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Posts from 2009

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  1. 2009 [page #13]

Shameless Self-promotion Sunday

It’s Sunday. Everybody get Shameless.

What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

Friday Lazy Linking

From right-on to WTF? in three easy steps

  1. Here’s Chris Moody, quoting (with approval) from a post by Doug Mataconis, in his own post entitled Where the Libertarians and Socialists Agree:

    There's a distinct difference between the free market and the state-aided corporate capitalism that we live with today. …

    Many on the right make the mistake of thinking that believing in capitalism means that you're obligated to defend the actions of the capitalists, but when those actions involve using the state to evade the discipline of the market, you're no longer defending the market, you're helping to destroy it.

    — Doug Mataconis, quoted in Chris Moody (2009-10-08): Where the Libertarians and the Socialists Agree

    Right on, I say. Exactly. (Although, as a libertarian socialist, I can’t work up much surprise at finding libertarians and socialists agreeing on something. After all, I agree with myself all the time. Anyway.)

  2. Here’s Chris Moody, in his comments on the pull-quote:

    There is a vital difference between a government that acts as a referee to ensure rights are preserved so that everyone can compete, and a gang of bureaucrats who prop up well-connected citizens so that they can unfairly compete with everyone else

    — Chris Moody (2009-10-08): Where the Libertarians and the Socialists Agree

    … Wait. Hold up.

    I mean, yes, certainly there’s a problem with gangs of bureaucrats propping up the well-connected, and the more activist the government gets in promoting some players at the expense of others, the worse. But what’s this about a government that acts [only] as a referee to ensure that rights are preserved so that everyone can compete? Any government that is a government will always fail to preserve the right to compete in at least one area — since government claims a sovereign right to write, rule on, and enforce the laws, that means that nobody can effectively compete with a government, no matter how limited the government may be, in a very important market — the market for rights-protection. Moreover, since any government will always not only require you to subscribe to their services, and not anyone else’s — but will also force you to pay for those services at a rate determined by the government, in the form of taxation, that also means that in any politically governed market, competition is always skewed by the fact that market agents are not permitted to freely choose what kinds of security to put in for, or how much to put in for security in the first place — meaning that government has every reason to seize more and more wealth away from productive purposes, and to put it towards forms of security that mainly serve government’s own prerogatives, rather than the actual rights of their captive clients. Government itself is an instance of the exact problem in question — beating out competing uses for individual or common wealth by means of monopoly and brute force.

    Government as such can’t fairly referee competition because any government, just as such is a coercive, anti-competitive, market-distorting entity. (If not strictly limited government, what’s the solution? No government, of course: a free market in everything, including a genuine free market for personal defense, the abolition of legal privileges for agents of the state acting under color of law, and an unconditional individual right to bargain down prices for, or simply to exit, any particular arrangement supposedly for her own defense.)

  3. Here’s Chris Moody, a bit further down in his commentary, in which he tries to cash out his earlier talk about the (mythical) notion of a government strictly limited to fairly protecting people’s rights to compete, with a supposed real-world example to guide future political action:

    Instead, we should follow the roadmap that was agreed upon more than 200 years ago and strike down laws that allow well-healed citizens the ability to use government force to gain advantages over others through in the marketplace.

    — Chris Moody (2009-10-08): Where the Libertarians and the Socialists Agree

    Dude, WTF? The United States Constitution? Really?

    A paper Constitution which was specifically crafted in order to increase, not decrease, the power of the central government to seize taxes, parcel out land titles, and pass fugitive slave laws, all for the benefit of well-heeled merchants, industrialists, bond-holders, speculators, and plantation masters? And to increase, not to decrease, the central government’s power to take control over what Madison lamented as the present anarchy of our [sic] commerce, and so to regiment and redirect it towards the forms of commerce (and to the particular commercialists) that Madison favored? That’s your roadmap?

    I mean, sure, given that part of the motivation was to coercively finance the internal improvements that were seen as necessary for the economy of a great nation, I suppose that this particular map did call for a lot of roads. But at whose expense?

