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Idle questions

Here’s regular Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist and occasional libertarian Vin Suprynowicz, in a recent column against so-called Political Correctness in American Universities:

Internationally renowned Austrian economics professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe used a standard textbook example of investment time preferences in a classroom lecture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a few years back, pointing out that gay couples often invest with shorter time horizons[*] because they are less likely to have children to profit from investments that mature after they’re gone.

— Vin Suprynowicz, las Vegas Review-Journal (2009-06-07): Discussing guns dubbed academic misconduct

Actually, what happened is that, in a lecture on time-preference in economics, Hoppe listed homosexuals alongside small children, muggers, murderers, rapists, and democratically-elected politicians, as an example of a group of people whose supposedly high time-preferences supposedly led to destructive or antisocial behavior.

Suprynowicz describes this as a standard textbook example of investment time preference. That’s a claim that makes me curious. Is it really? Can anyone name at least one college economics textbook in common use that cites homosexuals as an example of a group characterized by high time-preferences?

* Actually, the lecture had nothing especially to do with investments or investing in the conventional sense of the word. Hoppe’s examples of actions driven by high time-preference included consumption of snack foods, muggings, rape, and tax increases. On the whole sorry, stupid affair see Jason Kuznicki (2005-02-12): Last Words on Hoppe and GT 2005-02-08: Hoppe and Churchill: On the Justice of Strange Bedfellows.

In a freed market, who will stop markets from running riot and doing crazy things? And who will stop the rich and powerful from running roughshod over everyone else?

Q. In a freed market, who will stop markets from running riot and doing crazy things? And who will stop the rich and powerful from running roughshod over everyone else?

A. We will.

Sheldon Richman put up a nice piece last week for The Goal Is Freedom called Regulation Red Herring: Why There’s No Such Thing as an Unregulated Market. (Incidentally, while you’re reading Sheldon’s piece, be sure to check out the illustrative photograph of the Federal Trade Commission building’s awesome allegorical statue of government restraining trade.)

Sheldon’s point, which is well-taken and important, is that if regulation is being used to mean making a process orderly, or regular, then what radical free-marketeers advocate is not a completely unregulated market. For something to even count as a market, it has to be orderly and regular enough for people to conduct their business and make their living in it and through it. Government interference only seems necessary to regulate a market, in the positive sense of the word regulate, if you think that the only way to get social order is by means of social control, and the only way for to get to harmonious social interactions is by having the government coerce people into working together with each other. But, as Sheldon argues:

Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek pointed out years ago that the real issue regarding economic planning is not: To plan or not to plan? But rather: Who plans (centralized state officials or decentralized private individuals in the market)?

Likewise, the question is not: to regulate or not to regulate. It is, rather, who (or what) regulates?

All markets are regulated. In a free market we all know what would happen if someone charged, say, $100 per apple. He'd sell few apples because someone else would offer to sell them for less or, pending that, consumers would switch to alternative products. The market would not permit the seller to successfully charge $100.

Similarly, in a free market employers will not succeed in offering $1 an hour and workers will not succeed in demanding $20 an hour for a job that produces only $10 worth of output an hour. If they try, they will quickly see their mistake and learn.

And again, in a free market an employer who subjected his employees to perilous conditions without adequately compensating them to their satisfaction for the danger would lose them to competitors.

What regulates the conduct of these people? Market forces. (I keep specifying in a free market because in a state-regulated economy, market forces are diminished or suppressed.) Economically speaking, people cannot do whatever they want in a free market because other people are free to counteract them. Just because the government doesn't stop a seller from charging $100 for an apple doesn't mean he or she can get that amount. Market forces regulate the seller as strictly as any bureaucrat could—even more so, because a bureaucrat can be bribed. Whom would you have to bribe to be exempt from the law of supply and demand?

It is no matter of indifference whether state operatives or market forces do the regulating. Bureaucrats, who necessarily have limited knowledge and perverse incentives, regulate by threat of physical force. In contrast, market forces operate peacefully through millions of participants, each with intimate knowledge of his or her own personal circumstances, looking out for their own well-being. Bureaucratic regulation is likely to be irrelevant or inimical to what people in the market care about. Not so regulation by market forces.

