L.A. Liberty

Libertarian Link Roundup

Some interesting reading I’ve come across while sitting on a chair in the sky…

War

• Lew Rockwell’s manifesto of peace.
• Aeon Skoble’s thoughtful contributions to the subject of libertarianism and war. 
• Glenn Greenwald on the endless war on terror.
• Has the Left made peace with the warfare state?
• John Whitehead on the war on terror and the surveillance state.

Economics

• Jeffrey Tucker on the dangerous “witchcraft” of central banking.
• Hunter Lewis on the essence of Keynesianism.
• Walter Williams notes that taxes destroy transactions and thus jobs.
• The Minimum Wage: An Unfair Advantage for Employers
• The Minimum Wage Harms the Most Vulnerable
• “Economics isn’t rocket science; it’s a lot harder. We should admit as much and when asked to measure things we cannot measure, we should admit our ignorance.”
• Richard Ebeling: The Federal Reserve’s “Exit Strategy” is just more monetary manipulation

Philosophy

• George Smith defends the non-aggression principle: “Libertarianism is a political theory that deals with the concept of justice. It does not deal per se with establishing what is and is not “morally permissible.” That is the realm of ethics, or moral theory, which is a much broader discipline than political theory.”
• Tom Woods on progressive confusion of “society.”
• David Friedman on democracy, partisanship, rational ignorance, and why he believes things.

IRS Scandal

• Jonah Goldberg admits that the president probably didn’t ask the IRS to target political opponents - but they were an agency after his own heart.
• Tim Lynch and George Will offer some “empirical evidence” on IRS political manipulation.
• Doug Ross compiles a timeline on the IRS scandal and concludes: “1. Steve Miller lied to Congress, 2. Lois Lerner lied to Congress, 3. Barack Obama lied to the American people”
• Audit reveals disturbing new information on IRS abuse scandal.
• The IRS has a long history of political abuse.
• Obama apologetics in full force: New Republic blames the Tea Party for the IRS Scandal, NY Times claims that IRS targeting of Tea Party only proves Republicans are desperate, Nancy Pelosi thinks people are making a big deal about this because “the president is such a great president.” 

Miscellaneous

• Mike Riggs shares the Drug Policy Aliiance’s “An Exit Strategy for the failed War on Drugs”, noting 75 ways in which to make the Drug War less awful (of course, there solution is much more simple: end prohibition of all peaceful activity. Period.). 
• Shikha Dalmia on the Myth of the Scientific Liberal: “The core trait of a scientific mind is that when its commitments clash with evidence, evidence rules. On that count, what grade do liberals deserve? Fail, given their reaction to the latest evidence on universal health care, global warming, and universal preschool.”
• “[C]ollege students run up big bills to pay for educations unlikely to deliver payoffs to match the money invested. It’s no surprise that delinquency rates on those student loans are soaring. So, what’s the federal government’s response [included in Obama’s budget next year]? [I]t plans to expand a program that encourages students to take on debt with promises that taxpayers will assume the burden.”
• Americans who favor gun control incorrectly believe gun crime has increased.
• The case for legalizing horse meat.
• How zoning kills affordable housing.
• Read this if you still think teachers’ unions and educrats care about kids.
• Missouri Legislature Nullifies All Federal Gun Control Measures by a Veto-Proof Majority
• John Stossel notes: “Forty-three million Americans moved from one state to another between 1995 and 2010 — about one-seventh of Americans. … [They] have moved away from high-taxed, heavily regulated states to lower-taxed, less-regulated states. Most don’t think of it as a political decision. They just go where opportunities are, and that usually means where there’s less government.”
• How big business depends on big government.

Libertarians and War: A Bibliographical Essay →

Anthony Gregory does yeoman’s work collecting books, essays, and opinions on the libertarian stance on war.

Read it, click the copious embedded links and spend a few days reading those, and be sure to bookmark it for future reference. It’s a veritable bounty of knowledge and insight…

Re: [Statelessness] is chaos

alphaqueup:

People do not agree on what laws are desirable and what laws are undesirable. An anarchic society would either result in new states taking power or endless combat (most probably both). Furthermore, decentralization is weakness. Good luck defending your small town against a much larger political entity. No, anarchism is simply not realistic.

