Striking the Roots of Racism

Several days ago I had a fascinating conversation with a good friend regarding the origins of racism and the optimal methods for ameliorating its impact. The following post is largely based on that conversation, but also draws heavily from my study of such anti-racist thinkers as Tim Wise, Arthur Silber, and Cornel West.

Due to the human tendency towards "in group" and "out group" thinking, just about every human is to an extent racist. This does not mean they hate people based upon race, or that they harbor any ideological racism. But they do hold some emotional bias. This unconscious, unintentional racism has been confirmed by studies. As they say on Avenue Q, "everyone's a little bit racist," even far left, anti-racist bloggers like me.

And so, if we're all racists, whites make up the majority of our population, and whites are conferred with greater power than blacks thanks to years of slavery and Jim Crow, economic inequities between races should not be surprising. It should disturb you that a study by economists at MIT and the University of Chicago found that resumes with "white" sounding names were 50% more likely than the same resumes with "black" sounding names to lead to call backs for interviews. But it should not surprise you. It likewise should not be surprising that when minimum wage laws decrease the amount of people businesses can profitably employ, blacks are the ones hurt most (And in fact whites are often helped). But it should certainly give you pause.

Power of course only exacerbates the problem, particularly power involving authorization to use legal force, break the law with nearly guaranteed impunity, and imprison individuals. Yes, breaking news from the department of "Fucking obvious, but unremarked upon by respectable politicians": The criminal justice system is really racist. Michelle Jones thoroughly documents this in The New Jim Crow, specifically focusing on the war on drugs and the mass incarceration state to which it contributes. A few damning facts she points out include:

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste—not class, caste—permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

But there's a problem with all these facts: Humans want to consider ourselves and the things we love good and moral, and in our society, racism is deemed the height of evil. So we resort to denial. Admit to racism? It's hard to save face with that confession. Unpack the invisible knapsack of privilege? We might no longer feel we earned all we have.

And so, the white establishment must smear those who challenge their delusional vision of a fair and equitable America. Why, accusing white people of racism? These "civil rights activists" must be racist! Conservative firebrand David Horowitz wrote an entire book based on this premise titled hating whitey.

Similarly, employment difficulties of blacks must be denied. The truly skilled white privilege denialist will here play the victim, noting affirmative action programs as a form of "reverse racism."

The most illustrative example of the vehemence of our racial denial is the debacle surrounding Jeremiah Wright. Many politicians on both sides of the aisle are connected to preachers who compare my LGBTQ friends and I to pedophiles or who wish death upon us. Billy Graham had connections to multiple presidential administrations and had a repeated record of explicit racism against blacks. Yet when Reverend Wright told the reality, albeit in an incendiary manner, of American imperialism, war crimes, and racial oppression, that was too much.

And so the denial permeates our political spectrum. Even that radical socialist Barack Obama, known for his "deep seated hatred for white people", operates on the factually dubious assumption of a post-racial America. His most famous line of oratory hinges upon this PC delusion: "There's not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America." As Arthur Silber wrote yesterday on this matter:

Second, and of equal significance, is the fact -- acknowledged by almost no one, and certainly not by good liberals and progressives -- that Obama himself is a notably vicious racist: "All this means that it is Obama himself who has adopted the white racist framework. Yes, I repeat that: Obama has adopted the white racist framework with regard to every issue of importance."

This is true because Obama denies the truth of American history in some of its most essential aspects and fully embraces the myth of American exceptionalism -- which is a myth of white American exceptionalism. It is also true because Obama has intentionally adopted more particular racist tropes, such as the myth of "irresponsible" black fathers. (And follow some of the many links provided near the beginning of this article for much more on this topic.)

Please don't say Obama can't be a racist because he's black, or half-black, or however the hell you want to describe it. Just don't. I know you can be smarter than that, if you'll only try. In America today, the fastest path to power is via the white, male ruling class. Obama wanted and wants power, period. So in every way that matters, he identifies with the white, male ruling class. Now he's the leader of that class. See how that works?

So, how do we deal with all this racism? Certainly addressing symptoms such as the drug war and poverty would help. However, with deep seated problems, we must strike the root. This requires that we view racism not as an epithet to hurl at political opponents, but instead as an idea and structure of domination to seek out and ameliorate. For how else can we honestly find the racism lying latent in our psyches and our favored institutions? And if we can't even admit to the problem, it will be damn hard to solve.

Connor Boyack on Immigration

Over at Connor's Conundrums, Connor Boyack presents his views on immigration. Boyack is one of my fellow Utah residents, and is a libertarian, Constitutionalist, and Mormon writer. While I disagree with him on religion and overall have more radical views than he does, he is easily one of the most thorough and rational bloggers I've encountered. It shows in this piece. Boyack first presents a detailed history of immigration law in America, offering a persuasive case that originalist and libertarian interpretations of the Constitution would make our current restrictive immigration laws unconstitutional. He also offers well sourced rebuttals to the economic and crime based anti-immigrant arguments.

Free Market Socialism: An Introduction

My good friend Ciaran, who introduced me to the insights of free market libertarianism (Particularly the works of Frederic Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises), expressed his confusion at the notion of free market socialism. As the concepts are typically considered polar opposites, I figured I would offer some glimpses at various strains of free market socialist thought. To avoid the obvious contradiction, let me make clear to all readers that socialism does not here refer to the nationalization of industry, or other forms of government takeover. This is typically what such great free market economists as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and even Frederic Bastiat meant when they said socialism. However, throughout history socialism has had a broader meaning, which basically boils down to the abolition of the existing capitalist order in favor of a more equitable system without such hallmarks of capitalism as strong class distinctions, boss/employee hierarchies in the workplace, and oligarchic control of the means of production. Throughout the rest of this post, I will give examples of how radical left wing free marketeers have sought to abolish these facets of capitalism while still maintaining libertarian notions of private property rights. Specifically, I will be drawing on the works of the modern individualist anarchists and self proclaimed free market anti-capitalists such as Kevin Carson, Charles Johnson (Often known on the internet as Radgeek), Roderick Long, Sheldon Richman (Editor of the free market periodical The Freeman), and Brad Spangler (Director of the market anarchist Center for a Stateless Society).

First, we'll discuss a favorite in socialist thought: unions. Unions are typically seen as opponents of the free market by libertarians, and many progressives and supporters of labor see statism as a friend of workers' rights. There are many objections to these ideas raised by free market anti-capitalists.

The first is that a variety of government restrictions on free association and contract (i.e. free market activity) explicitly restrict the power of labor unions. In his post Free the Unions (and all political prisoners), Radgeek explains:

Too many of my comrades on the Left fall into the trap of taking the Labor Day version of history for granted: modern unions are trumpeted as the main channel for the voice of workers; the institutionalization of the system through the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board in 1935, and the ensuing spike in union membership during the New Deal period, are regarded as one of the great triumphs for workers of the past century.

You may not be surprised to find out that I don’t find this picture of history entirely persuasive. The Wagner Act was the capstone of years of government promotion of conservative, AFL-line unions in order to subvert the organizing efforts of decentralized, uncompromising, radical unions such as the IWW and to avoid the previous year’s tumultuous general strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. The labor movement as we know it today was created by government bureaucrats who effectively created a massive subsidy program for conservative unions which followed the AFL and CIO models of organizing—which emphatically did not include general strikes or demands for worker ownership of firms. Once the NRLB-recognized unions had swept over the workforce and co-opted most of the movement for organized labor, the second blow of the one-two punch fell: government benefits always mean government strings attached, and in this case it was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which pulled the activities of the recognized unions firmly into the regulatory grip of the federal government. Both the internal culture of post-Wagner mainstream unions, and the external controls of the federal labor regulatory apparatus, have dramatically hamstrung the labor movement for the past half-century. Union methods are legally restricted to collective bargaining and limited strikes (which cannot legally be expanded to secondary strikes, and which can be, and have been, broken by arbitrary fiat of the President). Union hiring halls are banned. Union resources have been systematically sapped by banning closed shop contracts, and encouraging states to ban union shop contracts—thus forcing unions to represent free-riding employees who do not join them and do not contribute dues. Union demands are effectively constrained to modest (and easily revoked) improvements in wages and conditions. And, since modern unions can do so little to achieve their professed goals, and since their professed goals have been substantially lowered anyway, unionization of the workforce continues its decades-long slide.

