The government-installed administration at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas says that, what with the current round of massive state budget cuts, and the threat of future cuts one or two years down the line, they don’t have enough money to teach classes in unpopular majors. (Based on recent decisions from administrative committees, UNLV’s — excellent, but small — Women’s Studies program, among others, might just barely manage to escape the axe. For this round of budget cuts.)

But apparently they do have enough money to build a big memorial to dead government soldiers.

Of course they do; it’s a matter of priorities. When the allocation of money for the University is political, it’s always going to favor what’s politically popular over what’s educationally important. And there’s nothing more politically popular than Patriotically Correct monuments to dead government soldiers.

This is, of course, exactly why UNLV should be liberated entirely from government appointments of administration and from the government strings attached to government funding.

Supporters of the Women’s Studies department, and of academics at UNLV broadly, often view the prospect of privatization of the University with horror. I don’t–because if privatization just means turning UNLV over from governmental ownership to non-gvernmental ownership, that could mean a lot of different things. I understand the reaction, if they are thinking of the kind of legislative privateering where the University simply being sold off to the best-connected corporate bidder. What I think is that the University doesn’t belong to the state government in the first place, and so the state government has no right to sell it to anyone; it belongs to the students and the faculty who use it. And privatizing, or if you prefer socializing it, directly into the hands of the campus community is the only just way to dispose of the University.^[1] It’s also the best thing that could possibly happen to education at UNLV. As long as a government-imposed administration is in charge of UNLV, UNLV will be about serving the priorities of administrators, and serving the priorities of the government. UNLV will be about learning and teaching when it’s controlled by learners and teachers; the sooner we end the government occupation of campus, the better.

NV out of UNLV!

See also:

• GT 2007-11-08: Sprachkritik: Privatization
• GT 2004-06-07: Property to the People: the Leftist Case for Privatization

1. ^[1]Of course, a plan like that — just handing the University for free over to those who work and study in it, with no political strings attached, instead of coming up with some scheme to create a subsidized sale to an bureaucratic efficiency-minded corporate management, with lots of lingering state control over what they can do — is almost certainly something that will never come out of a committee of the state legislature. Or rather, it’s something that will never come out of a legislative committee unless they are forced to it by events on the ground. If it’s going to come about, it’s something much more likely to come about by a strategy of campus organizing, concerted strikes by faculty, staff, and students, and student occupations of buildings and facilities, aimed not at legislative influence in Carson city, but at asserting effective physical and cultural control over the campus. But I see the need for people-power tactics, instead of bureaucratic gamesmanship and legislative lobbying, as an advantage of my proposal. Not a weakness.↩

It’s a beautiful Sunday in May, and Shamelessness is in the air.

I’ve been working away in the scriptorium this week, not as diligently as I like, but diligently enough that some things long-planned are beginning to come to fruition. You probably know that the Bits & Pieces on Free Market Anti-Capitalism are coming out (and will continue to come out over the upcoming week). What you may not know, unless you specially follow it, is that I’ve also been steadily at work over at the Fair Use Repository. In particular, I’m happy to announce that, as I suggested I might last week, I’m now happy to announce that the complete text of the November 1914 issue of Mother Earth is now available online at fair-use.org. In particular, if you haven’t yet, I would recommend taking a look at Guy Aldred’s essay That Economic Army (a reprint from the Spur). The obvious aspect of the essay is a long tirade against the hypocrisies of Labour Party politicians and trades unionists who are long since dead. But whether the polemic entertains you or not, underneath it there is also a really interesting analysis of how the pressure of state capitalism seizes and deforms individual people, and entire industries, into gears for the war machine, through what Aldred calls economic conscription, and how this constructs and confines their interests so as to create a shared interest in perpetuating war. (The question of course is how to become the sand in the gears, instead of the oil.) This next week, I’ll be working some more at Mother Earth and Liberty, and completing the first run of Bits & Pieces (that is, getting through the material that was actually presented at the APEE panel), and hopefully coming back around to some related commentary. Also got a big pile of contact information from the last couple weeks’ A-Cafes that needs to be processed.

That’s my Shamelessness for the week. What about y'all? 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.

Like I said in the previous instalment, one of the things that we need to do, and don’t do often enough, is to carefully distinguish the broad meaning of markets as the sum of all voluntary exchanges, and the narrow meaning, and connotations, of markets as the cash nexus, and the particular forms of relationship and mediation which that brings along with it. The importance of consensual society, to any libertarian theory worthy of the name, is obvious. But the social and economic value of the cash nexus, as a social relationship, depends entirely on the context. What is positive and productive in a context of free exchange easily becomes an instrument of alienation and exploitation when it is forced on unwilling participants through government coercion.

