To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Armored police vehicles. Tactical teams. Everyone under house arrest. Soldiers and/or other armed enforcers roaming the streets. House-to-house searches. We call it, “Terror in Boston!” In any one of the several places the U.S. has invaded and/or is currently deploying drones, they’d call it, “Tuesday.” Perspective. Stated differently, maybe the “terrorists” won a while back?

And yet, we all – this author included – debated these items vigorously! And, it was all for nothing. (That this is the typical result of a Facebook debate is not lost on me.) Not only did very little of the debate address the issue underlying the initial posting, very little of the discussion even hinted at the larger issue of the likely effect of U.S. presence in other countries. It was, in effect, debating if the passengers on a cruise line known for sinking should have to wear life vests all the time versus only some of the time. Maybe the debate should have been focused on why the cruise line’s ships seem to sink so much?

A fundamental question is: Why do terrorists attack the U.S.? The Narrative implies, rather overtly, that terrorists attack America because Allah told them to. (If this reminds you of Flip Wilson’s “The Devil Made Me Do It” you’re on target.) Stated differently, according to The Narrative, terrorists attack the U.S. because they are driven to do so by allegiance to a religion of violence. They are, as one reporter stated on CNN or MSNBC or wherever, “followers of Radical Islam.” Ergo, spending almost any time trying to reconcile their behavior with that of a person making a strategic choice is time wasted. And, conveniently, putting that behavior in context with U.S. foreign policy is also left off the table. Certainly, if these people are attacking America because Allah told them to, we don’t need to worry that U.S. drone strikes have killed an estimated 2,600 to 4,700 people over the past decade, or anything like that. Revenge? That simply could not be it.

The Narrative is wrong. Tragically wrong. Conveniently wrong. Robert A. Pape at the University of Chicago researched terrorist attacks, looking for clues to the question of, “Why?” He was, in fact, trying to figure out if some corrupted version of Islam was at root, driving “true believers” to attack the west. The short answer he found is, “No.” As far back as 2005, Scott Horton, writing on Antiwar.com, noted, “for his book [Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism], Pape started with the bombings themselves – every documented case between 1980 and 2004 – and noticed some suggestive common threads. Foreign occupation, it seems – not religion – is the core motivating factor behind suicide terrorism. From Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank to Sikhs in India, from the jihadists of 9/11 to the secular Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – for all of these, it is ‘a nationalistic response.’”

Those people resorted to terrorism – suicide terrorism specifically, but terrorism generally, this author would argue – when they had been backed into a corner by a superior power and saw no better alternative. Before one writes this off as an insulting excuse and/or “blaming the victim,” consider that people such as Jeremy Scahill routinely report that innocent people – often women and children – have been killed by drone strikes. It is a matter of fact that President Obama’s first strike authorized in Yemen killed 21 women and 14 children, and killed few, if any, “high-profile” targets.

One can safely assume that none of these women and children was a so-called senior operational leader of Al Qaeda. These types of killings, murder by almost any rubric, are not unusual. They are typical. (They are even bi-partisan!) In fact, if one examines the standard for deciding to deploy a drone strike, he finds that it is, shall we say, low, remarkably, embarrassingly, disgustingly so. Said one government official about that standard, “the definition [of who can be targeted for elimination] is a male between the ages of 20 and 40. My feeling is one man’s combatant is another man’s – well, a chump who went to a meeting.”

The Narrative seeks to write off these facts by convincing us that U.S. foreign policy has not caused these feelings; that an irrational belief in “Radical Islam” is the cause; that “blowback” does not exist. This is a lie. The Narrative is a lie. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if everyone this author loved had been killed, while they simply went about their normal business, by missiles raining from the sky sent by a foreign invader, he might be a little pissed off too. To be very clear, this does notexcuse, in any way, the behavior of terrorists. Instead, it places the action of U.S. leaders in its proper light. Murder conducted by the U.S. government is morally no different than murder conducted by a crazed, desperate relative of “a chump who went to a meeting.” It’s far past time that the people of America stood up and told its ostensible leaders that enough is enough. We respond in horror when a single child in the U.S. dies at the hands of a lunatic. I reckon human beings in the Middle East feel the same way.

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

~ Søren Kierkegaard

Ah, election season! If there is any one time that guarantees a radical libertarian a barrel of laughs, it is the periodic selection of slave masters, masquerading as a key component of freedom. For the record, selecting which arrogant, well-connected megalomaniac will: kill foreigners (supposedly) on your behalf; redistribute your money to whomever he pleases ostensibly on behalf of helping those who cannot help themselves; and, maintain the cash cow that fictitious property — otherwise known as intellectual property — has provided for firms like Microsoft and Apple, all via the barrel of a gun, is not a practice endemic to freedom. It is exactly the opposite.

We have been taught to think that it is. Furthermore, the language has been perverted to support these fallacious thoughts. Entitlements? (How can one be entitled to that of another?) Running the government "like a business"? (How can you run an enterprise wherein all feedback necessary for making business-enhancing decisions, and the commensurate negative feedback from poor decisions, has been removed, like a business?) Tax cuts for the rich? (As a matter of mathematical fact, the so-called rich pay the bulk of the taxes in the United States. Nobody should have money forcibly taken from him, but the terminology "tax cut" implies that the mafia boss is doing you a favor by taking less this time. He is simply raping you more gently.) The U.S. political process — and the popular culture that feeds it — is rife with bogus meanings for words and phrases that have been hijacked. It would be illustrative, and likely educational as well, to examine some of these phrases more closely, but another subject beckons. This time of year — election season — also holds special meaning for black people.

If you're black, and you're radical libertarian, A.K.A. anarcho-capitalist, or market anarchist, or whatever moniker we're using this week, you very likely don't put a lot of stock in voting generally, and voting in presidential elections specifically. And if that is the case, you will — almost guaranteed — hear the phrase, "…someone died to give us that right" bandied about. Powerful words indeed, and I'll admit, persuasive as well. No one cognizant of debts paid by brave people before him wants to simply forget those debts. However, let me ask a more basic — and likely more controversial — question: Was voting ever a right worth dying for?

First, a little background is needed. My own proclivities with regard to voting — and my current disdain for the practice — are well catalogued, on LewRockwell.com, at Strike-the-Root.com, and elsewhere. But it wasn't always that way. I voted for Ross Perot, not once, but twice. (I recently finished paying off the bill to my therapist in the aftermath of those 2 suspect decisions.) As recently as the 2004 presidential election — and paying homage to the prevalent anybody-but-Bush thought process of many liberals of those times — I voted for John Kerry. Honestly, I've yet to forgive myself for that. Kerry was not only an unapologetic dyed-in-the-wool statist, having then served multiple terms in Congress, but he was also a milquetoast of a candidate, failing to excite his ostensive base in any meaningful way. This against a man, in George W. Bush, who was even by that point, plumbing new depths of embarrassing sentence composition as the supposed Leader of the Free World. If you are debating Rain Man and don't come out looking like William Shakespeare in the process, how can you claim to be qualified to lead a nation?

So yes, I have voted in the past, and it is those experiences that fuel my current disdain for the process. Surely, voting in national elections is the epitome of the aforementioned suggestion box for slaves, barely poking its head up into the category of "Waste of Time." The historical context is more interesting though. Returning to the question at hand, if previous generations of black leaders and black citizens actually died so that I might have a chance to participate in the ritual of voting, am I disrespecting that debt when I choose to stay home on November 6th?

First of all, and going back to a more basic point, voting is not a right. Voting is a privilege. That is, voting is a practice one may enjoy, but only given certain prerequisites, none of which are bestowed upon an individual as a function of being a person. For example, being safe and secure in your body — in your person — is a right. You obtain that by simple virtue of leaving the womb. Furthermore, it is universal, in that everyone enjoys it — or should enjoy it, in a moral society — the same as anyone else. Any abridgement of said right can only be justified on arbitrary grounds. It is also negative in its action. No other person is affected in any way by my being secure in my person. It gives me no positive claim on others; it only means that they cannot make a positive claim on me. Rights — legitimate rights — are all exactly like that. They are negative in their application and in their effect.

Privileges are often — although not always — positive. They are bestowed upon the recipient by virtue of distinctions often justified and implemented in positive terms, i.e., in direct contravention of the rights and property of others. In the early days of voting in the United States, voting was reserved for people of either wealth or property, and most likely both. It was "about" the maintenance of those two articles of ownership. It served as a prophylaxis against the unlawful — although that's not quite the correct nuance — removal of that property or taking of that wealth. In short, voting was a way for the rich folks to keep the poor folks from taking their stuff, while allowing the rich folks to divvy up whatever was left. Some might say "divvy up" is too negative. Fair enough. Voting gave the propertied citizenry a means to peaceably maintain what they believed to be the trappings of society. I rather think that's overly generous, but let's move on.

In that context, one can see that those who did not own property or have substantial wealth — and, ergo, did not vote — might get a little cheeky about not having the opportunity. In fact, one could begin to view voting as a means to obtain some of the wealth that seemed to be protected by that selective privilege. Stated differently, if one believes that voting is the means by which those who do vote maintain their socio-economic distance from those who do not vote, it makes sense to seek to widen the availability of the privilege. This is particularly true if the privilege is functionally tied to the acquiring the wealth, i.e., if voting is the means by which one obtains his money. But it is not. It never was. Nor should it be. To be clear: One does not obtain lawful property or legitimate wealth via voting to take it from others.

As one example, consider the Iroquois. The Iroquois Confederation, from whom the so-called Founding Fathers took a portion of the practices of the new American Republic, also practiced voting. In that case, only the women voted. In fact, in the Iroquois society, only women owned property. The braves simply lived with the women, did the hunting, and all the other "man stuff" while the women selected the chief. (Apparently, they figured a male chief would be helpful in dealing with male-centric societies.) This is another case of tying the voting privilege to property ownership, but the ownership came first.

While it is ironic — if expected — that the rich white males who founded the United States republic neglected to incorporate that whole women-owing-all-the-stuff-and-voting thing into their plans, it seems pretty logical for the privilege of voting to follow the ownership of property. Voting, in its purest application, allowed for peaceful policy-making among those for whom the policies held direct effect. It was not a way to determine how existing income and property should be redistributed, but rather a way to best utilize that which was jointly owned, and simultaneously protect that which was individually owned, albeit via positive action. It has become almost exactly the opposite in today's America. Voting is about who gets to infringe upon whom — via the guns of the State — which is the very antithesis of freedom and morality. As Bastiat said, "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." Not simply protection, but infringement. This is infringement is not only domestic, but also international. This is infringement not to help the many, but to enrich the few.

Conclusion

A privilege might be nice to have, but it is still just a choice, an option. Whether or not it is worth dying to obtain is tied up in the concept of subjective value. That you might feel it was worth dying for places no legitimate claim upon me. If you want to die to get something you feel is important, I salute you. But your decision — and whatever logic you used to justify it — places no obligation upon me, nor does it provide any clues to an appropriate valuation of your action on my part. You like vanilla. I like chocolate. Whatever.

In the United States, black people — particularly African slave-descended black people — have long been treated as wards of the state. In this capacity, our actions, our beliefs, our options, and in fact our epistemology has been shaped by allegiance to, and support for, a system that was initially used — dare I say designed — to subjugate us in the most heinous of ways. Factually, the same U.S. Constitution that supposedly bestows upon us the right to vote was used to lawfully place us in the ownership of landowners in the rural South. I'll just be damned if I'll willfully support and legitimize, with my participation, a system so arbitrary and immoral. Sometimes people die for dumb reasons. This is just one of those times, as far as I'm concerned.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

"Some fees are understandable, but the airlines have gone too far." ~ Zach Bennett, in USA Today

Sometimes it doesn't pay to read the paper. On a recent business trip I had some time to kill, so I filled it with one of my guilty pleasures — reading the copy of USA Today that was left outside my hotel room. As is my habit, I read the Sports section first. (Yes, I'm one of those guys.) I followed that vital bit of information gathering by reading the Life section. (Finding out which recent movies are "hot or not" tends to complete my day.) Finally, I settled in to absorb the certain-to-be Austrian-inspired insights in the Money section. The cover story was about the ostensibly outrageous fees airlines are beginning to charge for, well, everything.

As an aside, I'm sure the reader has seen the catchy commercials from Southwest Airlines, touting their "Bags Fly Free" slogan. Funny stuff. And, from the standpoint of business and economics, absolutely fair game. Southwest seeks to differentiate itself from other airlines by pointing out a particular sore point with travelers — having to pay for checked baggage. The USA Today piece highlighted the results of a recent survey — conduced by USA Today — on the same subject. The article noted that some airlines were charging as much as $450 for a checked bag. (This particular charge is for a bag over 70 pounds, flying on an Asian flight.) Seventy pounds? Really? Do people actually leave home with bags that heavy and want to have them fly for "free"?

The article also made the point that what the airlines were really doing was "unbundling" baggage fees from ticket fees. In other words, where all passengers previously paid a portion of the baggage handling fees for those who checked bags, the current paradigm is to charge only the folks who actually check bags, i.e., lots of bags or one really heavy bag equals lots of fees, or at least one really big fee. Sounds pretty simple, right? The question I had as I read the USA Today article, particularly as I read the quotes from both travelers and supposed experts was this: Is it unfair for an airline to unbundle ticket fees? Further, if they do unbundle them, is it unfair to charge passengers ostensibly exorbitant prices for, well, exorbitant packing? No, it is not. One might argue that since I never check a bag — a practice I began after several lost-in-space baggage episodes — my opinion is a little skewed, but I'd beg to differ.

Several of the people cited in the USA Today piece used words like "gouging" when they described the current (higher) fees for checked bags generally, and over-weight bags specifically. From the standpoint of Austrian economics, if the transaction is voluntary, the characterization of that transaction as gouging or unfair is misplaced. No one is forcing anyone to fly. No one is forcing anyone to fly a particular airline. No one is forcing anyone to pack in a particular manner. The airlines are simply charging customers for the specific service of which the customer takes advantage. More importantly, a rise in market prices for a scarce resource tends to drive additional entrepreneurs into the market, which leads to more choices in that market, all good things. [Well, except for the fact that the airline industry is so overregulated that it is very difficult for a new entrepreneur to enter this particular market.]

Consider the case of generators at the scene of a natural disaster. If prices for existing generators are allowed to rise to a price point that is market-driven, i.e., the market clearing price, given their scarcity (supply) and their necessity (demand), two outcomes — both beneficial — will result. One, not every generator will be bought, scooped up at a bargain price by anyone passing the store. Two, more generators will arrive, should all the local generators be sold. (If you were in the business of generator sales and you could sell generators at a profit, even after shipping them in from many miles away, wouldn't you do it?) However, should those prices be artificially held low, in a misguided attempt to protect the consumer, two other outcomes will result.

One, all generators will sell out. Two, no more will show up to replace them. The very condition the well-meaning, but economically-ignorant, protectors sought to preclude will take place — there will be people who need generators (and who could pay for them) who will not get them. This is the problem with anti-price gouging laws. What does all this have to do with ticket fees being unbundled from baggage check fees? Quite a bit.

One of the undercurrents in the USA Today piece was that of "unfair profits." The thought was (and is) that the airlines are raking in a ton of cash by charging bag fees, and those profits are somehow too high. The article also mentioned that the Transportation Department — in response to complaints — had imposed a rule requiring airlines to list fees for optional services. I don't know about you, but I can sense where this is going.

At some point, there will be calls to put a ceiling on the amount an airline can charge for these optional services. (If you're wondering how in the hell the fee for an optional service can simultaneously be unfair, you're not alone.) As already noted, what airlines are doing when they unbundle baggage fees from ticket prices is charge the exact person who should be paying the amount of money his transaction requires. Further, they are no longer charging me for some other dope's decision to bring too many clothes on a 3-day trip to his sister's house. Call me a greedy capitalist, but I like that.

Conclusion

What the airlines are also doing when they charge a substantial fee for a substantial bag is penalize people for bringing them. Should I, a rather frequent air traveler who never checks a bag, be required to finance the baggage checking privileges of other travelers? Should not the person who receives the service make the payment? Like hotdogs at a baseball game, those who consume them leave home knowing they will cost much more than they otherwise would. Furthermore, their purchase is optional. Both these qualities render any suggestion that the price is unfair ridiculous. The same must be true of a person who attempts to bring one of those old-time steamer trunks to the airport, planning on shipping it at no additional charge.

For the record, let me hasten to add: I too can be (and have been) miffed at prices charged in the airport, or my local minor league baseball park. Even when one understands the economics, he can be disappointed by the outcome. My fear, however, is not that people will continue to be ignorant of basic economics, or that I'll be faced with the decision to buy a $10 tube of mystery meat at the next baseball game I attend. My fear is that all the whining about unfairness, particularly in the air travel market — where there is already far too much government involvement — will lead to even more meddling by well-intended and economically-ignorant bureaucrats. If there is one thing upon which I hope we can agree it is this: We don't need more government rules at the airport. When you whine about baggage fees to the government — the terrorists win.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

"It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without becoming more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent. Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of the relationship to mankind…" ~ from the Preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Although watching it as much as one would like can be tough to do — particularly during the NBA Finals — most libertarians would probably agree that John Stossel's TV show is both entertaining and educational. On a recent show — watched via DVR — Stossel had Dr. Walter Williams as a guest. Williams did not disappoint. His brilliance was breathtaking at points. He provided clear, concise examples. He offered parables and life experience that should have been unassailable. And he provided much of it through a prism that resonated acutely with the life experience of this author.

The subject of this particular show was "The State Against Black People" and profiled how many, if not most, of the programs and policies implemented by the government have decimated the black race over the years. (As an aside, this author does not generally support a statist, collectivist view of any race of people. No race is monolithic. In this case, however, that point of view will be used for simplicity.) The aspect of the show that gives life to this essay happens to be one that Dr. Williams did not specifically focus upon, but one that troubles me greatly, and has for some time — the war on (some) drugs.

Having written on this racist monstrosity many times, both for LewRockwell.com and elsewhere, it should be relatively easy to deduce my stance, but just in case, let me re-state it for clarity: The prohibition of recreational drugs is a means by which the busy-body, and often racist, losers who desire to control America have decimated and continue to decimate that group of people for which they hold the most animosity and the least regard — black men. The drug war is not to protect the children, save the babies, shield the neighborhoods, or preserve the rain forests.

The drug war is a violent campaign against black men and by extension the black family, among many others (not all of them black, by the way); it has been so since it started. Furthermore, almost every prohibition of substances consumed in the United States of America has had as its raison d’être the subjugation of one group (generally some "minority" group — whatever group happens to partake of that substance) to the benefit of one other specific group of statist, power-mad megalomaniacs. (One might be tempted to suggest that this megalomaniacal group is primarily composed of white males, but the current occupant of the White House seems to be dancing to the same music and from all appearances, he likes it. And, he's not alone. So there's that.)

This might be ballsy stuff to say, particular on a website as widely read as this one, but (paraphrasing u2018Rhett Butler') frankly my dear reader, I don't give a damn — the facts and the logic bear this out. By the way, this essay will not focus on proving that the war on (some) drugs has been a failure. It has been, but ample scholarship already illustrates that fact. Two excellent recent examples may be found in Brian Martinez's "The Drug War at 40: Fascist and a Failure" from The Libertarian Standard and Charles Blow's "Drug Bust" from the New York Times. Back to Stossel's show…

One of his guests (a woman whose name escapes me) raised several objections against both the characterization of the drug war as racist and, more generally, drug legalization. What she said amazed me. Just as amazing was that neither Stossel nor any of his guests batted down her baseless and asinine points as the lightweight B.S. that they were. Unfortunately, it is likely that similar, and just as ignorant, points of view are widely held in the U.S. Let us consider that the secondary purpose of this essay. The next time someone presents such tripe as was uttered on that day, you will be armed. (By the way, this piece also will not discuss why legalization of drugs would not, despite the wildest dreams of people like Sean Hannity, result in crack whores taking over the streets. Glen Greenwald has already done that with his exceptional white paper on drug decriminalization in Portugal.)

In summary, here are the two arguments made by Stossel's guest: One, more black men are in prison for drugs because black men abuse drugs more, ergo the war on (some) drugs is not racist. Two, even if drug prohibition was immoral, black men could avoid going to prison if they just didn't abuse drugs so much. (They are free to choose, after all.) No, really, those were her arguments. It is my most sincere hope that there are no regular readers of this website who believe the same banal hooey.

More Users Equals More Inmates?

How can one say the drug war is racist? Let us start with some pretty basic numbers: Black people — men, women, and children — compose approximately 12.6% of the population of the United States. Black people — primarily black men — compose approximately 35.4% of the prison population. Anyone not living under a large stone or just arriving to Earth from another galaxy already knows America has a very healthy prison population, as evidenced by this handy chart. (For those not wishing to follow the link, the bottom line is this. The U.S. incarceration rate is over 700 people per 100,000 of population. The next highest rate is either in New Zealand at approximately 168 per 100,000 or Spain at approximately 164 per 100,000, dependent upon who is counting and which chart one examines.)

So putting folks in jail is a hobby for the American State. Putting black folks in prison, well, that's just a bonus! "Amerika" has more people in prison than any other nation on Earth, and the percentage of those people who are black and male is roughly three times the percentage of black people in the general population. Why? Again, Stossel's guest opined that this is because black people commit more drug crimes, and, therefore, get arrested more, convicted more, and incarcerated more. Each of these statements is so ignorant as to be comical, but more importantly, each of them is so cataclysmically incorrect as to be criminal, pardon the pun.

First of all, with the possible exception of crack cocaine, black people do not abuse drugs at a higher level than white people; that is, the absolute number of drug users who are black is lower. Ergo, the assertion is incorrect on its face, as evidenced by this illustrative chart from a study by The Stanford Law and Policy Review.

Here's the thing, though. It is possible (nay, even likely) that black men do get arrested more, convicted more, and incarcerated more. That does not mean that they, in fact, commit more drug-related crime. The available data illustrates rather starkly that for illicit drug use, black people are not leading the parade. (Let us, for the time being, put aside the issue of whether or not any person putting a substance into his own body can ever truly be criminal for the moment, since the overwhelming majority of Americans, and maybe even a few LRC readers may actually believe that the State establishes what is criminal versus discovers it. [Hat-Tip: Richard Marbury])

Secondly, the mathematics of drug distribution and drug production preclude the possibility that a group so small as black males could possibly be responsible at a level to justify their incarceration rate. In other words, drugs like crack and weed are produced in large quantities, but could be manufactured and packaged pretty much anywhere, assuming the raw materials are present. However, the sheer amount that is being produced and distributed suggests a larger operation than could be supported by just black folks. For more "sophisticated" drugs like heroin and cocaine, it seems that the production is almost exclusively off-shore. The finished product is then shipped into the States. Do you reckon there are lots of boats and planes berthed in the Inner City, where the predominant arrests of black males are made? Of course not. Yet, drug warriors continue to target and arrest black men, and ignorant people like Stossel's guest continue to deny that there is a racial component afoot. Notes Blow:

…no group has been more targeted and suffered more damage than the black community. As the A.C.L.U. pointed out last week, "The racial disparities [in drug arrests and prosecution] are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites.

Black people, comprising 12.6% of the U.S. population — are incarcerated for drug offences at a rate 10 times higher than that of whites — resulting in 35.4% of the overall prison population. If that doesn't sound like an old-school racist's wet dream, I don't know what does. (Sure, all the black folks in prison aren't there for drug offenses, but the overwhelming majority of people in prison are there for non-violent drug offenses.)

Depending upon from whence one obtains the numbers, the estimated total annual drug trade in the U.S. exceeds $100 billion dollars, at retail. (Taxpayers spend approximately $70 billion a year fighting the war on (some) drugs. Both the drug producers and the drug warriors are getting P-A-I-D. Nice racket, huh?) Does anyone really think that 12.6% of the total U.S. population is buying all those drugs? Oh, please. With roughly 38.9 million people in the entire U.S. black population, if one assumes that fully half of them are drug abusers, and that those blacks account for half of the retail sales of drugs in the U.S., each of them would need to spend over $2,500 per year on drugs. Does that sound reasonable? If the assumptions are modified, say with regard to only the black folks living in cities or only the black folks of a certain age, the numbers get even more ridiculous.

Conclusion

How is it then that so many black drug "offenders" end up in prison? Those black drug recreational drug users end up in prison because drug prohibition was likely created to snare them (among others, including Chinese immigrants, for example) and has almost always been implemented with that goal in mind. As the Stanford Law Review states, race defines the problem:

Race has been and remains inextricably involved in drug law enforcement, shaping the public perception of and response to the drug problem. [16] A recent study in Seattle is illustrative. Although the majority of those who shared, sold, or transferred serious drugs [17] in Seattle are white (indeed seventy percent of the general Seattle population is white), almost two-thirds (64.2%) of drug arrestees are black. The racially disproportionate drug arrests result from the police department’s emphasis on the outdoor drug market in the racially diverse downtown area of the city, its lack of attention to other outdoor markets that are predominantly white, and its emphasis on crack. Three-quarters of the drug arrests were crack-related even though only an estimated one-third of the city’s drug transactions involved crack. [18] Whites constitute the majority of those who deliver methamphetamine, ecstasy, powder cocaine, and heroin in Seattle; blacks are the majority of those who deliver crack. Not surprisingly then, seventy-nine percent of those arrested on crack charges were black. [19] The researchers could not find a "racially neutral" explanation for the police prioritization of the downtown drug markets and crack. The focus on crack offenders, for example, did not appear to be a function of the frequency of crack transactions compared to other drugs, public safety or public health concerns, crime rates, or citizen complaints. The researchers ultimately concluded that the Seattle Police Department’s drug law enforcement efforts reflect implicit racial bias: the unconscious impact of race on official perceptions of who and what constitutes Seattle’s drug problem . . . .Indeed, the widespread racial typification of drug offenders as racialized "others" has deep historical roots and was intensified by the diffusion of potent cultural images of dangerous crack offenders. These images appear to have had a powerful impact on popular perceptions of potential drug offenders, and, as a result, law enforcement practices in Seattle. [20] (Note: The footnotes shown reflect references in the original piece.)

This author would modify that last sentence to say "law enforcement practices everywhere." The money quote about the war on (some) drugs from Blow's piece might be, "It feeds our achingly contradictory tendency toward prudery and our overwhelming thirst for punishment." Certainly the war on (some) drugs feeds a thirst in the American psyche, but it ain't just for punishment. It reflects the same goals of which the writer spoke in the Preface to Douglass's Narrative — and it appears to be just a strong today as it was back then.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

"The measure of the state’s success is that the word ‘anarchy’ frightens people, while the word ‘state’ does not."

~ Joseph Sobran

A while back, this author wrote an essay on his disbelief in altruism that turned out to be one of his favorites. As well, it generated a fair amount of fan mail, both complimentary and condescending. (Who among us doesn't enjoy the occasional, "You're an idiot" reader response?) More recently, a thoughtful reader posed another question about the concept of altruism and this author's analysis of it. The respondent said:

I enjoyed reading your essay on why altruism does not exist. By and large I agree with it and think most compassionate and kind acts are related to [self-interest]. And I don’t think altruism is a necessary aspect of society either. However, I think I have an example of true altruism.

He went on:

My little brother is going to die. I have [the] choice of letting him die and inheriting his possessions, or I can sacrifice myself to save him. Let’s assume if I let him die no one will know that I could have saved him so no one will judge me about it. As an atheist, I do not believe in an afterlife and have no desire to die because I cease to exist at that point. [This] also means I don’t care about what people think of me once I’m dead. The only time it would be in my [self-interest] to die is if it ended unbearable suffering I was experiencing, which would not be true in this scenario. The only selfish aspect of sacrificing myself would be avoiding remorse I would experience if I let him die. Everything else being equal, I would rather live with that remorse than die. So we have countless major reasons why it would be in my [self-interest] to save myself, and only one smaller reason why it would be in my [self-interest] to save my brother. And yet I would sacrifice myself to save him. In this case the trade would not be in my favor. I attribute the reason why I would save him to altruism.

My respondent presents an interesting query, and one that would possibly attest to the existence of altruism except for several issues. Before continuing, let us, as was done in that previous essay, define altruism in two ways; both descriptive of the general consensus of what altruism would be if it existed.

Altruism: Selfless concern for the welfare of others; the commission of a selfless act in relation to another.

Or:

Altruism: The act of willingly, purposefully, exchanging one item of value (say, your own life) for another item of ostensibly less or, at best, equal value (say, the life of someone else).

First, my respondent makes what is probably a rather common mistake: he conflates self-interest, which denotes the driving force for all actions and selfishness, which connotes a disregard for others. While similar, they are different. Self-interest is, in this case, a praxeological construct, an inescapable condition of being human and having no choice but to use the ways and means at one's disposal. Acting man — borrowing from Mises — acts, period. His actions logically and categorically reflect his assessment of the ways and means at his disposal to reach the conclusion — the future desired state that he must, given that his action was purposeful, be trying to reach. In other words, if you — and I mean you — act on purpose, the very fact of your action means that the outcome you sought (from that action, at that time) has a higher value to you than any other outcome, i.e., self-interest in full effect. The possibility that said action might also benefit others is irrelevant to the point being made in this analysis.

Secondly, my respondent makes the mistake of what might be termed creating a duplicate armchair valuation. He says, "Everything else being equal, I would rather live with that remorse than die." He also says, "…I would sacrifice myself to save him." Well, it can't be both. That is the point of the action axiom. The analysis of altruism offered in that first essay — and still held firm in this one — is not "about" what might happen. In other words, what this analysis of altruism offers, what it attempts to provide, is a way to view what actually happened, what that action must mean, according to praxeology, relative to the actor's motives. It does not concern an evaluation of what others might think about the action. The important factor is that purposeful actions necessarily reflect internal valuations of the available ways and means. Returning to that previous essay one last time, we have:

Basic Austrian Value Theory (AVT) posits that the perceived value received by the participants in an exchange cannot be determined a priori. That is, no one outside a transaction can determine what those involved in a transaction will want to spend or receive in exchange. Only the actor can make those decisions, generally at the time of action. Of course AVT is applying these insights to "goods" and the exchange of value — generally money — for them. In this essay, I extend this premise to include choices where no literal "good," i.e., object, is actually exchanged, but where value is obviously still derived. This is, in fact, the heart of my argument that altruism does not exist.