Explicit regulation and statist neutering of unions is one thing, but it is also notable that government restricts business competition. This produces what Roderick Long terms an "oligopsonistic labour market," meaning a market in which there are few employers compared to laborers, and thus bosses have more bargaining power than workers. Sheldon Richman expanded on this point in his article Workers of the World Unite for a Free Market.

In general, any government intervention that makes it harder to start businesses pushes people into the labor market with less bargaining power than they would have in a free market. Less bargaining power for workers means more bargaining power for bosses. So it stands to reason that some percentage of the workforce must put up with lousy job conditions they would reject in a minute if there were a wider array of better opportunities, including self-employment. But there isn’t because the State, with the backing of established businesses, has kept those opportunities from coming into existence—sometimes by outright prohibition, sometimes by “progressive” measures to “protect” consumers and workers. Technology now makes it more feasible for people to work independently, but statutes and ordinances still stand in the way.

It all comes down to the same thing: squelching competition and creating dependence on thusly protected big hierarchical and often authoritarian firms. (Yes, small business gets some State benefits too, but see Roderick Long’s response here. Also see C. L. Dickenson’s “Free Men for Better Job Performance” here and here.)

Concerns about working conditions sound “left wing” but that’s only because libertarians have neglected the issue, without good reason in my view. (It was not always so. Nineteenth-century liberals explicitly appealed to working people and condemned the State-derived power of “capital.”) Too many contemporary libertarians mistakenly think that since sound economic theory tells us that poor working conditions can’t endure in an advanced competitive market, workers have nothing to worry about in a “capitalist” country like the United States. The problem with the argument is that “capitalism” doesn’t equal “free market,” and we haven’t had a free market—not even close. In fact, the economy we live in is far more the product of government-business collusion—going back to the beginning—than economic freedom.

Where the progressives and state socialists go wrong is in thinking that weak worker bargaining power is inherent in the market itself. It is not. It is the result of State privilege. Therefore the solution is not further government intervention, as the progressives want, but repeal of privileges, subsidies, licenses and the rest of the sources of political advantage that protect the well-connected at the expense of the rest of us.

While these state interventions demonstrate that labor interests and genuinely free markets are not enemies, they still leave open the question of whether a free marketeer can in good conscience support labor unions. Some certainly do. For instance, Brad Spangler, after making a point similar to the one above on how the state reduces labor's bargaining power, wrote on his blog "I urge, and challenge, free-market libertarians to show their solidarity with labor by supporting radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)." So what's so great about these radical unions? And can free market libertarians reasonably support unions at all? In his essay The Ethics of Labor Struggle: A Free Market Perspective, Kevin Carson discusses how well various labor tactics fit into libertarian ethics. He begins by responding the common libertarian objection that union effectiveness is based upon forcing worker compliance with strikes.

Vulgar libertarian critiques of organized labor commonly assert that unions depend entirely on force (or the implicit threat of force), backed by the state, against non-union laborers; they assume, in so arguing, that the strike as it is known today has always been the primary method of labor struggle. Any of Thomas DiLorenzo's articles on the subject at Mises. Org can be taken as a proxy for this ideological tendency. I quote the following as an example:

Historically, the main "weapon" that unions have employed to try to push wages above the levels that employees could get by bargaining for themselves on the free market without a union has been the strike. But in order for the strike to work, and for unions to have any significance at all, some form of coercion or violence must be used to keep competing workers out of the labor market.(9)

This betrays a profound ignorance of the history of the labor movement outside the sterile bubble of the Wagner Act.

First of all, when the strike was chosen as a weapon, it relied more on the threat of imposing costs on the employer than on the forcible exclusion of scabs. You wouldn't think it so hard for the Misoids to understand that the replacement of a major portion of the workforce, especially when the supply of replacement workers is limited by moral sympathy with the strike, might entail considerable transaction costs and disruption of production. The idiosyncratic knowledge of the existing workforce, the time and cost of bringing replacement workers to an equivalent level of productivity, and the damage short-term disruption of production may do to customer relations, together constitute a rent that invests the threat of walking out with a considerable deterrent value. And the cost and disruption is greatly intensified when the strike is backed by sympathy strikes at other stages of production. Wagner and Taft-Hartley greatly reduced the effectiveness of strikes at individual plants by transforming them into declared wars fought by Queensbury rules, and likewise reduced their effectiveness by prohibiting the coordination of actions across multiple plants or industries. Taft-Hartley's cooling off periods, in addition, gave employers time to prepare ahead of time for such disruptions and greatly reduced the informational rents embodied in the training of the existing workforce. Were not such restrictions in place, today's "just-in-time" economy would likely be far more vulnerable to such disruption than that of the 1930s.

Carson continues, discussing the previously noted restrictions on organized labor, and noting free market labor organizing tactics which have been banned.

More importantly, though, unionism was historically less about strikes or excluding non-union workers from the workplace than about what workers did inside the workplace to strengthen their bargaining power against the boss.

The Wagner Act, along with the rest of the corporate liberal legal regime, had as its central goal the redirection of labor resistance away from the successful asymmetric warfare model, toward a formalized, bureaucratic system centered on labor contracts enforced by the state and the union hierarchies. As Karl Hess suggested in a 1976 Playboy interview,

one crucial similarity between those two fascists [Hitler and FDR] is that both successfully destroyed the trade unions. Roosevelt did it by passing exactly the reforms that would ensure the creation of a trade-union bureaucracy. Since F.D.R., the unions have become the protectors of contracts rather than the spearhead of worker demands. And the Roosevelt era brought the "no strike" clause, the notion that your rights are limited by the needs of the state.(10)

The federal labor law regime criminalizes many forms of resistance, like sympathy and boycott strikes up and down the production chain from raw materials to retail, that made the mass and general strikes of the early 1930s so formidable. The Railway Labor Relations Act, which has since been applied to airlines, was specifically designed to prevent transport workers from turning local strikes into general strikes. Taft-Hartley's cooling off period can be used for similar purposes in other strategic sectors, as demonstrated by Bush's invocation of it against the longshoremen's union.

The extent to which state labor policy serves the interests of employers is suggested by the old (pre-Milsted) Libertarian Party Platform, a considerable deviation from the stereotypical libertarian position on organized labor. It expressly called for a repeal, not only of Wagner, but of Taft-Hartley's prohibitions on sympathy and boycott strikes and of state right-to-work prohibitions on union shop contracts. It also condemned any federal right to impose "cooling off" periods or issue back-to-work orders.(11)

Wagner was originally passed, as Alexis Buss suggests below, because the bosses were begging for a regime of enforceable contract, with the unions as enforcers. To quote Adam Smith, when the state regulates relations between workmen and masters, it usually has the masters for its counselors.

Far from being a labor charter that empowered unions for the first time, FDR's labor regime had the same practical effect as telling the irregulars of Lexington and Concord "Look, you guys come out from behind those rocks, put on these bright red uniforms, and march in parade ground formation like the Brits, and in return we'll set up a system of arbitration to guarantee you don't lose all the time." Unfortunately, the Wagner regime left organized labor massively vulnerable to liquidation in the event that ruling elites decided they wanted labor to lose all the time, after all. Since the late '60s, corporate America has moved to exploit the full union-busting potential of Taft-Hartley. And guess what? Labor is prevented by law, for the most part, from abandoning the limits of Wagner and Taft-Hartley and returning to the successful unilateral techniques of the early '30s.

Carson later notes some tactics which, if these regulations were not in place, could permit organized labor to have immense bargaining power over business, while never using force to stop "scabs" from continuing work.

[I]t certainly was easier to win a strike before Taft-Hartley outlawed secondary and boycott strikes up and down the production chain. The classic CIO strikes of the early '30s involved multiple steps in the chain--not only production plants, but their suppliers of raw materials, their retail outlets, and the teamsters who moved finished and unfinished goods. They were planned strategically, as a general staff might plan a campaign. Some strikes turned into what amounted to regional general strikes. Even a minority of workers striking, at each step in the chain, can be far more effective than a conventional strike limited to one plant. Even the AFL-CIO's Sweeney, at one point, half-heartedly suggested that things would be easier if Congress repealed all the labor legislation after Norris-LaGuardia (which took the feds out of the business of issuing injunctions and sending in troops), and let labor and management go at it "mano a mano."(18)

If nothing else, all of this should demonstrate the sheer nonsensicality of the Misoid idea that strikes are ineffectual unless they involve 100% of the workforce and are backed up by the threat of violence against scabs. Even a sizeable minority of workers walking off the job, if they're backed up by similar minorities at other stages of the production and distribution process on early CIO lines, could utterly paralyze a company.