    If your concern is government suppressing competition and picking favorites, then you’ll find that the only way to get rid of that is to get rid of government entirely. As soon as you slip from the necessity of no government interference to the myth of a government which does not interfere — as soon as you try to bring in a little bit of limited government, you’ll find that it is always going to end up rigging the game. And if you slip from the imaginary notion of an ideal limited government, to appeals to the alleged principles of some romanticized past government — if you try to bring in past constitutions and schemes for government, as the sort of limited government you’re looking for, you’re going to find that they never were all that limited anyway, even to begin with. The whole damned thing was rigged from the start.

    It’s not that the power of government has been perverted or abused to suppress competition and favor the well-heeled. The thing itself is the abuse. And the solution ought to be obvious.

Welcome, FreeTalkers

For those of you who have been around here for a while, you may be interested to know that I recorded a brief interview this afternoon on agorism and electoral politics with Mark Edge from FreeTalkLive. The interview will be attached to the end of the podcast, which I’m told will be available late tonight. Due to time constraints on the interview, there’s a fair amount that I got the chance to mention but didn’t allow myself the time to follow up on; if there’s anything that you want to hash out at greater length, please do drop it in the comments and let’s talk.

Update 2009-10-09. [An MP3 of the 2009-10-07 show, with my interview included, is now available for download](http://media.libsyn.com/media/ftl/FTL2009-10-07.mp3).)

For those of you who found out about me, or about agorism, or about this website, through the interview, or the show notes, welcome! Let me take a moment to introduce myself. I’m Charles Johnson, also known as Rad Geek. I’m an individualist anarchist, originally from Alabama, now living and working in Las Vegas. I am a member of the Southern Nevada Alliance of the Libertarian Left, maintainer of several anti-statist web projects, and an occasional writer for The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. If you’re new to the blog, or to agorism and individualist anarchism as a set of ideas, here’s some things which might give you some idea of where I’m coming from, and what I care about.

For an extended treatment of agorism, counter-economics, and what it’s all about — including its positive aspects, above and beyond its critique of electoral politics, you may want to check out this interview I recorded with Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries back in May:

For an in-depth discussion of counter-economics and direct action, and of the inherent limitations of electoral politics, see:

Among agorists, I’m a bit unusual in the extent to which I stress counter-economic that are either already-existing projects of, or else inspired by the historical examples of, and tied to goals traditionally associated with, the anti-authoritarian Left — including, notably, anti-statist radical labor unions, grey-market mutual aid networks like Food Not Bombs or LETS and other localized trading networks, black-market mutual aid networks like the Jane abortion network, existing feminist projects like the battered women’s shelter and rape crisis center movement, and existing social anarchist projects like CopWatch and the Anarchist Black Cross Federation. For some discussions of why, see:

If you’re curious, I discuss my views on why I think that some more familiar forms of libertarian political strategy — such as voting for Ron Paul, or running nominally libertarian candidates for government office, or trying to lobby the state to act less statist, or trying to vindicate some less-statist reading of the United States Constitution in the courts, or indeed spending any considerable effort on teaming up in an ongoing, open-ended political party with minimal-statists — are at best futile, and often actively destructive of serious politics, at some length in:

And since the topic of Ron Paul, specifically, came up, and since, out of concern for time, I stated my views but did not spend long on elaborating them — and since, while we’re here, the miserable failure of Ron Paul’s single-digit primary showing is currently the show pony for the awesome potential of libertarian electoralism — it may be worth pointing to some more detailed discussion of what my problems with the Pauliticos are, or were:

I suppose I could also discuss the even more miserable miserable failure of the Libertarian Party, and particularly of its recent strategy of mercilessly pruning away anything resembling libertarianism from the platform in order to advance the prospects for failed candidacies by ridiculous conservative tools, as in the recent Barr/W.A.R. ticket. But really, I am at the point where I think that kind of thing is really beneath comment. The Pauliticos may be wrong, but they have the benefit of being comprehensible. Not so, at this late date, those who still believe that serious political transformation is going to come about by means of the supporting LP.

Wednesday Lazy Linking

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