Conclusion

As far as I can tell, we are left exactly where we were after that first essay. No altruism to be found. If you made a "sacrifice" it was, by direct virtue of your action, "worth it to you" (at the time of the action) or you would not have taken that action. It is really just that simple. (By the way, this does nothing the render the action more, or less noble, whichever the case may be in the eyes of an observer.) As a fellow anarchist buddy of mine puts it, "altruism is praxeologically impossible." Agreed, still.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

This
essay originally appeared in the book, Why
Liberty, compiled by Marc Guttman.

I really should
have given this essay a better name. After all, it is about my journey
toward libertarianism and therefore (hopefully) truth. It would
have made sense to use something like "my journey toward the
light" or something equally regal. Here's the thing though.
My journey toward libertarianism has been anything but smooth or
regal. As a black person it seems to me that even though we have
embraced any number of political/philosophical approaches, libertarianism
is among the rarer. As such, my finding and embracing libertarian
theory involves equal measures of luck and courage. Perhaps that
is why I was asked to contribute this story! Either way, I feel
honored and happy to do so. It is my firm belief that I am onto
something that represents the best of logic, reason, and truth.
However, I did not always think so.

Growing up
in a small town in North Carolina, named Hallsboro, I had no contact
with any people who called themselves "libertarians."
As far back as I can remember, my folks and all my relatives voted
Democratic, at least as far as I could tell. In fact, I don't even
remember when I first heard the term, "third-party candidate"
but it was probably in college. In the portion of the South where
I grew up, it seemed pretty clear which party was out to help you
and which party was out to get you, particularly if you were a black
person. Still though, certain things about my childhood — the fact
that my paternal grandfather was a share cropper; the fact that
my maternal grandfather owned a lot of land; and the fact that my
father always seemed to be working — all had an effect on me. In
retrospect, it was a combination of these effects that made me open
to libertarianism even before I knew what it was.

Two instances
in particular stand out in my mind as providing seeds of libertarianism
that did not germinate until much later in life. The first such
instance involved a phone survey that I answered while my parents
were out. After all the normal demographic questions, the lady on
the phone began to query me about my parent's jobs and lifestyle.
At some point she asked, "And what does your dad do for work?"
At that exact moment my father was off on a job laying brick at
some location. In fact, during almost any down time he could usually
be found out doing something that would result in additional income
for the family. To this very day he has at least two hustles that
he uses to generate income. He was the original example of someone
having multiple income streams in my eyes. So I said to her, "he's
a bricklayer."

Later, my folks
and I were eating dinner and I recalled the story for them. When
I got to the part about my dad being a bricklayer, my folks both
laughed and corrected me. My dad, and my mom, were schoolteachers
and had been so for years. I knew that, but somehow it escaped
in that moment on the phone. My dad's practice — always looking
for an additional way to make money — rubbed off on me. To this
day, I am always looking for a way to generate additional income.
In fact, that point of view led me to experiences I will recount
later — experiences that further forged my libertarian leanings.

A second instance
of lessons I learned at home came during the school year. Our county,
like many counties in that part of the South, offered a free lunch
program at school. All one had to do was fill out a simple form
and receive the free lunches. Most of the kids I knew got free lunch.
I did not. In fact, when I brought the form home for my parents
my dad went off on a tirade.

He didn't yell
at me, but his words have stuck in my mind for 30+ years anyway.
He said something to the effect that he would rot in his grave before
he would fill out a form to receive something he simply did not
deserve. He was appalled at the number of people he knew to be financially
able to afford lunch who were receiving free lunch instead. In my
entire childhood and well into adolescence I can safely say that
I never saw my father change his point of view on this seminal issue.
If you can afford it yourself, lying to the state to get it for
free is just lazy, shiftless, unethical, and borders on immoral.

Looking back
on these two scenarios, I can see now how these working examples
of the power and in fact the glory of taking care of oneself fueled
me throughout life. That fuel remains plentiful in me to this very
day, and it came from my parents. But despite the groundwork laid
by those early experiences, I came out of engineering school at
Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, with a strong liberal
bent. I was not exactly a socialist, but I could see how
socialism: a) might work; and b) seemed fair.

In fact, now
that I think about it, I remember a statement that my high school
social studies teacher made in class one day. She said, "Socialism
makes a lot of sense, on paper." Of course, I believed her!
Clearly, or so I thought, the powers-that-be had unfairly secured
much of their wealth at the expense of the poor. Just as clearly,
drastic measures were warranted. (Maybe I had forgotten my father's
words. Luckily, they would return to me later.) Looking back, I
would now assume that most recipients of a liberal education – particularly
black folk — have been taught to feel the same way. Several
events during my first year working for the Eastman Kodak Company
conspired to shake the moorings of that belief system.

Early Indications

One such event
occurred when I got that very first paycheck back in 1981. As a
student, I had never really paid a lot of income taxes and as such,
had rarely focused on those "other" boxes on most paychecks.
When I got my first "real" paycheck that all changed.
I literally yelled something along the lines of "what the heck?"
and asked each of my office mates if something was wrong with my
check. Breaking all manner of unwritten workplace customs, I actually
showed my paycheck to each of them as I beseeched them for
help and understanding. I wondered aloud what this "FICA"
crap was and how anyone could just stand by and let that
much of their hard-earned money be taken away, for whatever
reason.

As I recall,
they all had a good laugh at my expense. Being older, they were
all too aware of the ubiquity of Social Security, which is what
those "FICA" contributions supported. They dismissed my
excitement for navet and life continued, as one would expect.
I remained upset (and frankly, that has not changed much in all
the years since) but I eventually realized that nothing could be
done.

Later that
year, or maybe the next one, I got into a heated discussion with
another of my work mates, another black man, who in addition to
being a technician in our design group, was also a local business
owner. He and his wife owned a beauty shop in Rochester's inner
city. (By the way, this "inner city" was nothing like
the horrible place that the mainstream media seems to know all about.)
He also owned a few investment properties, as I recall. He was quite
a character, and would become, in time, a mentor-of-sorts for me.

As I recall,
we were discussing the plight of black folk one day at lunch. (For
the uninformed, this is a topic that comes up many times per day
whenever "upwardly-mobile" black people gather in groups
larger than one.) As a loyal pseudo-socialist liberal, I had a strong
view of the responsibility of the state with regard to the
welfare of black folk. As an aside, although I saw the "logic"
of socialism, I subscribed to Reason magazine beginning almost
immediately after graduating from college. There was a conflict
taking place in my mind and I'm not sure I even knew it.

Anyway, as
I recall, our conversation involved some pounding on the table (long
a staple of the angry black man) and some raised voices.
I remember him smiling as I regaled him with all the reasons why
black folk simply could not make it without help. Seriously,
anyone with half a brain and any pride accepted the fact that we
had been taken advantage of! Somebody had to pay! At some point
in my rant, he uttered some words that I have not forgotten to this
very day — and I don't think I will ever forget them. He said, "I
don't want nobody's help. Just get out of my way and I can do it
myself!"

Those words
sounded simple-minded then. Hell, they sound simple-minded now.
As I fancy myself a scientist, the elegant simplicity of truth —
as exemplified by Occam's
razor — appeals to me. That statement held one of those simple
truths. Ironically, it was not until years later that it dawned
on me that a similar sentiment, and in fact a similar statement
would very likely have been made by either or both of my
maternal (land-owning) grandfather and my father. All that working
my dad did was because he was determined to make damned certain
he controlled his destiny, versus being at the whim of a person
for whom he simply tended land he did not own, which his father,
my paternal grandfather had done for his entire life. Lessons
well earned have a tendency to keep coming back like that I guess.

Little did
I have any clue — even the faintest inkling — that I would one day
be saying much the same thing to anyone who would listen, even going
so far as to submit my modest musings to websites such as LewRockwell.com
specifically so others could read them.

Bogus Beliefs
and Hard Lessons

After those
early debates with my would-be mentor, and even despite the shock
of seeing all that cash vanish from my paycheck to parts unknown,
life pretty much followed the standard course. I voted religiously,
while lamenting the evilness of the Republicans and believing in
the honest passion of the Democrats. In fact, I had a good-sized
list of other standard beliefs, such as:

• There was
  a distinct difference between the two major U.S. political parties.
  The Democratic Party was the party of tolerance and was lead by
  noble champions of the downtrodden wee folk. In sharp contrast,
  the Republican Party represented people who inherited their wealth
  or got it through nefarious means, plus some odd groups of hyper-religious
  intolerant modern-day witch burners.
• The only
  thing wrong with the government was that selfish and/or incompetent
  people were accidentally voted into office by people who
  basically just needed a little more education so they could become
  smart enough to vote as I did.
• The Civil
  Rights Movement, and most of American history for that matter,
  proved conclusively that government intervention was absolutely
  essential and would likely remain so for the foreseeable future.
• Drug users
  only used drugs because of personal character flaws or as a way
  to flaunt their inherent scuminess and disrespect for the
  safety of others and the sanctity of the family. They deserved
  long prison sentences as punishment for being such losers.
• No civilized
  society needed routine and widespread ownership of guns. In fact
  most private guns were owned by unsophisticated hillbillies or
  unredeemable criminals, or, Ku Klux Klansmen, who were typically
  drawn from one or both of the former groups. I wasn’t interested
  in arming any of them.

Rather than
further bore the reader with any (certain-to-be) long-winded explanation
of how I came to ditch these bogus beliefs like so much old fruit,
let me take another approach. In most things, the foundation is
what is important. In my case, the foundation of my beliefs centered
about essentially three things, which were:

1. The inherent
   unfairness of capitalism.
2. The historical
   reasons for the position of black folk in American society.
3. The proven
   ability of the state to provide the necessary changes and appropriate
   calibrations to the market for the good of all.

Getting involved
in real estate investing did more to completely eviscerate these
flawed foundational beliefs than I could have ever anticipated.
Once that demise took place, it was just a matter of time before
the others followed suit.

Out of the
Frying Pan…

When I bought
that first property I was certain of a few things. One, I could
purchase real property with little to no money down. Two, I could
structure those purchases, even on single-family homes, so that
I had "positive cash flow" almost immediately. Three,
given that I was a black person, my (likely) black tenants would
embrace my logic, reason, and passion. Together we would march off
into the sunset of wealth and independence! This happily-ever-after
story would provide an example for all the greedy white people who
had owned inner-city real estate before I came upon the scene. (I
promise you, I am not making this up.) Actually, I wish I were making
it up.

The deduction
that, in retrospect, started me on my final approach to libertarianism
occurred while I was a rental property manager and landlord, beginning
approximately 5 years after taking that first job mentioned earlier.
During this time I got to see not only how individuals interacted
with free enterprise, but also how the government and the market
interacted with those individuals. Additionally I got to see, first-hand,
how government programs ostensibly designed to help the poor actually
created a situation that locked people on welfare for generations.
Capitalism wasn't unfair — not allowing people a chance to
participate in it was.

Look at is
this way. In a genuine free enterprise or market-based situation,
one generally receives feedback directly in response to actions
he takes. This is how the entrepreneur knows what to keep doing
and what to stop doing. In some cases, it even leads to the failure
of a business. In the case of my tenants — people who received a
substantial portion of their income via government agencies, and
particularly in cases where a substantial portion of that income
went directly to a service provider without the tenant's
action — little or no feedback was present. The main benefit delivered
to my tenants was money, in the form of rent payments or rent subsidies.
These payments could go on for years, and in fact, even across generations.

By doing this,
the Department of Social Services (DSS) removed any semblance of
feedback that a person might receive regarding what will, in most
every case be their largest monthly financial obligation. By paying
these payments without any interaction from the tenant DSS certainly
made things more convenient for everyone. (As a recipient of these
funds, I enjoyed getting those checks directly!) But, they also
precluded the tenant from having to decide, on a monthly basis,
how to budget her money with regard to competing bills, like
rent, food, entertainment, etc. In effect, the tenant could just
"blow" the money they received, because the most important
item — their shelter — was taken care of without any action by them.
Is there any doubt what would eventually happen if this money stopped
showing up or if they had to make a decision themselves?

Lest anyone
think this is the result of some inherent failing in the tenant
or poor people in general, a closer examination of one's own life
reveals many of the same hidden-from-view scenarios. For example,
if the water authority where you live suddenly stopped delivering
potable water, what would you do? I'm willing to bet that most people
would panic, with no idea what to do next, aside from going
down to a local grocery store to stand in line, that is. Simply
put, when something is delivered without our action or involvement,
we come to rely on that delivery, sometimes despite what would otherwise
be prudent. (In the transportation field in which I work this is
known as "detrimental reliance" and is always a danger
in automated safety systems.)

In the case
of my tenants, the incentives were all screwed up. What little feedback
that actually was offered came in the form of reduced benefits
if one of these people went out and got a job to supplement their
income. Given those incentives, I could understand why people stayed
on public assistance versus getting a job.

Every so often,
the DSS would, via some means I never quite understood, decide that
they needed to "help" a welfare recipient move toward
more personal-responsibility-based financial management. The first
step in this process was always sending the rent money to
the tenant, versus the landlord, and having the tenant pay their
bills — including their rent — out of that money. It never worked.

In cases where
the DSS sought to let the tenant pay their own rent — versus paying
it for them — I never saw one tenant make the transition successfully.
Not one. After years of having their rent paid for them, why would
we expect anything different? In their attempts to "help"
the poor, the state actually made everything worse. Regardless
of the historical reasons why these people may have been poor, the
state showed no ability to make things better. The state knew neither
what to change nor how to change it.

In the aftermath
of drawing these initial conclusions, I came to a larger conclusion
that still fuels many of my beliefs today — if a person has never
owned their own business, or done something similar, they have no
idea how capitalism is supposed to work. At best, they’re guessing,
and it’s easy to guess wrong. Giving a man a fish, no matter how
well intentioned, or nutritionally-satisfying, will never teach
him to fish for himself. In fact after sufficient time has passed,
he will, almost without exception, forget that fishing was ever
necessary. And even if he does not forget, his progeny — those who
learn by watching him — have no chance to learn that which they
have never seen practiced.

Walking
the Walk and Talking the Talk

After all that,
where am I now? How would I describe myself and my specific beliefs
about libertarianism?

While I
could generally be described as a libertarian, a more appropriate
and more accurate designation would be market anarchist.

This means
most importantly that I freely accept that the main problem with
the current system of government is, in fact, that we have one.
In direct correspondence to the old saying, "they lie when
the truth would suffice," our politicians abuse the truth pretty
much whenever they open their mouths to speak. The entire system
is based upon one set of folks milking another set for as much as
they can.

Most, if not
all, laws that exist are the expression of some bureaucrat’s power-laden
wet dream or some lobbyist's profit-seeking scheme. Government is
fundamentally about force and violent (if needed) coercion. And
don’t get me started on the IRS. (They call him Uncle Scam for a
reason, no?) If stealing — forcibly taking someone's property and
giving them nothing in exchange — is morally wrong for the individual,
then it cannot be justified just because a bunch of guys who call
themselves "the government" need some cash.

The most
basic expression and most fundamental dogma in libertarian theory
is the non-aggression axiom — the initiation of force is never justified.

I subscribe
to pacifism as a dogma and am openly against warfare, particularly
as it is practiced by the imperial empire known as America. (History
has shown time and again that the only reason for a standing army
is for imperialist advancement.) Still, I understand that self-protection
may occasionally be necessary. I might therefore be best
described as a "porcupine pacifist" in that I simultaneously
decry aggression while having no compunction about advocating a
citizenry chock-full of well-armed, well-trained individuals and
families. From a black perspective specifically, history supports
this premise. Anyone who has spent any time analyzing the inner
city would have to be seriously delusional to think that disarming
the law-abiding citizenry increases safety.

The general
history of civilization and society supports the private ownership
of guns. I think Cesare Beccaria, a legal theorist from the 1700′s
said it best, “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…disarm only
those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…Such
laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants.”
The logic of this is undeniable to me, and I find it amazing that
people believe otherwise.

The mainstream
political parties are inherently similar, barely avoiding
being identical; therefore, spending any time debating about them
is time wasted.

My best explanation
of this belief occurs in my initial article for LewRockwell.com,
entitled, "Where
Have All the Black Libertarians Gone?" where I state:

"I
do not doubt that on many of these "hot-button" issues
[gay marriage, abortion, voting rights, social security, school
choice (vouchers), national defense, welfare, affirmative action,
etc.], the two parties seem different. If one judges by
only these issues they might actually be different to varying degrees.
Are the specific issues really that important in the grand scheme?
Maybe. Should we not be just as concerned with the methodology for
addressing them? Definitely. But if the two parties were substantially
different, would we not see, in the aftermath of each election,
noticeable and substantial upheavals in policy, law, and as a direct
result, day-to-day life? And if we do not, were those ostensive
differences really important?"

I continued
with:

"Even
if the two parties did actually have radically different ideas about
right and wrong — and implemented radically different policies as
a result — one key factor would remain the same. Those policies
would be funded based upon coercion supported by the threat of violence.
Basically, the state, as realized in every western "democracy"
available for study, functions on principals closer to the Mafia
than any utopian republic described by Plato. Simply put, they [the
state] force all to contribute to their treasury, for the creation
of products and services that no one has a choice about accepting,
at a cost that always escalates. Nice racket."

The best
means by which to right past wrongs are private, not via legislation.

One oft-debated
area where being black and libertarian might come into conflict
is over the issue of reparations. Few issues are so fundamental
to a belief in personal responsibility and self-determination than
that of a debt owed to one's ancestors. Again, my current thoughts
on this issue are clear from the article I mentioned above. To wit:

"The
only method available to the state for securing money [is] — theft.
Frdric Bastiat, in his pamphlet The
Law puts state-sponsored theft, which he refers to as
"plunder" into scientific terms when he says:

"When
a portion of wealth is transferred from the person who owns it,
without his consent, and without compensation, whether by force
or fraud, to someone who does not own it, then I say that property
is violated and an action of plunder is committed."

"If
someone stole something from you, having the state steal from someone
different does not really solve the problem, does it? And if the
state stole — or more accurately, allowed someone else to steal
— something from your ancestors does it make sense for them to now
steal something from everyone else and give it to you? Not so much."

Conclusion

So then, I
embraced libertarianism not because it sounded interesting when
I studied its theories. In fact, I have not, even to this day, read
many of the books libertarians point to as seminal in their "conversion."
(This is neither an attack on those books nor a suggestion for others.
It is simply a statement of fact. And yes, my study of libertarian
philosophy, including many of those "classics," continues.
But let us be clear. The people from whom I learned had never heard
of Murray Rothbard or Ludwig von Mises.) I embraced libertarianism
because it best fit (by far) the conclusions I had already reached
empirically. That should come as no surprise, since the truths upon
which libertarianism rests were truths before there were
any theories or high-sounding descriptions of them.

Those
conclusions prompted me to begin my study of the more theoretical
aspects, which further confirmed my initial thoughts. I can only
hope that others will conduct their own honest investigation. I
have little doubt that their conclusions will be similar. Allow
me to end this trip down memory lane as I ended my first published
libertarian article:

"To
be completely free, secure, and happy, there are three things that
concern me — life, liberty, and property. The state did not create
them. The state can only take them away. There has been enough of
that already. So unless I want to enjoy the fruits of income redistribution
— which account for a major portion of the state's budget, excluding
national defense — there is not much left for the state to do on
my behalf."

Indeed. Not
much at all — like NOTHING.

December
30, 2010

Wilt
Alston [send him
mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three
children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his
part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal
research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily
on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The
Best of Wilton D. Alston

Having always liked those you-might-be-a-[whatever] lists, it seems that now might be a time to come up with one of my own. No doubt some entries have been left off, but this is a good start.

You might be a statist if…

• You vote in every election, but soon after your candidate takes office, you wonder aloud (or secretly) about his qualifications.
• You have voted for political candidates in your own party, expecting them to care more about you than the people who actually paid for them to be elected.
• You have voted for political candidates in different political parties than your own, expecting a different result than voting for a candidate in your own party.
• You believe some bureaucrat in Washington, who doesn't know you from Batman, actually cares about you.
• You complain to all who will listen about the terrible policies of The Other Guy, but somehow think Your Guy's policies, demonstrably no different, are better.
• You think that a person who happens to show great skill in one narrow area, such as public speaking, is qualified to make decisions about the lives of others across many areas, as if the fastest runner in a tribe is automatically qualified to be Chief.
• You hate greedy corporations, but think an organization such as a government — itself beholden to (and factually a horribly-mutated form of) a greedy corporation — will protect you from (… wait for it …) greedy corporations.
• You think welfare only happens when the government gives money to poor people, or to rich people, or to people of another race, or to people of another socio-economic strata, or to corporations, versus whenever any organization takes money from one person via violence or coercion and gives it to another.
• You think it is possible for a government to change the laws of supply and demand or determine an appropriate response to scarcity.
• You've ever used the terminology "public option" and weren't talking about making a Number 2 in the woods.
• You think the land mass — and the people inhabiting it — on one side of an imaginary line in the sand called a border, are objectively better than the land mass — and the people inhabiting it — on the other side of that imaginary line in the sand.
• You think some guy in a special uniform is objectively different from you in terms of morality and rights.
• You believe that rights are obtained by declaration, or via guns and violence, or by the application of all three.
• You think that rules written by members of the State can be used to control the State, as if consulting an old piece of parchment very closely and then yelling "Article 76!" was ever a reasonable response to a corrupt man holding a gun.
• You get squeamish about shooting someone yourself, but have no compunction with having a nameless, faceless representative of the State shoot someone on your behalf. (The further away this person lives, particularly if it's someplace you cannot find on a map without help, the better.)
• You think it is morally justified to install an army base in the vicinity of a so-called foreign people, but would cry foul at the top of your lungs if the roles were reversed.
• You think it can be morally justified to withhold trade with the people of a country — called an embargo or imposing sanctions — in order to blackmail the ostensible ruler of that country to do your bidding, but do not understand that such an action is morally equivalent to holding an innocent person hostage in order to elicit a certain action from someone who knows them.
• You think your neighbor, or some guy on the other side of town, should be restricted from owning a firearm, since he might be psychopath, while simultaneously assuming that some other guy, who also might be a psychopath, can be armed because a third guy or group of people — none of whom you have ever met — authorizes it.
• You think that one person can morally make decisions about the appropriate use of the private property of another person.
• You think the moral nature of theft, murder, slavery, assault, and kidnapping change dependent upon the size of the group that authorizes these actions.

Conclusion

The moral nature of a man is unchanged by the existence of an organization or his position within that organization. Organizational pursuits wherein the only real criteria for participation is desire and the threat of negative market response is non-existent — such as politics and government bureaucracy — will, given time, attract those who are both desirous of the benefits afforded by the available ways and means and motivated by the lack of negative feedback. (In other words, losers.) Inevitably, such organizations morph toward becoming chronically inefficient or oppressive, or both. (It is ironic that one of the main arguments against anarchy is also the reason one should most urgently support it.) This will happen no matter if people are inherently good or inherently bad since the ability to off-load responsibility and rent-seek — intrinsic qualities of any state — increase given a monopoly of violence and coercion. If there is no penalty for doing dumb stuff, more dumb stuff gets done. While this situation might ultimately be worse if people are inherently evil it makes sense to keep the old fable in mind. Since it was a snake when you picked it up, eventually you will get bitten.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

Socialists believe in two things which are absolutely different and perhaps even contradictory: freedom and organization. ~ Élie Halévy

My friend Stef Molyneux is fond of talking about “the conversation” within which all of us who spout off about liberty are engaged. The quote above sparked an interesting conversation on one of the several (thousand?) networking sites of which I am a member, and that discussion led to this posting. Nearing the end of that discussion, one of the posters said, “I am not one of those who thinks the private sector is necessarily better at everything.” He followed that statement up with, “That’s why building codes are mandatory — if they weren’t you wouldn’t want to go in a structure taller than three stories.” These simple sentences contain essential nuggets of what puzzles me so greatly whenever I find myself in a discussion of philosophy. (Aside: Whenever one thinks he’s discussing government policy or health care or immigration or gun control or supposedly-illegal drugs, he is really discussing philosophy.)

Defining Terms While Hiding People

First of all, what the heck is “the private sector”? To my way of thinking, the terms private sector and public sector were created by statists in an attempt to obscure the facts. Similar confusion can also occur when one uses terms like “the government” or “the State.” (For those scoring at home, yes, I’ve used both those terms before and will very likely use them again, sooner rather than later.) I’ve also tried to communicate at least once or twice, that those terms, while helpful, are abstractions, not legitimate moral entities. An overly strong belief in or reliance upon any group — be it a group created by biology or a group created by ideology — is absolutely bound to lead to improper conclusions and actions, particularly if one forgets to employ evidence, logic, and reason.

How does all this relate to the term “private sector”? We don’t have any such thing. We don’t have a public sector either. As a matter of fact, the market is an abstraction as well. We’ve only got people — people who may be accurately described by this apodictic and praxeological truth: When given a voluntary choice, they act to better their situations using ways and means at their disposal. Rules and regulations, imposed by ostensibly noble leaders, cannot alter this truth.  This does not mean that rules are bad.  It means that the most effective rules of human interaction do not emanate from the top down.  In fact, the existence of a monopoly of force to impose rules and regulations guarantees that those very constructs — rules and regulations — will be used by the few to take advantage of the many. Those statist rules will, unavoidably, become additional ways and means by which people seek to gain advantage.

The aggregate decisions of a group of actors purchasing goods and services — actions reflective of ways and means — is what we refer to as the market. The existence of those decisions, taken individually or in aggregate, also cannot be altered. That is, not only do we only have people, but we also always have people. Rules and regulations, be they divinely-inspired or beamed directly from Beelzebub’s electronic organizer, cannot eradicate this necessary component of a market response — people. Although he was speaking about the overarching rules and regulations of a society, the late Per Christian Malloch, in a currently-unpublished masterpiece, may have summarized this concept best when he said:

Constitutions, bills of rights, statements of principle, party platforms, and all other Guarantees can never be more than self-imposed restrictions which cease to affect the people who run a government the instant they cease to believe in their rightness, or as soon as it is clear that the people will not punish the government for ignoring them.

Celebrating the Folly of Regulation

Consider the second portion of my discussion partner’s statement, that if building codes weren’t mandatory, entering any building over 3 stories would be dangerous. To illustrate the folly of this assertion, let us consider two cases; one where there are no statist rules and another where we have the current situation of government-sanctioned mandates for the construction of, well, everything. Let us set a baseline to our discussion by asking a few questions. Why is the building being constructed? For what purpose? For whom?

As a further baseline for both scenarios, let us accept, without debate, that everyone who constructs buildings does so with the goal of spending as little money on safety as possible. Let us further assume that below some lower limit — call it a “construction index” for lack of better term — copious amounts of death and destruction will befall anyone unlucky enough to enter a building so constructed.

What if said building is constructed for you? Would you accept it without having it checked out first? Would you hire an expert or require that the builder provide an independent opinion?  (Think: “Show me the CarFax.”) Even if you planned to rent the building out, would the prospective occupants move in without assurances that the construction index was met? Would they absolve the firm who built the building of any liability? Do you know anyone who would not take similar steps and/or require similar assurances? I do — people who think that a government mandate protects them. In fact, that is the main difference between the answers to these questions in the 2 cases.

In case 1, the people who plan to occupy the building would (or should) hold the builder to whatever standard they require, be it higher or lower than the accepted construction index. In case 2, they will, if they respond to the inappropriate sense of security, A.K.A. detrimental reliance, expressed by my discussion partner, expect that since the building had to “pass” code, that it is, in fact, safe. (Adding insult to injury, if the building proves to not be safe, the builder may still be liable but not the organization that coercively imposed the standards and supposedly inspected for them! Nice racket.)

What incentive-based assurance can be had that the building inspector — a person who will not occupy the building and with no on-going moral or legal culpability — will be a better judge of its safety than those persons who will occupy it? If he’s on your payroll, or under contract that you require from the builder, both he and the builder are liable. If he works for the State, well, crap happens. Further, what is to prevent the building industry from seeking to set the standards for construction indexes as low as possible, via lobbying and/or outright bribery? Actually, after further review, there is not much difference between lobbying and bribery.  (Recall that we’ve only got people, and when presented with a choice, they act to better their situations using the ways and means at their disposal.) The setting of coercively-enforced building codes becomes but another means for a builder to obtain profit and/or market share. Worse yet, it takes attention away from that means of generating profit and market share, i.e., happy (and safe) customers, upon which he should most urgently focus.

Conclusion

Given that people and incentives always exist, the primary outcomes which government regulation can produce are negative. Among them: rent seeking, artificially-high barriers to entry, and outright fraud. The existence of these tendencies cannot be eradicated by regulation. Instead, two of the three mentioned here — rent seeking and higher-than-expected barriers to entry — are direct results of regulation. We (some of us, anyway) tend to ascribe powers and majesty to the government that it simply does not possess, particularly since it is, in Molyneux's words, "a bubbling ecosystem of competing self-interest." Worse, we accept the mutilation of markets to which coercive monopoly power leads, falsely and ignorantly assuming that this mutilated market — still composed of only people — will somehow be better than a free one.

The results of a recent scientific study found that markets make people act more fairly.  Covering the study for Reason Magazine, Ronald Bailey notes, "The upshot is that efforts to extract people from markets (e.g., communism, socialism, fascism) encourage them to revert to the innate savagery of dealing fairly only with kin and fellow tribespeople."  We've only got people, People!  If one set of people can use a monopoly of coercion, as a means to further their ends, they will inevitably do so — at the detriment to another set, or as is our current case, everyone else. Returning to Bailey, "Successful societies are those that adopt market norms and they tend over time to outcompete societies organized in more primitive top-down ways."  Primitive is an excellent descriptor for the gun-wielding cesspool of self-interest that is the coercive state.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

Nancy Pelosi claims that the new "healthcare" bill will "create 4 million jobs — 400,000 jobs almost immediately." The audacity and shamelessness of these lying politicians is something to behold. ~ Bill Anderson (on the LRC Blog)

After my pedestrian attempt at some basic erudition on stimulus the other day, I got a note from a respondent. Even though he completely agreed with me, that respondent offered examples of the bogus justifications politicians like Pelosi use to sell their boondoggles. He suggested that attacking these misconceptions head-on might be instructive. Given Pelosi’s statement, and the (no doubt) enthusiastic reception it received, I am forced to conclude that my respondent was correct.