Outside of the strike concept, radical unions such as the IWW have supported on the job direct action. Carson writes:

An alternative model of labor struggle, and one much closer to the overall spirit of organized labor before Wagner, would include the kinds of activity mentioned in the old Wobbly pamphlet "How to Fire Your Boss," and discussed by the I.W.W.'s Alexis Buss in her articles on "minority unionism" for Industrial Worker.

If labor is to return to a pre-Wagner way of doing things, what Buss calls "minority unionism" will be the new organizing principle.

If unionism is to become a movement again, we need to break out of the current model, one that has come to rely on a recipe increasingly difficult to prepare: a majority of workers vote a union in, a contract is bargained. We need to return to the sort of rank-and-file on-the-job agitating that won the 8-hour day and built unions as a vital force....

Minority unionism happens on our own terms, regardless of legal recognition....

U.S. & Canadian labor relations regimes are set up on the premise that you need a majority of workers to have a union, generally government-certified in a worldwide context[;] this is a relatively rare set-up. And even in North America, the notion that a union needs official recognition or majority status to have the right to represent its members is of relatively recent origin, thanks mostly to the choice of business unions to trade rank-and-file strength for legal maintenance of membership guarantees.

The labor movement was not built through majority unionism-it couldn't have been.(15)

How are we going to get off of this road? We must stop making gaining legal recognition and a contract the point of our organizing....

We have to bring about a situation where the bosses, not the union, want the contract. We need to create situations where bosses will offer us concessions to get our cooperation. Make them beg for it.(16)

As the Wobbly pamphlet "How to Fire Your Boss" argues, the strike in its current business union form, according to NLRB rules, is about the least effective form of action available to organized labor.

The bosses, with their large financial reserves, are better able to withstand a long drawn-out strike than the workers. In many cases, court injunctions will freeze or confiscate the union's strike funds. And worst of all, a long walk-out only gives the boss a chance to replace striking workers with a scab (replacement) workforce.

Workers are far more effective when they take direct action while still on the job. By deliberately reducing the boss' profits while continuing to collect wages, you can cripple the boss without giving some scab the opportunity to take your job. Direct action, by definition, means those tactics workers can undertake themselves, without the help of government agencies, union bureaucrats, or high-priced lawyers. Running to the National Labor Relations Board (N.L.R.B.) for help may be appropriate in some cases, but it is NOT a form of direct action.(17)

Thomas DiLorenzo, ironically, said almost the same thing in the article quoted earlier:

It took decades of dwindling union membership (currently 8.2% of the private-sector labor force in the U.S. according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor) to convince union leaders to scale back the strike as their major "weapon" and resort to other tactics. Despite all the efforts at violence and intimidation, the fact remains that striking union members are harmed by lower incomes during strikes, and in many cases have lost their jobs to replacement workers. To these workers, strikes have created heavy financial burdens for little or no gain. Consequently, some unions have now resorted to what they call "in-plant actions," a euphemism for sabotage.

Damaging the equipment in an oil refinery or slashing the tires of the trucks belonging to a trucking company, for example, is a way for unions to "send a message" to employers that they should give in to union demands, or else. Meanwhile, no unionized employees, including the ones engaged in the acts of sabotage, lose a day's work.

DiLorenzo is wrong, of course, in limiting on-the-job action solely to physical sabotage of the employer's property. As we shall see below, an on-the-job struggle over the pace and intensity of work is inherent in the incomplete nature of the employment contract, the impossibility of defining such particulars ahead of time, and the agency costs involved in monitoring performance after the fact. But what is truly comical is DiLorenzo's ignorance of the role employers and the employers' state played in establishment unions making the strike a "major 'weapon'" in the first place.

Instead of conventional strikes, "How to Fire Your Boss" recommends such forms of direct action as the slowdown, the "work to rule" strike, the "good work" strike, selective strikes (brief, unannounced strikes at random intervals), whisteblowing, and sick-ins. These are all ways of raising costs on the job, without giving the boss a chance to hire scabs.

Sabotage and other forms of direct action pose interesting property rights questions for libertarians. Carson's answer to these questions is as follows:

As I already mentioned, sitdowns and monkey-wrenching would appear at first glance to be obvious transgressions of libertarian principle. Regarding these, I can only say that the morality of trespassing and vandalism against someone else's property hinges on the just character of their property rights.

Murray Rothbard raised the question, at the height of his attempted alliance with the New Left, of what ought to be done with state property. His answer was quite different from that of today's vulgar libertarians ("Why, sell it to a giant corporation, of course, on terms most advantageous to the corporation!"). According to Rothbard, since state ownership of property is in principle illegitimate, all property currently "owned" by the government is really unowned. And since the rightful owner of any piece of unowned property is, in keeping with radical Lockean principles, the first person to occupy it and mix his or her labor with it, it follows that government property is rightfully the property of whoever is currently occupying and using it. That means, for example, that state universities are the rightful property of either the students or faculties, and should either be turned into student consumer co-ops, or placed under the control of scholars' guilds. More provocative still, Rothbard tentatively applied the same principle to the (theatrical gasp) private sector! First he raised the question of nominally "private" universities that got most of their funding from the state, like Columbia. Surely it was only a "private" college "in the most ironic sense." And therefore, it deserved "a similar fate of virtuous homesteading confiscation."

But if Columbia University, what of General Dynamics? What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to "private" property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison stare, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their "private" property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horsethief and the murderer must be "respected."

But how then do we go about destatizing the entire mass of government property, as well as the "private property" of General Dynamics? All this needs detailed thought and inquiry on the part of libertarians. One method would be to turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants; another to turn over pro-rata ownership to the individual taxpayers. But we must face the fact that it might prove the most practical route to first nationalize the property as a prelude to redistribution. Thus, how could the ownership of General Dynamics be transferred to the deserving taxpayers without first being nationalized enroute? And, further more, even if the government should decide to nationalize General Dynamics--without compensation, of course-- per se and not as a prelude to redistribution to the taxpayers, this is not immoral or something to be combatted. For it would only mean that one gang of thieves--the government--would be confiscating property from another previously cooperating gang, the corporation that has lived off the government. I do not often agree with John Kenneth Galbraith, but his recent suggestion to nationalize businesses which get more than 75% of their revenue from government, or from the military, has considerable merit. Certainly it does not mean aggression against private property, and, furthermore, we could expect a considerable diminution of zeal from the military-industrial complex if much of the profits were taken out of war and plunder. And besides, it would make the American military machine less efficient, being governmental, and that is surely all to the good. But why stop at 75%? Fifty per cent seems to be a reasonable cutoff point on whether an organization is largely public or largely private.(19)

If corporations that get the bulk of their profits from state intervention are essentially parts of the state, rightfully subject to being treated as the property of the workers actually occupying them, then sitdowns and sabotage should certainly be legitimate means for bringing this about.

As for the other, less extreme tactics, those who object morally to such on-the-job direct action fail to consider the logical implications of a free contract in labor. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis describe it,

The classical theory of contract implicit in most of neo-classical economics holds that the enforcement of claims is performed by the judicial system at negligible cost to the exchanging parties. We refer to this classical third-party enforcement assumption as exogenous enforcement. Where, by contrast, enforcement of claims arising from an exchange by third parties is infeasible or excessively costly, the exchanging agents must themselves seek to enforce their claims. Endogenous enforcement in labour markets was analysed by Marx--he termed it the extraction of labour from labour power--and has recently become the more or less standard model among microeconomic theorists.

Exogenous enforcement is absent under a variety of quite common conditions: when there is no relevant third party..., when the contested attribute can be measured only imperfectly or at considerable cost (work effort, for example, or the degre of risk assumed by a firm's management), when the relevant evidence is not admissible in a court of law...[,] when there is no possible means of redress..., or when the nature of the contingencies concerning future states of the world relevant to the exchange precludes writing a fully specified contract.

In such cases the ex post terms of exchange are determined by the structure of the interaction between A and B, and in particular on the strategies A is able to adopt to induce B to provide the desired level of the contested attribute, and the counter strategies available to B....

Consider agent A who purchases a good or service from agent B. We call the exchange contested when B's good or service possesses an attribute which is valuable to A, is costly for B to provide, yet is not fully secified in an enforceable contract....