If this is correct, there can be no unregulated, or unfettered, markets. We use those terms in referring to markets that are unregulated or unfettered by government. As long as we know what we mean, the expressions are unobjectionable.

But not everyone knows what we mean. Someone unfamiliar with the natural regularities of free markets can find the idea of an unregulated economy terrifying. So it behooves market advocates to be capable of articulately explaining the concept of spontaneous market order—that is, order (to use Adam Ferguson's felicitous phrase) that is the product of human action but not human design. This is counterintuitive, so it takes some patience to explain it.

Order grows from market forces. But where do impersonal market forces come from? These are the result of the nature of human action. Individuals select ends and act to achieve them by adopting suitable means. Since means are scarce and ends are abundant, individuals economize in order to accomplish more rather than less. And they always seek to exchange lower values for higher values (as they see them) and never the other way around. In a world of scarcity tradeoffs are unavoidable, so one aims to trade up rather than down. The result of this and other features of human action and the world at large is what we call market forces. But really, it is just men and women acting rationally in the world.

— Sheldon Richman, The Goal Is Freedom (2009-06-05): Regulation Red Herring

That last point is awfully important. It’s convenient to talk about market forces, but you need to remember that remember that those market forces are not supernatural entities that act on people from the outside. Market forces are a conveniently abstracted way of talking about the systematic patterns that emerge from people’s economic choices. S if the question is, who will stop markets from running riot, the answer is: We will; by peacefully choosing what to buy and what not to buy, where to work and where not to work, what to accept and what not to accept, we inevitably shape and order the market that surrounds us. When we argue about whether or not government should intervene in the economy in order to regiment markets, the question is not whether markets should be made orderly and regular, but rather whether the process of ordering is in the hands of the people making the trade, or by unaccountable third parties; and whether the means of ordering are going to be consensual or coercive.

The one thing that I would want to add to Sheldon’s excellent point is that there are two ways in which we will do the regulating of our own economic affairs in a free society — because, as I have discussed here before, there are two different kinds of peaceful spontaneous orders in a self-regulating society. There is the sort of spontaneity that Sheldon focuses on — the unplanned but orderly coordination that emerges as a byproduct of ordinary people’s interactions. (This is spontaneity in the sense of achieving a goal without a prior blueprint for the goal.) But a self-regulating people can also engage in another kind of spontaneity — that is, achieving harmony and order through a conscious process of voluntary organizing and activism. (This is spontaneity in the sense of achieving a goal through means freely chosen, rather than through constraints imposed.) In a freed market, if someone in the market exploits workers or chisels costumers, if she produces things that are degrading or dangerous or uses methods that are environmentally destructive, it’s vital to remember that you do not have to just let the market take its course — because the market is not something outside of us; we are market forces. And so a freed market includes not only individual buyers and sellers, looking to increase a bottom line, but also our shared projects, when people choose to work together, by means of conscious but non-coercive activism, alongside, indeed as a part of, the undesigned forms of spontaneous self-organization that emerge. We are market forces, and the regulating in a self-regulating market is done not only by us equilibrating our prices and bids, but also by deliberately working to shift the equilibrium point, by means of conscious entrepreneurial action — and one thing that libertarian principles clearly imply, even though actually-existing libertarians may not stress it often enough, is that entrepreneurship includes social entrepreneurship, working to achieve non-monetary social goals.

So when self-regulating workers rely on themselves and not on the state, abusive or exploitative or irresponsible bosses can be checked or plain run out of the market, by the threat or the practice of strikes, of boycotts, of divestiture, and of competition — competition from humane and sustainable alternatives, promoted by means of Fair Trade certifications, social investing, or other positive pro-cott measures. As long as the means are voluntary, based on free association and dissociation, the right to organize, the right to quit, and the right to put your money where your mouth is, these are all part of a freed market, no less than apple-carts or corporations. When liberals or Progressives wonder who will check the power of the capitalists and the bureaucratic corporations, their answer is — a politically-appointed, even less accountable bureaucracy. The libertarian answer is — the power of the people, organized with our fellow workers into fighting unions, strikes and slow-downs, organized boycotts, and working to develop alternative institutions like union hiring halls, grassroots mutual aid associations, free clinics, or worker and consumer co-ops. In other words, if you want regulations that check destructive corporate power, that put a stop to abuse or exploitation or the trashing of the environment, don’t lobby–organize!