It seems that much of the American public — and almost the entire American legislature — believe two things that Austrian economics and basic math would refute. One, that stable, legitimate jobs can be created by government spending. Two, that the national economy is improved by this act of creation, i.e., that we are collectively better off because of this spending than we would otherwise be, ceteris paribus. With ample apologies to the giants who have already explained this before me, I feel compelled to offer not only a hearty “Right On!” to the points Anderson raised in his blog post cited above, but also a throaty “Hell No!” to both of these assertions.

Quoting my respondent, all emphasis is mine:

Politicians sell the stimulus not just as a make-work scheme, but that it will produce tangible benefits. Just as the federal highways increased productivity, the argument goes, new high-speed trains, better bridges, and keeping teachers employed will increase American productivity. The debt will be repaid from that increased productivity.

Further:

The proponents of stimulus would argue that but for the stimulus, taxpayers’ incomes would be that much lower. To the extent that taxpayers’ incomes increase more than the increased tax burdens to repay the borrowed funds, taxpayers are conceivably better off.

Finally:

[A]t least from a theoretical standpoint, the concept makes sense. After all, businesses leverage their balance sheets every day in hopes of paying off that debt with increased future productivity.

This essay will serve to answer my respondent’s examples and, with luck, address these misconceptions, at least for the people not as delusional as Pelosi and Krugman. To wit:

Tangible Benefits Versus Lost Purchasing Power

If one is talking about the person who is receiving government largess, it would be foolish to dispute that he is tangibly benefiting, particularly from a standpoint of high time preference. That a person with no job and no (apparent) prospects can be bribed with a high-paying (or even moderate-paying) make-work job is no discovery. Under closer scrutiny this short-term tangibility turns into long-term horse feces.

Consider: According to census figures, a “MALE HOUSEHOLDER” made an income of $10,742 (in 1973 dollars) in 1973. That same person made an income of $41,844 (in 2006 dollars) in 2006. According to the computations at MeasuringWorth.com, it took $4.54 in 2006 to have the same “purchase power” as $1.00 in 1973. You can already see where I’m going, right? A person would need 4.54 times the income he was receiving in 1973 to purchase the same items in 2006. Multiplying $10,742 by 4.54 equals $48,768. Our hero is $6,924 in the hole and he hasn’t paid any taxes — income, excise, duty — anything, yet!

Is it any surprise that regular people would be struggling more and more with time? Such is the conclusion one should draw from this chart from a previous (and soon-to-be-updated) essay.

Please note that the income on this chart is already corrected for inflation. Up to approximately the 80′s, we all seemed to be growing together, income-wise. Since then not so much. Where did that money go? Pelosi, and plutocrat scum sucking the government teat before her, stole it and/or helped funnel it from the bottom of the socio-economic ladder to the top. (Krugman and his ilk cheered.) What increased productivity? How is anyone except the plutocrats conceivably better off? All I see is a structural transfer of wealth, a transfer of wealth benefiting politicians and their cronies, regardless of party affiliation.

Increased Income Versus Increased Tax Burden

There can be little doubt that long term (in a time frame covering only a portion of my adulthood) regular people are not better off because of government economics. The indications are all around us. Why did a person need more money in 2006 than they needed in 1973? Inflation. (Recall that the printing of fake money does not cause inflation; the printing of fake money is inflation.) One way inflation is perceived is as rising prices. From whence does inflation come? The Fed.

Contra the myths of stimulus, not only does the taxpayer not have increased long-term income, but he also has increased tax burden in its place. Simultaneously, he gets to enjoy the Cantillon Effect — whereby "income and wealth is redistributed to those who receive the new [inflation] money early in the process, at the expense of those who receive the new money later, or those who live on fixed incomes and receive none of the new money." Worse, the Cantillon Effect is generally not perceived, yet remains a direct result of the Fed's inflationary actions.

With apologies for being overly dramatic, it rather insults me that plutocrats (and their academic court jesters) continue to suggest that rising prices are inflation. Such an assertion attempts to place inflation in the realm of naturally-occurring phenomena. It just happens, out of the blue. If that were true, one might be convinced that those smart guys at the Fed were trying to help. They aren’t. The example of MALE HOUSEHOLDER shown above should provide ample evidence.

Theory Versus Reality Involving Leverage

My respondent suggested, again as an example, that the government investing via stimulus was similar to targeted investment by a business, noting, "Businesses leverage their balance sheets every day in hopes of paying off that debt with increased future productivity." Several differences should be apparent.

One, truly private businesses are risking their own money, or the money of their voluntary investors. The government has neither a legitimate balance sheet nor voluntary investors. (If you stole that which you have, does itemizing it make your enterprise legitimate?) Two, if the risks don’t pan out, a truly-private business will fold and go under, well, unless the business is GM or Chrysler or AIG or Citibank or, well… (At least we can agree that they should go under.) Three, a private business can efficiently manage resources, using the feedback of the aggregate decisions of its customers, A.K.A., the market. A public enterprise cannot, since its market is captive. This truth has been borne out over and over again since before people like Mises and Hayek and Rothbard (and maybe even Aristotle) first observed it. Four, private businesses make money by producing that which is in-demand and/or not obtained from elsewhere. In other words, they excel if that which they supply is more novel (higher value, higher utility, etc.) and/or cheaper than that which might otherwise be obtained. With few if any exceptions, the items supplied by the government can be produced elsewhere at a cheaper price and supplied more efficiently as well.

In the case of the government — or a government-owned enterprise like General Motors — using leverage, the risk side of the equation is missing. This is what is known in Austrian circles as moral hazard. The poorer the performance of a government enterprise, the more money the enterprise receives. (Read: FEMA, the firms noted above, the recipients of TARP, etc.) Unfortunately, that additional risk capital comes from the same well-spring as the initial public burnt offering — the tax payer and/or the printing press. Again, see the adventures of MALE HOUSEHOLDER to get a glimpse at the climax.

Conclusion

There is no scenario under which the government can spend money more effectively than a truly-private enterprise and no scenario under which the money spent by the government won’t hurt those who it was supposed to help, eventually, probably sooner rather than later. The fact that such money is deficit-financed just makes bad matters worse. When the Republicans say that spending helps, they're helping their cronies. When the Democrats say that spending helps, they're hurting their supposed constituency, which makes the hoopla over Jim Bunning all the more ironic. Occasionally, as in the case of TARP, it’s pretty clear at the outset that the money is specifically intended to provide corporate welfare, and no one on either side of the aisle even pretends that they’re trying to help the common folk.

At least they were honest in their dishonesty that one time.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

"It [the stimulus package] prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been. I think everyone would have to acknowledge that's a good thing." ~ Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight's Chief Economist

When I previously lamented the appeal of government-funded direct investment — currently known as stimulus — on the LRCBlog, I was purposely dismissive and not very expository. This essay dials that attitude back just a little, because if a recent piece from the NYTimes is any indication, the economic philosophy to which we Austrians ascribe continues to be virtually unknown and/or unimportant to the mainstream media (MSM). Certainly one should not judge success by such a rubric, but at some point the proletariat — who are, in large part, informed by the MSM — must be educated if there is any hope of returning to fiscal responsibility on a national level. (At some point later today, I will likely return to my skeptical stance, but for now, let us be hopeful!)

Why do people like stimulus? In the short run, there can be no debate that projects that would not otherwise be funded are getting funded. That is a fact of government boondoggles. One could further argue that people who otherwise might not be working are employed on those projects. (Using strict utilitarian thinking, if one's choices are get paid versus not get paid, he will generally opt for the former, all things equal.) One might even convince himself that the negative effects of government spending are far enough into the future that the people being paid — even to accomplish ill-conceived make-work tasks — will be dead before many of the chickens roost. Keynes's quip that in the long run we’re all dead makes sense, albeit regrettably short-sighted, because of this future basis.

The Times piece asserts, among other things, that one can judge the success of the stimulus package by the number of jobs created, saying, “the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs.” Contra the points raised above, one has insufficient information to conclude that without stimulus jobs, no jobs would exist. One must realize that government intervention is to blame for the employment market or lack thereof. That government spending creates a temporary solution is therefore insufficient justification for that spending. Worse, there is no scenario under which government spending results in long-term net positive economics for the citizenry. Why? The government has no money, so spending requires one of two approaches.

Money for Nothing

Approach One, the government can take the money. This is called taxation when completed against rank-and-file civilians. (It is called seizure when completed against someone who has broken a law, typically a law created by the government.) Whether or not one subscribes to the morality of taxation or its necessity or the goodness and practicality of the tasks accomplished with the money, there can be no debate about the source. It is taken from the proletariat at gunpoint and/or under threat of imprisonment. As Hoppe has noted, everyone understands that without enforcement, compliance would fall to nearly zero in no time; ergo, one can deduce that tax money is taken not donated.

Approach Two, the government can print the money. This is called changing the money supply, and is most effectively accomplished via a central bank issuing fiat currency. There is more to it than simply starting a printing press at the U.S. Mint or even hitting the “Enter” key on some keyboard, as it involves commercial banks and loans and other financial legerdemain, but for our purposes, one can simply think of it as starting up a giant printing press and taking the new greenbacks off the end. By the way, this approach does not cause inflation. This approach is inflation — more money chasing the same number of goods.

Some might argue that there are other approaches: borrowing the money; or, selling government land. Borrowing the money would be very roughly equivalent to taking out a loan, just like one might at his local bank, if his local bank was a country like say, China. To use this approach, the State still has to print money or collect taxes to fund the repayment, so this is really just a special case of Approaches One and Two. Selling government land as a separate approach is problematic since the acquisition of the land had to be funded with either Approach One or Two, or simply taken, again at gunpoint.

Others might quibble that the many flavors of taxation — duties, excises, tariffs — should not be lumped together. In every case the State is collecting money to fund services no one wants by adding a fee to transactions in which the State is not a necessary participant. Six of one equals dozen of the other. (To conclude that no one wants the services offered by the State, we return to Hoppe's logic: compliance would fall to zero without violence and coercion ipso facto no one really wants the services. Further, the implementation of withholding illustrates that the State itself understands that it would receive much less taxation income and/or acquiring that income would be much more difficult without taking their "cut" before you get it.)

No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Each of the primary approaches has negative consequences. With taxation, the person from whom the money is taken doesn’t have it to spend or save as he sees fit. If you’ve ever had month left at the end of your money, you can readily appreciate why this consequence is negative. With printing, the negative effect is more subtle and future-based, using Keynesian logic. It is worth noting that with borrowing, the negative consequences are even worse than with Approaches One and Two by themselves, but borrowing can only happen because the primary approaches happen so regularly. In other words, the U.S. is a good credit risk because it has a solid stable of taxation livestock, a long-tenured government, and a central bank controlling a very productive printing press.

So, to bring this essay a little closer to a long-awaited climax, what’s so bad about stimulus, really? Why do we Austrians lament malinvestment and business cycles? Are we just as worried about an unclear financial future as some environmentalists are about an unclear global warming future? No. The truth about one’s financial future, given malinvestment, is pretty clear and requires no complex computer models to decipher.

Firstly, the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble should be clear indications of what happens when government money and policy drives investment into industries that otherwise would not exist in such a state. (We have no correspondingly solid examples from the world of anthropogenic global warming. In fact, we have counter examples aplenty — but maybe that is another debate.) Secondly, and just as important, the negative effects are not that far into the future. Both of the bubbles mentioned above were inflated and popped in portions of my adulthood.

Consider this chart from Wiki:

There is no need to be an economist here. Goods and services cost a lot more than they used to, in just a portion of my lifetime. The impact to my personal financial well-being is not found in some Keynesian dead-and-don’t-care future. The impact is felt right now, particularly by those in the lower quartiles of the socioeconomic spectrum for reasons noted below. An update to my analysis on the widening gap between the plutocrats and everyone else is on the way, but in the meantime no one should think that profligate government spending, be it on stimulus or other financial boondoggles like wars all over the globe, will only hurt folks who are yet to be a twinkle in their parents' eyes.

A Structural Transfer of Wealth

Consider a Monopoly game. If a house on Park Place used to cost $1,000 during the previous round, but now costs $1,500 due to an infusion of new money, as long as everyone at the table receives more money, more or less simultaneously, we’re good to go. In real life, some people receive their extra money while that house on Park Place still costs $1,000 — allowing them to buy it — while other folks get their money, assuming they actually get more, after the cost has risen to $1,500, placing them further behind in a game they cannot control but must continue to play. When one examines inflation as driven by the Fed, and the resulting economic positioning of the plutocrats vis-à-vis regular folks, he is forced to conclude: this transfer of wealth is structural. Worse yet, since central banking is intended to function in this way, the effect cannot be mitigated by simply "giving the poor people their money first."

Some might suggest that the government could retire the additional money injected into the money supply, using the really smart guys at the Fed to control inflation or some such. To that I would simply say: All measures of the money supply point to it increasing steadily for some time now with no end in sight. Inflation, under the Fed and since the removal of the gold standard, has been positive, substantial, and sustained. Central banks exist to control the money supply, which generally means increasing it. One is hard-pressed to find another reason for their existence.

Once the Cantillon Effect has taken place, that is, after someone has purchased Park Place, or similarly invested the extra money they got ahead of you, it really doesn't matter if the monetary basis — the money supply — returns to a previous level. (I know quite a few people, and I am one of them, who would vigorously argue that this structural transfer of wealth is exactly the reason the Fed was originally created — but that too is another debate.)

Conclusion

The negative effects of having less money because the State took some of what you had is obvious. The negative effects of inflation need to be just as obvious. If the amount of money held by everyone rose simultaneously with the level of inflation, it would not matter as much, but this is not the case.

The people at the top of the financial food chain are ahead of everyone else on an income and asset basis and will remain so — with a growing lead — for as long as the Fed controls the money. The short-term goodness of a make-work job this year will be mitigated by the increased cost of paying for electricity next year. The guys who own the electric company won’t feel it that much. Their banker won't feel it at all. The working stiff reading the NYTimes and feeling good about stimulus will…every time.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

"Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends… …when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.” ~ Isabel Patterson

Here we go again. Another day, another Internet call-to-arms! Readers may remember my rant-fest about the Non-Urban Dictate (NUD) e-mail that I got from a buddy of mine. (Interestingly, I'm still getting positive e-mail about that essay.)

This time, I'm responding to a call-to-arms piece I got from my wife, a piece that has been attributed to both Bill Cosby and George Carlin at different times. (Yes, if you're scratching your heads over that one, you're not alone.) The piece, which could easily be categorized as a joke (it is, after all, attributed to a comedian) seems to resonate with people. Unfortunately, it is also sorely lacking in not only basic logic, but also economic understanding. One might ask why it makes sense to do a long-format article about an Internet chain letter joke. The answer is: the thinking that undergirds the humor is widespread. If not, no one would “get” the joke, nor would the piece be sent around so often.

The platform was not penned by either Bill Cosby or George Carlin. (Snopes notes that this piece doesn't really fit either comic's personal style or political leanings. Frankly, I can't see either of them saying half the stuff this platform asserts.) Although the economic logic is flawed, as I said, there are other areas of concern. I'll cite selected platform planks directly, some in more detail than others, with the hope of providing subsequent people who receive this type of stuff with insight, whether they get a good laugh or not. Not surprisingly, other authors have pieces that attack specific flaws in the platform, to which I will link as appropriate. (Certainly I will not include every relevant citation on any one topic, so my apologies to anyone I miss.)

The Horrors of Press u20181' for English…

The platform says:

Any use of the phrase: "Press 1 for English" is immediately banned. English is the official language; speak it or wait outside of our borders until you can.

First of all, English is not the official language of the United States. In fact, the U.S. does not have an official language. (Remember all that land of the free stuff? It goes hand-in-hand with not requiring that one speak a specific language, or pray to a certain idol.) One should never let facts get in the way of a good Internet chain letter though.

Why does this thinking resonate with anyone? Why does it matter? A business, any business wants to increase revenue by increasing customers. An easy way to do this is to cater to (or pander to, if you will) specific traits displayed by a set of customers. Providing a selection for Spanish-language customers is no more (and no less) reasonable than: providing later hours for people who work 9–5; providing Saturday hours for people who work Weekdays; providing a mailing address for people who would prefer to use the U.S. Mail versus show up in person; or, providing an "Express Lane" for people with only a few items in their shopping carts, just to present a few comparable options.

If I said that, effective immediately, anyone who couldn't arrive at my business between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. would be turned away, you'd think I was an idiot, right? At very least if I lost many of my customers it wouldn't be that surprising. The economic law — economics 101 — can be stated thusly: A successful business generally morphs to fit its customer(s) needs, not the other way around. (Businesses do "train" customers, but that's a subtle point.) Any backlash to the availability of alternative language choices is not enlightened; it is racist, plain and simple. Providing options for non-native English speaker is good business, particularly given that Spanish is spoken by approximately 12 percent of the U.S.

No More Imports!

The platform says:

We will immediately go into a two year isolationist attitude in order to straighten out the greedy big business posture in this country. America will allow NO imports, and we’ll do no exports.

That's what I call packing a cornucopia of economic ignorance into a tight space. As Mises states in this recording, the goal of business is to supply as many customers as possible; to fully satisfy as many needs as possible. (FYI: Mises is answering the question: "Are the interests of the American wage earners in conflict with those of their employers, or are the two in agreement?") The greed of big business is no issue, unless the guns of the State help them along. One example and one very basic overarching concept may prove instructive here. The concept is: division of labor.

Let's say, for example, that one thinks "America will accept no imports, and America will provide no exports" is a valid option. Think of the case where one applies this to himself and his next-door neighbor on a desert island. The corollary would be: you'll make everything you need and he'll make everything he needs. (You take this action despite the fact that you might be better at fishing. and he might be better at hunting.) Looking forward, I can make this prediction without feeling one pang of doubt: This arrangement will result in both of you attaining no better standard of living, remaining at a subsistence level.

The economic law — economics 101 — can be stated thusly: Through cooperation and exchange, we can produce more, often much more, than if we work in isolation. When examined through an understanding of comparative advantage — another name for division of labor — the suggestion that we should only use what we can make here is, well, ignorant. By the way, comparative advantage doesn't know anything about fake lines in the sand called borders or made-up abstractions like citizenship, so the economic truth is the same for someone located in India as someone you can see upon the grassy knoll next to your house. Going into an "isolationist attitude to straighten out the greedy big business posture in this country" would result in the rank-and-file having (and not enjoying) a lower standard of living, with no real change in the attitude of big business either way.

The platform continues with:

When imports are allowed, there will be a 100% import tax on it coming in here.

This platform plank might actually be more economically ignorant than the previous one. Who gets the money from an import tax? Why do they deserve it? What service has been provided? If an item is cheaper to buy from Harry than from Stan, imposing a tax on Harry's item does not necessarily hurt Harry, as he could still sell the item to someone else, particularly if one is talking about a worldwide market. Nor does it necessarily help Stan. It hurts the customers of Stan's business, who will now either have to pay much more than they otherwise would for the item they want or continue buying the item they don't want. Either way, the customer loses out. Worse, neither the customer nor Stan will get the "extra" money. Paraphrasing Manuel Ayau from Not a Zero-Sum Game, we could say: "If we had imposed a 100% import tax on the first Toyotas, we could still be driving Tempests!" Stated more rigorously with regard to Austrian economics, the additional cost added to the transaction by the import tax provides no additional benefit or value to either party in the transaction. It is useless overhead, effectively only funding the bureaucracy that accepts the money.

Patrolling the Border

The platform says:

All retired military personnel will be required to man one of the many observation towers located on the southern border of the United States.

The number of people who genuinely feel that it makes sense to forcibly repel "illegal aliens" using an imaginary line in the dirt called a border is amazing. First of all, from the standpoint of simple geography, America is not full, and not close to being full. So, the influx of people, from wherever, will not, in the foreseeable (or I'd argue the distant) future, cause any problems for the U.S. in terms of a place for them to go. Furthermore, even if every person on Earth — all 6.5 billion of them, and counting — moved to Texas, that single state would be about as full as say, Hong Kong, according to some pretty basic computations by someone from Ithaca College.

However, this platform plank is not about geography or population density. It is, similar to the "press 1 for English" complaint, about racism. (It is also a reflection of the sheeple fighting over the crumbs, but maybe I will get to that later.) A few years ago, I co-authored a piece with Molyneux entitled, "Importing Freedom" that was published at Strike-the-Root.com. In that article we asked, "Other than when they got here, what makes immigrants different than the poor [or other inhabitants] we already have?" Of course, the answer is nothing. If it would be immoral to deport those already supposedly draining the system, how can the inefficiency and theft of that system be used as a logical argument against letting others come here simply because they too could end up using it?

Akers and Boudreaux provide additional insight in an article published in the Christian Science Monitor, citing division of labor while ably dismissing the claim that more workers will lead inexorably to less income for those already here. They noted that, "The US work-force has more than doubled since World War II, yet workers’ real total compensation (wages plus benefits) is higher now than ever. Notice that Manhattan’s employees make more money than Mississippi’s."

There is neither a moral nor an economic reason to worry about immigrants entering the U. S. The most basic libertarian ethic, the non-aggression principle, puts the immorality of the anti-immigration paradigm into context. In order to prevent voluntary migration of peoples, one must employ either violence or coercion. Even if the supposed attraction of welfare checks is the raison d’être for this platform plank, Block clears up that concern in "A Libertarian Case for Free Immigration": "Let it be said loudly and clearly: end welfare for all people, but at the very least for immigrants and their descendants, and by definition immigrants will no longer be attracted to our shores in order to receive such funds." I'd bet good money that if welfare ceased to exist, anti-immigration fanatics wouldn't shut up, and that's probably the real message.

Bringing Social Security Back

The platform states:

Social Security will immediately return to its original state. … Neither the President nor any other politician will be able to touch it.

I don't really know if this plank is more a reflection of economic and historical ignorance or a display of a belief in alternate realities. Social Security began as a government scam. It remains a government scam. To which original state should it return? The first recipient of monthly payments, Ida May Fuller, took out much, much, more than she put in, which effectively illustrates the scamariffic nature of the plan. (According to the Social Security Administration, Miss Fuller paid in $24.75 and took out $22,888.92. Even over 40 years, that's not a bad return!) The current recipients are financed by the current payers. While one might debate whether a pay-as-you-go scheme is the same as Ponzi scheme, no one can reasonably claim that a pay-as-you-go system is the same as an investment fund. The government uses the ostensible fund, and always will, as a slush fund for whatever purpose it likes, borrowing against it willy-nilly. There is no chance — none — of setting this situation straight. Abolish it, period.

Steroids

The platform goes:

Professional Athletes – Steroids? The FIRST time you check positive you’re banned from sports … for life.

I've already gone on record saying I don't care who uses hGH. That opinion extends to steroids, but this platform plank points to a deeper issue. Why should someone running for President of the United States care one whit about an issue specific to professional sports? Certainly, presidents, like kings before them, tend to take an interest in the hobbies and pursuits of their subjects, but this plank suggests the imposition of rule from above, over sports. What possibly justifies this interest? I heard a sports-analyst-pundit say it best, "The government has more important things to do than worry about steroids!" (I would say the government has nothing important to do, but then again, I am an anarchist.)

Regardless of one's view on the government's appropriate job, the issue should rest with Major League Baseball (MLB). As Armentano notes, "MLB did not have an explicit prevention and treatment program for drugs until well after Mark [steroid poster child] McGwire retired in 2001." The people in charge of deciding important stuff like the height of the mound and the number of strikes didn't legislate against so-called performance enhancers until very recently. Yet this presidential platform offers a resolution? In the pantheon of things the State might worry about — were it actually necessary — steroid use in sports should be near the bottom, just above the quality of pizza cheese and whether or not navel lint should be considered a natural resource.

Pulling Back the Aid

The platform says:

All foreign aid, using American taxpayer money, will immediately cease and the saved money will help to pay off the national debt and, ultimately, lower taxes.

Wonder of wonders, this platform plank actually makes sense! The best saying I have heard about foreign aid is attributed to Peter Lord Bauer, and goes, "Foreign aid is a process by which the poor in rich countries subsidize the rich in poor countries." Thompson Ayodele, the Executive Director of Initiative for Public Policy Analysis (IPPA) in Lagos, Nigeria, would agree. Further, he would suggest that not only does aid not help those to whom it is ostensibly given, but it actually hurts. James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist would emphatically disagree with any suggestion that money is what is needed to solve Africa's problems. Taking money from U.S. poor that does not help African poor doesn't much sound like aid to me.

The Pledge and the Anthem…

The platform offers:

The Pledge of Allegiance will be said every day at school and every day in Congress. … The National Anthem will be played at all appropriate ceremonies, sporting events, etc.

LRC's own J. L. Bryan says it best, "Anyone who attended those giant child-processing centers the state insists on calling u2018schools' will recognize the [pep rally] scene." Bryan cites Gatto with regard to the most important point to understand about situations where the Pledge and the Anthem are played.

The Pledge and the Anthem are collectivist indoctrination devices, similar in content and intent to the infamous salute employed by another collectivist, the mention of whose name will undoubtedly draw many e-mails. The bottom line is quite simple: if you're forced to do it as part of a big group at a government school, it likely is intended specifically to undergird government control.

Conclusion

There were other planks in the platform that I wanted to address, but time and space ran short. Much has already been written on crime and punishment, and law. Equating welfare checks with legitimate paychecks doled out on Fridays, also mentioned in the platform, is not really worth much analysis, except to say: Treating a welfare check as if were a paycheck does nothing to change its source from theft, its purpose from income redistribution, the fruit it bears from emasculation.

In the final analysis, this bogus presidential platform appeals to the same jingoistic ignorance as many all-too-real populist political movements throughout the U.S. I don't want to take over the government. I don't want a person I've selected to take over the government. I don't want to control your life. I don't want you to control mine. If "working inside the system" was a viable step to take, then I — or someone who could "pass" for white — should have joined the KKK a long time ago and cleared things up for black folk all over the South. Of course, that's lunatic, as are most of these Internet presidential platforms, well, except for the ones you'll see around here!

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

Rather than keep the reader guessing until the end, I'll answer the question that heads this essay right now, before I go any further. Absolutely, positively, without question, without qualification, the answer is, "Yes!" If you don't need further convincing or want to get back to an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," please consider yourself excused. (It is, easily, one of the funniest shows on all of TV. I understand completely.)

A number of events conspired to cause me to examine this issue. In the aftermath of my most recent essay on Plaxico Burress and his bogus conviction for shooting himself, I received quite a bit of positive feedback. One of the most interesting pieces came from a representative of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. JFPO has produced a movie entitled, "No Guns for Negroes." It is one of the most poignant and informative pieces on this subject. (On a personal note, I had not felt the visceral anger that this film engendered in a long time. My emotional state when I first finished reading, "Twelve Years a Slave" was close, though. I will try to not let my emotions spill over into this essay, but I can't make any promises.)

The Issue, True and False

I've heard a disturbingly-large number of people make the following statement. "Plaxico Burress was dumb!" as a way to, apparently, justify his treatment. One person even remarked that Plax deserved to be in jail for being so stupid. (I reckon that was a joke; nevertheless, further editorial comments strewn with curse words redacted.) Frankly, I have no clue if Plax Burress is intelligent or not. I also don't know what his favorite flavor of ice cream might be. Both those tidbits have equal relevance to the issue of gun control generally and what happened to him specifically.

More important though is this. Intelligence tests have a long and storied history in the quest of the State to keep the black man firmly in his place. If people really wonder if a victim of draconian statist violence masquerading as law and order is "smart" or not — and think that issue matters one iota — then the descendants of the racist bastards who initially conspired to strip black folk of the ability to defend themselves can proclaim "Mission Accomplished" and put another shrimp on the barbeque.

The fact of the matter is this: Dating back to the Antebellum South and beyond, the State has enacted laws specifically designed to keep black folk unarmed. This is not debatable, nor a matter of perspective. It is a matter of fact. The jailing of Plaxico Burress should not be viewed as an isolated event, simply the fallout of a careless high-profile citizen. It is the fruit of a racist tree planted in 18th century America, a tree that continues to bear fruit even in 2009. Consulting a paper on the racist history of gun control in Georgia produced by GeorgiaCarry.org, one finds this informative quote from Florida Supreme Court Justice Buford commenting on the practice of developing seemingly race-neutral gun control laws that — in reality — selectively applied only to blacks:

I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of Negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the Negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and sawmill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.

You can't ask for more honesty than that. But, you may ask, how can I draw a similar conclusion about the laws of the City of New York? Isn't it clear that people like Mayor Bloomberg are genuinely concerned about the safety of all citizens? No. Hell no. How do I know? Let us examine another large U.S. city, Chicago, IL.

Disarmed Negroes, Not Just Fun During Slavery

In a piece entitled, "Chicago, gun control, and racism" we find this nugget:

Between 2000 and 2006, Chicago, home of the handgun ban, saw an [sic] handguns comprise a 43.2% larger portion of all homicides, increasing from 55.5% to 79.5% of all homicide methods. Firearm usage increased 24.7%, from 65.6% to 81.8% of all homicide methods. …Meanwhile, for the rest of Illinois, firearm usage decreased 16.0%, from 72.3% to 60.7%. (Handgun data not available.)

What does this mean? It means in the City of Chicago, where draconian gun-control quite similar to that of New York City exists, crime has increased. Not only that, but the crime has increased selectively in black neighborhoods. (You'll have to read the whole article to glean that tidbit.) Wouldn't that mean that one should do more to disarm criminals? If it were possible to disarm criminals selectively — and only in that event — such an obvious conclusion might make sense. Of course, such selective disarmament is nigh impossible. A better approach — an approach grounded in logic — is reflected by three points I made in an essay from quite a while back. That essay attempted to speak to anarchy, but the points I made relate directly to why widespread ownership of guns by law-abiding citizens must necessarily drive violence down. This issue is important enough that I'll restate those points in their entirety here:

1. The fog of war is preserved.

The primary result of any coercively implemented government attempts at disarming evil people is the disarmament of law-abiding citizens. Gun-control advocates, like those mentioned by Richard Poe in “The Disarming of Black America,” seem to believe that an authoritarian crackdown on having firearms will reduce violence by making everyone equal, i.e., equally unarmed. The fact of the matter is this can never, ever happen. The example of Kennesaw, GA provides a direct proof of the falsity of this premise. Cesare Beccaria, a legal theorist from the 1700′s (who some believe greatly influenced Thomas Jefferson), explains why with this unassailable logic.