An employment relationship is established when, in return for a wage, the worker B agrees to submit to the authority of the employer A for a specified period of time in return for a wage w. While the employer's promise to pay the wage is legally enforceable, the worker's promise to bestow an adequate level of effort and care upon the tasks assigned, even if offered, is not. Work is subjectively costly for the worker to provide, valuable to the employer, and costly to measure. The manager-worker relationship is thus a contested exchange.(20)

The very term "adequate effort" is meaningless, aside from whatever way its definition is worked out in practice based on the comparative bargaining power of worker and employer. It's virtually impossible to design a contract that specifies ahead of time the exact levels of effort and standards of performance for a wage-laborer, and likewise impossible for employers to reliably monitor performance after the fact. Therefore, the workplace is contested terrain, and workers are justified entirely as much as employers in attempting to maximize their own interests within the leeway left by an incomplete contract. How much effort is "normal" to expend is determined by the informal outcome of the social contest within the workplace, given the de facto balance of power at any given time. And that includes slowdowns, "going canny," and the like. The "normal" effort that an employer is entitled to, when he buys labor-power, is entirely a matter of convention. It's directly analogous the local cultural standards that would determine the nature of "reasonable expectations," in a libertarian common law of implied contract. If libertarians like to think of "a fair day's wage" as an open-ended concept, subject to the employer's discretion and limited by what he can get away with, they should remember that "a fair day's work" is equally open-ended.

This may strike some libertarians as a convoluted rationalization of transgressions against property and contract, but it still presents a well thought out and thoroughly libertarian case for direct action by labor.

Interestingly, the previous Kevin Carson passage provides a perfect segue into another area of free market socialist thought. When he discusses how to deal with state property, which to a pure market anarchist is not legitimately owned by the government, he hits on a key element of free market socialism. The market anarchist, such as Murray Rothbard, believes that because governments obtain property either by force or fiat, it is not legitimately owned by them. Thus, privatization should occur. Unfortunately, the typical meaning of privatization in America involves a conservative practice. When the American government "privatizes" something this either means paying a corporation with tax dollars (Which a pure free marketeer considers ill gotten gain) to do something ordinarily done by government, giving government property to a corporation, or selling said property to a corporation. The first is irrelevant to our discussion of government property, and the second two are clearly illegitimate and distort the market, as they effectively amount to giving away or selling stolen goods. So how does one privatize government property? In his essay How and How Not to Desocialize, Rothbard writes:

It would be far better to enshrine the venerable homesteading principle at the base of the new desocialized property system. Or, to revive the old Marxist slogan: "all land to the peasants, all factories to the workers!" This would establish the basic Lockean principle that ownership of owned property is to be acquired by "mixing one's labor with the soil" or with other unowned resources.

Desocialization is a process of depriving the government of its existing "ownership" or control, and devolving it upon private individuals. In a sense, abolishing government ownership of assets puts them immediately and implicitly into an unowned status, out of which previous homesteading can quickly convert them into private ownership. The homestead principle asserts that these assets are to devolve, not upon the general abstract public as in the handout principle, but upon those who have actually worked upon these resources: that is, their respective workers, peasants, and managers. Of course, these rights are to be genuinely private; that is, land to individual peasants, while capital goods or factories go to workers in the form of private, negotiable shares. Ownership is not to be granted to collectives or cooperatives or workers or peasants holistically, which would only bring back the ills of socialism in a decentralized and chaotic syndicalist form.

There is a reasonable libertarian case to be made for not giving the property to a co-op or collective initially as the form of privatization. However, who is to say that if given control over a factory, the workers would not want to implement a cooperative themselves with their individual shares? As they homesteaded it, this would be their right within a genuinely free market. Radgeek advocates for this and related market socialist forms of privatization (Which he argues could be reasonably be termed "socialization") here and here.

Another issue which tends to separate advocates of pure free markets from socialists is the matter of public property. One common market anarchist view is that in a free market, all property would be privately rather than publicly owned, and thus tightly controlled by the owner. While this would deal with the tragedy of the commons quite nicely, it would also likely decrease options available to the poor, and freedom of movement for everyone. However, public does not imply government owned, and thus there is room in a free market society for public ownership. In 1996 Roderick Long wrote a piece titled In Defense of Public Property, which deals with the issue well. On the matter of whether public property fits libertarian theories of property rights, Long argues

On the libertarian view, we have a right to the fruit of our labor, and we also have a right to what people freely give us. Public property can arise in both these ways.

Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it's hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms — not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day.

The cleared path is the product of labor — not any individual's labor, but all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.

Public property can also be the product of gift. In 19th-century England, it was common for roads to be built privately and then donated to the public for free use. This was done not out of altruism but because the roadbuilders owned land and businesses alongside the site of the new road, and they knew that having a road there would increase the value of their land and attract more customers to their businesses. Thus, the unorganized public can legitimately come to own land, both through original acquisition (the mixing of labor) and through voluntary transfer.

This provides a fairly clear route for a socialistic manner for eliminating government ownership of places like parks, which have been homesteaded by the public at large.

Ultimately, it's important to remember that even if you don't think that roughly socialist economic relations are beneficial, in a libertarian society they may coexist with capitalist relations. Wendy McElroy, no anti-capitalist, explained this quite eloquently in her blog post Capitalism v. The Free Market.

At the risk of being misunderstood, I am not a capitalist. Instead, I advocate the free market. Capitalism is a specific economic arrangement with reference to the ownership of property and capital. It happens to be the arrangement I prefer because I believe it is more just, a far better reflection of reality and produces more prosperity than the alternatives. But I wouldn’t crusade for capitalism the way I would crusade for freedom of speech. What I would crusade for is a free market in which individuals exchange or co-operate with each other according to their own choices.

What’s the difference? Consider: I live near an old-fashioned Mennonite community that organizes its economic life along socialist ideals rather than capitalist ones. The community is absolutely voluntary – that is, it results from the free choices of individuals. In a free market, my neighbors can peacefully disagree with my assessment of capitalism and set up whatever voluntary alternative appeals to them…for whatever reason it appeals to them (e.g. religion). My approval of their non-capitalist lifestyle is not necessary until or unless they attempt to make me adopt their preference. That’s the free market: everyone peacefully pursues whichever economic goals they wish by whatever means is voluntary. If your chosen means is not capitalism and you don’t want my advice…then I wish you well… even though I doubt you will succeed in the way I define ‘success.’ Nevertheless I feel no urge to knock on your door as an evangelist for capitalism who is determined to demonstrate the error of your ways.

I think it would be fitting to close with a video series of Gary Chartier explaining why "advocates of freed markets should oppose capitalism." A written version of the same general arguments is available here.







I have tagged in the Facebook note for this post many advocates of free market anti-capitalist thought, as well as some of my best free market capitalist and non-market socialist leaning friends. I would be interested to read debate on these topics.

The Homosexual Experience is a Gift

My friend Richard Matthews recently posted as a Facebook note a reflection he wrote titled "The Homosexual Experience is a Gift." I think it presents a really beautiful perspective on homosexuality, and the queer experience in general.

Written January 2009... shortly after coming out.

I just came from my weekly get-together with The Village where we had possibly the most fascinating discussion about the homosexual experience that I have ever had. We dedicated a good portion of our hour-long interaction to the tremendous similarities between the X-Men and the real-life feelings and experiences that LGBT teens and adults have in being closeted, coming out, and living life as outsiders.

For those of you who don't know very much about the X-Men, they're not your average comic book heroes. The biggest names in the world of comics are Superman, Batman, and Spiderman. These are good 'ol boy superheroes. They're invincible, mysterious, and most of all: loved and adored by the respective cities that they protect. Not so with the mutants of the X-Men. While they do have incredible super powers and abilities, their story is one of struggle, rejection, and ultimately redemption.

Mutants in the world of X-Men are born with a genetic mutation that usually doesn't manifest itself until they begin to come of age as teenagers. When these characters begin to realize that they're “freaks”, there is a cataclysmic internal struggle that erupts within each one of them. Desperate to be normal, they struggle with self-loathing, depression, and often rejection by their families.

The tragic beauty of the story is that each one of them has a unique and amazing gift. At first, these mutant teens are consumed with hate for the abnormality that is part of them, but over time, many of them awaken to the stunning exquisiteness of their individuality. When they begin to find each other, they grow in strength and purpose. As this community of misfits grows and begins to take shape, the normal population reacts with cruel and shocking brutality. Laws are passed against them, they are attacked and beaten on the streets, and lies and misinformation flood the airwaves to spread fear and hate.