It’s true that there is a difference of opinion on which laws governments pass are legitimate or warranted or desirable - but there is a minimum that essentially all people agree to be just. As I explained in my post on unjust laws, “the only just law is that which initiates aggression against none. In other words, one that echoes natural law; that is, one that protects and respects the life, liberty, and property of all equally. Any violation of a person’s self-ownership is illegitimate. So laws against theft, assault, battery, murder, slavery, rape, fraud, trespass, destruction of property, and the threats thereof are all legitimate because they would exist irrespective of a state. They are axiomatic consequences of human self-ownership.”

Furthermore, only states fight wars. It’s not the anarchy that would cause combat it would be the states, or rather foolish people believing it is legitimate to force other people to live and behave a certain way, defer authority to the majority’s (or the mighty’s) chosen rulers, and submit to their un-peaceful decrees all in the name of preventing some foreign entity from doing the exact same thing.

In truth, it is your position that is unrealistic: believing humanity is incapable of living peacefully and voluntarily yet granting some of those same ignoble members of humanity great power over others.

Perhaps a power vacuum would quickly be filled, and the toppling of one tyrannical state could leave an opening for another. The weak who believe in the supremacy of a state will blindly fight to maintain the status quo. And again, the problem here is states. But that is why the fight for voluntarism is first and foremost an intellectual one. The desire to be free from force and conflict and servitude (the hallmarks of all states) must first foment in the minds of individuals, before it can manifest itself into anything that lasts.

As the great Étienne de La Boétie beautifully noted nearly 500 years ago:

“Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows — to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”

[F]rom the point of view of justice and morality, the State can own no property, require no obedience, enforce no contracts made with it, and indeed, cannot exist at all.

A common defense of the State holds that man is a “social animal,” that he must live in society, and that individualists and libertarians believe in the existence of “atomistic individuals” uninfluenced by and unrelated to their fellow men. But no libertarians have ever held individuals to be isolated atoms; on the contrary, all libertarians have recognized the necessity and the enormous advantages of living in society, and of participating in the social division of labor. The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State.

On the contrary, as we have indicated, the State is an antisocial instrument, crippling voluntary interchange, individual creativity, and the division of labor. “Society” is a convenient label for the voluntary interrelations of individuals, in peaceful exchange and on the market. Here we may point to Albert Jay Nock’s penetrating distinction between “social power” — the fruits of voluntary interchange in the economy and in civilization — and “State power,” the coercive interference and exploitation of those fruits. In that light, Nock showed that human history is basically a race between State power and social power, between the beneficent fruits of peaceful and voluntary production and creativity on the one hand, and the crippling and parasitic blight of State power upon the voluntary and productive social process.

All of the services commonly thought to require the State — from the coining of money to police protection to the development of law in defense of the rights of person and property — can be and have been supplied far more efficiently and certainly more morally by private persons. The State is in no sense required by the nature of man; quite the contrary.

— Murray Rothbard

We were on the verge of obtaining a reasonable degree of liberty. We were going to get our taxes slashed and simplified but not abolished, the military budget reduced and the troops brought home, drugs decriminalized and managed via harm reduction, a significant liberalization of immigration controls without totally open borders, new restrictions on the Fed’s central planning powers adopted in 2008 and 2009, some more flexibility on pharmaceutical testing and health insurance, moderate patent reform, a diminution of pages in the Federal Register, prison reform, genuine oversight and remedies for police misconduct, strengthened due process and warrant requirements in national security cases, a plan to phase out massive entitlements, some fair-minded school reform, and a scaling back of federal gun laws. We were on the cusp of this moderate but significant step toward liberty, where we would not get all we wanted, but we would get much of what we wanted. But I ruined it all. I cited Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner. I made the perfect the enemy of the good, and now the liberty that was in our grasp is lost forever. Sorry, everyone. My selfish desire to adhere to ideological purity has spoiled our chances at increased freedom once again.