Where government regulators would take economic power out of the hands of the people, on the belief that social order only comes from social control, freed markets put economic power into the hands of the people, and they call on us to build a self-regulating order by means of free choice and grassroots organization. When I say that the libertarian Left is the real Left, I mean that, and it’s not because I’m revising the meaning of the term Left to suit my own predilections or some obsolete French seating chart. It’s because libertarianism, rightly understood, calls on the workers of the world to unite, and to solve the problems of social and economic regulation not by appealing to any external authority or privileged managerial planner, but rather by taking matters into their own hands and working together through grassroots community organizing to build the kind of world that we want to live in.

All power to the people!

See also:

Wednesday Lazy Linking

  • … but the streets belong to the people! Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-10): The People’s Stop Sign. In which people in an Ottawa neighborhood take nonviolent direct action to slow down the traffic flying down their neighborhood streets — by putting up their own stop signs at a key intersection. The city government, of course, is now busy with a Criminal Investigation of the public’s heinous contribution to public safety.

  • Abolitionism is the radical notion that other people are not your property. Darian Worden (2009-06-09): The New Abolitionists The point is that the principles of abolitionism, which held that regardless of popular justifications no human is worthy to be master and no human can be owned by another, when carried to their logical conclusion require this: that no human is worthy of authority over another, and that no person is owed allegiance simply because of political status. When reason disassembles the popular justifications of statism, as advances in political philosophy since the 1850's have assisted in doing, the consistent abolitionist cannot oppose the voluntaryist principles of the Keene radicals.

  • Mr. Obama, Speak For Yourself. Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-09-09): Speaking of the State

  • A campaign of isolated incidents. Ellen Goodman, Houston Chronicle (2009-06-08): Sorry, but the doctor’s killer did not act alone

  • Let’s screw all the little guys. Just to be fair. (Or, pay me to advertise my product on your station.) Jesse Walker, Reason (2009-06-09): The Man Can’t Tax Our Music: The music industry wants to impose an onerous new fee on broadcasters.

  • Some dare call it torture. Just not the cops. Or the judges. Wendy McElroy, WendyMcElroy.com (2009-06-08): N.Y. Judge Rules that Police Can Taser Torture in order to coerce compliance with any arbitrary court order. I think that Wendy is right to call pain compliance for what it is — torture (as I have called it here before) — and that it is important to insist on this point as much as possible whenever the topic comes up.

  • On criminalizing compassion. Macon D., stuff white people do (2009-06-05), on the conviction of Walt Staton for knowingly littering water jugs in a wildlife refuge, in order to keep undocumented immigrants from dying in the desert.

  • Freed markets vs. deforesters. Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader Environment (2009-06-04): Do You Know Where Your Shoes Have Been?, on the leather industry and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Utne does a good job of pointing out (by quoting Grist’s Tom Philpott) that the problem is deeply rooted in multi-statist neoliberalism: because of the way in which the Brazilian government and the World Bank act together to subsidize the cattle barons and ‘roid up Brazilian cattle ranching, the report is really about the perils of using state policy to prop up global, corporate-dominated trade.

  • Well, Thank God. (Cont’d.) Thanks to the Lord Justice, we now know that Pringles are, in fact, officially potato chips, not mere savory snacks, in spite of the fact that only about 40% of a Pringles crisp is actually potato flour. Language Log takes this case to demonstrate the quasi-Wittgensteinian point that, fundamentalist legal philosophy to one side, there’s actually no such thing as a self-applying law. (Quoting Adam Cohen’s New York Times Op-Ed, Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more [linguists groan here], while judges like [Sonia] Sotermayor are activists. But there is no magic way to interpret terms like free speech or due process — or potato chip.) I think the main moral of the story has to do with the absurdity of a political system in which whether or not you can keep $160,000,000 of your own damn money rides on whether or not you can prove to a judge that your savory snack hasn’t got the requisite potatoness to count as a potato crisp for the purposes of law and justice.