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms…disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants.

Stated differently, those who respond to laws, such as turning-in unregistered weapons, are, by definition, law-abiding citizens. They are not the ones about whom we have to worry! Those who have no plan to obey the laws are unimpressed by such pleas. Worse yet, they expect that those they hope to prey on will respond to such requests. As a result, they know that their victims are unarmed. Few things can embolden a person who has the tendency to aggress against another like knowing for a fact that he is safe to do so.

2. The argument from morality is honored.

One of the underlying assumptions in every environment where citizens have been disarmed via state coercion is that certain people, and only these people, are qualified and empowered to partake in certain practices. For example, the police are always armed. No one in his right mind would suggest otherwise. What objective moral criterion makes a policeman different than a regular citizen in this regard? Is it the uniform? Unlikely — uniforms provide no qualification in and of themselves. Is it the training? No — anyone can be trained. Is it via the consent of the governed? No — I am unqualified and unable to bestow a right away that I do not have.

Stated hypothetically, I cannot reasonably suggest that an acquaintance of mine (call him “Bob”) can have a gun, while simultaneously requiring that another acquaintance (call him “Rob”) cannot be armed. What is different about the police, and who made it so? Bob, Rob, and I are of the same species, sharing the same natural rights and privileges, and endowed with the same frailties. Only mysticism or irrationality can justify my elevation of one or the other to a status that we each cannot obtain on our own. (As an aside, some may recognize this quality of anarchy as a direct — but somewhat simplified — restatement of the concept of universalizability.) Whatever one prefers to call it, the same conclusion can be drawn.

3. The opportunity cost for violence remains appropriate.

When a criminal knows his victims are unarmed, his opportunity cost for violence is artificially lowered. Furthermore, and maybe more importantly, when those ostensibly authorized to “serve and protect” know that they — and only they — can inflict “lawful” violence upon others, they have a tendency to overreact when faced with a choice to use violence. Each time we hear about a citizen being shot multiple times by groups of police, or policemen actually breaking the law by selling drugs or other contraband, this truism is fully illustrated. Yet, when no one has an advantage — and generally only then — everyone is enticed to act accordingly.

When I was a kid, although there were occasional fights, most of them amounted only to shoving matches. Often, even the most ardent emotional dispute would end up with two kids staring each other down face-to-face and nothing more. Thinking back upon these “interactions,” the simple wisdom of one of our sayings about them strikes me. We would often say to anyone watching one of these staring matches, “One of them is scared and the other one is glad of it!” That, sports fans, is the essence of appropriate opportunity cost. Basic logic dictates: if you know you're going to have to pay for the aggression, you are generally slower to take part in it.

Anyone who thinks the opportunity costs for criminals looking to act out violently in Chicago is not reduced by widespread citizen disarmament is sadly, and cataclysmically, mistaken. (If recent biting essays from Will Grigg on the tendency of law givers to infringe upon their subjects don't convince you that opportunity costs, not only for criminals, but also ostensive law-enforcers, affect behavior, I don't know what will.)

A Psychological Perspective and a Historical One

When a buddy of mine read the essay from which the above three points were taken, he remarked to me that the terminology, "fog of war," made him uncomfortable. Thinking of our society as a place where war between citizens is a constant possibility should make one uncomfortable. Here's the important point, stated as an equation: Being Armed <> Being Violent. Being armed is not equivalent to being violent. In fact, exactly the opposite is true of the vast majority of citizens. However, and this is where it gets dicey, those who wish to infringe don't really care that much about being peaceful. Quoting myself from yet another essay on the Right to Bear Arms:

Have you ever met a bully? Almost everyone can remember that kid back in high school who took advantage of the nerds and/or the weaker kids. Generally, he was bigger, but not surprisingly — if you understand his pathology — this guy never accosted the kids who could readily defend themselves. Why? Bullies are cowards…Gun-free zones — and any other places where people are known to be less able (or less willing) to defend themselves — tend to attract bullies and/or psychos.

No one should be worried about peaceful citizens becoming psychotic Rambo-clones the instant they obtain a gun — at least no one who rationally thinks about this. Everyone should be concerned about losers who want to infringe upon you knowing they can do so without the threat of specific, immediate, response. (As bad as it might sound, I wonder if Derrion Albert would still be alive today if he had been toting a burner. We'll never know.) One more example from history seems appropriate. This comes from a Wikipedia article on United States v. Cruikshank. To wit:

On Easter Day 1873, an armed white militia attacked Republican freedmen who had gathered at the Colfax, Louisiana courthouse to protect it from a Democratic takeover. Although some of the blacks were armed and initially defended themselves, estimates were that 100–280 were killed, most of them following surrender, and 50 were being held prisoner that night.

In the aftermath of the massacre, two of the shooters were indicted. (Two? Sure, the law can protect a brother!) After a series of appeals and all the normal constitutional grandstanding and precise reading, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions. Furthermore, the Court ruled, essentially, that the laws of the nation did not apply in the case of individuals infringing upon one another. Quoting directly, “The fourteenth amendment prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another.” I actually agree with that statement. What troubles me, however, is how that ruling was used to allow for paramilitary groups to attack blacks with impunity. Returning to the article, we find:

In the short term, blacks in the South were left to the mercy of increasingly hostile state governments, who did little to protect them…The Cruikshank case effectively enabled political parties’ use of paramilitary forces.

Conclusion

I don't want to shoot anyone, and, honestly, I never have. I agree wholeheartedly with whoever first uttered the powerful phrase, "There is no way to peace; peace is the way." I don't expect that many who are reading this essay feel differently. That said, when and if someone attempted to infringe directly upon me, I suspect I'd feel way better being able to defend myself versus having the legislature (or the cops) on speed dial. Your safety and freedom is your responsibility. It always was. It always will be. This sentiment is expressed more eloquently in a piece entitled, "76 Reasons to Have a Gun" with "a right exercised is a right retained." Those who endeavor to take the ability to defend that safety and freedom away from you do not have your best interests at heart. They never did.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

~ Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City

"Plax Burress gets two years in jail for shooting himself and Charles Augusto is a hero for shooting somebody else. What a country!"

~ Facebook Status

I almost didn't submit this piece. Besides, LRC's own Johnny Kramer already summed up my feelings with an essay published during the time of the initial public discourse on the issue. This quote from his essay is absolute money:

To summarize, Burress is being prosecuted not for damaging another person’s body or property, for which that person has filed a complaint, seeking restitution and/or damages; he’s being prosecuted for not having a permission slip from the State to carry his own property. And the people who helped him get medical treatment are being threatened for not turning Burress in to the State for not having a permission slip and because the piece of his property, for which he didn’t have a permission slip, involved in the victimless incident happened to be a gun; and for not cooperating with the State, once the non-crime came to its attention, in helping it gather evidence to prosecute Burress for the non-crime, and possibly to prosecute them for their involvement in the non-crime too.

Exactly.

Little more need be said. And if you need more, Kramer and others already said much of it. (Despite that admission, I could not help but offer my own thoughts recently on the LRCBlog, with "Shoot Them, You Win. Shoot You, You Lose.") Now that Burress has been sentenced, it seems appropriate to revisit the case, not because there are new truths from a libertarian and moral perspective, but because it still incenses me for this man to be going to jail — a place rightly reserved for evil people who have infringed upon others directly — for a crime that is, at best, man-made and at worst, non-existent. One of my anarchist friends may have said it best with, "from a libertarian perspective, Burress going to jail for what he did is an Orwellian nightmare of the highest order."

Another reason I feel so compelled to again chime in on this issue involves the racial component, particularly as it resonates in combination with the fact that Burress is a professional athlete. The final reason I feel compelled to pontificate as Plaxico is sent to Riker's Island has to do with this opinion, which I believe to be fact: Everyone should be armed if they so desire, not just athletes. Burress being armed represents neither the exception nor the rule.

What Part of "Self Defense" Don't You Understand?

Some time ago, black sports reporter and pundit Stephen A. Smith voiced a commentary on ESPN that fit well with the typical reaction to an event like Burress shooting himself. For example, Smith voiced his extreme disappointment with black athletes who seem to not understand that they cannot misbehave without consequence. In this regard, I agree with him, largely. There are consequences for behavior. All people, be they professional athletes, politicians, or run-of-the-mill citizens should realize this. However, this event is not about bad behavior — not in the slightest. From the libertarian and more importantly, from the moral standpoint, Plaxico Burress did nothing wrong. He injured himself with his own property. Let that sink in for a moment.

Charles Augusto also discharged an illegal firearm, actually killing several people, on purpose. He was rightfully defending himself, but it’s still incredibly similar. (For the record, my heart does not bleed for the rights-infringers Augusto shot.) I suspect that Plax wanted to avoid the fates of Darrent Williams and Sean Taylor, both NFL players, both shot by others (one of them, Taylor, in his own home). Plaxico Burress felt he had to protect himself — and he had data that suggested such a step was prudent — so he carried a gun. The Constitution affirms this right; it does not grant it. As such, the City of New York cannot take it away.

One last bit of context is worth noting. Burress went through the metal detectors that are, as far as I know, relatively standard in night clubs such as the one he visited. His gun was found by security. They let him through with it. Let that sink in too. (Apparently, the people tasked with keeping the club safe also realized that Plaxico was not out of line to be carrying a burner!) Yet, somehow, the DA can throw the book at him for not having an appropriate permission slip. If the owners of the property, or their representatives, didn't care, who is the complainant?

The mind reels.

Roger Goodell, Commissioner of the NFL was quoted as saying, "if you're in a place where you suspect you need to protect yourself, you should leave that situation." This initially might appear to be a fine, if tragically simplistic, motherhood statement. Under scrutiny, such a sentiment is ludicrous to the point of hilarity. Apparently, Commissioner Goodell thinks that only a person in the wrong place will ever need to defend himself. Given that the aforementioned Sean Taylor was killed in his home, I reckon such infantile logic — and I use that term loosely — as employed by Goodell can be placed in its proper context and completely ignored. Where Burress wanted to go, where Burress should have gone, and the fact that he carried a gun are separate issues.

In a truly free society, with a truly free market, one should be rewarded or punished for doing whatever he feels is appropriate, as long as he does not infringe upon the private property of another. The consequences fit the behavior. The Burress case and its resulting punishment reflect a quasi-parenting paradigm that is incessant in the American body politic. This punishment paradigm is antithetical to private property since it is based upon a belief that the State — much like an ignorant, overbearing parent — can do whatever it likes to its subjects, ownership and property be damned. The State owns everything, including you, and can therefore punish as it sees fit.

I have written about this error in logic before, but that such a paradigm continues to exist so virulently is still disturbing. More distressing, it seems that race and status interact to further confuse the issues. I have heard it said that if Burress was either poor or not famous, he wouldn't even have stood trial. I believe this to be the case; and while it saddens me, it does not surprise me. If justice is the goal or the result, why would such an observation be so believable?

Conclusion

This case might not necessarily be about race, but it is definitely about status. The Burress prosecution presented the DA with an opportunity to “make his bones” by pursuing a high-profile, wealthy, dare I say, uppity Negro athlete. (Recall that Eliot Spitzer made his bones pursuing wealthy, uppity Wall Street types.) The DA can’t really pursue Augusto because he’s just a regular guy who the local press has made into a hero. Not so with Burress.

An acquaintance of mine remarked that "Burress deserves to be punished for being stupid. People could have been injured!" Really? That anyone would cheer this outcome is proof that Queen Amidala was right when she noted, "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause." If people can be put in cages for what might have happened, and frankly the U.S. is well along that course, it's just a matter of time before the erstwhile mistakes you made become offenses punishable with jail time. (Wait. Is that the phone ringing? It's probably George Orwell calling to get his 1984 back.) If the Burress case reflects how we view law and order in a just and civil society, the economic ignorance exposed during the current fake health care debate is the least of our worries.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

~ Ben Wallace-Wells, Mother Jones Magazine

For about the tenth time, I admit it. I’m a slow learner. I’ve lamented the drug war lots of times, in lots of places, covering many of the same points. Even in the wake of a recent blog post wherein I noted that education and health care are functioning properly from a statist perspective, I still didn’t realize the truth of the “War on (Some) Drugs” until now.

No, it was only after reading a fascinating article in Mother Jones, from which the quote above is taken, and particularly after deeply drinking of one of the thoughtful comments to that article, that it finally dawned on me: The drug war is working. The comment about which I speak, which I will examine below, was submitted by someone who refers to himself as “Just a guy.” He was responding to another poster who referred to himself as "Johnny Hempseed" whose comments I will also include.

Ironically, Hempseed posited many of the same arguments that I (and others) have vociferously made. They include: that history shows that drug use does not lead to a breakdown of society; that recent evidence in places like Portugal illustrates that legalization does not lead to a dramatic rise in users; that prohibition generates much if not all of the violence so attendant with the drug war. Yada. Yada. Yada.

The initial respondent, "Johnny Hempseed," stated:

There were no thugs, gangs, hoodlums, or guns involved with any drugs before the early 1900′s. They were sold peacefully in apothecaries in cities and off of the back of wagons in rural areas. True, some users of opiates struggled with addiction, but the rate of addiction was virtually the same as it is today. Many church missions offered help to the homeless and drug and alcohol addicted.

He continued:

Until the early 1900′s there was virtually no stigma on cocaine or cannabis use whatsoever. These two medicines were routinely used on infants for things like teething pains or colic or restlessness. Sigmund Freud injected cocaine with a syringe every morning. Babe Ruth and Sandy Koufax were regular cocaine users, as were most professional baseball athletes.

He repeated something I've said a thousand times:

To end the War on Some Drugs we have to realize that the best way to attack every violent drug dealer in the country and simultaneously put them all out of business is to sell cannabis, cocaine, and yes, even heroin, legally in regulated outlets.

He ended with:

Almost every time you hear of a violent killing in the USA it’s because of unresolved commercial drug disputes. A person who can’t call the police is an excellent target for robbery. And these robbers then become targeted for violence, because you can’t sue them or have them prosecuted.

That's great stuff. Heck, he could have written my previous essays and saved me some work! He even used the terminology "war on SOME drugs" which is a personal favorite of mine. For the record, I agree with him in large part. However, "Just a guy" posted something that finally gave me pause. To wit:

That was a very well thought out reply and is the same conclusion that a large portion of our population has reached. Unfortunately however, it’s not about the “War on Drugs” or saving kids or anything else. It’s about profit. Money. The drug war is probably our country’s largest economy. Politicians, judges, lawyers, police officers, deputy sheriffs, jailers, prison guards, social workers, probation and parole officers, a third of the military, Customs, FBI, DEA, IRS, U.S. Marshals. The drug war makes these people's house and car payments at least in part. The drug war is about continuing to expend resources on an issue that will not go away. They’ll never legalize it. There’s too much money to be made fighting it and too many jobs at stake to make it legal. But it is what they should do, they just won’t.

I wish I could say that no one has made these points to me before, but I can’t. (To those respondents who sent me e-mails with similar points, I apologize for being dense.) For some reason, “Just a guy” caught me at a point when the knowledge could seep in. The War on (Some) Drugs is functioning exactly as one should expect, even right down to the racial disparities in enforcement.

It is certainly an unfortunate fact that there are still people who don’t accept the historically-relevant and anti-prohibition, liberty-based arguments. (That so many continue to pettifog about the experience of decriminalization in Portugal simply illustrates the inherent weakness of the argument from effect.) It is equally unfortunate, if somewhat oddly reassuring, that these people’s existence has little to do with the fact that the war on drugs likely won’t end anytime soon, no matter the rhetoric of change we hear or might be convinced to believe in.

While I am convinced (by Hoppe, among others) that the power of the State rests largely on the approval of the masses, history illustrates that a tiny minority with sufficient economic undergirding, implied social authorization, and monopoly of force can exist and flourish despite the fact that the majority seemingly disagrees with them in principal. (Aside: South Africa experienced apartheid for decades while blacks outnumbered whites at least 10-to-1. Similarly, in the U.S. which has a population of over 300 million people, only about 2 million people work for the federal government, excluding the Postal Service. Having "them" outnumbered isn't sufficient to generate change.)

As one should expect from almost any action of the coercive state, the war on drugs has created a teeming caldron of self-interested drug-warrior-bureaucrats, people who benefit both from fighting the war, and just as important, seeing that it does not end. For these people the war on drugs is not only a calling, but an income stream. Worse yet, the drug war has spawned a network of supposedly private enterprises beholden to it. This is an ecosystem — large, well-funded, politically-entrenched — that exists directly as a result of the war on drugs. There is little chance that these people will simply return to normal life or that they would ever wish to do so.

The violence, the power, the control, the money attendant with administering the war on drugs attracted them. The on-going battle keeps them busy and very gainfully employed. From the standpoint of the prison-industrial complex, the drug war has created a virtual cottage industry, and it's a really big cottage, complete with a whole new generation of slaves to work the plantation. The popular narrative — that without valiant drug warriors standing in the gap, drug abuse and crack whores would overwhelm the sacred American family and our way of life — is bogus and has always been so. The lessons of alcohol prohibition in the U.S. and drug decriminalization around the world bear this out. However, the popular narrative does somehow manage to keep many of the people the drug warriors claim to protect confused enough to not see the truth, even if that mattered.

Conclusion

So what is the real message of this essay? And what does praxeology or Austrian economics have to do with it? All too often liberals, conservatives, progressives, and even libertarians are tempted to proclaim that [government program] isn't working. The ostensible facts bear the conclusion out. Free marketers tend to believe that such programs don't work due to the endemic inefficiencies of the State. One could therefore conclude that these programs, complete with the misplaced incentives that undergird them, continue simply due to the inertia inherent in a broken system. Some of that might be true, but the phrase, "cui bono" comes to mind. One should consider that before he concludes that a government boondoggle isn't working. It's working for somebody, or it really wouldn't keep on going…and going…and going.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

~ Discover Magazine, November 2006, "20 Things You Didn't Know About … Elections"

I recently came across a website whereupon a liberal blogger, who evidently was of some formal training since he noted that he was a Ph.D., attempted to attack several economic misunderstandings he believed libertarians have. A portion of his treatise focused upon what he called, "The Fallacy of the Commons." I admit that I was initially very interested in reading his views. (I've heard it said that any interaction with a critic — assuming it is respectful and bidirectional — can benefit everyone's understanding. In retrospect, I'm not so sure — but I digress!)

I figured reading his prose would help me understand, via simple economic logic, what remains in dispute between the ostensible left and libertarians. Given that I'm a former-liberal libertarian, I figure that most liberals are interested in the same things that I was back in my staunch bleeding heart days: Success and happiness for everyone. Any substantive attack of a specific libertarian paradigm should reflect that goal. Simultaneously, and hopefully, any such attack should also reflect logic and reason.

It Helps If One Understands the Market

While I'm willing to assume that the author had good intentions, I found several errors of both logic and basic economics in his piece. Given that even people touted to actually be economists, such as William Stanley Jevons, can draw fallacious conclusions, this is no real surprise. (Some people can be almost completely clueless and still win a Nobel Prize in economics — but again, I digress.) Maybe an analysis of one of the examples used by the blogger noted above — fishing for profit — will prove instructive.

Let us assume that a specific variety of fish generates the most profit. As one might expect, an industry grows up around harvesting this fish for sale. After sufficient time, so goes the theory, depletion of the species occurs due to the pursuit of profit by fishermen. In response to this depletion, fishermen add more boats to their fleets in order to continue to obtain these fish for sale. As an inevitable result (again from the theory), more boats increase fish scarcity — which drives up the price, prompting even more fishing. So concludes the blogger: The market sends a signal exactly opposite to that required to preserve the resource.

I admit that the errors with this logic are not necessarily obvious, even after reading it and hearing it cited several times. What are those errors? The most glaring mistake is that the price mechanism in this example only affects one side of the transaction. This is incorrect for several reasons, but it is effective if one wants to present a skewed and negative view of the market.

First of all, simultaneously with the fishermen realizing that more fish = more profit, the buyers of fish — who are vital to the trade of fish — will also react to the higher prices. The prices will be higher due to either increased demand and/or lowered supply, one of which must happen if depletion is really occurring. In fact, the marginal value of the last few fish might be so high as to preclude the trade of those resources, if the market proceeds without "help" from some well-meaning externality. At some point, even though more fish could generate more profit if they were caught and sold, there would be no buyers (or substantially fewer buyers) at the resultant price point — thus, continuing to sell fish would be the wrong course of action for any vendor to take.

Secondly, the cost of supplying more fish — the cost of production — is not constant. Each additional boat does not have the same cost or the same output as each previous boat. (The daily cost of production varies within each boat, as fish movement patterns, weather, and simple chance effect the day-to-day likelihood of catching fish.) If adding new locations always generates the same profit or even more profit as each previous location, why do businesses ever stop expanding? Examples of businesses failing due to expanding too quickly are plentiful.

Finally, all of these signals are being sent asynchronously — that is, the increased profit for supplying fish in some cases will occur simultaneously with decreased demand for fish whose price is beginning to increase due to decreased supply in other cases. The supply, the demand, and the resulting price points are not static as an equation-based approach to economics might suggest. Catching and serving fish to the folks near the supply will be much cheaper than storing and shipping the fish to distant places. Because of this stratification of supply and demand, even the signals received by local fisherman won't necessarily lead to automatic over-fishing and depletion. The market sends not only the appropriate signal but also the appropriate range of signals versus the singular false signal asserted by the blogger.

What Is the Goal of Preserving the Resource?

One might also debate the use of the term "needed" in the ultimate conclusion proposed by our blogger. Why do these specific fish need to be preserved? Who gets to decide? How do they know? Who should pay because of it? Why? These are not so much economic questions, but moral ones. To have one group impose answers to these questions upon another group requires that the former group has unquestionable moral authority over the latter. This singular authority cannot be established, as the argument from morality informs.

Further, what makes a resource scarce? Isn't the fact that the supply is limited a necessary component of any scarce resource? This scarcity is, in fact, what makes the resource valuable. The term "preserve" hints at our blogger's real goal: He wants the scarce resource to exist at some equilibrium usage point whereby it is used for satisfaction while simultaneously not dipping below some supposed over-use point. How is this over-use point deduced a priori?

Which allocation of the resource is proper and who gets to decide? The allocation of truly scarce resources cannot be effectively accomplished by central planning, as has been effectively communicated time and again by thinkers such as Mises, among others. Without the feedback of true market prices, and the risk of using one's own money, any attempt to preserve a resource will result in guesses at best and unexpected (negative) outcomes at worst. In other words, someone will end up spending $830,000 on a system that gets used by 63 people.

The fallacies that drive such assertions as those by this blogger — and many of the actions of Congress and most recently, President Barack — are insidious. Consider the case of a natural disaster and the resultant need for generators. If the price of generators is allowed to rise uncontrolled in response to new demand, it is almost certain to reach a point high enough that the last few will sit in the store unsold, but they will be available. That is, the generators will not sell out. Further, at that resultant price point, suppliers will be falling all over themselves trying to find more! Conversely, if the price is held low, say with anti-price-gouging laws, it is inevitable that every generator for miles will sell out. The student of Austrian economics knows that none will show up to replace them. (If generators could be supplied at the lower price, there wouldn't be a shortage!)

Consider the example of labor: If wages are allowed to ebb and flow with demand for certain skill levels, everyone who wants a job will get it, since the only two people equipped to judge what the job is worth vis-à-vis the need for income will be allowed to interact directly. Conversely, if a price control — commonly known as a minimum wage in case of labor — is imposed, there will automatically be people unemployable at the wage, as well as jobs that cannot be offered at an appropriately low wage. Those jobs will remain undone as will those people remain unemployed.

Conclusion

If the level of fishing is controlled with the supposed goal of keeping the supply of fish from being depleted, the opposite result of what is intended will likely occur. Instead of eventually responding to the increasing marginal costs of supplying fish that are more and more scarce and deciding to do something different, prospective fisherman will be driven to keep fishing. This is because the marginal cost of acquiring the fish for sale never reaches the point that would exceed the marginal profit of selling the next fish. As Hayek illustrated long ago, the use of knowledge generates exactly the appropriate response, without the impossible task of centrally planning for any of it.

One other point before I leave this fish tale to rot. The blogger also assumes that the fishermen are too dumb to realize that their "Golden Goose" could eventually be in danger. Instead of modifying their behavior — fishing at a specific agreed-to, dare I say, voluntary rate (beginning to farm the fish, etc). — they just power ahead, blindly pursuing profit. Why is it that people like this blogger almost always assume that they, or someone they pick, are smarter than everyone else?

If only that were true.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

I have no interest in even trying to defend Bernie Madoff, but it strikes me as ironic that people are ready to tar and feather him for doing something the U.S. Gubmint has been doing since about 1935.

I wonder, "Why would this guy Madoff, who jilted people via a voluntary choice, be more worthy of condemnation than American Presidents, who routinely kill, enslave, and steal from people using coercion and the threat of violence?" Seriously, if Madoff deserves to be imprisoned and tortured, certainly someone who kills a family he's never met soon after his first day in office deserves similar punishment, no? Interestingly, I'm not the only person who wonders about this aloud, nor is every advocate of freedom in agreement on the issues. I rather think the Madoff case illustrates why libertarian restitution, applied outside the realm of security and patrol, is a best-case solution, but that is for another essay.

In many cases, among both the intelligentsia and the proletariat, whenever the discussion turns to politics, people display a partisan bias. In response to a few of my essays, respondents have even accused me of being a partisan. (No one ever said reading comprehension was a prerequisite for sending a random e-mail to some guy you found on the Internet.) As a market anarchist, I take no stock in any political party, mainstream or otherwise. I've stated as much more than a few times, starting with my very first essay ever, and continuing up through my "Is It Wrong If I Just Don't Care?" rant, and beyond.

Does either party have a premium on liberty? No. I agree with those who call for plumb-line libertarianism — neither left nor right. (While I am all for big-tentism between various "varieties" of libertarianism, no one should mistake neoconism for a flavor of libertarianism.) I often get a question, intended to be a straw man, when people find out that I feel this way, which is: "You're not saying that it doesn't matter if [place name of politician A here] is president versus [place name of politician B here], are you?" Yes, that is exactly what I'm saying. In terms of the major freedom issues, it doesn't matter worth a large pile of rat excrement which party produces the President of the United States. (In fact, this is what renders voting such a colossal waste of time.)

As an exercise, I began to examine previous American presidents to see if even one of them was free of rancid, oily, anti-freedom residue. The task was daunting, and I didn't finish it. Along the way however, I discovered a few interesting tidbits. For instance, from an interesting paper on the National Debt, I got:

For the mathematically inclined, if you take the first derivative of the data presented to find the slope of each President's debt increase, you will find that the Republican slopes are consistently more positive than the Democratic slopes.  For everyone else, this just means that unbiased mathematical proof exists to support the claim that since 1945, Republican presidents have borrowed more than Democratic presidents regardless of the inflation rate.

Ouch. The GOP, the supposed "party of small government" spends more money. Who knew? (Actually, who didn't know?) Further along in the same study, I found another interesting tidbit about Andrew Jackson:

Jackson did not believe in debt, or banks for that matter, and he made a real effort to eliminate all federal debt.  He got it down to $18,000 (or somewhere thereabouts) just before leaving office.

So "Old Hickory" was none too fond of debt. He also wasn't that much of a champion of freedom, given his stances on nullification — secession — and the forceful removal of Indians. (I admit it. I'm still a little shaky on how one can "discover" land with people already living on it.) Jackson's specific foibles aside, if holders of the highest office in a land supposedly founded upon the ideals of freedom do not exemplify a belief in freedom, it pretty much means that the late, great Harry Brown was right when he said, "Government doesn't work."

Author Ivan Eland, of the Independent Institute, has written a book entitled "Recarving Rushmore" which examines each U.S. president vis-à-vis the level of success each had in advancing the causes of peace, prosperity, and liberty. I certainly won't duplicate Eland's excellent scholarship in this essay, but this essay represents my own attempt to analyze selected presidents spanning the entire history of the presidency in the U.S. using a similar rubric. As an aside, based upon a wonderful long-format interview I was lucky enough to see, Eland rates John Tyler, Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Chester A. Arthur as the best presidents of the U.S., due to their stances and accomplishments in maintaining a limited government, operating via a restrained executive branch and maintaining a restrained foreign policy.

I focused on some of the mistakes of the plethora of not-so-great presidents, of which there are many to choose. (I might debate the existence of any good president, but since I'm an anarchist, that's no real surprise!)

Note: My sincere thanks to posters at the FreedomainRadio.com Forums for their help on this table.

Selected Presidents of the United States of America and Samples of Their Legacies against Freedom

#

President

Took Office

Left Office

Legacy Against Liberty

Party

Vice Pres.

Term

1

George Washington

April 30, 1789

March 4, 1797

• Quelled the Whiskey Rebellion via armed troops.

No Party

John Adams

1

2

2

John Adams

March 4, 1797

March 4, 1801

• Signed the Alien and Sedition Act.

Federalist

Thomas Jefferson

3

3

Thomas Jefferson

March 4, 1801

March 4, 1809

• Won the presidency directly by virtue of owning a lot of slaves.
• Imposed draconian embargo and enforced it via martial law.
• Prosecuted more people under the Alien and Sedition Act than John Adams.

Democratic-Republican

Aaron Burr

4

George Clinton

5

Notes: The first three presidents of the United States of America infringed upon their "subjects" in ways that were antithetical to the powerful words of document(s) they actually conceived and signed. A revolutionary leader like John Adams somehow decides that it makes sense to jail people for speaking out? Come on. Jefferson, who Eland rightfully calls "a towering intellect," jailed more people with the Alien and Sedition Act — a piece of legislation he did not originally support — than did Adams.

#

President

Took Office

Left Office

Legacy Against Liberty

Party

Vice Pres.

Term

16

Abraham Lincoln

March 4, 1861

April 15, 1865[4]

• Authorized military conscription, while authorizing the rich to avoid draft via cash payments.
• Sent troops into NY City to enforce the draft.
• Authorized the printing of 1st U.S. fiat currency.
• Effectively removed secession as a relevant possibility via the Civil War.

