I’ll be posting about my talk at the LP meeting soon, I promise, but I just blew an afternoon on painting a fence (in order to appease our complex’s property manager). I hear that this is the sort of thing that’s supposed to make men feel a sense of vigor and pride and accomplishment. But mostly it just made me want to take a hot bath and zone out with the TV until tomorrow.

Fortunately, other people do the thinking so I don’t have to. In particular, here’s a shout-out and congratulations to Kevin Carson (and thanks also to the indefatigable Sheldon Richman) for another fine article in The Freeman, on Hierarchy or the Market:

F. A. Hayek, in The Use of Knowledge in Society, used distributed, or idiosyncratic, knowledge—the unique situational knowledge possessed by each individual—as an argument against state central planning.

Milton Friedman's dictum about other people's money is well known. People are more careful and efficient in spending their own than other people's money, and likewise in spending money on themselves more so than in spending money on other people.

A third insight is that people act most efficiently when they completely internalize the positive and negative results of their actions.

The corporate hierarchy violates all of these principles in a manner quite similar to the bureaucracy of a socialist state. Those at the top make decisions concerning a production process about which they likely know as little as did, say, the chief of an old Soviet industrial ministry.

The employees of a corporation, from the CEO down to the worker on the shop floor, are spending other people's money, or using other people's resources, for other people. Its managers, as Adam Smith observed 200 years ago, are managers rather of other people's money than of their own.

By its nature, the corporation substitutes administrative incentives for what Oliver Williamson called the high powered incentives of the market: effort and productivity are separated from reward.

. . . The state's entry barriers, like licensing and capitalization requirements for banks, reduce competition in the supply of credit and drive up its price; enforcement of artificial titles to vacant and unimproved land has a similar effect. As a result, labor's independent access to capital is limited; workers must sell their labor in a buyer's market; and workers tend to compete for jobs rather than jobs for workers.

State subsidies to economic centralization and capital accumulation also artificially increase the capital-intensiveness of production and thereby the capitalization of the dominant firm. The effect of such entry barriers is to reduce the number of employers competing for labor, while increasing the difficulty for small property owners to pool their capital and create competing enterprise.

The cumulative legacy of these past acts of state-assisted robbery, and ongoing state-enforced unequal exchange, determines the basic structural foundations of the present-day economy. These include enormous concentrations of wealth in a few hands, the absentee ownership of capital by large-scale investors, and a hired labor force with no property in the means of production it works.

Necessarily, therefore, the absentee owners must resort to the expedients of hierarchy and top-down authority to elicit effort from a workforce with no rational interest in maximizing its own productivity.

. . .

The problem is not hierarchy in itself, but government policies that make it artificially prevalent. No doubt some large-scale production would exist in a free market, and likewise some wage employment and absentee ownership. But in a free market the predominant scale of production would likely be far smaller, and self-employment and cooperative ownership more widespread, than at present. Entrepreneurial profit would replace permanent rents from artificial property and other forms of privilege. Had the industrial revolution taken place in a genuine free market rather than a society characterized by state-backed robbery and privilege, our economy today would probably be far closer to the vision of Lewis Mumford than that of Joseph Schumpeter and Alfred Chandler.

— Kevin Carson, The Freeman 58.3 (April 2008): Hierarchy or the Market

Read the whole thing.

See also:

• GT 2008-05-29: Dump the rentiers off your back
• GT 2008-05-23: King Ludd’s throne
• GT 2006-03-30: How not to argue against worker co-ops

Besides taking very kind notice of my article in The Freeman, Roderick Long (2008-01-18) and Micha Ghertner (2008-01-14) each also mention the epigraph that I included — a long quotation on the experience of oppression by the radical lesbian feminist philosopher Marilyn Frye. The quotation is one of my favorite passages from her essay Oppression, in The Politics of Reality. I had originally hoped to include more of it, but the epigraph had to be trimmed back in the interest of space. The full version would have been:

The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped.

Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would gave trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.

It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced.

–Marilyn Frye (1983), Oppression, in The Politics of Reality. pp. 4–5.

