bullock scare a whole gang of aggressive males into submission with the mere suggestion she is armed. I cannot find a clip of the scene anywhere but there follows a transcript of. the gang leader is threatening Bullock's newly adopted son and she doesnt take any shit:

Gangster - Tell him, sleep with one eye open. You hear me, bitch?

Bullock - No, you hear me, bitch! You threaten my son you threaten me. You so much as cross downtown you will be sorry. I'm in a prayer group with the D.A.,
I'm a member of the NRA and I'm always packing.

Gangster - What you got in there, a .22? A Saturday Night Special?

Bullock - And it shoots just fine
all the other days, too!

Now that is fucking feminism!

misallocation

2012-04-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

there follows a classic case study of misallocated capital through taxation funded ‘investment’. the story is to be found in Bill Bryson’s account of New York State's canal west. He explains that it ‘made’ new york the industrial capital of the then united states and that in turn the industrial capital of the northern hemisphere.

But Bryson also states that Canada was better positioned to take that position and it had a huge river going deep into its heartlands of natural and agricultural resources.

So, would it not have been better, ignoring the artificial boundaries of states, for the capital that was taxed to fund the NY state canal to have been naturally invested into more promising opportunities in Canada where a pre-existing water bourne transport route was?

Or to put it another way – if you had a million dollars ot invest in the north American continent – would you;

A – build a massive and expensive canal across NY state and then put a factory at the end of it with what meagre funds remained? Or…

B – invest the whole 1 million dollars into a massive factory or number of factories at any number of points along this canadian river?

It’s not a question that needs definitively answering. It’s not a question of which should the gov have spent the cash on. It doesn’t even matter what everyone’s personal opinion is. The only thing that matters is what the aggregate outcome of the free market would be. That is to say what would have been the overall result of the many decisions by countless entrepreneurs as to where to invest. Indeed it may have been the case that the NY canal would have been built perhaps bigger better and faster. Or perhaps both Canada and NY. No one can know and that is the point. No single agency can possibly pick a winner. No hyper computer, or learned council exists or has existed that could consider all the infinite information that is collated and transmitted by the price mechanism and acted on by individuals motived by their own self interest and acting upon their own specialist knowledge.

Government can never pick a winner and it should not be in the business of doing so

why a healthy economy cannot exhibit total employment

2012-04-05T15:17:00.000-07:00

unemployment through developments in efficiency frees up individuals to take on new previously impossible jobs. Thus the economy expands as a robot takes over what was previously manual labour for ten men. Now those ten men are available for jobs that previously could not have existed due to the workforce being occupied in manual labour. in other words, prior to the robot there was no supply of labour available to fulfill a demand. following the introduction of the robot, the manual labour is still getting done, now by the robot, but now there are also ten extra jobs made possible by the newly increased supply of labour. everyone’s real wealth increases.

The corollary is the traditional socialist position. 19th century Fabians were concerned with full employment and were opposed to technological development and industrial progress as it ‘threatened’ the full employment of their trade union clients. Thus their conception of economics could not permit expansion as it was based in stasis. Everyone had to have a job and no job could be automated or removed through efficiencies. Thus there were never any excess workers available to make new jobs, services and products possible. The fabians must have realised this as I believe it was the basis of their eugenicist focus on population growth. Like other collectivists awarding medals for mothers who added their burgeoning offspring to the peoples’ workforce, the fabians needed population growth to provide the extra workers required for economic growth. Their social policies were opposed to the capitalist mechanism of doing more with less and so their economic policies became dependent upon ever increasing birthrates.

This of course was to be achieved through tax funded incentives and subsidies (todays ‘nudges’). Obviously they completely missed the Misesian observation that you cannot tax an economy into growth

Methodological Individualism

2012-04-04T15:02:00.000-07:00

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodological_individualism

Methodological individualism is the theory that social phenomena can only be accurately explained by showing how they result from the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.[1] The idea has been used to criticize historicism, structural functionalism, and the roles of social class, gender roles, or ethnicity as determinants of individual behavior.[citation needed] It is promoted by the Austrian School of economics in interpreting economic developments.

Mark Blaug, known for his work on the history of economic thought, has criticized over-reliance on methodological individualism, "it is helpful to note what methodological individualism strictly interpreted ... would imply for economics. In effect, it would rule out all macroeconomic propositions that cannot be reduced to microeconomic ones, ... this amounts to saying goodbye to almost the whole of received macroeconomics. There must be something wrong with a methodological principle that has such devastating implications."[2]

OH THE HORROR! I cannot imagine how unsettling Mr Blaug must find such a dangerous notion.
I do feel sorry for such academic statist macro economists. Pity them as they whinge that the logical result of methodological individualism is the complete negation of any and all macro economic tampering. As if it were a bad thing! The presumption being that macro economic thought and state manipulation exist and therefore must be unquestionably both necessary and desirable. His other implication being that both him and the rest of em would be out of a job and out of their comfy world of power, influence and privilege. mind boggling.

politically correct transport

2012-04-03T14:48:00.000-07:00

I will endevour to avoid the erroneous term 'public transport'. It is neither owned by nor operated for 'the public'. and neither can it be. once you understand the falsehood that is 'public ownership' and 'democratic control' then the mythological infantile propaganda that encourages us to believe we all somehow own a tiny share of everything called 'public' and that we somehow control this through the 'democratic process' will cease to hold you under its misleading thrall.
I would revert to a slightly more old fashioned term 'mass transit'. that is to say buses, trains, trams and planes. any transportational vehicle that can convey a number of unrelated individuals from point to point. notice that this appears to be broadly the same definition as that of the more current 'public transport' however there is a very important distinction between the two. Mass transit does not imply 'public ownership'. Mass transit comes from a time before the state siezed control of mass transit. private bus companies competed for custom offering cheaper fares and better service. one did not have to lobby for a route to be created in your area. if there was a demand then an entrepreneuring firm would emerge to supply that demand in the pursuit of profit. likewise for trains and trams and the exception that proves the rule - planes. How is a plane categorically different from a bus in this context? it is not and yet you will never hear the airline industry referred to under the umbrella term 'pulic transport'.
it was realising and accepting the implications of the above history that made me examine my previously unconsidered instinctual views of mass transit. coming from the place i do during the time we live in, my view of mass transit was coloured by the socialist outcomes of 'public transport' - that is to say its miserable and complete failure. upon discovering that mass transit had once been private, thriving and successful before its socialist takeover I realised it was not necessarily the actual idea of mass transit i hated but the reality of socialism-perverted 'public transport' that i had reacted against.
i no longer feel the need to defend the car against the bus or train. shorn of their political identities and associations their significance dissipates to a more natural level somewhere alongside the choice between white or brown bread. i do not particularly bother with such debates in favour of either 'side'. if only all such options were free to develop and propser in a natural economic environment users would be free to choose, their decision based on natural merit alone rather than which has been least politically molested.