I hope that by now you've begun to see some similarities to the struggles that real-life gay adolescents and adults face. Our discussion group, The Village, unanimously agreed that our homosexuality is, in fact, a gift. Let's look beyond the fact that many homosexuals have tremendous talent in art, music, writing, etc. Being gay in and of itself is a gift... a magnificent gift. One of our villagers said it very well when he said that the day he accepted his sexuality, he was overcome with the incredible sense that this was special. That this made him forever distinct from average. But what is the gift? The gift... is that at a very critical and formative time in our lives, we have to look deep within ourselves to accept that we're different... and good. We have to learn... that we are good people. Our straight friends will just give us blank stares if asked, “When did you realize that you were a heterosexual?” “When did you accept that being straight was okay?”

These questions (substitute gay for straight) often evoke tremendous meaning and passion from a gay person. The gift of homosexuality is not only our individuality, but is a mirror to the soul. How many times have you had to look into this mirror and try to figure out who you really are? How many prayers have been choked out through bitter tears while wrestling with the most fundamental questions of our very existence? There is something profound to be said for the personal insight gained through struggle and doubt. I would venture to guess that we look into this mirror often as we continue our lifelong struggle for equality, acceptance, self-acceptance, and peace. It's a gift not exclusive to the gay community, but I would say all gays have it to some degree.

In the X-Men saga, a cure is introduced to rid the world of the scourge of mutants. It is made available to any mutant who wants it. This “cure” introduces a whole new level of personal conflict for the special race of mutants. Each one of them has desperately yearned for normalcy at some point in their lives. Even those who have long accepted themselves are shaken to the core by the prospect and supposed simplicity of being “normal.” Ultimately, some of them take the cure, others do not.

Most of us have been through, or are in, a time of our lives when we would have given ANYTHING to be rid of our gift, to be loved and accepted by default by our families, friends, and by society as a whole. There are people who despise their gift. If a “gay cure” were controversially offered today, would you take it?

There was a long period of my life when I would have gladly given up everything to live the boring poorly-dressed life of a straight man. As a 13 year-old boy, the prospect of living my entire life hiding in the closet or being ridiculed as an openly gay man racked my young body with terror and despair. Fourteen years later... fourteen years of anguish, self introspection and soul-searching, I can confidently say that I would not change if given the chance. Hell no. Scarcity creates value; that's why diamonds are so precious. I do not doubt the wisdom of my creator; each one of us is invaluably precious. We were all raised as heterosexuals in a society that HIGHLY values heterosexuality. Yet here we are. “Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” - Oscar Wilde

Ethics, Empiricism, and Emergent Order: My Path to Left Libertarianism

Disclaimer: The following post reflects the views I held at the time of writing.  Some of my views may have changed, though many are the same.

From my roots as a civil liberties loving Democrat, to my Noam Chomsky and Bertrand Russell inspired move to libertarian socialism, to my current independent left libertarian radicalism, my political views have always been left of center. Initially I thought I had a place firmly within the Democratic Party, but gradually I have moved radically beyond the parameters of their policy platform. My views run the gamut of political philosophy, typically being based upon liberal, progressive, classically liberal, libertarian, socialist, and anarchist works. Fundamentally, however, they always have been, and I posit always will be, characterized by the attitude Bertrand Russell ascribed to liberalism in his essay Philosophy and Politics. Wrote Russell, "The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may lead at any moment to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way they are held in theology." With this openness to new data, my political views have undergone many evolutions.

The story of my political evolution begins, as so many do, with devotion to atheism and scientific naturalism. In fifth grade, while seeking quotes from my favorite historical figure, Thomas Paine, I stumbled across the website Positive Atheism, and their "Big List of Quotations." As I read through this list, containing both brilliant quotes from champions of science and liberalism and disturbing quotes from religious and socially conservative leaders, several opinions solidified. I became firmly convinced that free speech, feminism, reproductive choice, science (Particularly big bang cosmology and evolutionary biology), gay rights, and the separation of church and state were all immensely important and must be defended and advanced. Furthermore, I realized that these goals were under attack by religious fundamentalists and social conservatives, including the administration of George W. Bush. I still stand by these ideas. I remain a secular humanist to my core, diametrically opposed to the asinine assaults on reason which continue to emanate from the religious right and their army of bronze-age-dogma-worshiping bigots and philistines.

The next step in the evolution of my political ideology came from a somewhat less intellectual source: Liberal comedian Al Franken. His books Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them gave me some great laughs, and instilled in me some knowledge of the dishonesty and demagoguery that characterizes the American right. While I remain revolted at the right, I fear that in this period (Around sixth and seventh grade) I grew dogmatic and embraced many aspects of the Democratic Party platform on an emotional rather than rational basis.

But after consuming the pleasant partisan political junk food of Franken's hilarity, I moved onto some real philosophical red meat. My mind was blown by the articulate and principled works of the 19th century classical liberal utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill. I will confess for the sake of intellectual honesty that I have yet to read the entirety of his concise treatise On Liberty, but the excerpts I did read have since defined my political ideology. Most influential was Mill's enunciation of the harm principle: "That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right... The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." From this principle I realized the moral vacuity of drug control, bans on prostitution, and other symptoms of America's meddlesome, paternalistic tendency towards moralistic overcriminalization. Later I would learn of police brutality, the economics of prohibition, and many civil liberties issues entangled in these matters, and my opinions would grow stronger still. But fundamentally it was the words of Mill that triggered this libertarian spark in my thinking.

After the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill solidified my devotion to personal liberty, my skepticism of the state was enhanced, ironically enough, by the insightful writings of three great socialists. Of course, these were socialists of a decisively libertarian persuasion, and I believe their work has much to offer for all reasonable people regardless of their place on the political spectrum. I refer, of course, to Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, and George Orwell. The influence of Russell and Orwell upon my ideas is fairly self explanatory. Russell's skepticism and empiricism remain pervasive in my ideals and color my every thought. Orwell taught me how to see through political demagoguery, and particularly how all ideologies, even those which are on the surface devoted to humanity's liberation, can become the instigators of the most brutal and insidious authoritarianism. And of course, the entirety of this socialist trinity loved free speech with an absolutist fervor, while despising and distrusting blind loyalty to any party.

But the influence of Professor Noam Chomsky extends farther than that of his two comrades, brilliant and eloquent as both are. For it was Chomsky who sparked my outrage at America's undemocratic two party system, morally bankrupt and ever bungling CIA, and murderous military-industrial empire. With clear logic, scrupulously documented facts, and moral clarity, Professor Chomsky demonstrated the hypocrisy of our foreign policy, which condemns terrorism and tyranny while terrorizing civilians and installing and maintaining tyrannical regimes. Until I read Failed States, I had never fully comprehended the horrors our government was hypocritically unleashing in the Middle East, or the human cost of our previous unethical and illegal misadventures in Latin America and around the globe. Realizing that presidential administrations from both the Democratic and Republican parties were complicit in what amounted to war crimes toppled my partisan loyalty to the Democrats, which had already been shaken by the admonitions of Russell and Orwell. Professor Chomsky's analysis of how few substantive policy differences exist between the parties, about how the media in America serve as lapdogs for the state corporate apparatus, and of the many other systemic flaws in our political system, awakened me to the need for radicalism. Beyond the folly of the Iraq War, I saw the folly of an entire empire. Beyond the cynical demagoguery of the Republicans, I saw a narrow political spectrum in which Democrats and Republicans alike accepted the same morally repugnant premises. And beyond the lies of O'Reilly and Limbaugh, I noted that even real journalists sacrificed moral and intellectual integrity so as to retain their coveted seat in Washington's royal court.