Republican
National Union[5]

Hannibal Hamlin

19

Andrew Johnson

20

Notes: A lot has been written about Lincoln. Of all the U.S. presidents, he seems to generate the most heat. While I am certainly no fan, I am somewhat persuaded by this examination of the facts. It might be that I maintain no romantic view of the Confederacy. Given that Lincoln was himself a white supremacist, I've no love for him either. (Among his "legacies" not mentioned above, he promised the South that it could keep its slaves if it surrendered within 100 days of the remarkably mis-named Emancipation Proclamation. What a leader!)

28

Woodrow Wilson

March 4, 1913

March 4, 1921

• Authorized the creation of the Federal Reserve.
• Authorized the U.S. entry into WWI.
• Signed the Internal Revenue Act, which led to the modern personal income tax.
• Mobilized the U.S. economy for wartime, leading to the Military-Industrial Complex.
• Spearheaded the creation of the League of Nations via actions that eventually led to the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia.
• Signed the Espionage Act.

Democratic

Thomas Marshall

32

33

Notes: For a president who does not seem to get a lot of mention, Wilson seems to have set the table for an alarming loss of future freedom. The creation of the Federal Reserve alone deserves its own essay.

32

Franklin D. Roosevelt

March 4, 1933

April 12, 1945[1]

• Spearheaded economic policies that led to the Great Depression.
• Established The New Deal social programs.
• Authorized the U.S. entry into WWII.
• Authorized the bombing of Dresden.
• Set up Japanese internment camps in the U.S.
• Created the Tennessee Valley Authority, which led to nationalization of utilities.

Democratic

John Garner

37

38

Henry Wallace

39

Harry S. Truman

40

33

Harry S. Truman

April 12, 1945

January 20, 1953

• Authorized the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasake.
• Authorized the formation of the National Security Agency (NSA).
• Signed the War Powers Act which led to the formation of the War Finance Corporation, and later the Small Business Administration (SBA).

Democratic

vacant

Alben Barkley

41

Hubert Humphrey

45

Notes: FDR and Truman seem to get a lot of positive spin from those who ascribe to a liberal point of view. Given that the Great Society hurt poor people more than any single presidential act that seems rather misguided. In contrast, the acts of murder from the dropping of the atomic bomb cannot be misinterpreted.

37

Richard Nixon

January 20, 1969

August 9, 1974[2]

• Ended the gold standard.
• Started the war on (some) drugs.
• Continued CIA intervention in Chile's internal affairs.
• Continued interventions in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Republican

Spiro Agnew

46

Spiro Agnew[2]
vacant
Gerald Ford

47

Notes: Few bad decisions have had a more sweeping negative financial effect than the removal of the gold standard, although other decisions made around 1980 do seem to have really gotten the ball really rolling.

39

Jimmy Carter

January 20, 1977

January 20, 1981

• Instituted gasoline price controls, leading to a massive gasoline shortage.
• Authorized funding of the Mujahedeen.
• Signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
• Signed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).

Democratic

Walter Mondale

48

40

Ronald Reagan

January 20, 1981

January 20, 1989

• Promoted economic policies that deepened the chasm between ends of the socio-economic spectrum.
• Increased funding of the Mujahedeen.
• Contravened the Boland Amendment by laundering money from the sale of arms to fund his own private war — the Iran Contra Scandal.
• Doubled the size of the U.S. Federal Government.
• Got into bed with Osama bin Laden.

Republican

George H. W. Bush

49

50

41

George H. W. Bush

January 20, 1989

January 20, 1993

• Deepened U.S. involvement with Osama bin Laden.
• Authorized Gulf War I.
• Further increased the size of the U.S. Federal Government.

Republican

Dan Quayle

51

42

Bill Clinton

January 20, 1993

January 20, 2001

• Sponsored sanctions against Iraq.
• Authorized the Battle of Mogudishu.

Democratic

Al Gore

52

53

43

George W. Bush

January 20, 2001

January 20, 2009

• Signed the USAPatriot Act.
• Started the Iraq War.
• Authorized the invasion of Afghanistan.
• Further increased the size of the U.S. Federal Government.
• Committed a plethora of impeachable crimes.

Republican

Dick Cheney

54

55

Whole treatises could be written about the follies launched into history by George II. The guy generated his own impeach-Bush movement. Giving such a monumentally un-gifted man a larger entry seems wrong though. It also seems, if his First 100 Days are any indication, that Bush the Second's successor, President Barack, might enter into an almost Reaganesque realm with his combination of spending and contributions to liberty such as indefinite detention. I'll leave enhancing the entries of Clinton and Bush II, as well as creating an entry for President Barack as an exercise for the reader.

The bolded items in my table represent broad categories whose ramifications resonate today.

Fiat Currency

Few tools provide the State with power it should not have better than the ability to print money. Without fiat currency, long-term war is almost impossible. Without fiat currency, government debt is small, and generally must remain manageable, i.e., collateralized with something, even if it grows. In the case of the Civil War, all the fiat currency used to pay for it was retired after the war ended, but without that money, the war likely could not have been nearly as destructive. As I've noted, the debasement of currency for the benefit of the State dates back at least to Roman times. Fiat currency represents the most thorough debasement of the currency, since fiat currency is worth nothing. (If debasement is what one is after, you can't do much better than that!)

The Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve deserves its own essay. For a wonderful, if troubling study of this subject, I endorse G. Edward Griffin's "The Creature from Jekyll Island" heartily. For now, this simplistic explanation should suffice. The Federal Reserve is not that much more "federal" than Federal Express. It is simply a quasi-private central bank, run primarily by a presidentially-appointed board of governors. According to Wiki, a central bank has as its primary responsibilities: to maintain the stability of the national currency and money supply, with more active duties including controlling subsidized-loan interest rates, and acting as a lender of last resort to the banking sector during times of financial crisis (private banks often being integral to the national financial system). Given that the U.S. dollar has lost well over 90% of its value due to the inflation that is an inexorable result of central banking, I'd say stability has not been achieved. Wealth transfer, well, that has been achieved!

War

In another essay, I noted the folly of war when I said:

Governments exist to make war. They always have. This is because war is a racket. Standing armies, which are remarkably misnamed, are the realization of the fact that without professional soldiers, wars are often quick and indecisive or long and ridiculous. (That is, states can still fight, but it's not really that, well, satisfying and the wars can fizzle out due to simple logistics like running out of ammo or food, or having to tend the crops.) With professional soldiers employed by a highly-developed state, the cost of supplying them, feeding them, and housing them can be off-loaded to others. This makes it possible to invade and conquer distant lands and make “efficient” war, i.e., kill a lot of people very quickly. Best of all, the profits can still be absorbed by the war-racketeers.

That sums it up. The war racketeers have been milking the U.S. cow for years.

The Nanny State

Few things upset me more than bureaucratic paternalism masquerading as genuine concern. I've noted the insanity of statist authority paradigms in other places. As I noted, C.S. Lewis was prescient when he said:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.  The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

If the supposedly-omnipotent moral busybodies would simply mind their own business, we'd all be happier. We would also slow the apparently inexorable movement toward becoming a nation of criminals.

Conclusion

Given what one can see in my (admittedly incomplete) table, it seems pretty clear that U.S. presidents are not really champions of freedom and liberty. Since they occupy the highest office in the land — a position of power in the coercive state — this should come as no surprise. What is more troubling is the continued persistent belief that the next guy (or gal) elected to the position will somehow transcend the forty-plus year history of mediocrity, lying, infringements upon freedom, state-authorized theft, and murder of any foreign person with the gall to actually not like it when we show up with guns to teach them all about democracy. I've heard it said that quitters never win and winners never quit, but never winning while never quitting seems rather stupid.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

The Best of Wilton D. Alston

~ Bertrand Russell

Well, that didn’t take long.

In the first official bill signing of his administration, President Barack Obama struck a blow for the equality of all workers! Or at least that’s what he (and I reckon his supporters) think he did. There is much to discuss with regard to this issue, and I’ll get to that, but before I do, I think I better head off some knee-jerk reactions that this essay might generate.

No, I’m not a Republican, and even though House Republicans sought to block this bill, I am under no illusion that many of them have even a faint clue. (Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.)

No, I’m not of the opinion that men and women should be paid differently for the same work, but frankly, that’s not my decision to make. Given that value is subjective, I am not even sure what the term, "the same work" even means. (I will cover both of these issues below.)

What Is Important versus What Is Not

If anyone needed indication that many of the House Republicans who opposed this bill were just as clueless as many of the House Democrats who supported it, this quote should mitigate that confusion.

Read the rest of the article

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

Wilton D. Alston Archives

According to the more-than-occasionally-correct Wikipedia:

Predatory lending is a pejorative term used to describe practices of some lenders. There are no legal definitions in the United States for predatory lending, though there are laws against many of the specific practices commonly identified as predatory, and various federal agencies use the term as a catch-all term for many specific illegal activities in the loan industry.

One less contentious definition of the term is "the practice of a lender deceptively convincing borrowers to agree to unfair and abusive loan terms, or systematically violating those terms in ways that make it difficult for the borrower to defend against." Other types of lending sometimes also referred to as predatory include payday loans, credit cards or other forms of consumer debt, and overdraft loans, when the interest rates are considered unreasonably high. Although predatory lenders are most likely to target the less educated, racial minorities and the elderly, victims of predatory lending are represented across all demographics.

I have no real dispute with much of this. What troubles me, however, is the presumption that the State must protect certain people from taking out a loan that they themselves are seeking in the first place! I rather think predatory lending is when the taxpayer lends the government money to finance the clean-up of a malady that government policy caused. (Actually, in that case lending is a bogus description. That scenario sounds more like theft.) But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

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Sixty-three percent of people polled believe that ATM fees are a bigger waste of money than lottery tickets. Thirty-seven percent believe the reverse.

~ Compass Bank survey, reported in "USA Snapshots" in USA Today

Just when I think economic literacy cannot descend to a lower level, I come across a tidbit like the one above from USA Today. (Consider: With ATM fees you're paying voluntarily for a service you receive. With lottery tickets you're paying voluntarily for, well, nothing!) It's at times like these that I have no doubt that monumentally stupid ideas, like a bailout for the Big Three automakers, will get approved by the U.S. Congress. Certainly, the fact that Congress isn't spending its own money plays a part. Certainly, it makes perfect sense for an automaker to ask the government for money, since that well has been tapped before, despite the lunacy of such an action.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

Okay, so let me get this straight. The Big Three Automakers — General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler — are in financial trouble. This trouble is a result of [basically] not being able to sell the products they make in a high enough volume to generate revenue that is greater than or equal to their expenses. Ergo, they are losing money. (They are losing lots of money.) If they keep losing money, one or more of these manufactures will have to declare bankruptcy or go out of business, which could lead to hundreds of thousands of direct job losses. The failure of any or all of these firms could also lead to a substantial number of indirect job losses, as domino effects among their suppliers, many of whom depend upon the automotive industry, cause those suppliers to also go out of business.

I don't think my synopsis is unfair or misses any significant points. I also won't argue with the possible negative outcome(s). I have little doubt that many thousands of normal, law-abiding citizens could lose their primary incomes from a crash-and-burn scenario in the U.S. automotive industry. (The best and brightest of any of the Big Three could also end up at a competitor, making even more money!)

First of all, any displaced worker won't be displaced forever, if at all. Secondly, when a business is not meeting the needs of its clientele or when that business is mismanaged, it is supposed to go out of business. This is what makes way for another business. Thirdly, I'd argue that keeping a bad business operating via State coercion, causes new businesses to be excluded from or limited in penetration of the market. (I'll talk about this technological and/or market exclusion, from which I think the Big Three massively benefit, later.)

Have a Heart!

One could debate this issue via all manner of economic logic, and maybe I'll get to that later, but let's examine this situation morally first. Is it the responsibility of the U.S. taxpayer to make sure these automakers remain solvent? No. Is it the responsibility of the U.S. taxpayer to make sure that people who work for the Big Three keep working? No. Is it the fault of the U.S. taxpayer that the Big Three are currently insolvent? Yes, partially. (That's not a misprint.) Taxpayers comprise the market and, of course, it is a market response that causes firms like GM to be losing money. GM is selling stuff that people don't want to buy, for whatever reason and so, few buy. GM is supposed to be losing money! Until and unless the U.S. automakers manage themselves in a way that: a) creates products that people want to buy and b) at a price that supports the expenses of the business, they should lose money. That's the choice that the market is destined to make, unless the government intervenes and screws things up. (Yes, other issues are at play here, some of them further exacerbated by the State, but the bottom line is: A business is beholden to its customers, not the other way around.)

If the choices made by customers eventually cause a lot of people, people who previously made a good living dependent upon that business, to lose their income, those are simply the breaks. Furthermore, this contraction is necessary for a healthy economic future. (Peter Schiff covers this situation in wonderful detail in a recent LRC podcast.) No customer is bound by any moral responsibility to buy from a particular vendor, no matter the eventual recipient of the profit that business generates.

Stealing Money and the Future Along with It

As I noted above, the debate about bailing out the automakers has both a moral component and an economic component. One portion of the economic argument that I fear will get far too little emphasis is what I termed above as technological and/or market exclusion. This is in my view, the biggest unintended negative consequence when the State keeps a bad business afloat. Consider these points, made by Bart Frazier in a recent FEE column:

Think of what it was like 500 years ago. Plumbing was almost nonexistent. We burned trees for fuel or cut them up to make homes. Our transportation was defecating in the streets.

Frazier continues:

We now heat our homes in an immensely cleaner fashion. There is now more forest in Vermont than there was 100 years ago. Natural gas is incomparably cleaner than energy obtained from burning wood and coal. Who could have predicted the natural gas furnace 100 years ago? Who could have foreseen the advent of hybrid vehicles? The free market has ways to alleviate social ills in the future in ways that are utterly inconceivable to us now.

My point and I'm certain I'm not the first to make it, is this. When the State keeps a poorly-run or inefficient enterprise running, it negatively affects the probability of some better approach gaining ground. When so much of the technological know-how that could be applied to new approaches is soaked up keeping a poor one running, we all lose. Simply put, it is as Manuel Ayau opines in his wonderful monograph "Not A Zero-Sum Game": "Had we achieved job security in the Stone Ages, we would still live in caves."

All Hail the Paradigm Pioneer

To examine this phenomenon more deeply, I'll need to dig into the archives. Joel Barker, in his 1993 book, "Paradigms: the Business of Discovering the Future" suggested that all paradigms have a lifespan that follows an "S-Curve," a picture of which I show below.

A paradigm, using Barker's nomenclature, represents an approach to solving a set of problems. It can be a complicated methodology or a simple one. It could encompass whole industries, or it could apply to particular competitors in a specific industry. For example, how the Big Three approach the manufacture and sale of automobiles is a paradigm. The internal combustion engine represents a vital construct in that paradigm. According to Barker, paradigms are developed by people who are willing to take risks — "paradigm pioneers" — he calls them.

In the early days of a paradigm, immediately following its initial development — shown as Phase A — problems are solved at a modest, yet ever-increasing rate, until the paradigm reaches maturity. Generally there are few people or firms applying the paradigm during the development stage. It is unproven and frankly, the old ways of solving problems have a "stickiness" to which I'll return later. Recall that the car and internal combustion engine did not immediately supplant the horse and buggy.

At full maturity — shown as Phase B — more and more people or firms have successfully adopted the paradigm. By this point, massive numbers of problems are being solved relatively quickly. (And correspondingly from an economic perspective, massive profit is being generated, with all the commensurate lifestyles improvements as a consequence.) For example, the horse and buggy eventually lost all market share to firms manufacturing cars, and society was socio-economically massively better as a result.

It is during Phase B, which can be quite long, that more and more entities apply the initial paradigm in new ways and improve it incrementally. In Barker's parlance, people who adopt this proven paradigm are "paradigm settlers" and they reap the rewards of the paradigm pioneer's risk, while not incurring much, if any, of that risk themselves. It makes sense to copy a successful approach versus invent one. While Henry Ford can be credited with mass producing the first automobile, it didn't take long for lots of people to duplicate his approach, i.e., apply his paradigm, and for many ancillary industries to grow up around the automotive industry. Note that the operations of the Big Three differ from those of say, Honda or Toyota. They each apply the automotive manufacturing paradigm in unique ways.

You Gotta Know When to Fold 'Em

Eventually, a paradigm begins to get stale — depicted by Phase C — and fewer and fewer new problems are solved. Stated differently, and again returning to Barker's premises, problems that the original paradigm did not solve, or that have been discovered during its implementation, collect during the entire life of the paradigm and eventually begin to cry out for a new solution. It is inherent in the existing paradigm that these problems cannot be solved by it. Unfortunately, those who have mastered (and benefit from) an existing paradigm are reticent to abandon it for something new. (This is the stickiness of which I previously spoke.) There is risk. There is likelihood of failure as new ideas vie for supremacy. The current approach is making money! Market share is strong. Stock price is high. Why rock the boat?

Despite the attractiveness of continuing to "dance with the girl you brought" visionaries and entrepreneurs will eventually seek new approaches to solving the collecting problems. This is fortunate, because simultaneously, any sufficiently mature paradigm will eventually be old enough that it could fail suddenly. (As well, the effects of the problems that collect during the useful life of a paradigm will eventually become substantial.) Paradigms, particularly technological management paradigms, have a natural life and will therefore eventually need to be replaced. The struggles of the Big Three automakers — particularly when juxtaposed against the success of Honda, Toyota, etc. — illustrates that their paradigm has gotten stale. The march of progress is unending, and must be so for a society to continue to enjoy an ever-higher standard of living.

That is, unless there is interference from without. You guessed it; this is where the State comes in, generally to bailout those who are still riding an old, stale paradigm for all it's worth. New paradigms can also be squelched if those applying an existing competing paradigm can successfully mitigate the threat the new approach poses. Most firms do this via actions like negative advertising, or, in the case of both the automakers and large firms like Microsoft, actual purchase of the competing idea. If a firm is financially strong enough to do this, so be it. The customer is still able to decide for himself, most of the time, unless the State controls access to the market.

Conclusion

Do you ever wonder why all those exciting concept cars — flying vehicles and other whatnottery — ideas conceived and presented decades ago, never seem to hit the market? Me too. Yes, I understand that technological probability will almost always lag behind artistic possibility. Still, I suspect that Manuel Ayau's truism about the Stone Ages applies equally well to this discussion. If the horse-and-buggy manufacturers had been bailed out, we'd probably still be cleaning up behind our transportation. Maybe I'm being unfair, and maybe the Big Three have applied themselves aggressively to the seemingly interminable problems of engine efficiency, gas mileage, etc. but I wonder. The entire environment that supports, not only the types of cars we now drive, but also, where we drive them and how we drive them, is rife with statist intervention. And yet, these iconic car manufacturers need more help from the State? You're kidding, right?

Again, I ask a simple question: If the Big Three's paradigm appears to be reaching the end of its useful life, why shouldn't one or all of them go out of business? If the government swoops in — toting a gargantuan bag of stolen money — is it more likely to drive these automakers (pardon the pun) to solve old problems in new ways or allow them to keep on milking the same old cow? The answer seems obvious to me. Even more obvious is this: The Big Three struggle while other automakers make money. Says Cato's Daniel J. Ikenson:

…the car industry itself is not in crisis. Even if one or all of the Big Three failed, there would still be plenty of strong auto companies operating throughout the United States. The Big Three currently account for slightly more than half of all light vehicle production and slightly less than half of all light vehicle sales in the United States.

I read a great quote in a recent Casey Research Update. It comes from GATA’s secretary treasurer, Chris Powell, who says, "There are no markets anymore, only interventions." That certainly seems to be the case in the U.S. The unfortunate thing is, the average (read: non-Austrian-trained) citizen and the statist economic pundits who mislead him all seem to think we do have a free market. Worse yet, they think that it is a failure of that market that causes GM and its cohort to need a ton of stolen money to survive.

At the risk of seemingly harsh, I can only offer one answer to such an assertion: B.S. (As an interesting aside, one entrepreneur who would appear to know of what he speaks, particularly when it comes to the automotive industry, agrees with me!)

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

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"Deficits and a mounting debt, therefore, are a growing and intolerable burden on the society and economy, both because they raise the tax burden and increasingly drain resources from the productive to the parasitic, counterproductive, “public” sector. Moreover, whenever deficits are financed by expanding bank credit – in other words, by creating new money – matters become still worse, since credit inflation creates permanent and rising price inflation as well as waves of boom-bust u2018business cycles.'"

~ Murray N. Rothbard "Repudiating the National Debt"

As I did the research for another essay, I came across some interesting data regarding the changes in real wages that seemed to begin in approximately 1980. Just for grins, I dug up more data on income, courtesy of the Economic Policy Institute, and analyzed it, creating the charts below. The first chart below shows the median family income in the U.S. from 1966 through 2003, in 2003 dollars. (Only the data up to 2003 was available.)

This chart shows what I would predict based upon my impression of the goal and purpose of the Federal Reserve. While my impression may be incorrect, one conclusion still seems obvious: A massive transfer in real wealth from the lower quintiles to the richest quintile seemed to begin in approximately 1980, at least according to this measure. The chart below, which was generated from the same data, shows average percentage increases in real wages from 1966 wages for each quintile.

Up until about 1980, the growth in real wages across economic classes seemed relatively uniform, that is, enjoyed by everyone. Thereafter, one can see that the growth in wages is skewed toward the upper income levels. In my view, this skewing exemplifies the transfer of wealth driven by inflation (and increased national debt) and to whom that money flows. That transfer continues today. My suspicion: The State, via the Federal Reserve, is the facilitator of that transfer. (I'm not alone in my suspicion, as a recent LRC podcast seems to indicate.) It strikes me as curiously ironic that the Monetary Control Act, which gave the Fed much broader powers, including the power to "monetize" sub-prime mortgages, was passed in 1980. Again, while I am certainly no economist and therefore cannot draw a firm conclusion, my suspicions are strong.

Either way the result is rather obvious. That result is the widening gap between the proverbial ends of the income spectrum that seemed to accelerate beginning around 1980. According to a well-researched and fascinating presentation on the economy by Chris Martenson, entitled, "The Crash Course," the Greek philosopher Plutarch stated, "An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics." That this imbalance seems to be ever widening in the current U.S. society should be, in my view, cause for concern, no matter the amount of debt. This is not because it is inherently bad for some to be more proficient at making money than others. Differences in performance are both normal and expected. However, when the State facilitates that difference well, "Houston, we have a problem!" (FYI, Jim Davies has a wonderful essay that explains some of the caveats of the Crash Course, one of which is its Malthusian point-of-view. Davies' essay very worthwhile; nearing required reading in my view.)

Make no mistake; the production of fiat money by a central banking scheme drives much of this widening gap between the ends of the socio-economic food chain. Libertarian philosopher and Austrian economist Roderick Long explains:

When the central bank creates money, the new money doesn't propagate throughout the economy instantaneously; some sectors get the new money first, while they're still facing the old, lower prices, while other sectors get the new money last, after they've already begun facing the higher prices. The result of such "Cantillon effects" is not only a systematic redistribution of wealth from those less to those more favoured by the banking-government complex, but an artificial stimulation of certain sectors of the economy, making them look more inherently profitable than they are and so directing economically unjustified levels of investment toward them.

Speaking of debt, how has that changed since 1980? The graph below, taken from zFacts.com and modified just slightly, shows national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, with the president at the time thrown in for fun.

While correlation is not necessarily causation, it certainly seems like the creation of a mountain of debt fits with the beginning of the transfer of wealth from the bottom of the economic food chain to the top. It should be noted, however, that there is a "lag" on the chart above. In other words, the national debt had already turned the corner on an exponential curve before 1980. If total national debt is not the harbinger of wealth transfer, it certainly seems to fit rather nicely, as the graph below, taken from an informative analysis by a gentleman named Steven McGourty seems to illustrate.

It seems clear that by continuing to erect a huge pile of national debt, Reagan, and pretty much every president since, with the exception of Clinton, has successfully strengthened the State's wealth transfer medium. Fleecing the sheeple, while keeping them entertained, dumb, and afraid of bogus threats versus real ones; what a concept! (I have to give it to Slick Willie. While he had a tendency to use The Oval Office for, er, relatively novel pursuits, he apparently understood that out-of-control national debt was not a good thing, per se. Then again, maybe he was just busy with other things!)

Nixon, by unilaterally removing the systematic brake on debt expansion imposed by the Gold Standard, decreased the amount of time necessary for the debt curve to reach its exponential portion. (He really was a crook, only he wasn't alone.) I admit that I haven't a real clue what will happen going forward, but I would bet that it won't be as pleasant as say, a root canal, particularly if that future enjoys the same amount of State control over the money supply as the past. Given that this essay is being penned during U.S. election time, it is also worth noting one other truth. Neither party has any interest in reversing the course the U.S. state has been on since Nixon's time with regard to spending fiat money. (Only the recipients at the margins might change.) In fact, all indications are that spending will accelerate.

Conclusion

I'll end this essay the same way I started it, with Rothbard:

In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to vote for an increase in the statutory limit on the federal public debt, which was then scraping the legal ceiling of one trillion dollars. They cried because all of their lives they had voted against an increase in public debt, and now they were being asked, by their own party and their own movement, to violate their lifelong principles. The White House and its leadership assured them that this breach in principle would be their last: that it was necessary for one last increase in the debt limit to give President Reagan a chance to bring about a balanced budget and to begin to reduce the debt. Many of these Republicans tearfully announced that they were taking this fateful step because they deeply trusted their President, who would not let them down.

As Murray opines, these are "Famous last words." While one might argue that Reagan let those Republican congressmen down, I'd assert that he actually made the wealthiest 20% very happy. That happiness continues today, for the time being. (Personally, I don't think Reagan ever planned to balance the budget, but that's a debate for another day.) There was a time when I would have said this gravy train of "free" money for whomever or whatever boondoggle would continue for as long as the coercive state draws breath, but even the State can't change the laws of math.

Those laws indicate that the debt load of the U.S. has each of us headed for a bumpy — possibly very bumpy — ride, of which this most-recent $700B scam was just the iceberg's tip. Buckle up. (And gentlemen, wear a cup.)

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

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“Constitutions, bills of rights, statements of principle, party platforms, and all other Guarantees can never be more than self-imposed restrictions which cease to affect the people who run a government the instant they cease to believe in their rightness, or as soon as it is clear that the people will not punish the government for ignoring them.”

~ Per Christian Malloch, "The Theory of Anarcho-Capitalism and its Libertarian Opponents" (unpublished)

I have an admission to make. It isn't that earth-shattering, nor will this be the first time I've made this particular admission. Nonetheless, my admission is: I learn much more by writing these essays than anyone will ever learn from reading them. This truth plays out over and over each time I submit a piece to LRC, or Strike-the-Root, or a newsfeed to the John Birch Society website, or when one of my pieces appears in print anywhere else.

This truth manifests in any number of ways, including the insight I absorb as a natural result of doing the research. It also manifests when I read and consider the feedback I receive. To illustrate, I'll examine two recent examples, both of which speak to something that occasionally seems obscure: No one has precise knowledge of how to facilitate the transition from the current situation to a stateless society. One might even argue that there is little to be gained by fiercely debating such strategic matters. More importantly, as has been mentioned before, several times, by several people, there is no need to "get to" anarchy anyway, since it's already here and therefore cannot be escaped. Writes Cuzán:

…a “third party” arrangement for society is non-existent among those who exercise the power of government themselves. In other words, there is no “third party” to make and enforce judgments among the individual members who make up the third party itself. The rulers still remain in a state of anarchy vis-à-vis each other. They settle disputes among themselves, without regard for a Government (an entity outside themselves). Anarchy still exists. (Emphasis in original.)

Indeed!

A Funny Thing Happened Along the Road to Ancapistan

In response to my "Would You Push the Button to End the State?" essay, I received several notes from an LRC reader in Somalia. As an aside, that a person in far off Somalia thinks my modest musings are worthy of not only reading, but also thoughtfully responding to, is immensely flattering and intellectually rewarding. (Interesting fact: The Internet is awesome.)

In response to my "Teaching Freedom Early?" newsfeed, I read a not-so-complimentary comment on the JBS website. That a person thinks I need to "get a life" and feels compelled to say so publicly, albeit anonymously, helps to balance out any flattery-induced-ego-boost I might experience from the example above. (Interesting fact: The Internet presents a low barrier-to-entry, which when combined with the ability to remain anonymous, sometimes makes people brazen and occasionally insulting. Then again, I've noted that phenomenon before.)

The main issue of the first respondent's e-mails, which covered quite a bit of philosophical and political ground, resolved to: Is minarchy between the current (statist) condition and full-fledged anarchy? And if this is true, why not start with getting closer to minarchy as a strategic means to achieving full-fledged market anarchism? In contrast, the main issue of the second respondent's comments seemed to be that I was a pseudo-intellectual with too much time on my hands. (Frankly, I can't argue with that!)

The first respondent felt that the primary questions were about "day 1" not "day 1000." That is, he felt that few could reasonably argue with the logical superiority of market anarchism in the long term. Rather, he asked, "What about the short term?" He posed several rather typical questions about moving from statism to anarchy. Among them:

• How does one privatize the existing (and quite large) stockpile of weaponry?
• What of the courts? Who polices and locks up criminals?
• How can one enforce contracts, since the right to seize property requires police and accounting?
• Who oversees a system that can facilitate assets: property and liquidity?
• Who regulates Natural Monopolies?

I reckon these are valid questions. Certainly, I hear them often enough. Not surprisingly, there have been a plethora of answers to these types of questions as well. Despite my attempts to answer some of them, the best primer to these issues might be Roderick Long's "Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections," which covers some of these issues, and others, in excellent philosophical and historical detail.

The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single … Question?

One of my radical libertarian colleagues has a pet theory that he has shared with me several times. He thinks that few people, if anyone, ever follows the links in a piece like this. Given my own reading habits, I tend to agree, and am therefore tempted to extensively block quote from Long (and others) below, turning this essay into a type of one-stop-shop for answers to these recurring "how-to" questions about market anarchism.

You know what though? I won't. Actually, I refuse to do so. The reason was provided some time ago by another colleague of mine, Manuel Lora. He writes:

The problem starts when the “viability” of freedom becomes contingent upon the “answer” to those questions. That is, if the “right” and fully satisfactory answer is not achieved (ignoring that no such answer could ever be 100% correct), then somehow the desire for liberty is lessened and statism creeps back in.