now that the intro to this blog post has exceeded in length and possibly quality what i originally had in mind let me get on with it:

the reason i digressed into semantics is because I wanted to compare a form of public mass transport, a form of private individual transport and another form of transport that politically falls somewhere between the two. the first public form is a train, the second private form the car and the third the more problematic bicycle. the politcally favoured and promoted bicycle would not fit into the category 'public transport'. my politics hating mind could not compute. how could i refer to politically favoured forms of transport if they would not all fit the categorical umbrella 'public transport'? then i hit upon 'politically correct transport'. It covers the unjustifiable idollatory of collective solutions such as public transport but can also include the Gaia worshipping unpleasantness that is commuting by bicycle (I happen to love recreational bicycle use and abuse but hated having to go to work on the fucking thing)

finally to the point...

why not use a favourite emotive opinion twister of the statists against them next time the ole 'public transport' slanging match rears its ugly head. I refer to the big bad 'Think of The Children'!

present them with the aformentioned three options - train, bicycle and car.

now consider which you would rather put your child on...

how safe will they be on a bicycle in traffic?

how secure will they be trapped on a train full of unpredictable, unpoliced strangers?

and now consider whether they might wobble into a ditch or get mugged whilst safely ensconced within the comfy private confines of a car.

which two do the state endlessly promote and subsidise and which does the state endlessly persecute and charge?

now tell me who is genuinely concerned about the fucking cheedlren

how to defend from the goal line

2012-04-02T14:21:00.000-07:00

In terms of national defense do compulsory team sports instil this mad idea that one cannot defend from the goal line? You often see rugby teams defending from their own try line. If they did nothing but defend in this way then they could not lose. However they would not gain anything over their opponents in order to win either. Thus they must stray from their own defences and open themselves to risk in a gamble. Because the whole point of team sports is to win, the team cannot remain the ever vigilant peaceful isolationists such as Switzerland. So when we come to debates regarding national defense I get told that it is impossible to defend from the goal line; that 'we' must 'defend' aggressively with overseas misadventure. The opportunity to externalise the cost of the sporting gamble enables monarchs, rulers and democracy voters to indulge in risky behaviour such as interventionism and invasion.

how to see past the nose on your face

2012-04-01T14:16:00.000-07:00

what you will hear if you dare raise the possibility of roads without the state – 'but what if one company became a monopoly and charged sky high prices making huge levels of profit whilst offering terrible service?'

the gigantic and obvious truth this excuse for a challenge ignores is that the state currently has a just such a total monopoly. There is no point fearing a future possibility of monopoly when we currently suffer a present certainty of monopoly. The state (in the uk at least) makes more from road taxes and fuel duties than the roads cost them on maintenance and construction – this difference is their profit. Percentage-wise it is colossal. So the anti-anachists' fears regarding roads are in fact description of the status quo.

why the state?

2012-03-31T14:10:00.000-07:00

In the same way that the onus is on monotheists to prove all other gods false and justify theirs as the one true god, the onus is on statists to explain not only why other nation states fail to conform to their own ideal but they must also explain the absence of world government.

If government is natural and necessary why is there no global government? If it is so preferable why does the world seem to overwhelmingly not prefer greater conglomeration of coercive power? why do nation states fight fiercely to defend their individual sovereign existence in an anarchic global order. why is this principle of individual sovereignty violently prohibited at any level other than the nation state?

a radically economic view of cooking

2012-03-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

Not only is eating out more economically efficient (due to the cast iron laws of comparative advantage, specialisation and the division of labour when not impeded by minimum wages, regulation and restrictions on the use of land) but it is safer. Most accidents occur in the home and most of them are the result of cooking – a specialist skill and a hazardous past time. Not only is it best not to waste time learning and practicing the art of preparing food but it is safer. Totally free markets in medical, household and buildings insurance may perhaps offer lower premiums to customers without kitchens. Save all that real estate cost on space, all that cash on specialist equipment and protect yourself from burns, cuts, poisoning, onion tears, odours and risk burning the house down.

who invented the internet

2012-03-29T13:12:00.003-07:00

Some statists, or more accurately anti-anarchists, may claim that the internet is not the product of the market but was developed by the state for the military. This may well be historically accurate. However the free market has clearly taken the idea and developed it far beyond its original limited scope into the resource it is today. but more importantly making the case that the internet has its origins in coercive action does not justify or legitimise the state in any way. The implication would be that the internet has its origins in the state and that absent the state we would not have the internet. This is an a priori statement that cannot be proven. That the state invented the internet does not preclude the development of a similar or better system in a non coercive society. If the state had not monopolised communications from the very inception of its history then things may have been very different. The state has claimed monopoly over communications throughout history – postal services, telegraph services, telephone services. It is only in the last ten years or so that most states have de-nationalised such communication services. These industries are still licensed, heavily regulated and cartelised for purposes of control and profit. But my point is that absent the state, communications may have developed differently. For example digging trenches across entire continents, and burying millions of miles of the precious metal copper (all centrally controlled) may perhaps not have been the most effective way to implement such networks. Perhaps radio (a technology contemporaneous with wired telecoms) would have been the choice of non centralised society. Perhaps in this non state world we would have had mobile telephony fifty to one hundred years sooner. Perhaps competing telecoms networks would have innovated new services to entice custom. Perhaps the age old human dream of the video phone (up there with the similarly state-prohibited flying car) would have come to fruition far sooner. Perhaps wired networks were the best choice and wireless televisual and radio services would have been more plentiful without the costs of nationwide broadcasting if simply piped into the home. Perhaps nothing would have ever been broadcast. Perhaps private commercial enterprises without the opportunity to offload IP type enforcement onto the state, would have opted for physical media to avoid free riders rather than mindlessly spewing their content free to all. (I'm thinking postally delivered wax cyclinders, vinyl discs, vhs cassettes etc)

Perhaps air ballons or tethered kites would have been a cheaper, earlier and more easily achievable form of signal intermediary than trillion dollar orbital space satellites. Perhaps the somalian post state mobile phone telecoms explosion shows the possibilities.

The possibilities are endless. But my point remains that just because the state does something does not follow that that good or service is impossible absent state involvement. Who is to say that in a totally free market telecoms companies would not have innovated a system similar to what we call the internet? Bastiat's that which is not seen. The internet is hampered by its origins. It was never meant to do what it does now. Its foundations are limited. Who is to say that the alternative anarcho-web would not have been more able to adapt and grow.

Even saying that 'just because the state did it first does not mean the market would not have done it later' does not go far enough. My point is that the state may have hampered and otherwise impeded the development of such goods and services to the point where the state was the only actor capable of such ‘innovation’ at that time.

Freedom of money equals freedom full stop

2012-03-23T15:14:00.001-07:00

Attack the System » Blog Archive » Greeks Adopt Alternative Currencies as Economy Implodes

Links to numerous examples of failing centralised fiat systems and emergent voluntarist markets.