Chomsky's writings may have saved me from the sick stagnation of the political mainstream, but I was still hampered with delusions. I was a social democrat who believed that the optimal solution to our problems was a truly democratic government that provided services to the people and limited corporate power through regulation. I also thought that, while Barack Obama was going to be a politician within the center right authoritarian spectrum party, he would substantially roll back the damage Bush did. It is now my opinion that I was wrong on both counts. On the first point, I now see that particularly in America, but also elsewhere, the state has an intractable tendency to become a tool of inequity and privation. Orwell and Chomsky taught me this, but it didn't really sink in until now, particularly as both remained to some extent state socialists. It didn't really sink in until I read detailed policy analysis from the Cato Institute and other sources on corporate welfare. It didn't sink in until Timothy Carney on the right and the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) on the left started reporting on Obama's corporatism. And it didn't truly sink in entirely until I re-exposed myself to the philosophy of individualist anarchism. I was first introduced to individualist anarchism when I read Wendy McElroy's brilliant book XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography. In this truly stellar defense of sexual liberation and free expression, Wendy McElroy eviscerated the ideas of anti-pornography feminism, expounding on her philosophy of individualist feminism, which has at its roots such 19th Century individualist anarchists as Moses Harman, who was frequently jailed for his publication of "obscene" articles advocating birth control and condemning marital rape. But this time I encountered a farther left brand of individualist anarchism, an ideology promoted by the likes of Professor Roderick Long, a philosopher at Auburn University. The "free market anti-capitalism" of Roderick Long and his comrades such as Kevin Carson, Brad Spangler, and Sheldon Richman combined the consistent anti-statism I had loved from Wendy McElroy and Murray Rothbard with the compassion for victims of non-governmental hierarchies that I so admired from the likes of Noam Chomsky. This should not be too surprising, for as Roderick Long explained in his lecture "Rothbard's Left and Right: 40 Years Later," leftism and libertarianism were not originally considered opposed, but in fact "what we now call free market libertarianism was originally a left wing position. The great liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat sat on the left side of the French national assembly, with the anarcho-socialist Proudhon. Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing — feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business — were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals." Roderick Long has also written a variety of very persuasive papers, such as Corporations versus the Market, explaining how the state creates oligopolies, and thus an oligoponistic labor market unfriendly both to workers and consumers. Corporate power is largely a product of state intervention, and it has a tendency to then incur ever more favors from the government, resulting in our current corporatist plutocracy. At the same time, the writings of many great economists taught me how undirected emergent order, a phenomena I had long defended in the natural sciences against the teleology of creationists, can lead to great things in human action. For these reasons, I abandoned social democracy in favor of free market anti-capitalism. So what caused the other change, what led to my disillusionment with Obama? Well, in accepting the despotic assumptions of the Bush Administration when it comes to civil liberties, in arguing for indefinite detention, in claiming the authority to order the assassination of US citizens, in using the state secrets privilege to cover for the Bush Administration's crimes, Obama has shifted the debate in a dangerously authoritarian direction. Liberals who would have once condemned such policies as "Constitution shredding" now defend them as pragmatic, while the right hysterically screams that Obama will kill us all by allowing some terror suspects their Miranda Rights, and clamors to avert this non-threat by annihilating the Bill of Rights with their "Enemy Belligerent Act." Only principled "civil liberties absolutists" like Glenn Greenwald are left, as a small minority in our political discourse, to argue for Thomas Paine's ideal that "in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other." As long as Obama stands explicitly against the Bill of Rights, I cannot consider myself his supporter.

These are not the only changes that have happened recently in my political consciousness. The writings of several commentators, most notably Radley Balko, have alerted me to the true nature of the modern American criminal justice system. It is an unjust system, in which police and prosecutors are above the law, law enforcement agents become ever more militarized to prosecute a failed "war on drugs," and innocent people are jailed, even executed. Similarly, I have gone from an advocate for mainstream LGBT rights causes such as gay marriage, to a radical seeking to abolish all forms of prescribed gender roles, and the gender dichotomy that excludes transsexuals, intersex individuals, and so many others.

While all my opinions, as Russell wrote, "are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may lead at any moment to their abandonment," I hold my current views with passion and a willingness to act. And so, for now, I proudly proclaim the following:

I stand in solidarity with the queers, the immigrants, the workers, the prisoners, and every civilian casualty in foreign wars and the domestic drug war.
I stand against bigotry of every stripe, violent aggression in all its manifestations (Including the state itself), dogmatism and all the ignorance it begets, corporatist cronyism, and state secrecy and dishonesty.
I stand for justice, reason, and liberty, wherever these values may lead.

Why We Need an Alliance Between Libertarians and the Left

Currently, there exists a fair amount of animosity between libertarians and the left. It's understandable. Many libertarians go around denying climate science, bashing altruism, smearing the poor as lazy or incompetent, and declaring big business "a persecuted minority." On the other hand, many on the left went into histrionics after the Supreme Court affirmed First Amendment principles in Citizens United v FEC, look to government as the first solution to social and economic ills, and are willing to abandon their anti-war views and support of civil liberties in order to pass their statist domestic agenda. That being said, on the issues I deem most important in our society today, libertarians and the left are (Or should be) in agreement. And we need to unite around these common goals, because, as I will demonstrate in the remainder of this post, the Democrats and Republicans are largely united against our interests here.

The American political machine is fundamentally broken. Libertarians and independent liberals spend lots of time raging against it, for a menagerie of reasons. Thus, I will use this post to diagnose systemic flaws both groups addressed here should find rather terrifying, as well as my favored solutions.

First, let us examine the two party system. For more than a century, we have oscillated between the Democrats and the Republicans, and despite their hatred of one another, the similarities are more striking to me than the differences. Under both parties our troops were sent on superfluous and imperialistic missions. Under both parties the CIA has deposed democratically elected governments, propped up tyranny, and generated blowback which later endangered our national security. Under both parties torture and war crimes have never had any chance of being prosecuted provided they were committed by the US government. Under both parties corporate welfare distorted the market and defiled the public interest. Under both parties "tough on crime" politicians compete to see who can do the most to overcriminalize, take away more of our Fourth Amendment rights, militarize our police force, and incarcerate more of our citizens. Peel away the differences in rhetoric, and underneath you have two parties opposed to peace, equality, and freedom in shockingly similar ways.

Naturally, there have been attempts to bypass this flawed two party system. In 1971, the Libertarian Party was formed to advocate smaller government. As an outgrowth of Ralph Nader's independent campaigns for the presidency, a national Green Party coalesced in 2001 to advocate for environmentalism, grassroots democracy, social justice, tolerance, peace, and non-violence. A plethora of other parties outside of the bipartisan power duopoly exist in the American system. Yet until we reform certain policies, we WILL be subject to rule by "Demopublicans." Neither libertarians nor the independent left are truly represented by either major party. And even if they were, such a narrow political spectrum would be anathema to the values of both groups. Libertarians should understand that a maximization of competition and free discourse are both desirable. The independent left, in its desire both for free exchange of ideas and a functional and participatory democracy, should revile the two party system as well.

But the two party system is currently entrenched by a wide range of political machinations which we must work to dismantle. So as to prevent votes for third parties becoming mere "spoilers," a system such as instant runoff voting, in which voters rank candidates in order of preference, must be implemented. Discriminatory ballot access and campaign finance laws must be reformed, simplified, or abolished. Debates should be wrested from the control of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is run by the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties. A more detailed discussion of such problems and proposed solutions to these problems occurred at the Cato Institute in October 2009, and in the spirit of this note it featured both a libertarian economist and a leader in Ralph Nader's campaign.

Moving beyond the two party system itself, we must examine the corrupt shenanigans which occur in Congress. One common and corrupt practice involves tacking irrelevant and often immensely deleterious amendments onto bills. Examples include a draconian copyright provision the RIAA and Harry Reid snuck into an education bill, a policy decreasing transparency regarding Bush era torture which was added to a defense appropriations bill by Joe Lieberman, and the attempts to use the health reform bill to reinstate federally funded abstinence only sex education. More odious still is the fact that Congress members often don't bother to read their own bills. After being informed of frighteningly anti-Constitutional policies included in the PATRIOT Act, quite a few politicians admitted to voting for the bill without having read it. Now, I know that many politicians (*cough* Michelle Bachmann *cough*) may have difficulty reading bills written above a first grade level, but it's their job. In response to these systemic flaws in our legislature, the libertarian advocacy group Downsize DC has proposed the Read the Bills Act and the One Subject at a Time Act.

Another systemic flaw concerns the creation of classes of citizens which are above accountability for their actions. The mountain of evidence for this proposition of an American "culture of impunity" can, and does, fill many blogs and books. So as to prevent this post from being side tracked, I shall present three clear instances of the phenomenon.

First, the Bush torture program. Such a program is clearly illegal, both under section 2340A of the federal criminal code and under the International Convention Against Torture, which was pushed through by noted far left civil libertarian President Ronald Reagan. Yet not only do Bush, Cheney, Yoo, and other administrative architects of systematic torture of prisoners have almost no chance of being prosecuted, the Obama Administration has actively worked to protect them from mere scrutiny. For instance, in the case Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen, Obama's Department of Justice advocated the position that the state secrets privilege meant torture victims did not even deserve their day in court (http://www.aclu.org/national-security/obama-administration-seeks-keep-torture-victims-having-day-court). In a related story, both the Bush and Obama administrations threatened a British court that we would cut off intelligence sharing with Britain if they released evidence pertaining to the torture of British citizen Binyam Mohammed (http://www.aclu.org/national-security/british-court-orders-release-torture-evidence-extraordinary-rendition-case). The court did so anyway, and intelligence sharing has not ceased, although the Obama Administration expressed regrets and stated that this would harm our future intelligence sharing programs.