Lora continues:

“How would roads work? How can a flu pandemic be prevented? What about organ trafficking? Would we need car insurance? How much? Who would [we] determine that? What if drugs are cheap and widely available? I don't want people to have AK-47s! What about licensing and standards? If everyone can make their own money, then it's going to be chaos!”

Lora then answers the question:

So let me answer the question as clearly as I can. I am not a socialist!

Lora is noting, quite correctly, that the answers to every conceivable implementation issue cannot be deduced a priori. Simply put, if central planning worked, there probably wouldn't be any market anarchists! I'll go Lora one better regarding these types of questions and any other similar questions that anyone is tempted to send me via e-mail in the future. My answer, as bad as it might sound, is: How should I know?! Besides, as my second respondent implies, anyone who endeavors to answer every conceivable question about the future not only has too much time on his hands, but fancies himself a version of Kreskin on steroids as well! (If Shrubya can raise a tragic lack of intellectual curiosity to high art, I can get a pass for not caring once in a while, no?)

Granted, discussing and attempting to answer such questions can be very interesting. (Full disclosure: I'll likely be involved in such a discussion before week's end!) Honestly though, I don't really give a large rat turd who oversees a system that facilitates assets in a stateless society. I rarely worry about regulation of natural resources or monopolies after the EPA is closed. The rather obvious fact that I've only a faint clue to the answers to such questions is just icing on the cake. What does concern me is individual liberty. Luckily, it is upon this foundation that everything else is based anyway. As an aside, was the fact that few could accurately predict where the newly-freed slaves would work or live sufficient justification for keeping them chained up?

I don't want to be stolen from, enslaved, or unfairly imprisoned. I don't want to steal from anyone, enslave anyone, or imprison anyone, particularly for a behavior, that while possibly unwise, infringes upon no one else. I believe in private property. Just because you and a couple of other folks supposedly voted to steal that property from me doesn't change the morality of the action. (If it does, then this whole discussion is moot.)

If we start there — with the argument from morality — I'm willing to take my chances that the polar bears, the Rain Forest, and the planet will survive just fine. Given the amounts of my own money and time I've voluntarily invested, I'm also pretty confident that the poor and the sick will be cared for as well. I'll even admit that some issues with which mankind might be faced in the future might be large enough to require cooperation. Here's the thing. Cooperation doesn't come out of the barrel of a gun. Is it too much to ask that the self-righteous busy bodies spend only their own money (or money given voluntarily to them) and stop making war on the rest of us?

Fighting the Battle in the Locale that Houses It

A while back, as I spoke to another father at one of my son's Boy Scout camp-outs, something he said made me think. He had just asked me which of the contenders for president I'd be supporting and I had answered, "They're all lying, thieving, killers, so who cares?" or words to that effect. To his credit, he admitted that I had a point. (The number of times this has happened is low enough for me to think that not everyone has figured this out, but I've already beaten that horse to within an inch of its life.) He then wondered aloud: "How does one remain hopeful for the future, after such a conclusion?"

That's an interesting question. I don't think cynicism is the inevitable result of deducing that megalomaniacs, interested in lining their own pockets and not much else, run the State. In fact, I remain convinced that by realizing where the battle will ultimately be fought and won — in my head — I don't have to become cynical at all. Just because it becomes apparent that the lying, cheating, stealing, buttheads I used to think were "my leaders" are just, well, lying, cheating, stealing buttheads is no reason for sadness. Ridding oneself of delusion is a liberating experience, not a depressing one!

A clue to why what we think is more important than what we experience comes from Victor Frankl, who noted that the battle is in the mind when he said:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (Emphasis in original.)

The battle then is won or lost not without but within. As someone said long ago, "What happens to you is way less important than what happens in you." The battle for freedom and liberty is fought by the individual with himself and his beliefs, not against faceless bureaucrats in D.C. or elsewhere.

Maybe Zhuge Liang offered a further clue with:

Those who are skilled in combat do not become angered, those who are skilled at winning do not become afraid. Thus the wise win before they fight, while the ignorant fight to win.

Conclusion

My philosophy: Win the battle for freedom in your own head, against your own ignorance, first. Enter the battlefield of ideas and share them with others, if you like, soon thereafter. Worry about who pays for the roads in Libertopia much later, if ever. Trust a bureaucrat, even a well-armed bureaucrat, with the future, never. (That complicated pre-existing conditions will have to be dealt with is actually rather exciting!)

If what I say here has not convinced you, that's okay. In fact, I'm pleased. I don't want to convince you. I want you to convince you. If I can convince you about market anarchism today, some other A-hole can convince you about statism tomorrow. I'd rather have you make you own decisions — with or without help from my pedestrian erudition — and go from there, voluntarily. I'll still take my chances. Will you?

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

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"…people who vote are quick to distance themselves from the guy to whom they gave their support. It seems to me that if your candidate lies, cheats, steals, or gets a whole bunch of people killed you — the voter who supported him — might share some blame. … With the secret ballot, everyone can claim to be disappointed with the guy they actually helped elect!"

~ "I Don’t Mind If You Keep Voting, But…"

In the piece above, I attempted to lay out some very basic non-voting logic, as well as provide a handy-dandy bibliography to some of the exceptional non-voting prose from giants like Butler Shafer, Wendy McElroy, and others. From the very positive feedback I received, it would appear that I got my message across. Still, I know people continue to fight with themselves on this matter. I have close friends who face internal and external debates about why voting is so necessary, and why anyone who really "understands the struggle" would have to take part, and similar hooey.

The simple fact of the matter is this: Voting — and I'm talking here about national-level elections for public office, but similar logic is available, if less applicable, at other levels — is a waste of time. Shaffer's suggestion that one is better served doing a thorough examination of his navel lint was overly kind. This essay represents my (hopefully) final volley in this debate. Thereafter, my navel lint will get all my attention on Election Day. When that's done, I'll find something else to do that won't involve entering a booth to select the liar I like best.

Why Is Voting for President a Waste of Time?

Voting for President of the U.S. is a waste because the issues that should garner the most interest and cause decisive post-election changes will remain unchanged no matter who is elected. This is absolute, undisputed, unmitigated, hard, cold, polished-to-a-high-gloss, quick-fried-to-a-crackly-crunch, naturally-seasoned, artificially-flavored fact.

How do I know? Well, for one thing, it's been true since the first election for president ever held in the U.S. Yes, it was true immediately after those initial rich white guys — affectionately known as the Founding Fathers — put their let's-have-a-country-of-our-own scam to pen and paper. The truths have only gotten more obvious, while developing wider scope, since those early days in the late 1700's.

Jim Davies, a columnist over on Strike-the-Root, put together an interesting list of the items about which one typically complains regarding the government. His list included many of the oldies but goodies: fair elections, taxation, bankers running America, needless foreign wars, politicians ignoring the Constitution, etc. He then offered solutions to each, culminating with an analysis of how the completion of this list would result in a "better" government, or not. His conclusion is the same as mine: One can't get that which he should most desire — freedom and liberty — from the government.

Let's create another list, shall we? (My list won't be as long as Davies' but that's okay.)

War

Governments exist to make war. They always have. This is because war is a racket. Standing armies, which are remarkably misnamed, are the realization of the fact that without professional soldiers, wars are often quick and indecisive or long and ridiculous. (That is, states can still fight, but it's not really that, well, satisfying and the wars can fizzle out due to simple logistics like running out of ammo or food, or having to tend the crops.) With professional soldiers employed by a highly-developed state, the cost of supplying them, feeding them, and housing them can be off-loaded to others. This makes it possible to invade and conquer distant lands and make "efficient" war, i.e., kill a lot of people very quickly. Best of all, the profits can still be absorbed by the war-racketeers.

Without a standing army, just defending the plot of land you occupy could be a challenge, although frankly, defending it often, or ever, will likely be unnecessary. The emergence of the State, dating back to Sumer and ancient Mesopotamia led to the rise of the state-military complex. These early warfare states arose out of the supposed need for state-financed facilitation of the public good via public works. Make no mistake however. The real reasons for the existence of the military-industrial complex had (and has) little to do with freedom and everything to do with power, control, and corruption.

Question: Will the incredibly large worldwide U.S. military presence, including over 750 bases, be curtailed dependent upon who wins any election for president?

Answer: No.

Follow-up question: Regardless of who is elected, will the gargantuan domestic military-industrial complex be popped like a zit on Baron Harkonnen's festering kiester?

Answer: Nope. The subject won't even be seriously debated.

Given the pending "financial crisis" one might argue that the gravy train of govern-mint cash for weapons and those who make them will dry up on its own. Don't count on it.

Money

Websites such as LewRockwell.com, Strike-the-Root.com, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), the Mises Institute, the Library of Economics and Liberty, the Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF), and many others have provided and continue to provide a cornucopia of information on economics, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and all that inhabits the space in-between. Inspired writers, from Murray Rothbard to Lew Rockwell to Mark Thornton have provided ample education on historically relevant events and currently-held mythical beliefs. (Occasionally, even a poser like me chimes in.)

The methodology employed by the Fed — the printing of money with no underlying market-generated value — causes inflation. Inflation — the perceived rise in consumer prices — results in a massive transfer of wealth from those at the bottom of the economic food chain to those at the top. Frankly, that's why the Fed was created! (The debasement of currency for the benefit of the State dates back at least to Roman times.)

Question: Will the Federal Reserve be abolished dependent upon who wins any election for president?

Answer: No.

Follow-up question: Regardless of who is elected, will the wealth transfer that has corresponded with the loss of over 80% of the value of the dollar since 1970 be stopped like one of those Toyota Tundra trucks?

Answer: Not hardly. Best case, it gets mentioned in passing.

Despite the fact that the abolition of the Federal Reserve would not, I repeat, not result in the end of the State, it would still be a nice step. Instead, when the current fiat currency scheme goes belly-up — and it will, because they always do — one can be sure that agents of the State will come up with a new one to take its place. The same financiers (or people just like them) who absorbed that transferred wealth the first go-round will return again to the teat, fat and happy as ever.

Any bailout, such as the one currently under discussion, simply provides an opportunity to really gouge from the taxpayer for a specific instance, but the systematic transfer of wealth, caused by the inflation/debt sandwich, both predicated on the printing of money, continues either way. There is a plethora of great insight out there about why economic crises are the rule versus the exception and why the current "crisis" is just another scam, including but certainly not limited to:

• Robert Higgs, "The Bogus Financial Crisis" podcast from the Lew Rockwell Show;
• Stefan Molyneux, "The Empire Strikes Out" video on YouTube;
• George F. Smith, "Crop Seeding in America" essay on Strike-the-Root.com.

Taxation

Everywhere one goes, he is taxed, often heavily. When you buy a grande-sized cup of over-priced coffee, you pay taxes. When you fill-up the tank of that long-term-financed SUV, you pay about 40% of the cost of each gallon of gas in taxes. A typical American works about four (4) months to pay "his fair share" of income taxes. (How did it come to be true that anyone has a "fair share" of something he didn't volunteer to give?) Others have already proven that there is no such thing as a just tax; but of course, the purpose of taxation has never been justice.

Worse yet, when you die, if you've somehow managed to sequester any of the money you made along the way, generally in the form of earthy possessions (while simultaneously managing to keep eating regularly and sleeping inside) your heirs will pay additional taxes on the value of those possessions, referred to as your estate. This after you, the deceased, paid taxes on all of that stuff as it was acquired!

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), just a collection vehicle for income taxes, operates like a police organization, with armed thugs, raids on homes, all that. The best part: The amount of "hidden taxation" from the printing of money by the Fed more than accounts for the income generated by the IRS. I'd assert that they don't even "need" the money, despite the amount of government income supposedly due to individual income taxes. (Maybe that's better left for another essay.)

Question: Will the IRS be abolished dependent upon who wins any election for president of the United States?

Answer: No.

Follow-up question: Regardless of who is elected, will the practice of taxing the citizen at every turn be substantially trimmed back, kinda like the hair during one of Nick Arrojo's cuts on What Not to Wear?

Answer: Absolutely, positively, not.

Exemplary of the type of Cat-in-the-Hat lunacy available when viewing the U.S. political system, any suggestion about changing the income tax system almost always includes the term "revenue neutral," as if the amount of money is okay, it's just how they collect it that needs modification. Discussions of taxes by either party take on a surreal air, as if the laws of logic, math, and reality can be suspended at will. A buddy of mine summed it up after he watched Obama's acceptance speech at the DNC. "The best part was when Obama said he'd cut taxes and afterward, buy everyone a pony and later, a saddle for that pony." The Republicants are no better and only the mathematically-challenged think so.

Liberty

A person would have to have spent his entire life in a gated community way off the grid or quietly sleeping under a large rock nourished by only his thumb to not notice that the prison population in the United States is large. Very. Large. There has been no shortage of reporting and opinion about the fact that the United States of America can accurately be described as a prison nation. I've personally lamented the fact that much of the prison population in the U.S. is both non-violent and vice-generated. (When I say "vice-generated" I mean simply that people are in jail for doing something to themselves that other people don't like.) The fact that we've got a war on (some) drugs, not a war on (all) drugs, is equally obvious.

I've never been one to decry a good conspiracy theory, but I maintain no strong opinion about the involvement of the CIA in the U.S. drug trade. For all I know, there is a building at Langley where government workers are actually cooking cocaine for eventual distribution as you read this essay. I couldn't care less, because that's not the point. What you ingest is your business and will continue to be so long as people have ownership of their bodies. (Hat tip: Stephan Kinsella on how we come to own ourselves.) While I agree with Kinsella, it seems that there are a lot of people who aren't convinced, and many of them have guns and work for the State. That is the point!

Question: Will marijuana (or any other supposedly "controlled" substance) be legalized dependent upon who wins any election for president?

Answer: No.

Follow-up Question: Will the prison-industrial complex be smashed like a cockroach crawling out of a trailer park dumpster dependent upon who wins any election for president?

Answer: Hell no.

Second follow-up question: Will the fact that, according to a New York Times editorial, "one in nine black men, ages 20 to 34, are serving time" (often for drug-related offenses) be substantially and directly addressed by any elected official, including any black elected official, ever?

Answer: Never in a million years. (Frankly, the black politician is probably just glad it's not him in prison.)

Providing a bit of almost terminal irony, Paul Armentano notes an interesting fact about one of the contenders for this year's I-run-the-world sweepstakes:

[D]uring the mid-1980s, [vice presidential candidate] Biden was the chief senate architect of the federal anti-drug laws that re-established mandatory minimum sanctions for various drug possession crimes, and established the racially based 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crimes involving the possession of crack versus powder cocaine. Many academics have credited Biden’s law as one of the primary reasons why America now possesses the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, and why approximately one out of every nine young African-American males are now in prison. (Emphasis added.)

The chart below shows incarcerated Americans since 1920. Note the sharp rise beginning near 1980. And now this Biden guy wants to help lead change for America? You cannot make this stuff up!

And that's Not Even the Half of It

In this essay I have only examined four (4) areas — war, money, taxation, and liberty. No matter what other areas one examines: the chronically-mediocre educational system, the pharma-paid murderers known as the FDA, the theft-fest known as the United Nations, the security-industrial-congressional complex, the answers will generally be the same. The real problems will not be addressed in any substantial way as a result of a national election for president. The problems exist as a direct and unavoidable consequence of the existence of a coercive state. The agents of the State can't fix the problems because the existence of the State causes them!

These issues don't exist only as an unfortunate result of slightly misinformed public servants desperately trying to meet the challenges they have nobly volunteered to address on our behalf, but failing. They exist because lying, sack-of-cow-dung megalomaniacs created them, either as unintended consequences of some dubious scheme or as direct means to the acquisition of power and money. Two other points should be noted.

One, when I assert that voting doesn't matter, I'm not suggesting that the "winners" have been pre-ordained by unknown and powerful men, like some scenario from The Matrix come to life. I'm saying it doesn't matter who wins since the winners are simply proxies for the game within the game. The people who finance elections finance both sides and will get paid back either way. The people who are fleeced as a result of elections inhabit both sides and will keep paying either way.

Two, when I list the failures and evil machinations of the current government, I am not suggesting that such behavior has culminated with the latest set of would-be leaders. In other words, voting isn't a waste because the present crop of contestants is so bad. The suggestion that George W. Bush is the worst president ever rests equally on the availability heuristic and a misunderstanding of history.

The first president of the United States led a military force to quell a civilian rebellion caused by one of his cabinet member's revenue-generation schemes. That the new nation had just finished an armed rebellion, fought in part against unfair taxation, is rather ironic. It has only gotten worse since then. Again, the existence of the State is the problem. Even a president exhibiting such obvious mental limits as Dubya is but a symptom.

The contests between people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the similar contests between people like John McCain and Mitt Romney may very well be legitimate, with the outcome of primaries and caucuses in places like Iowa and New Hampshire fiercely-contested and unknown to all. The same might even be said about the general election. Pretty clearly, voting fraud is not a figment of the imagination, so someone cares about winning.

Fans of a particular NFL team care who wins as well. Analogous to elections, the people who actually benefit from NFL games are a tiny subset of the people who care. (By the way, I love the NFL, and can be found watching almost any game telecast at any time. Now that I consider it, I might actually benefit more from watching the NFL than voting. Yahtzee!) Getting excited about electing a particular master is incredibly stupid if one will still be a slave — subject to virtually the same amount of random theft and rape-as-needed — after the election is over. Given that over 40% of the voting-eligible U.S. population stays home on Election Day, I'm evidently not the only one who realizes this.

Conclusion

Now, none of this means that all is lost and one must become cynical and negative. Perish the thought! There is a wide range of pursuits that become available when the smoke surrounding and generated by busy work such as voting is cleared away. Enjoy them. (Personally, I'm looking forward to some great laughs as people like Tina Fey lampoon Sarah Palin.) More importantly, as Woodson taught long ago, freedom begins in the mind. Similarly, Rockwell opined just recently, "Real change comes from working in the world of enterprise and ideas." There is work to be done.

Hoppe has written extensively on why the consent of the stolen-from is required for the State to keep stealing. In "On the Impossibility of Limited Government…" we find:

…It is necessary to recognize that the ultimate power of every government – whether of kings or caretakers – rests solely on opinion and not on physical force. The agents of government are never more than a small proportion of the total population under their control. This implies that no government can possibly enforce its will upon the entire population unless it finds widespread support and voluntary cooperation within the nongovernmental public. It implies likewise that every government can be brought down by a mere change in public opinion, i.e., by the withdrawal of the public’s consent and cooperation.

Indeed. It is vital to realize that "the ultimate power of every government rests solely on opinion and not on physical force."

Voting illustrates both support and consent. Withdraw them, please.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

Wilton D. Alston Archives

DIGG THIS

"The genuine libertarian, then, is, in all senses of the word, an “abolitionist”; he would, if he could, abolish instantaneously all invasions of liberty, whether it be, in the original coining of the term, slavery, or whether it be the manifold other instances of State oppression. He would, in the words of another libertarian in a similar connection, u2018blister my thumb pushing that button!'"

~ Murray N. Rothbard, "Why Be Libertarian?"

One of the questions with which I've personally struggled is an answer to the infamous "button-pushing" scenarios. Generally, it goes something like this: Suppose you really wanted [place negative action here] to stop. If you could stop this situation, or cure this ill by pushing a button, would you do it?

These scenarios can be played out over any number of examples: slavery, poverty, famine, and, of course, the coercive state. While the answer can seem obvious, it can also be not so obvious. For instance, I've argued that pushing the button and ending the State would result in a lose-lose situation. Certainly, if one stopped the current state from functioning with some instantaneous bolt of lightening, that would be positive in the short run.

However, in the long run, if the people, the citizenry, the proletariat, were not educated sufficiently by the time of the button-pushing, i.e., their pre-existing beliefs were not replaced sufficiently, then another state, possibly more coercive than the first, would soon arise. In the interim, we'd be faced with all manner of chaos as people nurtured on the sweet teat of the State struggled to fend for themselves! (We're talking Mad Max way beyond Thunderdome!) Or so I've argued. I've even assumed, maybe unfairly, that my logic answers the question of support for political candidates. If I accurately ascertain Rothbard's point-of-view from the piece I quote above, he might not agree with me.

To Save the Earth!

It's not that I've never heard a somewhat convincing argument for button-pushing. One such argument came during a discussion on one of the several (hundred, apparently) Internet forums of which I've been a part over the years. The scenario is: A huge asteroid is heading for Earth, and is certain to result in a cataclysmic collision, an extinction-level event, something on the order of what probably removed the dinosaurs and made way for mammals to take over. (Yes, this is the same scenario that spawned two relatively recent movies — Armageddon with Bruce Willis and Deep Impact with Morgan Freeman — so I guess it's a pretty popular scenario.)

Independent of this pending catastrophe, some scientist (mad or otherwise), or farmer, or philanthropist, or whatever, has somehow created a very powerful laser or force ray, or phaser. There is no doubt in anyone's mind, including that of the inventor, that this machine can eradicate this asteroid as a threat to mankind! We're saved!

Well, not quite.

At some point along the way between the gnashing of teeth, the rending of clothes, the sold out mineral water at local mini-marts worldwide, and, the deep sighs of relief when the MSM reports the invention, the inventor drops some bad news. He's not going to deploy his weapon. His reasons, while unimportant for my scenario, may have to do with his religion, or his beliefs about the sanctity of asteroids, or something else, but the bottom line is pretty basic: Humanity is on its own. Emissaries from all over the globe visit the man, but to no avail. He won't change his mind and even Bill Gates is unable to buy him off. (Yes, that would shock me too, but hey, that's another essay.) What is to become of our civilization?

Just before the asteroid crashes into Earth, or even gets close enough to affect Earth's orbit gravitationally, some random person breaks into the building where the laser is housed, runs over to the control panel, and pushes the button. The asteroid is destroyed. The catastrophe is averted! Earth is saved.

The Ends Justifying the Means?

How should a radical libertarian view the actions of the Earth-saver in this case? Clearly, he violated the ownership rights of the inventor of the anti-asteroid ray, did he not? Actually, a number of arguments could be made on both sides of this debate. For one thing, Earth was in clear and present danger, and that included the button-presser. So maybe he was acting in self-defense? Every libertarian knows that the right to self-defense is absolute, right? Well, not exactly. As Roderick Long points out;

The spectrum of libertarian opinion on the subject [of war] ranges all the way from Leonard Peikoff, who defends the use of nuclear weapons against civilian targets, to Robert LeFevre, who denied the legitimacy of all violence, even in self-defense.

I can imagine, therefore, that not all libertarian opinions on our ostensible hero's actions would be positive. Many, if not most, would still argue that aggression, by definition, is involuntarily interpersonal, as was this action. Clearly, the action taken by the button-pusher-who-saved-the-planet fails the NAP. That infraction alone seems sufficient to render the action "wrong" under libertarian law. Rothbard wonderfully addresses this quandary by communicating that the probability of the success of an action bears not on its correctness with respect to libertarian law. Although Rothbard is talking about how one might bring about a more libertarian society and how to evaluate those actions, his prose fits this situation as well. To wit:

Antilibertarians, and antiradicals generally, characteristically make the point that such “abolitionism” is “unrealistic”; by making such a charge they are hopelessly confusing the desired goal with a strategic estimate of the probable outcome.

For a fact, we know that pressing the button will result in the "abolition" of the threat to Earth. The desired goal and the process for its accomplishment are both obvious in this case. I might argue that no debate over strategy is even relevant, although a clear infringement of rights took place.

What about consequentialist evaluations? The button-pusher could, one might argue, reasonably expect that the punishment for any such rights violation would be less than death. As such, he has traded off on the far lesser of two evils, and become a hero in the bargain. Not bad. Hell, even if death was the ultimate penalty our button-pusher faced, he has still successfully employed the logic taught in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." Likely few libertarians would agree, but no one ever said Star Trek was a good example of libertarian law!

The danger of using this logic should be obvious. If the ease with which a certain penalty can be dealt with by a certain infringer is used to offset punishment for a crime, a rich man can murder whomever he likes, and simply pay the ostensive beneficiaries a large sum of money in restitution afterwards. Clearly, we want a more absolute view of right and wrong. (The complexity of restitution in practice is a complex subject all its own!)

The problem then, is that we need to separate moral actions from prudent actions, and not fall prey to judging the morality of an action in a positive way simply because that action is prudent. Similarly, the prudence of an action is not mitigated simply because it is immoral. The two are separate. Life, art, and history are rife with similar quandaries. Jean Valjean steals to eat: right or wrong? Certainly most would agree that 19 years for such a crime is a little excessive! Still, a rights infringement — theft of property — took place.

Relatively recent pop culture provides examples as well. In one of many great lines from Batman Begins Christian Bale's character — Bruce Wayne — muses about his time living on the streets, "The first time I stole so that I wouldn’t starve, yes. I lost many assumptions about the simple nature of right and wrong." While I understand what he's getting at, he overstates. Right and wrong remain relatively simple in nature. I'd argue that an immoral act, performed under duress, remains immoral. Similarly, and as found via even a cursory examination of the argument from morality, an immoral act, performed by the majority, even after a vote, remains immoral.

So after all this, where are we? Would I, as Murray mentions, "blister my thumb" pushing that button to end the State? And, how does the answer to that question affect the asteroid scenario, if at all?

Conclusion

To save the earth: yes, I admit that even under the caveats described above, I probably would still find a way to push the button, up to and including infringing on the property rights of the mad scientist asteroid lover. (Please don't take away my market anarchist card!) I would have committed a crime, and at very least would owe restitution to the owner of the phaser. (However, keep in mind that lifeboat situations rarely, in my view, convey lessons for universally preferable behavior outside the lifeboat.) As for pushing the button to end the State, my answer is still no. However, the reason is not tied to the NAP in any way.

Instead it comes down to this: The State is something of a delusion. Once a person realizes, as Marc Stevens opines, that "there is no state" just people, he can move ahead without that delusion clouding his outlook. For example, voting, or worrying about who voted are no longer huge worries. Election time is about as important as the monthly Full Moon. Life gets simpler and allows for other pursuits.

Do I still have to deal with theft as a result of the people who claim to have dominion over me? Sure, but frankly, my life is not defined by a few assholes on a power trip. I'll continue to lampoon them — here and elsewhere — whenever I get the chance, but freedom starts at home, in the mind, and that's really the territory one needs to reclaim first anyway. As Jameson Frank said, "Our greatest battles are that with our own minds." It is the individual beliefs of the governed, taken in aggregate, that power the State. Carter G. Woodson offered similar advice (to which I have referred before) in his timeless tome, The Mis-Education of the Negro, with:

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his u2018proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.

Dr. Woodson continues with:

History shows that it does not matter who is in power … those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.

Button or no button, I'd say that about sums it up.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

Wilton D. Alston Archives

DIGG THIS

My phone is tapped. My mail is read.
They know the thoughts inside my head.

The money I deposited
is now reported to the Fed.

They chip my hand, dispense my bread.
I think they watch me go to bed.
I don't object. I'm glad instead
to be controlled until I'm dead.

~ G. Edward Griffin, from "It's All for My Security"

As I listened to a classic speech from Murray Rothbard, entitled, "The History of Taxation" something he said struck me. (Often, when listening to Rothbard, this happens.) He mentioned the obvious connections between people who worked inside the banking elite and those who worked, or seemed to work, outside of it, in the regulatory realm. There seemed to be, at that time and now, a cross-pollination between the two bodies, even though one is supposed to oversee the other.

Given that I used to work in regulated medical devices, I wondered if the same was true of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Were there obvious conflicts of interest between those the FDA ostensibly regulates and the organization itself? Let me be honest. I didn't wonder. I was almost certain of it. (I left regulated medical devices after 17 years due in no small measure to my growing disgust with the FDA, and what I saw as the inevitable negative effects of regulation and control implemented by that government central planning body.) If what I've seen over the years is any indication, my suspicions were correct.

My hypothesis back then (and now) was simple: all the FDA did was make everything they regulated more expensive and not necessarily safer. (I'd argue that the possibility for payola, graft, deception, and other financial and/or ethical shenanigans virtually guarantee that many items are, in fact, more likely to be dangerous than safe.) No hypothesis is complete without data. This essay is my attempt at providing just a few examples of those who build the henhouse (industry) and those who ostensibly protect it (government) working in tandem. While one likely cannot draw any firm conclusions from what I present here, I'd say the indications are that, as with that old saying, having the fox guard the henhouse is a losing proposition.

This Is Your Government on Drugs

The FDA assumes all regulatory functions for food and drugs in the U.S. and, in doing so, creates a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants to use government guns to take advantage of that market. If one examines the people who work for the FDA and the people who work for "big pharma" all too often, it appears to be the same people, in varying stages of their careers.

For example, the video, "Your Milk on Drugs — Just Say No" which covers the somewhat suspicious approval of rBGH, recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, is illustrative in this regard. To wit:

The person in charge of policy at the FDA when rBGH was approved was Michael Taylor. Before he became Deputy Commissioner for Policy at the FDA, he was Monsanto's attorney. He would later become a vice president at Monsanto.

One of the people who did research on rBGH at Monsanto was Margaret Miller. She later became FDA Branch Chief for Hormones and Pharmacological Agents, in the division that evaluated her previous research on rBGH.

While a graduate student, Susan Sechen did research on rBGH at Monsanto, only later to become the Primary Review Officer for the FDA, actually becoming one of the evaluators on rBGH.

That's a lot of cross-talk and this is but one example. While I will certainly stop short of accusing these people, one would have to be very trusting to not see the conflict of interest waiting to flower in some negative way. The State, with its perverse incentives, leads to the regulated and the regulators sucking a teat on either side of the same fat cow.

The taxation victims — the citizenry — pay for all the feed.

War: Nice Work if You Can Get It

The same phenomenon is visible with regard to the military. In fact, it has been identified and chronicled for many years. One such chronicler is Carroll Quigley, identified by people like G. Edward Griffin as Bill Clinton's mentor. (Clinton himself referred to Quigley as such more than once.) Says Quigley, quoted directly from his classic Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time:

Most high officers of the American armed forces in the war and postwar period retired before the fixed age of sixty-two, often on a disability basis (which exempted retirement pay from income taxes), and then took consultant jobs with industrial firms whose chief business was in war contracts.