August Landmesser

2012-03-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

Spot the free thinking individual among the sheep

You know the social ostracism you receive upon even verbally challenging a universally resented state tyranny such as taxation, now imagine the courage it took to do this.
August Landmesser deserves at least enough seconds of your life to go read the wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Landmesser

criminal enterprise

2012-03-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

Can you imagine working for a company that only has a little more than 635 employees, but, has the following employee statistics..

29 have been accused of spouse abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

9 have been accused of writing bad cheques

17 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3 have done time for assault

71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit

14 have been arrested on drug-related charges

8 have been arrested for shoplifting

21 are currently defendants in lawsuits

84 have been arrested for drink driving in the last year

and,

collectively, this year alone, they have cost the British tax payer

£92,993,748 in expenses!

Which organisation is this?

It's the 635 members of the House of Commons.

The same group that cranks out hundreds of new laws each year designed to

keep the rest of us in line.

What a bunch of ‘toss-pots’ we have running our country - it says it all...

And just to top all that they probably have the best 'corporate' pension

scheme in the country!!

If you agree that this is an appalling state of affairs, please pass it on

to everyone you know.

Anarchism without Hyphens

2012-03-04T10:04:00.000-08:00

Karl Hess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Hess

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no
vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” – Karl Hess, for Barry Goldwater; attribution to Cicero.

Any man who holds true to the above belief, can weld and was a friend of Murray Rothbard has go to be worth reading.

Anarchism without Hyphens
There is only one kind of anarchist. Not two. Just one. An anarchist, the only kind,
as defined by the long tradition and literature of the position itself, is a person in
opposition to authority imposed through the hierarchical power of the state. The
only expansion of this that seems to me reasonable is to say that an anarchist stands
in opposition to any imposed authority. An anarchist is a voluntarist.
Now, beyond that, anarchists also are people and, as such, contain the billionfaceted varieties of human reference. Some are anarchists who march, voluntarily,
to the Cross of Christ. Some are anarchists who flock, voluntarily, to the communes
of beloved, inspirational father figures. Some are anarchists who seek to establish
the syndics of voluntary industrial production. Some are anarchists who voluntary
seek to establish the rural production of the kibbutzim. Some are anarchists who,
voluntarily, seek to disestablish everything including their own association with
other people; the hermits. Some are anarchists who will deal, voluntarily, only in
gold, will never co-operate, and swirl their capes. Some are anarchists who, voluntarily, worship the sun and its energy, build domes, eat only vegetables, and play the
dulcimer. Some are anarchists who worship the power of algorithms, play strange
games, and infiltrate strange temples. Some are anarchists who see only the stars.
Some are anarchists who see only the mud.
They spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed
is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is
not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be
free. After that it’s all choice and chance.
Anarchism, liberty, does not tell you a thing about how free people will behave
or what arrangements they will make. It simply says that people have the capacity
to make the arrangements.
Anarchism is not normative. It does not say how to be free. It says only that
freedom, liberty, can exist.
Recently, in a libertarian journal, I read the statement that libertarianism is an
ideological movement. It may well be. In a concept of freedom it, they, you, or we,
anyone, has the liberty to engage in ideology or anything else that does not coerce
others, denying their liberty. But anarchism is not an ideological movement. It is an
ideological statement. It says that all people have a capacity for liberty. It says that
all anarchists want liberty. And then it is silent. After the pause of that silence, anarchists then mount the stages of their own communities and history and proclaim
their, not anarchism’s, ideologies—they say how they, how they as anarchists, will
make arrangements, describe events, celebrate life, work.
Anarchism is the hammer-idea, smashing the chains. Liberty is what results and,
in liberty, everything else is up to people and their ideologies. It is not up to THE
ideology. Anarchism says, in effect, there is no such upper case, dominating ideology. It says that people who live in liberty make their own histories and their own
deals with and within it.
A person who describes a world in which everyone must or should behave in a
single way, marching to a single drummer, is simply not an anarchist. A person who
says that they prefer this way, even wishing that all would prefer that way, but who
then says that all must decide, may certainly be an anarchist. Probably is.
Liberty is liberty. Anarchism is anarchism. Neither is Swiss cheese or anything
else. They are not property. They are not copyrighted. They are old, available ideas,
part of human culture. They may be hyphenated but they are not in fact hyphenated. They exist on their own. People add hyphens, and supplemental ideologies.
I am an anarchist. I need to know that, and you should know it. After that, I am a
writer and a welder who lives in a certain place, by certain lights, and with certain
people. And that you may know also. But there is no hyphen after the anarchist.
Liberty, finally, is not a box into which people are to be forced. Liberty is a space
in which people may live. It does not tell you how they will live. It says, eternally,
only that we can.
the dandelion, Spring 1980 by Karl Hess
found at
http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Karl_Hess_forprint.pdf

cant do better than this

2012-03-02T11:22:00.000-08:00

just a lazy redirection of a blog post but easily worth the click through. If some other guy has already said it then why reinvent the wheel. http://attackthesystem.com/2012/03/02/no-one-notices-no-one-cares/ angry, exasperated, just how we all feel.

if you need cheering up check out the always hilarious and excellently written fred http://www.fredoneverything.net/Abdulah.shtml

the spark that just might end the state...