  • Small riots will get small attention, no riots get no attention, make a big riot, and it will be handled immediately. Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal (2009-05-30): In China, a New Breed of Dissidents. The story makes it seem as though the most remarkable thing about the emerging dissident movement is that they are safe enough for the State to tolerate them, rather than launching all out assaults as they did against the Tienanmen dissidents in 1989. Actually, I think that that misses the point entirely; and that the most interesting thing is that they have adopted such flexible and adaptive networking, both tactically and strategically, and that they now so often rise up from the very social classes that the Chinese Communist Party claims to speak for (not just easily-demonized students and intelligentsia, but ordinary farmers, factory workers, and retirees) — that the regime isn’t tolerating them; it just no longer knows what to do with them.

  • Counter-Cooking and Mutual Meals. Julia Levitt, Worldchanging: Bright Green (2009-06-03): Community Kitchens (Via Kevin Carson’s Shared Items.) If I may recommend, if you’re going to work on any kind of community cooking like this, particularly if you’re interested in it partly for reasons of resiliency and building community alternatives, you should do what you can to make sure that it is strongly connected with the local grey-market solidarity economy, through close cooperation with your local Food Not Bombs (as both a source and a destination for food) and other local alternatives to the state-subsidized corporate-consumer model for food distribution.

  • Looking Forward. Shawn Wilbur, In the Libertarian Labyrinth (009-06-06): Clement M. Hammond on Police Insurance. An excerpt on policing in a freed society, from individualist anarchist Clement M. Hammond’s futurist utopian novel, Then and Now which originally appeared in serialized form in Tucker’s Liberty in 1884 and 1885. (Thus predating Bellamy’s dreary Nationalist potboiler by 4 years.) Hammond’s novel is now available in print through Shawn’s Corvus Distribution. The good news is that, while Bellamy’s date of 2000 has already mercifully passed us by without any such society emerging, we still have almost 80 years to get it together in time for Hammond’s future.

  • Here at Reason we never pass up a chance to have some fun at the expense of Pete Seeger. Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-09): They Wanna Hear Some American Music. On brilliant fakery, the invention of Country and Western music, the cult of authenticity, and the manufacture of Americana. For the long, full treatment see Barry Mazor, No Depression (2009-02-23): Americana, by any other name…

  • Anarchy on the Big Screen. Colin Firth and Kevin Spacey have signed on for a big-screen film adaptation of Homage to Catalonia. The film is supposed to enter production during the first half of 2010.

Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.)

Communications

The Crash

For a long time I had conflicting feelings about Bureaucrash. On the one hand, I was encouraged to see a well-funded, well-organized libertarian organization that had broken out of the electoralist trap, was no longer focusing on trying to persuade statist politicians to be less statist, or, even worse, to try to replace them with other statist politicians, and that instead was committed to bypassing that whole shell game in favor of a primary focus on culture jamming, street-level organizing, and other forms of activism directed at ordinary people rather than at the political apparatus and its hangers-on. And I know lots of awesome organizers and activists who have come out of Bureaucrash, I think precisely because of that focus.

On the other hand, Bureaucrash always presented itself as a wing mainly of the American libertarian movement; even while many or most Crashers were not only radicals but anarchists, they spent a great deal of their time hanging out with, and promoting the causes of, reformist minimal statists — a strategy I think to be fundamentally self-undermining. And part of the reason for all this was, of course, that there was always the Competitive Enterprise Institute hovering there, in the background. And besides the institutional ties, in site of the shift in focus and rhetoric, there were still the lingering cultural and rhetorical attachments to the old conservative think-tank-tarian world — notably, a lot of cap-doffing, even in supposedly irreverent culture-jamming, to Capitalism, President Thomas Jefferson, and other idols of libertarian respectability; also what seems to me to have been a lot of crude, or even willful, misunderstanding of the counter-globalization movement, and the critique of multi-statist neoliberalism.