Another instance of America's culture of impunity is clearly evident in a concept known as "absolute prosecutorial immunity." This is the notion that if prosecutors deliberately falsify evidence, in clear violation of both ethics and law, they are immune from any lawsuits by the innocent victims of their dishonesty. There exists legal precedent to support prosecutorial immunity, which the Supreme Court justified in such cases as Imbler v. Pacthman using the argument that such protections were necessary so that prosecutors were not deterred from doing their job. The only legal precedent which currently exists to open prosecutors to any semblance of legal accountability for misconduct is Buckley v. Fitzsimmons, which states that prosecutors working in an investigative capacity are subject to mere qualified immunity. Last year, the case Pottawattamie v. McGhee, in which two prosecutors (who had colluded with police in order to manufacture evidence which sent innocent men to prison for 25 years) argued that they could not be sued, came before the Supreme Court. Such a case essentially threatened to overturn the small chance for prosecutorial accountability offered by Buckley v. Fitzsimmons. Among those filing amicus briefs in favor of the prosecutors were a who's who of status quo authoritarians, including the U.S. Solicitor General and the attorney generals of 25 states. Filing briefs on behalf of reason, responsibility, and justice were such organizations as the libertarian Cato Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union, typically deemed a left wing organization. We cannot know how the Supreme Court would have decided the case, as a settlement was reached before the ruling was issued. For more information, I suggest you read Radley Balko's article on this issue. Liberals and libertarians alike (Along with all decent people with any sense of justice) should care about accountability in this case, particularly as the United States already has one of the highest prison populations and has plenty of incentives for prosecutors to convict, with very few for them to avoid convicting the innocent.

The last example I will give you regarding this country's pervasive paucity of accountability concerns police. Regardless of their merits as a group, when they do violate laws, they are typically not subject to anything resembling the punishment faced by us mere civilians. One recent case involves an off duty cop engaging in a hit and run while drunk, yet not facing any prosecution. A litany of similar and often worse stories may be found on Radley Balko's blog under "police professionalism." What makes this lack of accountability even more morally bankrupt is that it coincides with a massive expansion of police powers and incentives to use and abuse them, largely as part of the war on drugs. Under asset forfeiture laws, the police may confiscate your property simply by contending that it was obtained through illicit activity. They can do so even if the property owner has not been charged with any crime. Scarier still, SWAT teams frequently engage in raids armed with heavy artillery and get the wrong house, killing or frightening innocent people and pets as a result. While they are given federal funding to do this, there exists no system of oversight to create incentive to only use such force when it's needed. The Cato Institute has a map of botched paramilitary SWAT raids, color coded in accordance to the specific harm caused.

So far the systemic problems discussed have been matters where it's fairly expected that libertarians and leftists will agree. Civil liberties, imperialism, and the unsatisfactory nature of the two party system are the sort of problems you'll find discussed regularly in both Z Magazine and Reason Magazine.

Where libertarians and the left tend to disagree is economics. Libertarian economic policy is based on the idea of free markets, and seeks to maximize individual control over one's own property and contracts, consequently limiting or eliminating government intervention in voluntary transactions. Left wing economics, on the other hand, is based on the common good, and seeks to help the poor and the workers while limiting the power of corporations over the common people. Thanks to the statist branch of the left and the corporatist branch of the right, many have become convinced that these goals are diametrically opposed. But this is simply a myth, fostered by a left which seeks to smear free markets and a right which seeks to use libertarian rhetoric to protect the wealthy. While there are some cases, such as welfare, health care, and worker protection laws, where libertarianism and leftism arguably are opposed, the litany of largely ignored cases where big government distorts markets and defiles property rights to favor big business means that libertarians can often find common ground with the left even with regards to economics. Moreover, many left libertarians, including Sheldon Richman and philosopher Roderick Long, argue quite persuasively that in a truly free market, the absence of state enforced corporate privilege would grant working people far greater bargaining power and thus deter abusive corporate policies. For purposes here, I will not go as far as them, and will instead focus on cases where the state unambiguously distorts markets to the benefit of big business and the detriment of the public interest.

Perhaps the most obvious example consists of corporate subsidies. According to a report by Stephen Silvinski of the Cato Institute, the federal government spent $92 billion on corporate subsidies in the 2006 fiscal year. Silvinski suggests the formation of a corporate welfare reform commission. Such a commission would analyze the federal budget to find corporate subsidies which do not serve a compelling state interest, and would place their reform recommendations before a congressional vote. Considering the vast swath of agencies which engage in corporate welfare, such a commission would certainly have their work cut out for them.

One of the most bloated and undeniably detrimental manifestations of corporate welfare comes in the form of the extravagant subsidies and perverse incentives which come out of the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA spends piles of taxpayer money subsidizing domestic agribusiness, and while this spending is defended as a way to help small farmers, in reality the bulk of it goes to large corporate farms, as explained here. Worse still, the USDA utilizes protective tariffs and production quotas so as to reduce competition for sugar producers, in addition to offering them direct subsidies, a topic on which this Cato Institute report expounds. These distortions of sugar markets dramatically raise American sugar prices, which often leads companies which use sugar to relocate, resulting in American job losses. Additionally, by making it easier for sugar companies to profit in America, the USDA has encouraged the already disturbing destruction of Florida's Everglades. Combined with our government's extravagant corn subsidies, these artificially inflated sugar prices have led to the perverse proliferation of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener. The horrible health impact of high fructose corn syrup is well supported by scientific evidence, yet the USDA continues to create incentives for it to increase in prevalence.

Another disgusting corporate welfare program is the Export-Import Bank. Unlike the USDA, which serves some purposes of arguable legitimacy such as regulating produce for safety and operating the National Forests, the Export-Import Bank is entirely an agent of rank corporatism. While their supposed purpose is to secure American jobs, many of the companies the Export-Import Bank subsidizes rapidly dispose of their American jobs. Indeed, the Export-Import Bank has financed many a foreign corporate operation, thus arguably creating incentives to get rid of American jobs rather than preserve them. Bernie Sanders, the only self identified socialist in the Senate, wrote an excellent article in The Nation exposing the wasteful corporate welfare that plagues the Export-Import Bank.

I could spend the remainder of my life elaborating on federal level corporate welfare programs and the various ways they sew perverse incentives, but in doing so I would be neglecting the unjust and economically nonsensical programs which occur on the state and local level.

One egregious example of state level corporatist corruption is eminent domain abuse. The Constitution provides for eminent domain, or the confiscation of private land for public use, provided just compensation is given to the previous owners. Historically eminent domain has been used to build publicly owned and accessible projects such as roads and schools. However, recently it has been used to confiscate individual land and transfer it to corporations on the grounds that they will improve the local economy and this constitutes a "public use." This happened to Susette Kelo's house in the city of New London. Her land was confiscated so as to pave the way for a new development by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Kelo's legal challenge to this state sponsored corporatist theft made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that the confiscation of Susette Kelo's land was constitutional. When I first read of this decision, my reaction was a simple "WTF?" And what of the alleged "public" good that would come from pushing Susette Kelo out of her house? Pfizer closed its New London facility in November 2009. This closing both underscores the tragedy and absurdity of using eminent domain to benefit private corporations and provides a certain poetic justice, in which wealthy thieves fail to profit from their kleptocratic cronyism. How's that "public use" looking now?

Another, less well known form of local level corporatism consists of the proliferation of superfluous licensing laws. Licensing laws can be arguably justified when the profession in question can pose a great risk to others when handled incompetently. This is the impetus for licensing laws surrounding medicine, trucking, and school bus driving. It can also be arguably valid when the professionals in question are providing a trusted public service and using taxpayer money, as in teaching. But for the bulk of professions, the impact of licensing is to decrease consumer choice, decrease competition, raise the cost of services, enrich the oligopoly of license holders, and inhibit the poor from starting businesses by increasing start up costs through bureaucratic fees. This is why it is absurd when the state of Texas requires eye brow threaders to obtain Western style cosmetology licenses irrelevant to their particular service (http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3014&Itemid=165). Or when Louisiana requires licenses for florists (http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=747&Itemid=165). Worse still, the laws sometimes blatantly defy the First Amendment, such as the Texas law which does not restrict who can provide interior design services, but does regulate who may term themselves "interior designers" (http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1240&Itemid=165). Free speech problems also emerge with Virginia's licensing laws for yoga teaching (http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3005&Itemid=165).