2012-02-24T12:40:00.002-08:00

history creeps up on ya. No-one foresaw the collapse of the soviet union. CIA docs evidence as much. quite often historical change appears to erupt from nowhere because the contributory factors are almost infinitesimally and imperceptibly gradual. Imagine a worn tap dripping into the bath of an abandoned house. the drain is blocked and, even though the tap drips perhaps only once a day, eventually all those drips add up. Over time the bath fills, it overflows and the water permeates the floor. The timbers become sodden and begin to rot. The weight of an overflowing bathtub is too much and the floor collapses taking with it the corner of the house. The neighbours are shocked - what on earth caused the apparently sudden collapse of the house!?
Life is what happens when you're making other plans and that is no more true than when applied to anarchist dilletante whitterings over 'strategy'. Should we back Ron Paul, is politics the answer, what about agorism, seasteading, freeman legal challenges, survivalist escapes, expatriation, secession?
When the state ends (some states, a state, any state), and it will end - just a matter of when not if - I surmise it will be the result of a number of factors but the time and manner of its collapse will be unexpected. And the following is one such possibility. Just a tiny fragment of news to which I imagine most people, even within the bizarre, intertwining, otherwise unrelated worlds of interest that I follow, will ascribe no great import. Mobile Money Africa - How Bitcoin will Revolutionise the way Africans Transact.
We all know fiat currency is one of the foundations of the state. Any alternative is a lightning strike of hope for the prospects of individual freedom. Every school of thought you follow (and I say this because I guess my small readership come from a variety of freedom loving backgrounds - Freemen, Libertarians, Anarchists, Conspiracists and any mixture of these and more)will have theoretical, critical explanations of fiat currency and the evil it enables. if this foundation is weakened then the inherently unstable edifice of the state will come crashing down.
As Africa develops apace, new demand is outstripping old supply. I refer to infrastructure. Millions of people are beginning to climb from the poverty that hundreds of years of the shitty end of statism has foisted upon them. As markets emerge and commerce develops, the infrastructure of banks, currency and their attendant systems is non existent. In the ageing western world our now woefully corrupted supply systems developed symbiotically alongside demand. Africa, China, India and South America are bootstrapping and fast. In Africa they do not have to invent the telegraph, then the telephone, then the mobile phone and then mobile internet. As soon as individuals could afford such technologies they could be purchased from ready developed markets such as the far east, just across the Indian Ocean. So now you have millions of people, their commerce untethered from the shackles of outmoded communications but restricted by factors beyond their control. Namely security and banking. the state reserves such essentials for itself lest anyone think their parasitical institution dispensable. How can a travelling salesman, lorry driver or fisherman transact, exchange, transmit and store the capital necessary for commerce in a state barely capable of anything other than the crudest forms of extortion (thats taxation if youre new here). These economic actors are coercively prevented from fulfilling the market demand for banking and security that they and others clamour for. Instead they are left to operate their peaceful win/win exchanges without the mechanisms we take for granted. Imagine how much business your company could do without BACS payments? Without being able to 'wire' money to your suppliers or receive such from your clients everything rather grinds to a halt. Economies regress to geographically limited primitivism. Africans cannot trade in cash as the physical environment is hardly conducive to the secure transportation of large sums.
As a result Africans have rapidly and wholeheartedly taken to "Mobile Money'. In the absence of the ancient wired communication networks the west has in the past benefited from and now, is restrained by, Africa uses mobile communications. Those cheap tv ads you see offering to buy your old mobile phone handset? thats where theyre all going. If you were to instigate a nation-wide communications network right now today starting from a blank canvas, by far the most economic choice would be wireless. No-one in their right mind would spend millions digging holes and burying mile upon mile of semi-precious metal. The state still does but then what do you expect? No, Africa is connected by mobile phones and it is this technology that also came to be utilised to overcome their other problem - banking. Some of the early mobile networks had functions whereby users could exchange and even transmit their Pay As You Go credits - the key word being CREDIT. 'Money' has taken many forms throughout history from nuts, to shells, to coffee beans, to fancy rocks, metals, coins, promissory notes, and now phone credits. the original idea behind enabling users to transmit their credits was that family members could spread and share phone usage but this quickly became used to transmit meaningful sums for the purposes of trade and payment. It became possible to charge credit to your phone and both store and transmit that capital to others from the handset. In some highly developed urban areas people no longer had to carry cash. Phones had become the African debit card. I read an excellent article on this phenomena (sadly i can no longer find the link in my notes). As ever do not take my word for it. do your own research - it is a fascinating development and one which you will find few MSM outlets covering.
But finally i must come to the point. These transactions and credits are currently denominated in terms of nation state fiat currencies. Funds can be and are tracked for the purposes of extortion (taxation) and regulation (racketeering). The article to which i linked above has excited my interest as it hints toward a historical development of seriously large scale implications. If the African mobile money networks move toward a decentralised, non-state, 'uncontrollable,' incorruptible currency system like Bitcoin, we may see gigantic ramifications. As it stands Bitcoin has huge potential to bring about the kind of change we desire. Right now it is of interest for a small number of technology and economics geeks. We do not have the critical mass to push it over the edge into the widespread uptake the currency is capable of. The above article may suggest that this impetus is coming and coming soon but from a source unexpected by the forums of geeks and trolls who mutter about such things.
Before i get too carried away i must say that Bitcoin is widely misunderstood even by those who support it. Again please do your own research and draw your own conclusions (as if I need deign to even suggest such a thing). Bitcoin is not natively 100% anonymous but it can be made so very easily indeed. Now imagine however many hundred million Africans in fast moving economies beginning to transact in untaxable, uninflatable currency! The agorist dream come true. As the old heartlands of statism - Europe & America - decline in entirely predictable super inflationary corruption, the new rising markets in Africa, India, China and South America may, just possibly, break free of state control.

what is it good for? absolutely nothing. say it again!

2012-02-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron…Is there no other way the world may live?

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953

shamelessly ripped off from the excellent http://attackthesystem.com

Note to Trooper Thompson

2011-09-17T02:12:00.001-07:00

Well done for yet again tirelessly defending Rothbardian Libertarianism. After a year or two taking on the trolls at Old Holborn and elsewhere I have given up as a result of learning a bit about the irrationality of most people and the futility of the tribal instinct to build consensus. Plus I’m not very successful.

Your recent spat with Longrider was fairly exemplary of this sort of thing. He was clearly spoiling for a fight and his pugilistic point scoring was a long way from reasoned debate. Some people are incapable of following a rational argument and I no longer waste my time on them.

Your most recent adversary (andcabbagesandkings) was comparatively refreshing in that he was actually aware of libertarian theory and wasnt coming from an emotionally charged irrational opposition as most critics of libertarianism do.

Such 'why im not a libertarian' or 'why I left libertarianism' articles all tend to follow similar feelings (I say feelings quite intentionally as it is their lack of guiding first principles that ultimately undermines their position). Those non-libertarians that believe they have considered and then rejected libertarianism or former libertarians that have 'moved on' all tend to hold the same misconceptions. Such apparently subtle yet fundamental misunderstandings as 'wider' conceptions of coercion, or positive versus negative rights, cloud what is a clear and consistent ideology which is probably why such individuals feel it is not for them. If one doesnt completely understand the perversion of incentives, the cast iron law of special interests/regulatory capture or that there is no safe, controllable level of coercion then one will tend to stray back toward the more intellectually simple and superficially attractive statist 'solutions' based on coercion.

Another significant factor in such intellectual rejections is that of subconcious ego massage or even intentional status posturing. I point to Peter Hitchens the former aetheist. Making financial and intellectual capital from books on aetheism and then following a high profile volte face into Christianity. What keeps a writer more 'interesting' to the unprincipled consumer of 'intelligentsia,' consistent adherence to the same 'tired, boring' principle, or chopping and changing between new and exciting opposites? This is why I think a lot of libertarian bloggers (particularly in the US, where the background understanding is greater and thus the general standard higher, so such 'next level' considerations are possible) make a great deal about being 'left libertarians'. “Oh I used to describe myself as an anarcho-capitalist but now I reject all that 'old-fashioned' stuff in favour of new, trendy, compassionate lefty values.”

we can see such self-contradiction even within this single blog post from cabbagesandkings. Near the start he outlines how he still understands that markets are the best mechanism for the distribution of scarce resources. But then in the latter parts where he outlines his 'issues' with libertarianism he talks of his preference for state directed/planned provision of healthcare resources. This is inconsistent. One cannot pick and choose when and where to apply a principle. Otherwise it is no longer a principle merely a subjective guide of personal aesthetics.