In the case of poor people — and especially poor people who live in the socioeconomic or racial ghettos of large cities — both state socialists and state capitalists have spent no end of time looking at one or two wires, and wondering why the bird behind them builds its nest in such a funny, cramped shape. Since their perspective has excluded treating state oppression of the poor in any systematic way, the state socialists, rightly understanding that poor people are basically alright, wrongly figure that the problem must be the inherent vices of the market process. The state capitalists, rightly understanding that the market process is basically alright, wrongly figure that the problem must be in the vice, folly, or ignorance of individual poor people, or poor subcultures. But both of them are wrong. To understand the problem aright, you have to start by stepping back to see the whole cage. Then, and only then, can you meaningfully talk about what poor people can do about breaking out–and what you, if you are not yourself poor, can do to help them in their efforts.

The bad news is that, in spite of an immune system which has been almost preternaturally resistant to common ailments for the past several years, I am currently in the process of getting my ass kicked by a cold or some other (hopefully) 24-hour bug.

In place of saying much of anything that I’d actually have to concentrate write out, I’ll share a little bit of trivia about my recent appearance in The Freeman. This is not actually the first time that something by a Charles W. Johnson has appeared in the pages of The Freeman. But the first article published under that name was not by me, but rather by my granddad. (I still get the occasional e-mail asking me if I am the author of some quote pulled from the article by some libertarian newsletter. Nope; I was just named after him.)

In fact, my dad also had an article published back when he was a frosh in college — A Letter to the President, in January 1964. My grandfather’s article, Medical Care Is Not a Right, appeared in April 1969. (My grandfather also had a couple of articles on medical topics in Bob LeFevre’s Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought: Non-Participation, published in Spring 1967, and Medical Political Protection, published in Fall 1968.) I may be the first third-generation Freeman contributor in the history of the publication.

Here’s something I found in the mail yesterday:

Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It

Governments—local, state, and federal—spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the plight of the urban poor. Look around any government agency and you'll never fail to find some know-it-all with a suit and a nameplate on his desk who has just the right government program to eliminate or ameliorate, or at least contain, the worst aspects of grinding poverty in American cities—especially as experienced by black people, immigrants, people with disabilities, and everyone else marked for the special observation and solicitude of the state bureaucracy. Depending on the bureaucrat's frame of mind, his pet programs might focus on doling out conditional charity to deserving poor people, or putting more at-risk poor people under the surveillance of social workers and medical experts, or beating up recalcitrant poor people and locking them in cages for several years.

But the one thing that the government and its managerial aid workers will never do is just get out of the way and let poor people do the things that poor people naturally do, and always have done, to scratch by.

Government anti-poverty programs are a classic case of the therapeutic state setting out to treat disorders created by the state itself. Urban poverty as we know it is, in fact, exclusively a creature of state intervention in consensual economic dealings. This claim may seem bold, even to most libertarians. But a lot turns on the phrase "as we know it." Even if absolute laissez faire reigned beginning tomorrow, there would still be people in big cities who are living paycheck to paycheck, heavily in debt, homeless, jobless, or otherwise at the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. These conditions may be persistent social problems, and it may be that free people in a free society will still have to come up with voluntary institutions and practices for addressing them. But in the state-regimented market that dominates today, the material predicament that poor people find themselves in—and the arrangements they must make within that predicament—are battered into their familiar shape, as if by an invisible fist, through the diffuse effects of pervasive, interlocking interventions ….

— Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It,
In The Freeman (December 2007), 12–17.

You can read the whole thing at The Freeman‘s website. Enjoy! FEE’s website doesn’t (yet) support online comments, but I’d be glad to hear what you think in the comments section over here.

While I’m on the subject, I’d like especially to thank Sheldon Richman for his encouragement and his help, and my companion L. for her patient reading and helpful comments. The article would have been much the poorer, or more likely nonexistent, without their aid.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-12-14: Friday Ego Blogging
• GT 2007-11-16: Urban homesteading
• GT 2007-11-08: Sprachkritik: Privatization
• GT 2007-09-15: Free Riders
• GT 2006-06-14: Enclosure comes to Los Angeles

Coming soon; keep an eye out. For a partial preview of some of the themes I’ll be touching on in my article, see GT 2007-11-16: Urban homesteading and GT 2007-09-15: Free Riders.

(Thanks to Sheldon Richman 2007-12-14.)