I have barely skimmed the surface of how the state has acted to counteract the interests of both leftists and libertarians. Suffice to say that we need a political movement which provides an alternative to the corporatist, authoritarian, warmongering, corrupt, unaccountable bipartisan duopoly which currently plagues our government.

This is why libertarians, liberals, and leftists should join forces for radical yet rational change. That and the fact that, as all their names start with L, there are awesome opportunities for alliteration.

Refuting Anti-Immigrant Ignorance

"WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Press 1 for English. Press 2 to disconnect until you learn to speak English. And remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, JESUS CHRIST and the AMERICAN SOLIDER. One died for your soul, the other for your freedom. If you agree... copy and paste in your status"

As many of you may expect, I find this Facebook status meme to be odious on multiple levels. For the purposes of this blog I will ignore the platitudes about "JESUS CHRIST and the AMERICAN SOLDIER" dying for us, as the substance of this nativist status meme concerns how one should treat immigrants who do not speak English.

Now, ignore that this country has no national language, and it's merely an emergent property of our society that English is the dominant tongue. We should at least grant a few things to the nativists here, after all. Assume that a country where we all speak the same language, English, is an important goal.

Alright, for the remainder of this discussion we assume that the priorities of this status meme are sound. We assume that a populace with one language is superior to a population where some speak English and some speak Spanish, presumably because English speakers were here first. We'll ignore the fact that most of the early European immigrants on this continent didn't take the time to learn the indigenous languages.

A national language is important, dammit! And it's clearly the fault of immigrants for not learning our language, right? I mean, that's indicative of intellectual laziness. It's not as though they have anything else to do.

Oh wait.

Most immigrants to whom nativists object, particularly those who don't speak English, are economically disadvantaged individuals who are working hard to build a better life for their family. Now, typically that can require a full time job, which can interfere with the already challenging task of learning a language. If only that were the only challenge and time commitment faced by immigrants in this country. Sadly, our bureaucratic, tough on crime, xenophobia exploiting government has decided to make their lives even more difficult, further cutting into each alien's time to learn English.

The remainder of this essay shall document a few of the difficulties faced by immigrants which are direct results of government policies, or have been exacerbated by government policies.

First, we shall discuss the difficulties faced by "illegal", or rather undocumented/unauthorized immigrants. The most obvious of these is the blatant trampling of their constitutional rights. The agency most concerned with using the law against unauthorized aliens is the Border Patrol. And unlike the rest of our law enforcement community, the Border Patrol is not bound to follow the standards for search and seizure established by the Fourth Amendment. The American Civil Liberties Union has termed the border, specifically all areas within 100 miles of the external boundary of the United States, to be a "Constitution free zone," because Border Patrol agents are permitted within this vicinity to stop any vehicle for a "routine search." No warrant or probable cause is required. Now, it's not just immigrants who face the impact of this. Indeed, by the ACLU's population estimates, "fully TWO-THIRDS of the United States’ population lives within this Constitution-free or Constitution-lite Zone. That’s 197.4 million people who live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders." So, it's not just immigrants who face the impact of this policy, but still, when one has a full time job and is being sought by an agency unrestrained by usual Constitutional safeguards, learning English might be a tad bit difficult. And that's still ignoring the fact that Border Patrol further moves their search into powerful privacy invasion mode via technology, including: "watch list and database systems such as the Automated Targeting System (ATS) traveler risk assessment program, identity and tracking systems such as electronic (RFID) passports, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), and intrusive technological schemes such as the Secure Border Initiative Network (SBINet) or “virtual border fence” and unmanned aerial vehicles (aka 'drone aircraft')." A more detailed expose on how the Border Patrol regularly violates constitutional rights may be found in this post at Fr33Agents.

The constitutional rights of unauthorized immigrants face further threats beyond the powerful Border Patrol itself. Take perhaps the most egregious example: Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona. Radley Balko of the libertarian magazine Reason describes Arpaio with the following colorful language: "The publicity-loving self-proclaimed 'Toughest Sheriff in America' made himself famous with his desert tent prisons, chain gangs, reality TV show, and, most recently, with his almost certainly illegal crackdowns on undocumented immigrants. Arpaio is now the subject of a federal grand jury investigation." That's right; Arpaio's tactics for cracking down on immigrants are so legally dubious that the United States Department of Justice is engaging in an investigation of Arpaio and the police department he runs. This is the same Department of Justice which wrote a legal brief advocating that prosecutors have absolute immunity from lawsuits if they deliberately falsify evidence. Yet even they note constitutional problems with Joe Arpaio. Their investigation involves charges that Sheriff Arpaio engaged in racial profiling in violation of the 14th Amendment and that he blatantly violated the procedural rights of the accused in his anti-immigration crackdown. The Sheriff's lesser known comrade, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Peyton Thomas, has engaged in quite a few legally dubious moves himself. One of the most relevant for immigration is that he has attempted to charge immigrants with human trafficking for smuggling themselves into the country. And though the ACLU, widely considered a left leaning organization, is among the leading critics of Maricopa County's tyrant wannabes, these bumbling authoritarians face a certain amount of ire from the libertarian right as well. Arizona's right leaning think tank the Goldwater Institute has quite a few choice words for Joe Arpaio and Andrew Peyton Thomas. For instance, after Thomas issued a subpoena to obtain the IP information of all who access the website of the Phoenix newspaper "New Times" (in retaliation for a critical article about Arpaio), Clint Bolick, a former Reagan Administration official and current constitutional expert at the Goldwater Institute, stated "That may have been the broadest subpoena ever issued in the history of the United States. It literally violated the rights of tens of thousands of people. Including me, I should add. I read the New Times online." Needless to say, Arpaio and Thomas defile the rights of both native citizens and immigrants in their jurisdiction, but one of their primary focuses has been cracking down on unauthorized immigration. Something tells me that learning English isn't your top priority when you're being harassed by tyrannical law enforcement agents.

Another key thing to consider is that unauthorized immigrants, already economically disadvantaged, are often put at a further economic disadvantage by government policies. Example: The health reform bill. At this point, almost nobody argues that health care for unauthorized immigrants should be subsidized by the taxpayers. However, the Senate bill takes this attitude even further. Under the Senate bill, unauthorized immigrants are not permitted to privately buy the cheaper insurance which would be afforded by the new health insurance exchange. Yet at the same time, it's possible that unauthorized or undocumented immigrants would not be exempted from the individual mandate (The House bill does not feature that exemption). So, in other words, they would be legally obligated to buy insurance, and it would automatically have a higher price and be harder to find than that available to US citizens. A full explanation of this was written in Reason Magazine here. I'm sure the extra financial burden will be quite conducive to educating oneself in the mechanics and subtleties of the English language. /sarcasm


So, all these burdens faced by unauthorized immigrants raise an interesting question: If there are so many disadvantages to illegal immigration, why don't the immigrants simply work through the legal immigration process? The answer is that our path to citizenship is now run by a bloated, inefficient, and downright labyrinthine bureaucracy, as illustrated in this flowchart from Reason Magazine. I challenge anyone who copied and pasted the status to which this post is a response to navigate that kind of tedious bureaucratic process while on a low income and learning a new language.

Now, the point of this note is not to say that there wouldn't be advantages to all or nearly all American residents knowing English. Doing so might well do wonders for ease and efficiency of commerce and communication, as well as for social cohesion. But learning a new language is also easier said than done. If the "learn to speak English" crowd really wants an America where we all speak English, they shouldn't be complaining about the immigrants. Instead, they should be complaining to their representatives, asking them to create a more streamlined, efficient, and immigrant friendly system in which immigrants would have the time to learn English. Hell, perhaps they should even push for publicly funded English classes, and create incentives by making success in those classes a key to a faster route to citizenship than is currently offered. But somehow I doubt many of them will do this. Because fundamentally I doubt their objections really are founded in the potential advantages of all Americans sharing a common language. Instead, I strongly suspect their concerns are grounded in fear, bigotry, racism, nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. And I think I've documented quite well how destructive such tendencies are to our rights and our prosperity.