The 'healthcare debate' is a thorn in the side of statist free market advocates. Only the Rothbardian free market anarchists can provide solid an consistent arguments and solutions that explain and solve the problems that are endlessly churned by the statist-quo. The 'debate' as it is usually framed consists of two tribes endlessly banging on about the NHS vs the 'American model'. (there are few who consider the other statist solutions of state payer – private provider models such as malaysia etc etc). The irrational, tribal statists cannot see past their traditional frames of reference. Only us free market anarchists can point to regulatory capture and special interests from the medical and financial worlds as the root cause of the problem.

What causes people to challenge free market solutions is that they cannot see the root cause of the problem. This can be seen in healthcare, housing and education. All the biggies. All 3 are artificially expensive due to state restriction of the market mechanism. There is huge demand so entrepreneurs should be incentivised into increasing supply. Thousands of people should be setting up medical practices in order to grab a bit of the action. But the special interests want their position protected, they dont want this extra competition. The state is only too happy to oblige in exchange for a cash/power grab and steps in to fuck with the market mechanisms.

Cabbagesandkings cannot or will not see this and so starts from the a priori assumption that healthcare is some magical exception to economic principles and because it is so expensive, irrational utopian idealised left wing statist solutions are the answer.

Same with education (as UK public education is considered 'free' and, due to compulsory payment through taxation and the resultant double payment problem, non state alternatives are pushed to the luxury market, noone considers the cost of state education vs private) unionised, uncompetitive suppliers have no incentives and so costs spiral. Those who cannot see into this intentionally obfuscated root cause often leap to externalise the horrendous costs through coercive state solutions.

And the real biggy common to most anti-libertarian stuff like this and that underlies both the arguments of cabbagesandkings and Longrider, is land/work. What I mean is that they both, in slightly different ways, found fault with strict non intervention in the relationship between employer and employee. They found last ditch footholds for statism in their perception that there is some unjust imbalance in such a relationship. That the state must exist and step in to stand up for the little guy (again ignoring the empirical argument that the big guy controls the state). Coercive restriction on the use of land is the criminally overlooked key to such objections. Why most libertarians do not seem to mention free use of land as much as they mention free use of drugs I have no idea. I have seen various estimates that a mere 6-13% of uk landmass is legally permissible for building on. This absolutely colossal market restriction has a corollary in the equally gigantic effect it has on costs of living. When supply is restricted and demand remains the same then prices, quite rightly, go up. In order to afford a place to sleep people have to earn more. (this is a double win for the state that taxes these extra earnings and the businesses) This radically shifts the natural balance in the voluntary agreements between employer and employee. If we ran the numbers of a theoretical anarchist island in which 100% of land was free for the owners to use as they wished, we could calculate the natural cost of housing. OldHolborn once quoted some figures relating to average price of an acre of agricultural land vs an acre of urban land with planning permission (something like 6k vs 90k). with such vastly reduced living costs the economic 'coercion' to work (to allow our opponents' fallacious misconception) would be lower. Employers would naturally have to do more to attract workers. There would be little need for legitimised blackmailing unionism or coercive interventions in the jobs market.

Even the majority of 'libertarians' fail to see the empirical history of coercive political rule. Perhaps it is no accidental failure but an unthinking avoidance? They refuse to accept the findings of public choice / institutional economics that political authority always grows toward totalitarianism. Bryan Caplan, and Patri Friedman have some great presentations regarding this failure of libertarians.

There is no constitution, no candidate that ever has or ever can control coercion. Tolkien knew this. In the LOTR scene in which Frodo attempts to offload the responsibility of bearing the ring of power to Gandalf, the old wizard explains that he would be tempted to use its power for good but essentially that temptation would corrupt him (Tolkien outlined his anarchist tendencies in a letter to his son Christopher, even going so far as to explicitly use that term. LOTR can be read in a very anarchist way. There is much about the corruptibility of men and the danger of power etc. the idyllic shire has no king and is staunchly non interventionist.)

One of the reasons I stopped online debating was when I learned how people rationalise. We think it is a fair competition of ideas among open minded individuals but unfortunately this seems not to be the case. Stefan Molyneux has material explaining that irrational individuals (in molyneux' analysis irrationality is not their natural state – irrationality is a corruption of human nature brought about by authoritarian parenting/authoritarian education/authoritarian religiosity) form their 'arguments' from ex-post-facto justifications for their immediate emotional instinctual response. One 'feels' a certain way and then subconsciously rationalises that position after the fact. So in the case of cabbagesandkings, if I indulge in the risky method of 'reading between the lines', it would seem that he may have a cultural predisposition toward socialised healthcare and welfare for the poor. This has always rankled throughout his time as a libertarian and ditching the consistent application of the non aggression axiom is a way of relieving this cognitive dissonance. His emotive subconscious can now breathe a sigh of relief as the weight of rational principle is lifted from his conditioned preference for familial/tribal 'care' to be extended to the political scale of the nation state.

As a coincidence, in a week when youre debating two bloggers on themes of utlitarianism vs deontological libertarianism, I happened to finally get round to reading some articles I have had on my reading list for a while. I cant remember where I saw them mentioned (possibly David Friedman's site) but they are transcripts of symposia of good libertarian/anarchist thinkers on the question of deontology vs consequentialism or what's right vs what works.
http://www.libertyunbound.com/sites/files/printarchive/Liberty_Magazine_December_2004.pdf page 18
http://www.libertyunbound.com/sites/files/printarchive/Liberty_Magazine_January_2005.pdf page 31

despite coming into libertarianism (right at the deep end of anarchy rather than the more common gradual realisation of normal right wing statism into minarchism into grudging reluctant acceptance of anarchism) by reading David Friedman's consequentialist 'Machinery of Freedom' I am very much a deontolgical anarchist. I am an unashamed follower of Stefan Molyneux and I literally dont think there is a single word he has spoken or written that I disagree with (not particularly intellectually rigorous of me I know but he is always right!).

I sought out these two articles because I have huge respect for David Friedman and I knew that a thinker like him would not have accidentally ignored deontological arguments. I wanted to know why he didnt think what I thought and whether I might be barking up the wrong tree. If you read the two articles you will see that he actually has a much more subtle and ambivalent position than MOF may imply. The panel also dispense with the common obstacle of lifeboat/flagpole situations. This may be of particular interest to you given the two, similar debates youve had this week. Molyneux too has dealt with the lifeboat/flagpole objection which actually turns out to be a bit of a strawman irrelevance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPJkr7xQxL0

on a separate Molyneux related note, cabbagesandkings (longrider seemed ignorant of such ideas) challenged Rothbard's philosophical basis – the conception of property rights in the self and homesteading. Rothbard is excellent and I am not saying he got anything wrong at all, however I think Molyneux does a slightly better job of establishing/explaining this principle. Just a stylistic/presentational difference – their philosophical point is the same lockean position http://www.fdrurl.com/UPBPDF

then again Hoppe weighs in with Habermasian argumentation ethics and gets even old Rothbard excited as Kinsella writes here in a fascinating piece on deontology http://mises.org/daily/5322/Argumentation-Ethics-and-Liberty-A-Concise-Guide
another good source for deontological explanation is a novel by an objectivist (one who thankfully finds fault with Rand) http://www.oldnicksguidetohappiness.co.uk/ . it lays out a similar list of arguments you will find in the contents of Molyneux' Universally Preferable Ethics. It establishes objectively establishes self ownership with step by step explanations of the logical conclusions we must derive from our senses etc.