In particular, for free-market anti-capitalists, there are at least three specific mechanisms we might mention — mechanisms that are especially important and especially pervasive, by which incumbent big businesses, and capitalistic arrangements broadly, benefit from rigged markets, at the expense of workers, consumers, taxpayers, and mutualistic alternatives to the statist quo:

1. Government monopolies and cartels — in which government penalties directly suppress competition or erect effective barriers to entry against newcomers or substitute goods and services;

2. Regressive redistribution — in which property is directly seized from ordinary workers by government expropriation, and transferred to economically powerful beneficiaries, in the form of tax-funded subsidies and corporate welfare, taxpayer-backed sweetheart loans, Kelo-style eminent domain transfers, &c.; and

3. Captive Markets — in which demand for a good is created, or artificially ratcheted up, by government coercion — which can mean a direct mandate with penalties inflicted on those who do not buy in; or a situation in which market actors are driven into a market on artificially disadvantageous terms as an indirect (perhaps even unintended) ripple-effect of prior government interventions.

As an easy example of a directly-imposed captive market, consider the demand for corporate car insurance. When state governments mandate that every driver to purchase and maintain car insurance from bureaucratically-approved insurance companies, they necessarily shrink the scope of voluntary exchange, but they also dramatically bulk up a particular, fetishized form of cash exchange – by creating a new bill that everyone is forced to pay, and a select class of incumbent companies with easy access to a steady stream of customers, many of whom might not pay for their services but for the threat of fines and arrest. As an example of an indirectly-imposed captive market, consider the demand for professionally-certified accountants. CPAs perform a useful service, but it’s a service that far fewer people, and indeed far fewer businesses, would need, except for the fact that they need help coping with the documentation and paperwork requirements imposed by the government’s tax code. A CPA is essentially someone trained in dealing with financial complexity, but finances are much more complex than they would be in a free society precisely because of government taxation and the bizarre requirements and perverse incentives tend to make things much more complex than they would otherwise be. Although government has no special interest in benefiting the bottom line of CPAs, it is nevertheless the case that CPAs are able to get far more business, and at a far higher rate, than they would in a market without income tax, capital gains tax, sales tax, and the myriad other taxes that demand specialized expertise in accounting and interpretation of legal requirements.

A quick way to gloss the free-market anti-capitalist thesis, then, is that we hold that many of the recognizable patterns of capitalist economics result from the fact that certain key markets – importantly, the labor market, housing rental market, insurance and financial markets, and other key markets are rigged markets. And, in particular, that they are often indirectly-created captive markets, and that the extent to which these needs are met through through conventionally commercial relationships under the heading of the cash nexus — rather than being met through other, possibly radically different sorts of social relationships, like co-ops, homesteading, sweat equity, informal exchange, loosely reciprocal gift economies, grassroots mutual aid networks, and other mutualistic alternatives — has little to do with people’s underlying desires or preferences, and a great deal to do with the constraints placed on the expression of those desires or preferences. Commercial relationships and the cash nexus grow fat because working-class folks in need of houses or jobs are driven into a market where they are systematically stripped of resources and alternatives, where they are constantly faced by artificially high costs, and where they are generally constrained to negotiate with incumbent market players who have been placed in an artificially advantageous position over them through continuous government interventions in the incumbents’ favor.^[1]

1. ^[1]See also Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It.↩

In order to get clear on the topic in a conversation about Free Market Anti-Capitalism, the obvious points where clarification may be needed are going to be the meaning of capitalism, the meaning of markets, and the meaning of freedom in the market context. We left-libertarians have spent a lot of time, and raised a lot of controversy talking about the first topic — whether capitalism is really a good name for the sort of thing that we want, the importance of distinguishing markets from actually-existing capitalism, and the possibility of disentangling multiple senses of capitalism.^[1] There’s been a lot of argument about that, but here I’m happy to just defer to what my fellow panelists and other left-libertarians have already said. What I’d like to focus on is the less frequently discussed side of our distinction — not the meaning of capitalism, but the different strands of meaning within the term market. As absolutely central as this idea is to libertarian economics, I would argue that there are at least two importantly distinct senses in which the term is used:

1. Markets as free exchange — when libertarians talk about markets, or especially about the market, we often mean to pick out the sum of all voluntary exchanges — any economic order based, to the extent that it is based, on respect for individual property, consensual exchange, freedom of association, and the freedom to engage in entrepreneurial discovery.

2. Markets as the cash nexus — but we often also use the term in a different sense — to refer to a particular form of acquiring and exchanging property — that is, to refer to commerce and quid pro quo exchanges, typically mediated by currency or by financial instruments denominated in units of currency.

Of course, one of the central points of libertarian economics is that these two senses are interrelated: when they takes place within the context of a system of free exchange, social relationships based on the cash nexus – producing, buying, and selling at market prices, saving money for future use, investing money in productive enterprises, and the like are positive, even essential features of a flourishing society.

But while linked, they are conceptually distinguishable, and it’s important to see, first, that markets in the first sense (the sum of all voluntary exchanges) include the cash nexus – but also much more than the cash nexus. Family sharing is part of a free market; charity is part of a free market; gifts are part of a free market; informal exchange and barter are part of a free market. Wage labor (renting labor in return for cash), rent, corporate jobs, corporate insurance and the like can be part of a free market, but so are alternative arrangements – including many arrangements that clearly have nothing to do with capitalism₃, and fit awkwardly, at best, with any conventional usage of the term capitalism: worker co-ops and consumer co-ops are part of the market; grassroots mutual aid associations and community free clinics are part of the market; so are voluntary labor unions (based on free association and the right to protest or quit), consensual communes, narrower or broader experiments with gift economies, and other alternatives to the prevailing corporate-capitalist status quo. To focus on the specific act of exchange may even be a bit misleading; it might be more suggestive, and less misleading, to describe a fully free market, in this sense, as the space of maximal consensually-sustained social experimentation.