Thus, four-star general Brehon B. Somervell, chief of Army Service Forces in World War II, retired on a disability salary of $16,000 a year at the age of fifty-four to join a number of industrial firms, including Koppers, which paid him $125,000 a year; three-star general L. H. Campbell, chief of ordnance in World War II, retired on disability at $9,000 a year at age fifty-nine and became an executive, at $50,000 a year, of firms from whom he had previously purchased $3 billion in armaments. Four-star General Clay retired at fifty-two on $16,000 a year, but signed up at once with General Motors and Continental Can at over $100,000 a year. Three-star air-force General Ira C. Eaker left the service at age fifty with $9,000 a year and joined Hughes Tool Company at $50,000. Another three-star air-force general, Harold C. George, went with Eaker to Hughes, at $40,000. General Joseph T. McNarney, in 1952, took his four stars, and $16,000 a year, to join Consolidated Vultee at $100,000. (Emphasis from original.)

These examples are from a time long-forgotten (or never noticed) by many who now prowl the Internet, but I would put down good money that there are just as many examples from last year as Quigley lists in his 1975 book.

Unsatisfied to just assume, I did just a little checking. I've no idea about his compensation, but I don't figure General Richard D. Hearney (USMC, ret) is joining Defense Industries’ (a major defense contractor) Board of Directors because he's bored. The most basic premise in having a successful business is obtaining a steady stream of paying customers. If one can help an enterprise find customers who not only pay top dollar, but also, who aren't even spending their own money, that's all the better.

These examples hint at possible conflicts of interest, but basic logic illustrates why such connections will generally lead to negative outcomes. (I guess "negative" is relative. If you're the one making good money, it's probably not negative for you.) One only need examine a simple small business example to see what I mean.

A Tale of Two Pizza Shops

Let's say you own a pizza shop, and your shop falls far short of sales goals. (Let us assume for now that these goals are based upon being able to operate successfully at a break-even point.) If your shop is to succeed, your incentive is to change something about what you do. You have to change, but you also have to support the business while doing so. You cannot require your customers to buy more pizza, producing more profit in the interim, and yet, if you do not make the needed changes, or if you make them too slowly, you will eventually go out of business. Hey, crap happens. This represents the classic dilemma that a business faces.

Now, let's say the same pizza shop is owned by the State, along with all other pizza shops. (A state-run enterprise in direct competition with a private sector business would eventually, and likely very quickly, fail. That's why there aren't any!) If the "business" falls short of sales goals, the incentives remain the same as the prior case, particularly if the operators — notice I didn't say "owners" — are ethical. They will want to change something. However, due to the funding paradigm of the State, the income remains constant while those changes are being made. In fact, if the operators of the enterprise can convince the right people, they might receive an infusion of additional cash despite the prior poor performance of the enterprise. (After all, one needs to keep the "business" going while the changes take hold, right? Pizza is a critical public need!)

At no point is the government pizza shop in danger of going out of business since its customers have no competitor to which to turn. In fact, if the changes are not made or are made too late, is really doesn't matter, since the income remains constant. Actually, since the "business" has just as good a chance of getting more money when it performs poorly as when it does well, there is little, if any incentive to improve in any measurable, substantive way. Even worse, the previously poorly-run pizza shops could also be absorbed into a larger, even less efficient, even more buffered-against-market forces pizza oversight organization. (Hint: The Department of Homeland Security.) Adding irony to misery, the money used to infuse the failing enterprise or create the new pizza behemoth is taken from the customers as well! Welcome to government services.

Conclusion

So what does all this mean? It means that the incentives that drive human action — the praxeology about which Mises so eloquently spoke — operate with Swiss watch efficiency in all endeavors whereby a man can be rewarded by his own efforts, which is generally, well, everywhere. Without the feedback mechanism of the free market creating a positive response feedback system — the more happy customers, the more money — one is left with a negative response feedback system of the state-controlled market — no matter what is done, the money remains the same. Ergo, the natural tendency is for doing less, or for interacting more strongly with the regulatory body than with those who should be receiving the benefits, the customers.

I am also saying one other thing: In any case where one might identify inefficient behavior in such a case as the scenario above, up to and including unethical behavior, the agents of the State are simply performing as one should expect. This also applies to those operating in ostensibly private enterprises that interact with the State in any manner outside the pull of the market. While one could certainly find a way to be disgusted at the actions of the people of whom I speak, the bottom line is this: They did exactly what we'd predict, and what self-interest would lead them to do. Even if their initial behaviors are ethical but misguided, eventually, as the feedback incentive mechanisms reward unethical behavior at the same (or higher) rate as ethical behavior, ethical behavior (and/or the people who endeavor to act ethically) will be crowded out. As a result, the system will eventually and unavoidably be overrun with shiftless, trifling, arrogant, thieving, their-own-rear-end-protecting bureaucrats.

Such is the inescapable result of people operating in the teeming cesspool of theft-financed self-interest known as the coercive state.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

Wilton D. Alston Archives

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Anybody depending on somebody else’s gods is depending on a fox not to eat chickens.

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Almost every black person, conservative or liberal, is familiar with the phrase, "It takes a village…" Almost every libertarian, radical or otherwise, is familiar with the terminology, "methodological individualism." Occasionally, as I've struggled with the pre-liberal genesis of my belief in libertarian law, playing it off against the learnings of my childhood and the raw, unfiltered truths of adulthood, a recurring question remains: Are those points of view — the individual versus the collective — at odds with each other?

According to an essay I came across a while ago, written by Dr. Anthony Asudullah Samad, black people are caught in a quandary. Do black folks have "No Black Agenda or Too Many Blacks With An Agenda?" This question — despite the collectivist paradigm within which it resides — likely generates intense interest in any black libertarian, no matter his political pedigree.

Ironically, when my wife proof-read my piece on the Don Imus situation, she said, "this piece makes it seem like you have an agenda." This caught me a little off guard, since, having read all my pieces one would have thought my wife would know by now.

I, Wilton D. Alston, have an agenda.

That agenda is: personal liberty. I want to make my own decisions, be judged upon my own performance, and reap the rewards (or penalties) of that performance. I want to keep the money I make — all of it — unless I decide to give it away. (And even then I want to decide who gets it.) I'm comfortable with the proposition of handling any disputes that may arise between me and those from whom I purchase products or services. If I need to seek professional help, I'm okay with finding it. I am not worried about being foreigner-invaded, globally-warmed, food-and-drug-unadministrated or environmentally-unprotected. If I get duped into buying a "lemon" from a car dealership, I realize that caveat emptor was in full effect from the get-go. Simply put, Wilton D. Alston's agenda with respect to the government is: Leave me the heck alone.

As Cedric the Entertainer says, "I'm a grown-ass man." I don't particularly need a nanny, a straw boss, or a bevy of ostensible black leaders to help me along that journey. My parents are available should I need advice and I'm certainly not opposed to obtaining supplemental advice, ideas, and mentoring from others as the need arises. I realize that seldom does anyone make it alone, and that the image of someone "pulling himself up by his own bootstraps" is just that, an image. Everyone receives help along their journey through life. However, the State has proven generally unable to provide that help in a way that does not result in long-term dependence and/or short-term graft.

Simply put, I will take my chances. If anyone wishes to judge me based upon the ostensible data and race-based predictions dredged up by some washed-up pseudo-thinker — such as those mentioned in my "Tell Me Again Why You're a Libertarian" essay, that's a risk I am quite happy for them to take.

This is the kind of individualism that my maternal grandfather, and my father and mother drove into me as a child. My grandfather would likely have spit in your face if you implied that he needed "help" from some over-arching body. My father, the son of a share-cropper who never owned the roof over his head, felt (and feels) pretty much the same way. So I've no compunction with taking the risks, be there any, or with living with the consequences of my performance. I believe I'm ready, willing, and able.

All that said — and I'd be the first to admit that "a rant will do you good" — there sometimes appears to be a friction present in the larger black community, if I may be collectivist for a moment, with regard to such a paradigm. It was that friction that scratched at my psyche as I read Dr. Samad's piece. Such is the friction between being black in Amerika — "we're all in this struggle together" — and embracing the libertarian ethic of methodological individualism. Says Dr. Samad:

…we need a Black agenda more than ever. Some people say we have one. There is no shortage of organizations and activities in which we may involve ourselves. But do they lead us to progress? We're all busy doing something, but our involvements gain little for the masses. All motion isn't progress. If it were, then why aren't we going forward? Maybe, it’s because there is no Black agenda pointing directly to collective progress.

Dr. Samad goes on:

In nearly every major city in America, Black communities are suffering from a combination of poverty, economic subjugation and police oppression. The Black community is in a constant state of struggle and a constant debate over its progress and what we're doing (what we gon' do, y'all) to bring about that progress. Over the past few months several significant issues, from police shootings across the nation (New York to Inglewood), to campus violence (elementary schools to college campuses), to the "Black Image" of other people calling African Americans everything from Ni**ers to Hoes, and everything in between.

With all due respect, why should I care if someone else does or does not think I've "made any progress"? Why would I continue to let my self-image be not only affected but also defined and defamed by someone else? Why must progress necessarily be judged collectively? Thinkers such as Hurston provided an answer to these types of question some time ago but more recent folks have put a new twist to it.

Shawn Carter, better known to some as Jay-Z has a song entitled "99 Problems." Given the popularity of hip-hop, it would seem that the words of this song and the defiant, supremely confident tone it sets could have seeped into the collective psyche of any supposedly struggling people. Here is a particularly relevant set of verses, where our hero gets into a bit of a debate with an officer of the law during an all-too-typical DWB traffic stop:

The year is ’94 and in my trunk is raw
In my rear view mirror is the [bleeper-bleeping] law
I got two choices y'all pull over the car or
bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor.
Now I ain’t trying to see no highway chase with u2018Jake'
Plus, I got a few dollars I can fight the case.

So I…pull over to the side of the road
And I heard, “Son do you know why I’m stopping you for?”
u2018Cause I’m young and I’m black and my hat's real low?
Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don’t know.
Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?

“Well, you was doing fifty-five in a fifty-four.”
“License and registration and step out of the car.”
“Are you carrying a weapon on you? I know alot of you are.”
I ain’t stepping out of [bleep] all my papers legit.
“Do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?”

Well, my glove compartment is locked, so is the trunk and the back.
And I know my rights so you gon’ need a warrant for that.
“Aren’t you sharp as a tack, are some type of lawyer or something?”
“Or somebody important or something?”
Nah, I ain’t pass the bar but I know a little bit,
Enough that you won’t illegally search my [bleep].

Now that brother has an agenda. His agenda is, "leave me the heck alone." I am doing my thing, and I know exactly what that is, so just leave me to do it and take your lying, thieving rear-end out of my face. Yes, that about sums it up for me too. (Hey, I wonder if Jay-Z is a libertarian.)

One should not think, however, that the items lamented by Dr. Samad and scholars like him are illegitimate. Far from it. (And certainly, rap music might not be the well from which springs the map for the future of the black race.) When Dr. Samad says, "In nearly every major city in America, Black communities are suffering from a combination of poverty, economic subjugation and police oppression," he is absolutely correct.

Where he and I differ is not in the identification of the problems. We disagree, if at all, on what to do about it. Some have opined that covert white racism still holds the black man down. That racism remains virulent and expressive in the U.S. is a relatively obvious conclusion, but unless one wants things to be worse versus better, he simply cannot look to the State to fix it. Besides, Lew Rockwell voiced my opinion, and found a legitimate (and in my mind primary) culprit, with, "The Enemy Is Always the State."

S. B. Fuller, a man who should be a hero to many, black and white alike, rose to robust entrepreneurial success at a time when Jim Crow racism was much worse than it has ever been in my lifetime. I'd like to believe that if Fuller can become a "Master of Enterprise," the racism of today's America isn't quite the problem some would claim. However, the history of black people in the U.S. is difficult, long, and complex; I would not presume to simplify it via that one example.

Even if covert racism, hell-bent on maintaining the position of the white race, is still virulent, there is but one way to meet it: head-on and, for goodness sake, not with the "help" of the Nanny State. History has proven time and again — from Montgomery, Alabama, where the police and mayor used their state-provided authority to facilitate the ability of the bus company to hang on despite the boycott, up to the present day, when the Prison Industrial Complex, financed with stolen (tax) revenue, is based almost totally upon free labor extracted from predominantly black men convicted of non-violent drug offenses — that the State is exactly the wrong place to look for help. (If one is still unconvinced, he need only examine stories like this one where a "suspect" died in police custody after being tased multiple times. Yeah, they'll protect you alright.)

During one of our somewhat typical discussions, my fellow LRC columnist Rob Wicks addressed some of these issues:

The impending lower standard of living can really be chalked up to increasing amounts of regulation, which makes it very difficult for poor people to go into business. A poor but industrious black person cannot start a business unless they either: 1) have enough money for whatever licensing (from business licenses to cosmetology licenses) they will need; or, 2) conduct an illegal business. Not all illegal businesses are drugs and guns. Some are home hair and nail salons. Some are bakeries without a commercial kitchen.

A black person who wishes to conduct business has to register with the State to have permission to do so. This was not the case with Madam C.J. Walker.

Indeed. A black person who is full of drive and determination is all too often thwarted by that which supposedly has his best interest at heart. He is forced into black (or grey) market activity which provides some of the financial outlet he seeks, but brings with it the increased risk of retribution from that very organization — the coercive state — that precludes many of his initial options. All the while, he is bombarded with questions and banal debate about the collectivist positioning of his race vis-à-vis some other race.

As our discussion concluded, Rob ended with:

The problem is not "no black agenda," nor too many black agendas. It’s too many people waiting around for someone else’s agenda. We need far more black agendas. Each person needs to have their own agenda. The problem is that far too many people want some “great man” to come along with one which they can follow.

(I probably couldn't have said it better, although I did add the emphasis.)

If you want freedom for you, but not for others, you're a hypocrite. If your idea of liberty is when the free government handouts go the people you think deserve them, you're still supporting naked theft. If you're concerned that [place racial designation here] people just can't make it without help, your concern is duly noted, but your condescension is insulting. (If you want to support worthy causes or needy people, I commend you. Feel free to use your money, not someone else's.) I'll take my chances either way.

Conclusion

Allow me to end this essay the same way I started it, with the great Zora Neale Hurston.

It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.

That's an agenda I can embrace. Handle your business and let the chips fall where they may. Just in case Hurston isn't your cup of tea, here's a little something from the great Frederick Douglass.

Everybody has asked the question: ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

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This year, there aren’t any gas lines (though stay tuned), but the price seems outrageous; and in particular, its rate of increase recently has been amazing. Once again, establishment media offer no credible explanation; reports of gas prices often follow weather information, which seems quite appropriate since they have little idea what causes either. But this time, there’s a difference: I’ve not yet seen a fully credible explanation of what’s going on even in libertarian literature. That’s a first.

~ Jim Davies, "Gas Puzzler" from Strike-the-Root.com

According to a recent study, among the things about which the elusive "average American" worries the most, the economy is among the top. What? That anyone, and yes, I mean anyone spends any time worrying about the relative health of a measure so nebulous as the economy is testimony to the abilities of agents of the State to draw attention away from truly important matters and toward completely made-up, nearing bogus, statistics that no one can change. On the other hand, I bet everyone has an opinion, forged with the frustration of a rapidly emptying wallet, about the question that heads this essay.

Not surprisingly, having people worry about "the economy" is also the type of question framing by which agents of the State can obtain almost god-like power. Someone must do, well, something! There outta be a law! Certainly the average Joe knows he can't change the economy, but he still likely believes that "the government" or "the Fed" or Congress or the President can somehow directly affect these areas. Maybe they can affect them, but I remain convinced of one other truth: almost anything they do will have negative and unexpected consequences.

In fact, that is exactly the premise of this essay. As I read Jim Davies interesting piece on STR — quoted above — I wondered right along with him. Why does gasoline cost so much? I do disagree with him a little bit though. There has been no lack of Austrian-flavored scholarship on the matter. Sterling Terrell's basic primer on gasoline economics provided excellent context for the difference between the current price and the historical price. He also showed credible reasons why the typical boogey-men — price gouging and excessive oil company profits come to mind — are not viable alternatives.

One must also, I think, avoid being blinded by rather typical American paternalism. What many people are really asking is: Why does gasoline cost so much in the U.S. now, and why did the price go up so quickly? The simple fact of the matter is that gas has been over $4.00 a gallon outside the U.S., off and on, for years.

It seems to me that two factors are at work.  One is the actual price of the commodity.  The second is the rate with which the commodity has recently approached that price.  My working assumption, based upon the free market based scholarship I've been able to read, is that gas purchased in the U.S. now costs just about what it should, given inflation between now and 1971.  For instance, according to Steven Yates in a very recent piece for the New American:

How much of the rise in gas prices is attributable to the overall rise in prices caused by dollar inflation? One way of finding out is to measure the price of gasoline in terms of “constant” dollars instead of nominal dollars. For instance, in 1971 — the year is significant because that was when President Richard Nixon took us totally off the gold standard — a gallon of gasoline that cost 50 cents a gallon would cost $2.66 today in 1971 dollars, as calculated by the Consumer Price Index. In fact, this is a very conservative estimate of the devaluation of the dollar for the reason that the CPI increasingly underreports the actual overall increase in the cost of goods and services. (See “Dangers of an Underreported CPI” in our June 23 issue.) But even this conservative estimate shows that most of the increase in the price of gasoline from 50 cents in 1971 to $4.00 today is attributable to the dollar’s overall loss of purchasing power, a devastating consequence of inflation.

So (very) roughly, nearly $3.00 of a $4.00 per gallon gasoline price can be accounted for by inflation!  (I won't spend any time debating the CPI. I think we can all agree that it is very conservative.) Even if one tries to use other rubrics, the answer remains the same. As Doug French noted just the other day — comparing the cost of a gallon of gas to "real money" like silver — the value of a gallon of gas is relatively unchanged. The cost of a gallon of gas in terms of the fake, inflation-roasted dollars we all must use, well, that's another story.

The puzzlement – to use Davies' very appropriate term – is that the rate with which the price has approached $4.00 seems much too high for inflation to be the only factor.  (The price has doubled in the last nine months. Inflation, that ain't!) He's correct. He also provides an excellent clue to the answer as well, when he says, "The premise is that the rate of oil price increase proves that no free market is operating." Exactly.

If one was to plot the price of a gallon of gas now and the price of a gallon of gas in 1971 and draw a line between them, overlaying another plot of inflation between now and then, he'd see a gradual rise to the current price and it would all make sense.  Heck, he could probably change the slope of the line to match changing inflation rates in the intervening years and still get an excellent match. So why has the price changed so fast recently? The answer is the same as always: the State did it.

My guess: the controls placed on gasoline prices in the U.S. wore out. Those controls held the prices down, particularly relative to pricing of the same commodity worldwide. When those controls — whatever they were and I don't claim to know — stopped working, the price went up rapidly. When the State uses price-control schemes, and we already know that no truly free market exists in oil, unexpected and negative effects always result.

One quick note about inflation: people often fail to see it as it really is.  They tend to define inflation as a rise in consumer prices, when, in fact, it is growth in what is accepted as money.  In the U.S., the inflation first was directed toward the stock market, and then housing.  When those markets tanked, then it was directed towards commodities and, ultimately, oil. And here we are. In a capitalist economy, over time (provided money is relatively stable) prices tend to fall, which is what we have generally seen.  However, when you have a government that tries to penalize production and engage in the art of inflation, you are going to see commodity prices rise. I think some might refer to the current rapid change in price as a correction, but I'm just guessing. That some might now think the government should impose controls to keep U.S. prices levels at the unrealistic level they had maintained for so long, when the culprit is government intervention in the first place, particularly because of inflation, is truly ironic.

Conclusion

The U.S. almost always used more gasoline than it produced. The U.S. generally exceeded almost every other industrialized country in the relative amount of gasoline consumed, i.e., the demand in the U.S. always impinged greatly on the worldwide supply. The economic fact of the matter is this: gasoline should have cost more in the U.S. than it has long before now! As best I understand economics, the people who use more, i.e., demand more, of something, all things equal, generally pay more. For years, somehow, the U.S. has gorged itself on gasoline while Canada, Europe, and everyone else paid through the nose. Well, now that nations like China are vying for that gasoline, the demand is up even more. Even at that, I'm not sure that the cost has topped out, given the relative cheapness of gas in the U.S. (That's not a misprint.) Don't believe U.S. gas is a relative bargain? Think again. (This data is three years old and still shows a massive difference.) But wait, there's more. I realize that saying Americans still pay less than many people around the world won't make the frustration one feels at the pump go away. Just for yucks, here is a chart, created with a handy web-based tool I found, that compares U.S. and Canadian gas prices, with crude oil prices superimposed.

Notice how Canadians have been paying about $1.00 a gallon more than U.S. consumers for a long time. Notice also, how the recent rate of change for crude oil prices still has not been fully accounted for in the price of either Canadian or U.S. gasoline. Notice too, how the Canadian price shows almost the same shape, only with a different set-point than the U.S. price. (I wonder where that money went.) According to AirInc, a company that tracks the cost of living in various places around the world, "the main factor in [gasoline] price disparities between countries is government policy." No surprise there. Worse yet, the State cannot fix anything without causing another problem someplace else. The size of the proverbial pipeline in the U.S. has been getting smaller and smaller for years, due to crazy regulations, environmental mumbo-jumbo, and just plain irrationality.

Well, guess what? The chickens of inflationary economic policy, combined with extremely non-free-market energy policies, are coming home to roost. Repeat after me: The State is always the problem. I just hope people wake up and don't actually cry out for more of what already didn't work. Yes, I know. I'm dreaming.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

Wilton D. Alston Archives

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"The jersey that I wear has never made me who I was. It has nothing to do with what’s written on my heart. Will I be playing for Russia? Yes. But I’m absolutely 100 percent still an American. I love our country. I love what we stand for. This is an opportunity to fulfill my dream of playing in the Olympics."

~ Becky Hammon

As I read the fascinating article about the ancient Olympics and the facts that: a) the games were largely for professional athletes; b) those athletes generally competed with a win-at-all-costs mindset; and most interesting, c) those athletes often competed with the aid of (what they thought would be) performance-enhancing drugs, I found deep irony. The recent furor, such as it is, over WNBA player Becky Hammon's decision to play for Russia in Beijing, provides a useful prism through which to examine a few questions.

How Does One Define a Traitor?

Rumor has it that Team USA women's basketball coach Anne Donovan referred to Hammon as a "traitor" for deciding to play for Russia. Traitor? I frankly do not know the context of Donovan's comments, or whether or not she was serious. From the coverage I've seen, it seems that she was. The level of duplicity, and frankly, stupidity, in such a statement yields a cornucopia of material to examine more fully. First of all, let us examine the terms in play. According to Merriam-Webster On-Line:

• traitor: one who betrays another’s trust or is false to an obligation or duty
• patriotism: love for or devotion to one’s country

The act of playing professional basketball is an occupation, a job. In exchange for playing that sport Becky Hammon is paid a fee, a salary. Given her relative skill, she would, all things equal, be compensated at a higher level than many of her colleagues. Her only obligation is to perform at the best of her ability in exchange for that money. As far as I can tell, she's done that, and continues to do so. So no trust is being betrayed, and all obligations — rightfully conveyed — are being met. (Frankly, there is no way to judge her love or devotion to her country one way or the other.)

How Does One Define Duty?

One could argue, I guess, that Hammon is making a lot of money via a scenario that would not exist were she not in the U.S. That may be true, but the same could be said of the many international players in the NBA. Are they similarly obligated to play for the U.S. too, since they are making a king's ransom in a sport invented and housed in the U.S.? Few would argue in the affirmative. In fact, it's not even worth noting that people like Yao Ming will be playing for their native country in the Olympics. Certainly, playing in the U.S. professional leagues confers no duty. (And still, no measure of love or devotion to the statist concept of a country is relevant!)

What about the fact that Hammon was born in the U.S.? The most basic libertarian analysis would find such an argument specious on its face simply because the concept of a country-of-origin — particularly in this case — is a flawed, collectivist, statist construct. The imaginary lines on some map are irrelevant when it comes to voluntary activity. However, one does not need to embrace ostensible libertarian and/or anti-statist logic to see the lunacy of suggesting that Hammon's nation of birth somehow obligates her. One only need look at history. The argument from morality informs us.

Is Hammon One in a Row?

I guess one could argue, if they were ignorant, that Becky Hammon represents a marked change in the way athletes operate in the U.S. Not really. The briefest examination of people who have both competed for and, in some cases, won medals for the U.S. shows a plethora of people not born in the U.S. For instance just this year we have:

• Bernard Lagat: 800, 1500, 5000 Meter Runs, born in Kenya, Africa. (Silver Medalist in Athens, Bronze Medalist in Sydney, both for Kenya.)
• Meb Keflezighi: Marathon, born in Asmara, Eritrea; (Silver Medalist in Athens for the U.S.)
• Said Ahmed: 1500 Meter Run, born in Somalia, Africa.

As far as I can tell, none of these people will be branded a traitor by anyone in the coming months, if ever. (There are more examples, and maybe even better ones, but I figured this smattering was enough.) The fact that Lagat actually won multiple medals, including gold medals at the World Championships, while a citizen of Kenya will not, I suspect, be raised by anyone in a negative attack on his patriotism. Nor should it be.

Not that far back, a Moroccan named Khalid Kannochi attempted, in vain, to become a naturalized U.S. citizen in time to compete in the Olympics. (He had fallen out with the Olympic committee in his native Morocco.) He failed, and the U.S. team could not take him and his world-record skills to the Olympics. I don't recall a single soul worrying about his duty or loyalties. Funny that. In fact, Kannochi was actually designated as American Athlete of the Year by Track & Field News in 2002!

Conclusion

As I briefly perused the blogesphere in preparation for this column, I noted that even some people who support Hammon's decision still refer to her as "unpatriotic" although they stop short of calling her a traitor. Here's what puzzles me. If a professional athlete plays for Chicago today, but Indianapolis next week, no one will refer to him (or her) as "unpatriotic." (Some sports fans with too much time to kill may use the term "traitor" but sports talk radio has never been known as a bastion of measured, thorough, intelligent discourse.)

If that same athlete cannot compete at the level necessary for one of the professional leagues in the U.S., he can go to Europe and compete. No one will refer to him as a traitor. If an athlete is born in a country other than the U.S. and comes here to compete, he can do so at his pleasure and if he's good enough, generate a large following both here and abroad. He is neither unpatriotic nor traitorous. In the most coarse– and rational — measure, love and devotion is not conveyed by one's occupation anyway.

And so it is with anyone who competes in the Olympic Games. They are athletes, individuals volunteering to ply their physical wares on the biggest and best stage they can find. While I celebrate these athletes, and will be watching many of them with great interest, it doesn't make a ton of sense to take a set of athletic events — originally inhabited largely by professional soldiers between wars — and turn them into a referendum on national pride. I can't say it is completely unexpected though. Hype often seems to generate more traction than truth.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

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"The sovereign, after taking individuals one by one in his powerful hands and kneading them to his liking, reaches out to embrace society as a whole. Over it he spreads a fine mesh of uniform, minute, and complex rules, through which not even the most original minds and most vigorous souls can poke their heads above the crowd. He does not break men’s wills but softens, bends, and guides them. He seldom forces anyone to act but consistently opposes action. He does not destroy things but prevents them from coming into being. Rather than tyrannize, he inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end he reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as its shepherd.

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2 [1840]

As I read Butler Shaffer's outstanding piece "The Messenger is the Message," which was ostensibly about Tim Russert, but was actually about so much more, several things occurred to me. First, Dr. Shaffer almost always seems to cover the concepts I've been considering better than I would have. Secondly, the timing of his essay was ironic given that I had recently been pondering something: would the State "work" if the population didn't "believe" in it? The coercive apparatus of the State, fine-tuned in the U.S. since the time of Washington and Jefferson, has risen to a level of fine art as it generates a belief in its necessity while simultaneously remaining just out of view.

Given that we are both anarchists, it is no surprise that I have enjoyed Dr. Shaffer's essays, most recently citing him in my "Anarchy, Anarchy — Wherefore Art Thou?" piece. That the solid logic that undergirds market anarchism — or whatever you want to call it — remains somehow in doubt is one of the most troubling and fascinating subjects to which I apply my available skills of analysis and modest writing talents. Why is it that almost any suggestion of even the possibility of a peaceful, anarchistic society is so often met with pseudo-intellectual derision or worse yet, insulting, pat-on-the-head "utopian dreamer" condescension? Excluding the corruption of those who enrich themselves from the State, it is met with these responses because honest people have been conditioned over years and years of public (Read: statist propaganda-laden) schooling.

I do not draw this conclusion — that the stability of the State requires belief — anew in the sense that no one has said it before. Thinkers such as Hoppe have eloquently spoken about the fact that the State obtains its legitimacy from those upon whom it aggresses. Instead, I make this assertion in direct answer to those who question the possibility that an anarchistic society is possible, as they simultaneously fail to note that a severely freedom-limited, statist regime is possible only as a result of a shared belief among the citizenry in the legitimacy of that State. That portion of a statist society that should be most treasured — peaceful voluntary interactions — is an outcome of anarchy's not-so-secret weapon, universally preferable behavior, while that which actually makes a statist society stable — propaganda — is not needed under market anarchism.

His Imperial Programming Is Strong

When I say "people have been conditioned" I'm not talking just about other people. I include myself in that category as well. The phenomenon of which I speak came into view recently, again ironically, in a thread I was reading on the FreedomainRadio Discussion Forum (FDR), the creation of another staunch anarchist (and one of my occasional co-authors) Stefan Molyneux. In that thread, entitled "My Emotional Resistance to Anarcho-Capitalism" the initial poster summed up the feelings of many budding anarchists with:

We [people who suggest that anarchy is not only possible but also preferable] are talking about completely abolishing the public sector.  Are there any guarantees that we (and I use the first person plural because I am strongly sympathetic to your arguments) will not create a nightmare like the intellectuals that dreamed of completely abolishing private property?

Or, to ask a more concrete question, do you believe that any society, from ancient Iceland to 1917 Russia to modern Iraq, is capable of anarcho-capitalism?  Are there certain infrastructures and philosophies that must be in place first?  Can anyone think of a realistic narrative to the creation of anarcho-capitalism?  And, most importantly of all, would there be any requisite change to “human nature?”

To say that many an anarchist has heard these questions more than once would be a gargantuan understatement. If you read FDR with any regularity you will probably come across several similar questions, posed by very sincere people with very sincere concerns, at least twice a week.