Just like Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia. When will people wake up and realise that far from helping the poor, the state keeps them poor.

2011-09-14T15:38:00.001-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8235324.stm http://zimbabweonlinepress.com/index.php?news=1195 Yet another individual helpless in the face of coercive oppression takes their life. just another man trying to work to feed his family prevented from doing so by petty bureaucracy. another self-immolation. fucking sick of it. when i bang on about regulatory capture and cartelisation its not just irrelevant economic theorising. it has real world implications. take a good hard look. this is the effect of coercion. you cant control it. you cant limit it. it is cancer. there is no safe or desirable amount.

Freedom of ideas will bring ideas of freedom

2011-09-08T13:07:00.001-07:00

Michael S. Hart, e-book inventor and Project Gutenberg founder, dies at 64

What is it good for?

2011-08-24T23:26:00.001-07:00

Sympathy for soldiers should not entail a concomitant endorsement of war. No matter how brave and selfless they may be, no matter how highly you value their individual sacrifice do not allow such reactions to be manipulated into supporting war.
Individual soldiers are as much victims as the other human collateral of state aggression. The entirely natural human reaction of empathy for their suffering should never be impressed into support, endorsement or legitimisation of the evil they are sent into.
The only way to support soldiers as individual people is to be completely opposed to sending them to war in the first place. Furthermore reducing funding for the military, one hopes, may reduce the number of individuals that can be tempted.
The current propaganda paradigm is that heart strings be tugged for 'our brave boys' to build support for aggression, militarism and war. 'Feel sorry for the amputees? Then vote for military funding'.
A shark will only eat your friend if you push him into the sea. If you both keep out of the water you'll keep your limbs. In the same way, a soldier can only become a casualty of war if you send him to war.

where does victim disarmament lead?

2011-08-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

a whole ton of riot inspired blog posts going round at the mo echoing the same sentiment re ownership of the tools of defence.

this one from mises.org is good but this comment from the facebook posting of the article is downright stunning! thankyou Jan Paulson whoever you are
enjoy...

In 1929 the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953 approximately 20,000,000 dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1911 Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917 approximately 1,500,000 Armenians, unable to defend them selves were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1928 Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945 approximately 30,000,000 Jews, Homosexuals, gypsies, mentally ill and political dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1935 China established gun control. From 1948 to 1952 approximately 20,000,000 political dissidents, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated

In 1964 Guatemala established gun control. From 1963 to 1981 approximately 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated

In 1970 Uganda established gun control. From 1971 to 1979 approximately 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated

In 1976 Cambodia established gun control. From 1976 to 1977 approximately 1,000,000 educated people, unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

The total number of victims that have lost their lives to Governments because of gun control in the last century is approximately 56,000,000.

Our Forefathers did not write the 2nd Amendment to protect our Right to hunt fuckin’ ducks. They wrote it in the same spirit that the Magna Charta was written. They wrote it to insure that OUR government would ALWAYS be in fear of the People and that’s the way it should be.

as the mighty doug stanhope says in a diatribe of his against drug prohibition. start your argument in the right place. start from where you want to be. dont compromise for the benefit of the righteous puritans. we should demand the freedom to put as much of whatever we like into our of fucking bodies because we own those bodies and noone else has the right to control us. start the argument from that point. if thats what floats your boat start off by saying that yes you do want to inject crack into your eyeballs. dont give into the bullshit compromise that the libertarian debate has something to do with medicinal marijuana or access to unregulated prescriptions. likewise, as Jan Paulson (unknown facebook user/commenter as far as i know) says above, do the same with gun ownership. dont plead like a pathetic serf for the right to control vermin or hunt for food!? start from where you want to be. you have the right to protect yourself and whats more, noone has the right to prevent you from doing so.

could anarchy really be any worse?!

2011-08-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

the most frequent reaction i get to most of my economic/social/political ideas is 'but there'd be anarchy! rioting on the streets, looting!'

well, well well.

many many people in london have just had the deeply unnerving lesson that the state cannot guarantee their security.

alot of people's faith in the state rests on widely held assumptions about the perfect, total and absolute nature of the state.

what we have seen in the last few days is the truth. actual reality. when i suggest anarchism, total individual freedom, even after i explain that we can have (and have had in history) law, order, security, and police without the state people eventually object 'but without state law and order there would be nothing stopping me from burgling or murdering you in the first place!' to which i answer - there is nothing 'stopping' me doing that to you right now. the state does not act like gravity. it reacts to crime occasionally but it does not 'stop' it. the state is not an absolute force of nature or physics. the mere existence of the state police does not stop crime.

people think it does. they think law and order are perfect absolutes. you may have heard that people's fear of crime is massively over inflated in relation to actual crime levels. i worked in the physical security market encountering the effects and truth of crime on a daily basis for years and i can tell you this is very true. the reason why, on any given day in your entire life, you have not been burgled is not because plod were stood by your front door pushing away the violent hordes. it is simply because there just isnt very much crime. if youre reading this you must realise how woefully ineffectual the police are, surely. do you really believe they have any effect on anything? is the fact that you may never have been burgled purely and directly due to the actions of the police or is it simply because there just is not much burglary going on? is the fact that you may have not been mugged every day because a personal copper precedes you on every stroll you take? no its because there are not very many muggers and there is very little mugging. perception versus reality.

but all the sheep lie asleep in their beds safe in the knowledge that the state keeps them safe. it provides security. not even 'security forces' or 'services' but people truly do believe the state just envelopes them in a cuddly blanket of safeness. we've got a state - nothing bad can happen. this abstract notion of security that just emerges from the equally abstract state like a gas.

what these riots and their rapid and wide spreading shows is that even a tax funded national monopoly police force has near zero effect (not because theyre soft or the wrong person is in number 10 - the french riot police are fucking brutal and they still have immense riots). the state does NOTHING. the reason why we tend to have peaceful stable secure lives is because that just happens. i do not mean that there is no need for security services. on the contrary i imagine that in anarcho-libertopia there will be many more times private security personnel than there are now police - what i mean is that we do not need a state to protect us from a fear that is largely imagined. usually there are not riots. in new york when the police went on strike crime rates dropped. the london riots are almost because of the police. youve got a state and there is still looting!
the state does not exist. it is an abstract concept. i dont walk around knifing people left right and centre because the state is there. i just dont stab people. most people dont. most of the time. not because of the state. they just dont.
the state does nothing.