The question, then, is whether, when people are free to experiment with any and every peaceful means of making a living, the sort of mutualistic alternatives that I’ve mentioned might take on an increased role in the economy, or whether the prevailing capitalistic forms would continue to predominate as they currently do. To be sure, the capitalistic arrangements predominate now – but that, of course, is no reason to conclude that the market has spoken. It would be enough if the predominance of capitalistic arrangements were the product of revealed preferences in a free market; but since we don’t have at present have a free market, it will, at the very least, take some further investigation – in order to determine whether those capitalistic alternatives prevail in spite of the unfreedom of actually-existing markets, or if they prevail, in part, because of that unfreedom.

Which brings us to the market as cash nexus. It is important here to see not only that the cash nexus doesn’t exhaust the forms of voluntary exchange and economic experimentation that might emerge within a freed market, but also that a cash nexus may exist, and may be expansive and important to economic life, whether or not it operates under conditions of individual freedom. Markets in our first, voluntary-exchange sense exist only where people really are free to produce and exchange – free market, in the voluntary-exchange sense of market, is really a tautology. But a market in the cash-nexus sense may be either free or unfree; cash exchanges are still cash exchanges, whether they are regulated, restricted, subsidized, taxed, mandated, or otherwise constrained by government action.

When free marketeers turn from the formal discussion of voluntary exchange, toward a substantive discussion of actually-existing economic relationships and financial arrangements, our analysis has to discuss more than just limitations on market activity. We often speak of market exchange and government allocation as cleanly separate spheres, as if they were two balloons, set one next to the other, in a closed box, so that when you blow one of them up, the other has to shrink to the same extent. That’s true enough about markets as social experimentation, but the relationship between cash-nexus exchange and government allocation is really more like two plants growing next to each other. When one gets bigger, it may overshadow the other, and stunt its growth. But they also climb each other, shape each other, and each may even cause some parts of the other plant to grow far more than if they had not had the support.

Any discussion of the cash nexus in the real world, then, needs to take account not only of the ways in which government limits or prohibits market activity, but also the ways in which government, rather than erasing markets, creates new rigged markets – points of exchange, cash nexuses which would be smaller, or less important, or radically different in character, or simply would not exist at all, but for the intervention of the state.

Thus, the social and economic value of the cash nexus, as a social relationship, depends entirely on the context. Kinds of interaction that are positive and productive in the context of free exchange easily become instruments of alienation and exploitation when they are forced on unwilling participants, in areas of their life where they don’t need or want them, through coercive government. The growth of markets as spaces for social experimentation is always a liberating development — but these social experiments may be mediated by the cash-nexus, or may be mediated by entirely different social relationships. The growth of markets as cash-nexus exchanges, on the other hand, may be liberating or violating, depending on whether those relationships come about through the free interplay of social forces, or through the direct or indirect ripple-effects of government force and the coercive creation of rigged markets.

I’ll be turning to the analysis of that context, and the way that free market anticapitalists apply it to the real-world business-as-usual, in the next instalment.

1. ^[1]For examples, see my Anarquistas por La Causa and What’s in a name?, Roderick Long 2006-04-08 and 2008-06-27, Steve Horwitz 2009-12-31 and 2010-01-07, Gary Chartier 2010-01-19, Kevin Carson 2010-03-06, Sheldon Richman 2010-03-02 and 2010-04-16, etc.↩

From Vandals Strike Downtown Santa Cruz, City on a Hill Press (2010-05-06):

Emily Bernard, a manager at Dell Williams Jewelers, was shocked by the event.

. . . While the police department has not publicly verified individuals or groups that are involved except the two transients arrested . . ., it is investigating the group of vandals as a possible anarchist organization.

Business owners and Santa Cruz community members alike ^[1] are focusing their blame on SubRosa, an anarchist café, partly because one of the men arrested admitted picking up fliers for the event there.

We can't let [an] anarchist café exist now that we know the potential of what they can do and publicize, Bernard said.

— Jenny Cain & Julia Reis, City on a Hill Press (2010-05-06): Vandals Strike Downtown Santa Cruz

I don’t know why Emily Bernard thinks that the existence of an anarchist café should be subject to her personal sufferance. She manages a business, but she doesn’t own downtown Santa Cruz. SubRosa pays their rent to a landowner who is willing to have them, and they have as much of a right to be there as anybody else. But in any case, the SubRosa community space is being scapegoated, harassed, and targeted by other business owners for eradication, for no other reason than the fact that they are Anarchists.

See also:

• GT 2010-05-06: Rad Geek answers your questions (Cont’d)

1. ^[1]Sic — The article is operating on a rather selective notion of who counts as a Santa Cruz community member (apparently Johanna Isaacson, Simone Chandler, and other Santa Cruz residents who support, or are part of, the SubRosa collective, don’t count).↩