However, as you may have noticed, in recent days CEI has taken some major steps towards relieving me of the burden of ambivalence. If you haven’t noticed, former Crasher Xaq Fixx lays out why in his resignation letter:

Hello Crashers,

I have had the pleasure of working with many of you during our time with Bureaucrash, and some of us have only recently discovered each other. Regardless of whether we are new friends or old allies, I thank you all for your commitment to liberty.

As you all know since the beginning of Bureaucrash the position of Crasher-in-Chief has always been held by very principled libertarians. All were welcomed to be members of the Bureaucrash community so long as they shared the desire to decrease the roll of the state in our lives. Passionate freedom fighters Ryan Oprea, Jason Talley, and Pete Eyre have guided the organization as members and not as top down masters by encouraging people to find their own path to liberty and offering assistance along the way. I had hoped to continue in this tradition if I was passed the sledgehammer. Jason and Pete were some of my earliest supporters, and I thank them for that. There were several other applicants for the crasher-in-chief (CiC) position that I would have gladly worked alongside as they followed the trails blazed by their CiC forerunners.

CEI has decided that tradition has no virtue, and crasher quantity is far more important than crasher quality. Over the past several years they have attempted to exert more control over BC, stifling several pro-liberty projects, hamstringing others, discouraging some issues and encouraging others that fit their narrow vision of liberty that coincides with the interests of their donors. Jason and Pete proved difficult to control, and I would be no better so they hired an outsider with no knowledge of our community. They chose someone that they wouldn't have to fight with or attempt to mold. I cannot blame them for their hiring decision, because to them it makes sense. Bureaucrash became their brand several years ago and they can do with it what they wish.

Lee Doren to some extent is as much a victim as any of us. He was hired to turn Bureaucrash into a youth outreach organization by a conservatarian think tank. Having no prior knowledge of Bureaucrash tt was not unreasonable for him to expect a crowd that shared similar views. He was also not given help for feedback from CEI after being hired; he was given a site and a password and told to make it work. His views may not be in line with ours, but they are what his superiors were looking for. We could perhaps fault him for taking a job with an organization where he strongly disagrees with the majority of active members, or at least being woefully uninformed about the goals of views of that group but, most likely, he was brought in to reform those things anyway. He is just doing his job, and as this is a voluntary organization we should remember that every government employee is more deserving of scorn and ridicule than he.

Because of CEI's clear disdain for Bureaucrash's traditions, and complete lack of respect for all of us, the Crashers, I feel it is time to turn our backs on the Bureaucrash brand. I will no longer be hosting the Podcrash, and will be returning all the equipment to CEI. If they are to offer me the position of Crasher-in-Chief, I cannot in good conscious accept it knowing what they want to turn BC into. I cannot continue to contribute my time, labor, and money to what is becoming a front group for an organization that is aligning itself with the authoritarian right instead of those that love liberty the most.

I would be honored if you would join me in finding somewhere else to unite against the ever growing state. I have created a facebook group, ABC (After Bureaucrash) Action to share some alternatives, and discuss what you want out of them.

Yours in Liberty,
Xaq Fixx

For some excellent commentary, see Brad Spangler’s remarks, Misconception: Radicalism undermines reform efforts. I’d just want to stress, in addition to what Brad has to say, that the kind of co-optation and self-vitiation that Brad talks about aren’t just tendencies, and they aren’t just the work of some clever set of minimal-statist manipulators. I think that they are built in to the electoral-reformist project itself, necessarily and always — that they are structural limitations that you will always face if your politics is hitched primarily to influence the state or trying to gain a base of power within the state. The process itself only admits of certain outcomes, and the process itself also tends to consume those who put themselves into it. (For more on why, see GT 2008-11-14: So you are in favor of personal money holes? and GT 2008-02-25: I am shocked! shocked! to find that politics is going on in here.)