as we have seen it only takes the slightest little spark to reveal to some people this truth. i mean that it only took a few arabian riots in the news a month ago to create a general background thought. it only took the unopposed looting of a 'contraversial' tesco's in bristol's lefty epicentre a few weeks back to add a uk context to this background feeling. and then it only took a police shooting and the ever present fuel of race relations to kick off whole litany of deeply smouldering problems. the kids in birmingham saw that there just isnt anything stopping criminal behaviour in the events of the first night in london. and so they kicked off on the second night. they saw, in their unthinking miseducated ignorance, a truth that noone else can. blinded by a thousand years of the 'benevolent' state none of the academics, journalists, politicians, intellectuals, chattering classes or even bloggers can see that it is not the state that generates, nurtures or protects peaceful voluntary interaction. these fabian subsidised feral scumbags saw within hours that the state's justification from security is complete bullshit.

in a recent episode of some cop drama that my girlfriend follows there was the story of an evil lunatic who strolled into crowded public places such as railway station concourses and started smashing random people to death with a hammer. the truth is that there is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from doing this at any time.

anyway having laboured that rather abstract notion and probably failed to convey my point ill move on

could anarchy have been any worse than the state in the last few days? imagine...

noone to coercively prevent you from defending yourself and others

noone to coercively prevent you from buying, owning and operating any tool you want....
including tools for the job of defense (gun is a scary word but should be no more scary than hammer, kitchen knife, circular saw, spoon or any other lethal unlicensed tool)

noone to coercively limit where you can live through irrational, unjust and hugely overlooked 'planning' laws. cities are largely creations of the state but i shall leave this for another post. i imagine few people living in hackney really dreamed of ending up there.

noone to coercively extort your property, hard earned by yourself through voluntary transactions, and use it to subsidise socially and individually damaging policies. education, housing etc.

noone to coercively extort your property so that you can no longer provide the basic essentials of life such as physical security (the number of victims ive met that knew they should have spent on gates and fences etc but could not afford it on top of 40-60% taxes) and no im not just a gate installer)

noone with the power to unnaturally mix people up. all the talk about 'these kids must be coming from another area' is bollocks. everyone deceives themselves that they live in a nice part of town when in reality they probably dont and even if they do some socialist fifty years ago probably built a fucking 'estate' bang in the middle of a natural and functioning area (i detest the prevalence of the word 'communities' in the news - the only 'community' i want to be a part of is one that i want to be a part of. not one through accident of geography.) egalitarians may not like it but in a natural human world you would not have sink estates next to peaceful productive homes. every single part of the uk has a fucking council estate. every single village, no matter how fancy the other inhabitants consider themselves to be, has a completely unnatural enclave of alien problem causing, tax-subsidised people bang in the middle. i dont care what colour they are - im extremely egalitarian in my hatred - some of the worst scum i have ever seen are white. why this happened if not by some mad intentional political design of social engineering i have no idea.

so as i have briefly outline above there are several policies inherrent to every social-democratic state, no matter its team colours, that caused or at the very least exacerbated the recent riots. but now let us consider what may have happened in an anarchy in reaction...

remember back at the beginning some black guy was shot by some white guys in fancy outfits? now i am not about to speculate or politically revise what may or may not have happened in that case but my point is that what are the chances that a whole bunch of black people would continue to voluntarily subscribe to the services of a largely white security company with, at best, a history of dubious conduct and laughable public relations?
im not called milliband or livingston so i wont excuse or justify abuse of property rights (everything is based on property rights - from the security of your hubcaps to your arsehole) but i will say that without the possibility of voluntarily changing service providers and given the impossibility of political change (voting, blogging, campaigning, petitions, even revolutions - economic choice theory explains why they never work) these people had no way of changing anything. a pointless, irrational outburst of violence is only really understood from this point of view.
i mean if the trolley attendant at tescos runs over my foot i dont piss around trying to get him sacked - i just go to asda. it never comes to this because the pressure is always there. this pressure is not there with the state which explains why its always so unutterably shit at everything.
if my boyfriend was shot erroneously by my security service or they failed to uphold their contractual obligations regarding the protection of my shop i would immediately take my money elsewhere. if, on the other hand, they were free to force me to pay then they could do whatever the fuck they wanted. its a wonder why they dont really.

as with the egyptian protests (no i am not likening the mindless thuggery in the uk to political protest) the egyptian people realised that absent the state they could provide all the services we are continually told can only be provided by coercively funded uniforms. i posted back then (and ranty kindly reblogged it) that the egyptians were running their own refuse collections, providing their own neighbourhood security and even funding and operating a field hospital and media centre in tahrir square. in london over the last few days some people (notably not the anglo-saxon fuckers with the benefit of hundreds of years of indoctrination against autonomy) have provided their own neighbourhood security in response to the revelation that the state barely exists. what us pathetic statist whities have done is to piss around pretending to clean up ffs. yes, its lots of fun to jump on the trendy bandwagon of flash mob social networking 'happenings' and get in the paper holding a mop/broom but it is no more than childsplay. as with diy in almost any area these big groups of dumb fuckwits would have been better off doing what they are best at for that period of time and then paying the money they earned to people who are best at cleaning up. diy is the most economically insane thing anyone can do (with the only caveat being that if you actually enjoy it then it can be seen as an entertainment expense).
(i should leave it for another post but anyone who earns more than any given specialist should fucking well leave it to the specialist do do it faster, better and cheaper. from toilet cleaning to dentistry. economies of scale and specialisation of labour apply just as much to your personal life as they do to arguments against socialism.

anyway i ask you would you rather pay your council tax for the 'terrifying' british bobby or pay for an ex squaddy? yeah even if you like that bit of the state that wears camo, you could still do without the police. a pc costs way more than a squaddy but is undoubtedly less able to perform the core function of the provision of security the pc may have been on more fabian courses but the squaddy will be fitter, have better awareness, reactions and presence.
if, like me, you dont think the state is much good at anything and even if it were that would be as imoral as rape then go for the free market option. you can get 4 security guards for the cost of one pc. each and every street in the country could have a full time private security guard dedicated to patrolling just that area 24/7 for less than it costs to have one guy in an antiquated uniform sat in an office 'covering' a whole town.
or if, for some reason you dont like the rational choice of the market then why not go for the communties option - i would rather pay a super local community contribution or even reciprocate in kind in some kind of militia. i would rather have the amateur Turks, Kurds and Sikhs of london protecting me than the dumb fucks that enjoy dressing up like GI joe.

ill post some links to works explaining voluntary legal systems one of these days. the thing to remember is that once you break the rules you want applied in defence of yourself then your protection agency will no longer be commercially able to uphold those rules on your behalf. in short once you loot a shop noone will prevent the shop owner shooting you.

in short without the state this probably would not have happened.
if it had happened it would have been dealt with effectively, efficiently and expediently.
AND you, as an individual, would have been free to do as you fucking well wanted. there would be no need for 'consensus' no need for tedious media 'examination' no need for more money to be TAKEN from you.
if you wanted to change police you could do instantly. if you wanted to move to the country you could do. if you wanted to spend all your money on guns you could do. if you wanted to build a 20ft wall around your family you could do.