Furthermore, I would bet my very last money that any person who alludes to having the slightest sympathies for even the so-called limited government ostensibly envisioned by the founding fathers would be besieged by similar questions regarding, among other things: maintenance of the common goods, the certain destruction of any semblance of peace, and (of course) the eventual rise of roaming rape gangs. (Mad Max lives! That the prevalence of bathtub ring and the lack of a cure for hemorrhoids are not also mentioned just as often is probably dumb luck.) Having personally taken part in more than a couple of these debates with thoughtful people spanning the educational spectrum from Ph.D. to high school drop-out, I still didn't understand the stickiness of such reasoning until recently.

Note the words I've emphasized in the quotations above. Is there any "guarantee" that the abolition of the State won't create a nightmare? Is society "capable" of anarchy? Can one furnish a "realistic narrative" of the past creation of an anarcho-capitalist society? Verily I say unto thee (yes, even an atheist can use Bible-esque sentence structure) I've been answering these same questions, or variations of them since (and before) my "A Libertarian Cheat Sheet" column was published. And I've not been alone. Many gifted, and often more talented, writers than I have attempted to do the same thing.

Still, this emotional resistance to the possibility of a "stateless society" (and more distressing, a psychological blind spot to the fact that the universally preferable behavior upon which a stateless society is based is a foundational reason for the State even working) rises like a Phoenix out of the ashes of the burnt, inconsistent, barely noticeable logic — and use the term very loosely — of statism! What in the hell?

Same Question, Same Answer

What valid guarantee has ever been offered for any societal construct? None. Is society capable of anarchy? Of course. If not, then no peaceful voluntary interactions would ever take place. Not surprisingly from my standpoint, I haven't had to call the police to help me deal with another human being in, well, ever. I handle my disputes privately. I wander through shopping malls, crowded streets, open-air markets in the U.S. and abroad, interacting with other people and vendors willy-nilly, with no concern that around the corner there lurks a criminal waiting to pounce or that someone with whom I deal will require government oversight to treat me fairly. I've been in ghettos, or, if you prefer, inner cities, all over the U.S. and in fact, unfamiliar communities all over the world and had similar experiences.

Never once have I thought I should take a cop with me, just in case! I've also never mistakenly concluded that it was only because a policeman or other "law giver" was close-at-hand that kept the hideous folks at bay. In fact I defy anyone to logically conclude that the presence of the threat of police presence provides one ounce of protection. Consider: I can virtually guarantee that in some communities with which I am intimately familiar, a robber could break into your home, beat you to within an inch of your life, take a shower, roll a huge spliff, and smoke it completely before you got off hold with 9-1-1. How's that for a realistic narrative?

As I responded to that poster, I will similarly declare here. People forget, I think, that every societal construct is based upon:  shared beliefs, Schelling Points, and yes, maybe even propaganda to some extent.  In other words, we learn from very early ages much, if not all, of the behavior that undergirds our societies.  (Hat tip:  "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten" – although that book title is probably a stretch on the concept.)  Exactly which lessons are taught, and in what order, given what priority, which are omitted, undergirded or justified by which authority, is a direct result on pre-existing and long-standing societal mores. Happily for us anarchists, it turns out that the undergirding premises of anarchy exist as universally preferable behavior! In other words the things that make anarchy stable are needed for any stable societal construct.

A school child in Iraq already "knows" (and more importantly accepts) many of the premises that will govern his life choices and behavior. Exactly the same can be said about a middle schooler in North Dakota. (That some folks believe that the current version of freedom in the U.S. — such as it exists — is not taught, is troubling, but expected. When paternalism is mistaken for patriotism even though neither is a proper substitute for a logical, evidence-based, dare-I-say, scientific paradigm for distinguishing truth from falsehood, this is the outcome.) On top of these early premises is layered a belief in the necessity of the State and a belief in the ostensibly otherwise unavailable benefits of statism.  Both of these latter beliefs are taught in government schools and are seminal to their existence and the need for them. In fact, the (un)stated mission of government schools spells this out for all to see.

A brief visit to the website for the Alliance for the Separation of School and State provides a few educational (pun intended) quotes from the past.

"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life…"

~ William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education in the late 1800s

"Only a system of state-controlled schools can be free to teach whatever the welfare of the State may demand."

~ Ellwood P. Cubberley, former superintendent of San Diego schools and Dean of Stanford University School of Education (late 1800s-early 1900s)

Now, I am not suggesting that once the propaganda has taken root in one's mind that he cannot unplug from the socket. People take the red pill all the time. But it is indeed difficult to do so. Nor am I suggesting, as the Alliance for the Separation of School and State seems to imply, that it is primarily via religious teaching that society can be peaceful. My opinions on any type of unquestioned authority, no matter its genesis should be clear by this time. Think for yourself. Treat people with universalizability — if everyone did this, would society still work — in mind. The argument from morality informs us.

Far too much of a statist society is based upon the acceptance of naked authority, and this reliance and belief begins very early in people's lives. Many a parent has answered his child with, "…because I said so!" in response to incessant use of the anti-authoritarian's favorite question, "Why?" (I openly admit to extreme embarrassment that I ever uttered those words, but I digress.) The raw fact is that the State says, "…because I said so" often enough and in so many situations that the practice can easily retreat into the white noise of what we mistake for a civilized existence.

Conclusion

Contrary to the most basic premise of the garden-variety anti-anarchist — that under anarchy society would devolve into chaos — it is far truer that without the free-thought-squelching grip of statist propaganda, the typical statist society is much closer to pandemonium than almost any anarchistic society. I submit that without the inculcation in the supposedly-inherent goodness of the State, the U.S. would have an uprising like the Whiskey Rebellion every other week! Let us place this assertion in context.

The amount of tax on whiskey imposed by Alexander Hamilton's mercantilist scheme amounted to about 7 to 18 cents per gallon. Today there is an average of about $1.16 of tax per pack of cigarettes. (One should note that that the amount of taxation on cigarettes is far from uniform, as was the case with the whiskey tax. Major tobacco states have an average of about $0.33 per pack while other states average out at about $1.27 per pack.) When you hear about cigarette producers or cigarette consumers taking up arms and refusing to pay the taxes on cigarettes let me know.

During the time of the Whiskey Rebellion, the late 1700's, there was no income tax in the U.S. Today, in the early 2000's, the average U.S. tax slave works for about four (4) months to pay his share of income taxes. Still, no armed revolt is imminent. Hell, even unarmed whining, if combined with non-payment, can land you in prison. More shocking, for most of these charges to stick, a jury of your peers would have to find you guilty of not freely submitting the theft of your property! (Okay, I give up. What the hell is "willful failure to file" supposed to mean?)

Indeed, the bulk of the population seems to agree that [place government program here] is not only a good idea, but also that without it [place negative outcome here] would most assuredly happen, and all without one shred of evidence! The faith — the belief — that supports not only the presence of heavily statist practices, but also the apparent willingness with which they are accepted provides ample evidence that the government educational system is producing exactly the effect for which it was created. (One may lament the apparent lack of good performance in the three R's, but let us conclude that an ignorant statist is very likely a better citizen for the coercive state than an informed anarchist and leave it at that.)

As such, there is no need to prove that anarchy is stable or possible, since statism itself requires considerable intellectual investment to be stable, despite the obviousness of universally preferable behavior upon which market anarchism and peaceful human interaction is based.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

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"A nation of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
~ Bertrand de Jouvenal

At this point in time, few people have not heard the stories about the West Texas Polygamists who had some 440 children seized by local authorities. The courts recently ruled that there was insufficient evidence to seize the children in the first place. The authorities acted outside their rights in taking the children from their mothers, members of the sect, so says the Austin-based, Texas Third Court of Appeals. Regardless of one's feelings about this particular group of people, it still strikes me as convenient selective logic to attack this group, or any other supposed cult, particularly when those attacks come from the State. When those attacks are supplemented with the cataclysmically misnamed Child Protective Services it just makes bad matters worse.

Imagine a scenario where people have been, over centuries, conditioned to support the cohesive social grouping(s) into which they are born. A random twist of fate makes them members. From the time they are born until their death, they are subjected to repeated assurances — both by other members and by the directors of the group(s) — that the most important aspect of their lives is their unmitigated support for their way of life, their culture, which is largely defined by membership in this group. In fact, they are told in no uncertain terms, via practiced pledges of allegiance to the cult's coat of arms at schools funded by the cult, that the cult is "indivisible" and endowed by a holy creator with "liberty and justice for all."

The cult has managed to infiltrate every aspect of life: land management, ownership of everything from real property to DNA, education, agriculture, medicine, appropriate personal choices, trade and sale of all goods, and even trade between the cult and other equally oppressive cults around the world. Imagine that this cult is so controlling that it requires — at gunpoint — allegiance to its geographical dominion. Attempts to leave the cult, either geographically or jurisdictionally, without permission, are grounds for lethal force by cult representatives. Indeed, for the organization to survive, its participants must not be allowed to easily leave as this could be construed as a sign of weakness.

To make sure its subjects understand its power, this cult requires that those born into it continue to pay tribute to it no matter where they live, i.e., even if they do succeed in escaping its geographic boundaries. Anyone who fails to follow this edict will have their personal liberty taken away immediately upon returning to the cult's geographic boundaries. Punishment is swift for those who fail to pay "their fair share" of income they made even while not within the geographic boundaries of the cult.

Periodically, this cult stages a great spectacle during which the members ostensibly get to select their leaders. History has shown that those who rise to the highest ranks of leadership during these spectacles are almost uniformly of the same socio-economic class, educational attainment, and have been, for the overwhelming majority of the cult's existence, of the same race and sex. Not only do they think alike, but they look alike as well. Careful analysis of the founding of this cult shows that its progenitors were simply well-to-do subjects of another cult looking for a scam they could themselves enjoy. Not-so-careful analysis of the outcome of these leadership-selection spectacles shows that little, if anything, in the normal daily lives of the lower-echelon cult members' changes as a result of these leader-selection pageants.

Interestingly, the cult's stated highest principles appear to pander to the "equality of men" and other supposedly egalitarian concepts. Simultaneously, those who govern the cult exist in a socio-economic stratum nearly impenetrable by their subjects. In an effort to appease those who might wonder why these trappings are not more generally available, that is, why their best efforts do not result in economic outcome that one might otherwise expect, the cult's leaders set up laws that supposedly guarantee equality of access and equality of outcome for those far below them in status.

Ironically, these laws — since they fly directly in the face of basic Austrian economic theory — preserve the conditions that the lower echelons hope to escape. Often they further enrich those at the top of the bureaucratic food chain. Worse, they pit factions at the lower ends of the socio-economic spectra against each other while preserving the position of the cult leaders.

Minimum wage legislation — a price floor — guarantees that those employable below that specific wage threshold will not get a job: unemployment must therefore result.

Maximum price control legislation — a price ceiling — guarantees that demand will far exceed supply: shortages must therefore result.

Believing that this cult has successfully discovered the Rosetta stone of cult dogma and operation, well-schooled members of the cult routinely travel outside its geographic boundaries and physically attack those who ostensibly threaten it. Interestingly, few seem to notice or care that the leaders of this cult — chickenhawks to their core — rarely endanger themselves in these misadventures, instead filling their armies with sacrificial lambs from socio-economic strata far below them. These crusades are always couched in the rhetoric of securing the blessings enjoyed by those within the cult for those unlucky enough to live outside its geographic boundaries or beyond its direct governance. More often, these wars are either wag-the-dog exercises or outright profit-generating exploits for the cult's leaders or their cronies.

This cycle continues interminably. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

We are, of course, talking about the State.

The disconnect, the query, the puzzlement, from whence the idea for this essay arose relates to why the State, obviously a cult, is not more vigorously decried, particularly outside libertarian circles, while voluntary organizations which have been labeled as “cults” by the State, are. Amazingly, those who exist under the State’s vicious talons also simultaneously support attacks on voluntary organizations simply because the State labels them as cults.

How many among us, after hearing that a cult has been "taken down" would not almost reflexively think, "Good. We’re all safer now!" This while enjoying membership — if one can call it enjoying — in a cult that arrests and incarcerates anyone who decides they’d rather not contribute to the coffers. Voluntary? Hardly. Draconian? Absolutely. The moral inconsistency necessary to deride sects like the one in West Texas — or any other similar organization as described by the mainstream media — while simultaneously chanting “USA! USA!" at a ballgame spins the mind.

The irony is overwhelming.

Maybe I overstate. Do you think one can’t end up in a "U.S. Rape Room," A.K.A. a prison, for failing to contribute to whatever cause the State dreams up? Well, Wesley Snipes — who has apparently been granted an appeal that will keep him out of prison for the time being — would beg to differ. Marion Jones is doing time right now because she lied in statements to representatives of the cult of state. (She lied about taking part in an exploit that was not against the law per se, so she is effectively in jail for lying, not for taking part in the exploit!)

The list of people in similar (and much worse) circumstances to Jones is long, and that's even if one ignores the people being dishonestly held at places like Guantanamo Bay, where they are often held without formal charges or any idea of exactly the edict against which they have transgressed. One hears the stories about how cult members on some compound can’t leave and laments their plight. Then we hear about illegal aliens getting arrested as they attempt to leave the U.S. Does that not sound similar?

Have you ever watched an episode of the Sopranos and wondered how the soldiers of le Cosa Nostra can so blindly follow the orders of a crime boss? You shouldn’t, well, unless maybe you missed a little story about a place called Abu Graib. While one might, if he ignores years of evidence, suppose that this one time the rights-infringers acted outside the orders of their superiors, the evidence points in another direction. When one of those current superiors, someone like Michael Mukasey is even to this day somehow unclear, at least publicly, on whether or not water boarding is actually torture, it doesn’t require a great deductive leap to think that the behavior of those at Abu Graib was more about getting caught enforcing orders than acting out against orders.

Conclusion

The classical (read: statist) definition of a cult seems to be any organization that doesn’t meet some standard of normalcy in its construction, its basis, its membership, or its practices. By that account, any socially-cohesive organization not fully authorized (read: paying tribute to, after being licensed by) the State, is a cult. That this definition (or maybe those who ascribe to it) often doesn’t include the most “cultish” organization ever invented is an example of intellectual gymnastics worthy of Olympic gold.

Here’s a suggestion: Forget about all the other cults. Don’t worry about them. Just leave them alone. Break free from the vicious grasp of selective logic and decry the most dangerous cult of all. One of the rubrics employed by Austrian economists to determine if an activity is illegal or unethical evaluates the level of choice employed by the participants. Simply put, was the transaction voluntary for all involved. For example, in the case of prostitution as long as there is a willing buyer and a willing seller, ceteris paribus there can be no activity warranting law enforcement or bureaucratic concern.

Similarly, if one voluntarily joins an organization that requires him to wear a chicken suit while baying at the moon on Wednesday nights, that is fine as well. While this activity might not appeal to everyone, anyone is free to partake, or not. However, the instant the participants and their chicken-suit-wearing friends require all in some arbitrary geographical region (country, state, county, city) to pay for buying, cleaning, and repairing the chicken suits, well, that’s a problem.

Just because one may have been taught, for as long as they can remember, that the original chicken suit wearers were founding fathers or that wearing chicken suits is patriotic is truly irrelevant.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.

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"I used to be disgusted; now I try to be amused."
~ Elvis Costello

Almost everyone is familiar with the genesis of the phrase, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" The Wizard of Oz, who uttered this famous phrase, had a scheme. That scheme was based directly upon an impression of omnipotence without any legitimate power. Surely that impression would be lost should anyone see him pulling levers and talking into a microphone. I can't help but imagine that if an agent of today's state were to switch places with the Wizard, he'd utter no such words. In fact, I suspect he'd just sit there, a nearly-naked pseudo-emperor, with no concern that we could see him. Instead of trying to be coy, he'd leave us with no choice but to exclaim, "Hey, what happened to the curtain?"

I admit that there was a time when I often found myself aghast with the navet of the "common man," whoever that might have seemed to be. That was also the time when I figured that the primary reason, or maybe the only reason, that the state could so successfully infringe upon the rights of the very people it claimed to protect was due to a combination heavy smoke and mirrors, blind trust, and inexplicable deference. Voltaire is credited with saying, "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere."

In a similar vein, Dresden James said, "The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves." Certainly both of these sentiments are true, but I've recently begun to think it's not quite that simple. Maybe it never was.

Who could blame a person for continuing to believe in his government when so much of its duplicity is obscured from everyone except crazy conspiracy theorists with too much time on their hands or ostensible whistleblowers with apparent axes to grind? Well, so much for that. Right about now, a random viewing of almost any news channel will provide a veritable cornucopia of examples that illustrate, in great and gory detail, that hiding is the last thing on the minds of today's bureaucratic rights infringers. Basically, they do whatever they want, and do so with brazen splendor.

Need proof? Let's take a casual stroll though a few recent and maybe even not-so-recent examples selected at random. I'll ignore stuff like Iraq or the election, since frankly, those are just too easy. Along the way, let's ask a few (hopefully) relevant questions.

Question 1: To Whom Does the War On Drugs Appeal?

I've written a good bit decrying the war against (some) drugs. This is not a rare point-of-view among libertarians. In fact, of the issues that seem to define libertarianism for the mainstream, being pro-drug-legalization is one of them. Still, there remains a relatively vocal group of people who disagree with this view, though I cannot figure out why.

Although it is a relatively rare occurrence, it still galls me when I hear someone lament the (apparently certain) fall of society should recreational drugs be made legal. I would assert that any such suggestion must be based upon equal measures of naïveté and lunacy. First of all, it's not like drug use is down in the U.S. since the war on drugs began. This is true of both recreational drugs and, more importantly, pharmaceuticals. As I mentioned a while back:

The U.S. market [for OTC pharmaceuticals] in 1998 accounted for 40% of the worldwide market, which was $302 billion. (Certainly the use of pharmaceuticals in the U.S. has not gone down since then.) Americans love drugs! There just happens to be a war against some of the people who use some of the drugs.

Secondly, almost any objective analysis of the drug war shows that fighting it, while debatable in terms of effectiveness, results in a substantial number of casualties even among those who are not involved on either side. Manuel Lora and I noted these effects:

Economically, the drug war causes one commodity, the illegal and supposedly illicit drugs, to be inordinately expensive. This generates disproportionate spending from those who consume this commodity. These people are not “islands” and their spending habits affect those with whom they interact.

In a family where one or the other parent is a drug user, the lifestyle is negatively affected, simply because a vice, a free choice, costs much more than it should. While one could argue that this person could simply change his lifestyle, we are talking here not about the user, but those who do not use whose lives are worse off for no other reason than that the war on (some) drugs skews the market.

Under what logic does it make sense for the state to drive the cost of a high-demand commodity up, while simultaneously increasing the violence surrounding the consumption of that commodity? When the use of that commodity represents what is at worst a victimless crime — wherein one takes part in a personal vice — there is no scenario whereby the moral imperative by which the state supposedly operates can be used to justify violent sanctions against the behavior. Simply put, what you do only to yourself is your business, and can only be so. (Hat tip: Lysander Spooner.) Any attempt to circumvent this moral law can have few outcomes that are not negative. The war on drugs, like alcohol prohibition before it, has had few if any, positive outcomes.

All that said, my contributions to the anti-drug war debate have been minor. Whole books have been dedicated to the fallacies. Paul Armentano profiled one such volume just recently. He pointedly observed, citing Lies, Damned Lies and Drug War Statistics:

Since the [Office of National Drug Control Policy's] founding in 1989, "trends in drug use, drug treatment, deaths attributed to drug use, emergency-room mentions of drug use, drug availability, drug purity, and drug prices are inconsistent with the goals of [the federal government]," the authors assert. "Yet, during this same time period, funding for the drug war grew tremendously and costs of the drug war expanded as well."

Money spent on the anti-drug bureaucracy went up while the behavior that bureaucracy supposedly fought — and all that went with it — got worse. Usage: unaffected. Violence: increased. Well, duh. At least 15 years ago, I heard Whoopi Goldberg say it best, "I can go outside right now and yell, u2018I want some drugs!' and get service in 15 minutes" or words to that effect. The war on drugs ain't working. It never did. (One might argue that it was never supposed to work, at least not as advertised, but that's another essay.)

In a bit of irony only possible in a bureaucracy gone tragically off-the-rails, not only is the DEA likely to break into a home and shoot somebody, they are likely to arm a few people (and equip them with PCs) along the way. According to a Forbes.com report, the Drug Enforcement Administration is losing more guns, but fewer laptops, than it did about five years ago. Wait. Does that really say more guns? Apparently DEA agents have always had a tendency to misplace their weapons and "donate" them, but now, it's worse than it used to be. From the article we find:

The majority of stolen guns had been left in an official’s car, despite a policy prohibiting leaving a weapon unattended in a vehicle. The report cited examples of guns stolen from cars parked outside restaurants, hotels, schools and gyms. Some agents had their guns taken from their cars while they were shopping or getting coffee. One firearm was stolen while the car was at the body shop.

Come on. At the body shop? These front-line drug warriors can't even safeguard the weapons they are given. Yet they are supposed to stem the flow of drugs? In what alternate universe? The more I read, the more convinced I am of one barely-debatable conclusion: Everyone knows the drug war is a bust. How could they not?

Yet, a SWAT team will probably be breaking down somebody's door in the inner city this very night, ostensibly protecting the citizenry from the flow of cocaine. (One can only hope they pick the right door, but even that's a toss up.) After all is said and done, pushers in the very city where these well-armed thugs work won't even notice a blip in the flow.

Again I ask, "What happened to the curtain?"

Question 2: What did the Roger Clemens hearing prove?

Let me begin by saying I'm no fan of Roger Clemens. I'm already on record regarding my thoughts on Barry Bonds and that whole situation. (For the record, I tend to regard Bonds as bit of an insufferable a**hole.) I am no more enamored of Clemens than I was of Bonds. (While we're on the subject of sports figures, in what parallel reality should Marion Jones be facing jail time for lying to a couple of federal agents about using steroids? Come on people. Give me a hint.)

Sure, Clemens' over-confidence is partially to blame for his predicament. It was largely his own hubris that led him to this point. I guess he figured he could just rear back and throw high heat at Congress like he had done for most of his baseball career. (Evidently he has lost a few MPH on that fastball, because no one seemed to flinch.)

As far as steroids usage goes, let us be clear on that as well. Major League Baseball spent years not caring about players using steroids. They didn't care when Jose Canseco and the Bash Brothers were lighting up the scoreboard in Oakland. They didn't care when McGuire and Sosa were in a homerun race. They didn't care when Barry Bonds got close to overtaking history. Stevie Wonder could see that and if he missed it, Ray Charles (RIP) could point it out, even now.

All that said, and even as bad as Clemens looked while foaming at the mouth with bluster and hoax at members of Congress, the scenario teaches each of us more about the state than about Roger Clemens.

For instance, this Kabuki Theatre was called a "hearing" but I can't figure out why. Apparently one can be compelled, via a subpoena, to "testify" before Congress. Before one testifies, he is sworn in, ostensibly to be under oath thereafter. Yet, almost everyone will admit, if asked, that the proceeding is not a court of law. Very few, if any, of the people overseeing the proceedings are practicing lawyers. No jury is empanelled. No judge is present. In the case of the Clemens hearing, no decision was reached, nor was any semblance of one even offered. What was it all for? Please, I need a clue here.

We're supposed to take the whole scene seriously, yet in the days leading up to the hearing, one of the key witnesses — Clemens himself — actually met with the people tasked with asking the questions, posing for pictures and signing autographs. (No, you can't make this stuff up.)

So what did the hearings prove? Nothing.

The legislature of the United States took up a lot of time, got on TV, and we all might as well have been watching Survivor. Maybe it's supposed to be consolation that if the Hall of Fame is "the island" Clemens may have been voted off. When did protecting the honor of a private industry like baseball become a key component of government legislation? Never, that's when. Protecting honor?

What happened to the curtain?

Question 3: What terrorist activities are precluded by the actions of the TSA?

I did a cover story for The New American magazine some time back, where I looked at the surveillance society and what it might mean going forward. I opened that piece with a quote from a report by a group that calls itself The Surveillance Studies Network. In its 2006 report one finds this bold statement:

We live in a surveillance society. It is pointless to talk about surveillance society in the future tense. In all the rich countries of the world everyday life is suffused with surveillance encounters, not merely from dawn to dusk but 24/7. Some encounters obtrude into the routine, like when we get a ticket for running a red light when no one was around but the camera. But the majority are now just part of the fabric of daily life. Unremarkable.

Little more need be said, and frankly this statement is correct. Going to the airport is just one such scenario where surveillance of the type that would normally chafe one's shorts will be, well, "unremarkable" in both scope and frequency. Here's the thing though. I might not be so disgusted with the TSA if it wasn't so mediocre. (Well, I would probably still be disgusted, but I'm just thinking out loud here.)

Further in that cover story I mentioned this tidbit.

The Seattle Times published a report of all the airport security breaches they had found between 2002 and 2004. The list was far from inconsequential, although the Times evidently stopped collecting reports after the number reached 100. According to the Times, "Screeners say that's [only] a fraction of the incidents, and most are never disclosed." The reported incidents included one instance when five DHS investigators posing as passengers managed to get knives, a gun and a bomb in their carry-on baggage through security checkpoints without being detected.

Wait. That can't be right. Five DHS investigators posing as passengers managed to get knives, a gun and a bomb past security in their carry-on baggage? Surely you jest. Most likely, it was their crack skills at circumventing the surveillance measures that allowed these insiders to accomplish their feat. Nope. Not even close.

More recently, some random guy on his way to some random location managed to get his pistol beyond security as well, and he did it by accident. When he returned to the checkpoint to inform the screeners of their mistake, what happened? Airport police were alerted. (They say no good deed goes unpunished, but I didn't know they were talking about the TSA.) Last I heard, he was scheduled to appear in court on a charge of possessing or transporting a firearm into an air carrier terminal where prohibited, which is a misdemeanor. He is, in effect, being punished for his honesty. I bet you're wondering what happened to the TSA guys who missed the gun initially. Me too.

I'm also wondering what happened to the curtain.

The Emperor Is Wearing Nothing but a Thong, and It Doesn't Fit

There is much more I could highlight, but time is short, and frankly, there is some NCAA basketball I need to watch. (Yes, my Duke Blue Devils took it on the chin, but hey, it's only a game, right? Great effort, Davidson!) Before I go, let's hit a few more examples.

Many readers are probably aware of the move toward red-light cameras in some municipalities. (This was one of the unremarkable surveillance technologies mentioned previously.) The supposed reason for these cameras is to force the number of people running red lights down, in other words, to protect us. Well, wonder of wonders, the data seems to show that red light cameras: a) don't drive red-light-running accidents down, and; b) increase rear-end collisions. (More accurately, red-light accidents of the type supposedly addressed are already so low as to not show meaningful changes. I'll have more on that in just a bit.) Regardless of what they do or do not accomplish safety-wise, they usually generate a nice chunk of revenue for the municipality that installs them.

Call me cynical, but I figure the cameras are only being installed for the money anyway. How do I know? For this rather obvious reason: now that people have figured out where the cameras are, municipalities are seriously considering taking them down. Apparently they cost more to have than can be covered by the revenue they generate after people know where they are. Now, if these cameras really make one safer, isn't taking them down exactly the wrong action, that is, if one really gives a crap about safety? Not for the state, evidently.

Returning to the non-problem supposedly addressed by red light cameras, a recent Nola.com report mentioned that New Orleans is instituting red light cameras. (The report came out on March 31st, 2008. Somehow waiting one more day strikes me as more appropriate, but I digress.) In the article we find this startling tidbit:

"By giving drivers a strong reason not to run red lights, the cameras are designed to reduce the number of right-angle or side-impact crashes, which studies show kill more than 800 people and injure 200,000 in the United States each year."

That paragraph says it all. At the risk of sounding insensitive, if 800 people are killed in the U.S. per year, given the gargantuan number of traffic lights in the U.S., that’s not a problem fixable via the installation of cameras. In contrast, 44,000 people died in all categories of motor vehicle accidents (2002 data).

In other words, the number of people that can be saved via the application of these red light cameras, assuming they actually accomplished their stated goals, accounts for 1.8 percent of all people (generally) killed in motor vehicle accidents. There just isn't much opportunity, and as such, there is not much likelihood of success. On the other hand, given the way the citations are handled — "just mail in the money and we're good" — these red light cameras can generate a bunch of cash. Bingo.

Conclusion

So what happened to the curtain? I think the TSA is using it.

Returning to these cretins briefly, we find yet another incident, just one of many. Apparently unsatisfied with simply being mediocre — as has been repeatedly and thoroughly highlighted by people like Becky Akers — these anti-champions in the war on terror recently sunk to an even lower low and have become abusive as well. Representatives of this crack unit actually forced an airline traveler to remove her nipple rings with pliers. (Make no mistake, freedom is on the march!)

According to the Associated Press, the victim said she could hear the agents snickering as she struggled to remove the rings. At least they let her use a curtain; at least I think they did. Adding insult to injury, the TSA’s customer service manager at the Lubbock airport concluded the screening was handled properly. Really? I don't know what's more puzzling, the answer or the fact that the TSA has a "customer service" manager! Query: who is the "customer" of a government agency? The people who pay do so at gunpoint. To whom does one legitimately complain?!

Ironically, I recently received an interesting article from a college buddy of mine. The article, which was in the (then) current issue of TheBlackCommentator.com appeared under the title, "Critical Thinking: It's Not Just Important, It's Essential" and contained this paragraph:

Critical thinkers insist upon not only gaining information but also seriously examining and analyzing it. Too often, people are uncritical receivers and accepters of information that, upon closer examination, is not only superficial and inaccurate but also utterly lacking in common sense. Critical thinking and analysis is what I refer to as the politics of unfettered thought. It is feared by the power elite but is absolutely an essential part of the struggle for economic, social, and political equality for people in America and around the world.

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but I don't figure the power elite — whoever they are — fears any such thing. I reckon I enjoy the politics of unfettered thought as much as the next guy, but while I'm at it, can a brother have the curtain back? At least then maybe I could pretend this was all a mystery or something.

Wilt Alston [send him mail] lives in Rochester, NY, with his wife and three children. When he's not training for a marathon or furthering his part-time study of libertarian philosophy, he works as a principal research scientist in transportation safety, focusing primarily on the safety of subway and freight train control systems.