So, depending on how you want to look at things, and how you think of what Bureaucrash was, you might think of this as the dismantling of Bureaucrash by the CEI. Or you might think of it as the liberation of Bureaucrash from the CEI. It all depends on whether you’re interested in the brand or in the substance. If it’s the latter, then it doesn’t matter what kind of shit the CEI decides to call Bureaucrash. What’s matters is what’s going on among those who have come out, who have left the purges and the chickenshit co-optation behind them. And if you’re interested in that, then I think there’s good reason to hope that this particular cutting of strings will lead to a more radical politics of individualism, without the constraints imposed by the think-tank paradigm, and with better connections and stronger ties to their real allies (or ALLies) and conversation partners in the freedom movement — the radicals, not the reformists; the counter-economy, not the Establishment; the anarchists, not the minimal-statists concentrated around the imperial Metropole; that is, the left-libertarians, agorists, mutualists, social anarchists, and the rest of us on the anti-statist radical Left. Here’s hoping, anyway.

So let’s get started. The ex-Crashers are congregating around ABC Action:

ABC Action means After Bureaucrash Action – This group is dedicated to those liberty loving activists that have made BC great over the years but are exploring other options due to the new direction CEI and Lee Doren want to take the organization.

And, for those of you who have a radical sensibility and some rad geekery skills, I especially want to point to Mike Gogulski’s Activism opportunity for liberty-loving geeks, which was the main motivating factor in my putting up this post. Mike says:

I have been asked to start up a small sub-working-group, a task force, if you'll pardon the term, of active people with the time, inclination, experience and knowledge necessary to provide and manage the technology infrastructure for this effort.

This will include, right away, setup and administration of a new ning.com social-networking site, and probably the same duties for a WordPress blog.

Longer-term, we need to create a new activist platform that goes beyond the capabilities of ning, and which could rival the reach and power of the online campaign management and fundraising systems used by groups like moveon.org, Campaign For Liberty, etc.

Anyone who would like to participate in this tech working group — or perhaps become its long-term leader — is invited to contact me directly, and right now!

Full contact info for me is at http://www.gogulski.com/contact.html

Yours in liberty,
Mike Gogulski

Bureaucrash has long been a focal point for libertarians who are young, focused, practical, radical, passionate, and creative. Now that CEI has made it clear that they want more boring professionalist politicos, the ex-Crasher networks are going to become a focal point for libertarians who are young, focused, practical, radical, passionate, creative, pissed off, and, for the moment at least, have become free of binding ties to gradualism, reformism, conservative small-government types, and their program of governmentalist futility-through-respectability.

A time, then, to strike, while the hammer is free to swing. We are going to dismantle the master’s house, and we are going to build our own damned tools to do it with.

Onward.

Wednesday Lazy Linking

Don’t forget.

  • The world is awesome.

  • People are awesome. You don’t need plans, or politics, or power. Put them up against people, and people will win every time. People came up with that video. Also, other people came up with this.

  • Technological civilization is awesome. (In case you’re wondering, it’s awesome because it’s made of people.)

  • Books are awesome. Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times (2009-05-29): Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader

  • To-day is awesome. It’s an anniversary. My love and I were married three years ago today. If the normal online rounds are held up for a while, well, that’s why.

Solidarity.

  • In memory of George Tiller. feministe (2009-05-31): In honor of Dr. Tiller (if you would like to donate in memory and in honor of Dr. Tiller’s work). Among others, the National Network of Abortion Funds has established a George Tiller Memorial Abortion Fund.

  • IQSN, L.A. I.M.C. (2009-05-27): Solidarity with Queer Bulgaria on 27 June 2009. A day of international actions in solidarity with the LGBTQ Pride march in Sofia, Bulgaria. Last year’s march was attacked by neo-Nazi groups who decided to Keep Our Children Safe with a campaign of roving basher gangs and by slinging molotov cocktails and small explosives at the marchers. International Queer Solidarity Network calls for a European mobilization, with support from the United States, that will stand in solidarity with Queer Bulgaria for this year’s march.

News.

Comment.

Historicize.

Communications.

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