Could anarchy really be any worse than this?

oi socialists and other fans of violence, coercion and the state

2011-08-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

as ever i am desperately trying to avoid 'the news'. i wouldnt even say that i avoid mainstream media now as even bloggers, largely divorced from costly primary sources of information such as interviews etc, are only really capable of a non mainstream view of a news agenda dictated by the mainstream. theirs is merely a differing take on the same mainstream stories. anyways i am caught in a near impossible struggle, desperately attempting to avoid whatever bullshit our ruling class want to promote.

(as a side note, a man whom i had considered to be pretty aware expressed dismay in reaction to my assertion that it is a legal condition of state broadcasting licenses that tv and radio companies run a certain number of news reports in a given period. thus their thought control is more pervasive than it otherwise would be)

all that said i am aware of the current shrieks of the ignorant unthinking entitlement parasites. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/02/charities-fight-survival-funds-slashed
for the real truth on these 'charities visit http://fakecharities.org/
it aint charity if it aint voluntary.

i would not join the guardian bashing of the blogosphere on such a subject normally but just minutes ago i noticed a tiny detail inside my fridge that prompted this rant.

Primula Cheese

yes the fate of individual human liberty and economic freedom may truly rest in this stuff

allow me to explain. see down the bottom there, see the little sign held by what i assume to be a cheese loving mouse, see what it says? profits go to charity. not just some profits as you may have seen on the odd box of cereal or healthy margarine spread, but all profits.

a month or so ago we had the socialist/statists shrieking in objection to the largest ever single act of voluntary philanthropy in human history. yes a single man, just one human individual voluntarily gave $1 billion dollars to the most needy people on the planet and these armchair altruists screamed blue murder from their islington villas. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=25098
the blogosphere was awash with criticism of the bbc (i spit on their extortion backed propaganda) newsnight smear against real charity. tweets from idiot socialists were reblogged with gay abandon and much scronful merriment as was right and proper.

i clashed with a friend of a friend on facebook (i know - the shame of it) over this issue at the time. my friend initially questioned why newsnight seemed to be taking a negative view of one of the most laudable acts of generosity ever witnessed. his friend made an ignorant comment in reply implying that this voluntary charity was not proper charity and that only the extortionate state form of altruism by proxy whereby do gooders can externalise the costs of their angelic selflessness counts as virtuous. so i cut him to ribbons in a thousand word waste of my time. in that diatribe i referred him to the RNLI. it is an amazing institution that provides a better service than the state could ever dream of even though it is a not for profit, truly voluntary charity. yes it benefits from state enabled charity status etc but it is impossible to exist on this planet without being in some way affected by the state so lets not be impossibly purist about this. my point is that the RNLI is one of the most perfect examples for the anarchist. not only is it voluntary. not only is it non state. not only is it amazing. but it provides exactly the kind of service that anti-anarchists claim would be impossible without the state. 'how wou;d the police work... how would fires be extinguished... what about ambulances?' the tired, myopic, indoctrinated sheep bleet. the RNLI is the perfect answer. no lengthy explanations of how the US medical health cartel is a million miles away from an anarchist freed market in insurance, law and health services. the RNLI is the perfect answer to so many objections.

i recently added bill gates to my mental list of evidence against objections from the statist quo. he made his evil disgusting fortune (sarcasm) from exploiting the planet's need for a universally compatible operating system. the socialists hate him like they hate everyone who has voluntarily improved the lives of millions of people. i do not refer to his later philanthropy but to his initial improvement of many people's lives when he developed and then dispensed his software. to a socialist this will come as a shock but commerce is the greatest engine for human betterment. that gates did so well that he was able to afford to totally focus on directly improving the lives of people is gravy.

but back to the cheese. why is this anarchist so excited by a tube of scandanavian squeezy cheese? because it has just joined bill gates and the RNLI on my mental list of pro freedom ammunition. together they exemplify three different models of voluntary problem solving. resorting to the violence of the state (taxation is extortion which cannot operate without the threat of violence no matter how deeply forgotten that core principle may be) is the most basic, primitive and barbaric 'solution' to the supposedly impossible problems of human organisation that i am constantly battered with as objections. who would build the roads, how would the hospitals work etc if the answer involves the state then it rests entirely on violence. if youre not into the deontological/ethics/philosophic source of individual freedom then i would argue that it is still the source of your heartfelt desire for freedom but you may not be aware of it. you may never be aware but we all know that taxation just aint right. any solution to social problems etc that involves taxation is based on violence and as such should be right out the window even if it supposedly works better than free market economic (even tho we know this to be complete socialist fantasy).

so before we blindly reach for yet another violent solution at least consider these three models of voluntary peaceful solutions. they are not the only way but now with squeezy cheese as my weapon we have one more argument in favour of human freedom.[

model 1 - the RNLI - a straight forward charity as everyone understands it. some people voluntarily fund it and the charity helps everyone that needs their services.

model 2 - bill gates - a voluntary commercial transaction generated by market forces brings benefit to both sides of the deal. one get cash the other some software. if either didnt feel they benefitted they would not voluntarily enter into the deal. in addition to this the party getting monetarily rich may choose to voluntarily gift some of this cash to worthy causes. yet more voluntary good.

model 3 - Primula and the Kavli Trust

http://primula.co.uk/our_company.html
http://primula.co.uk/good_causes.html
http://www.kavlifondet.no/english/

a company setup by the kind of evil capitalist scum that the socialists hate. the very essence of Atlas Shrugged. some bastard exploited poor scandanavian's need for cheese and mercilessly profitted. if only the government was in charge of cheese. anyway after two generations the evil cheese making capitalist family died out and voluntarily setup a charitable trust to run their company entirely for charity. 100% of Primula profits go to the Kavli Trust charities.
if every bleeding heart socialist got off their backside and put as much effort into making money as Bill Gates, Olav Kavli or John Galt then they too could actually pay for all the selfless acts they seem to desire. they should aim to be the biggest most money making capitalists in the world - even if they favour taxation of the rich and statism in general they should be aiming to become rich in order to contribute ever more to this virtuous extortion. but they dont so i question what they claim to desire. if the thought of riches disgusts them even if they were taxed 80% then they could voluntarily give even more as Primula does. they could give 100% of their profits voluntarily to support all the extortionate interest groups they bleet on about.

hurrah for voluntary socialism