— Anthony Gregory

Imagine that someone proposed that the key to establishing social justice and restraining corporate greed was to establish a very large corporation, much larger than any corporation hitherto known—one with revenues in the trillions of dollars. A corporation that held a monopoly on some extremely important market within our society. And used its monopoly in that market to extend its control into other markets. And hired men with guns to force customers to buy its product at whatever price it chose. And periodically bombed the employees and customers of corporations in other countries. By what theory would we predict that this corporation, above all others, could be trusted to serve our interests and to protect us both from criminals and from all the other corporations? If someone proposed to establish a corporation like this, would your trepidation be assuaged the moment you learned that every adult would be issued one share of stock in this corporation, entitling them to vote for members of the board of directors? If it would not, is the governmental system really so different from that scenario as to explain why we may trust a national government to selflessly serve and protect the rest of society?

— 

Michael Huemer (via georgeoughttohelp)

Reminds me of the Hoppe quote I posted a few days ago.

People too often suppose that large social problems can be solved only by deciding ahead of time which particular group of people and procedures hold the key to the solution.

While declaring “Let the government handle it” comes across as a solution, it’s no such thing. Instead, it is merely a sign of a simple and baseless faith — a simple and baseless faith that people invested with power will not abuse that power; that political appointees possess or will find better answers than will millions of people pursuing solutions in their own ways, and staking their own resources and reputations on their efforts; that only those ‘solutions’ that are spelled out in statutes and regulations and that have officials paid to implement them are true solutions.

So yes, show me a problem and I’ll likely respond “Let the market handle it.” I’ll respond this way because I know that not only is my own meager knowledge and effort never up to the task of solving big problems but that not even the Einsteins or Krugmans or Bushes amongst us can know the best solution to any social problem.

Solutions to complex social problems require as many creative minds as possible — and this is precisely what the market delivers.

— Don Boudreaux - A Simple Rule for a Complex World

I often wonder what world folks are looking at, let alone studying, when they make claims that the laissez faire model of economic liberalism is dominant. Every where we turn in our economic lives we can see the grabbing hand of the state. Throughout the western world we have bloated public budgets, the manipulation of money and credit, obstructionist regulations, and numerous measures to weaken the discipline of profit and loss. In short, we have state controlled market economies. We are living the policy reality of mercantilism, while rhetorically emphasizing economic liberalism.

Time to read Rothbard closely and straighten this mess out.

— Peter Boettke

The crucial monopoly is the State’s control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts – the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts.

— Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty

No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers. And concerning the struggle of all against all: that is a myth. Of course the racketeer protects his victims on “his” territory from other racketeers, but only so he can conduct his own racket more successfully. Moreover, it is states that are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and immeasurable destruction in the 20th century alone. Compared to that, the victims of private crimes are almost negligible.

— Hans-Hermann Hoppe responding to the assertion: “the state is based on a social contract, which provides the individual with protection and space for personal fulfilment, which without the state he would not have—in a struggle of all against all.”

Thank the State?

To be sure, sometimes the interests of the state (or, rather, the elites who “run” the state) coincide with the interests of the rest of us (or, more accurately, a select few of us). I appreciate the impulse of encouraging good behavior. And I respect the desire to put aside perceived prejudices to achieve beneficent ends. 

But unless the “good” done by the state is limiting and minimizing its very existence, then I cannot praise it. I find it - to borrow their term - vulgar to acknowledge that the state might do some good by ignoring that the state’s mere existence is predicated on coercive, violent force (and offering the implication - perhaps unintentionally - that the same good, if not greater good, would not have emerged without state coercion). It is foolish to commend a robber’s generosity and altruism with wealth he stole from people he harmed.

Further, the state cannot truly, on net, “help” people. It exists outside the voluntary nexus of consensual social interaction, and as such it is eo ipso oblivious to the true demands and desires of individuals and, as a centralized agency, incapable of an emergent order that is sensitive to those varying and subjective demands and desires. In short, it suffers from a knowledge and calculation problem, and it operates a zero-sum game in that all it gives it must first take. Even when it intends to do good, it often makes things worse. For example, observe what government does to ostensibly “help” the poor - minimum wages, the war on drugs, the welfare state, protective tariffs, etc. - and how the results end up having the opposite effect.

We must always remember whose interests are ultimately served by the state: those with power seeking more power. I am not willing to give the state any quarter. I will not thank it for the scraps of my own dinner. And I will not encourage its behavior by ignoring its great evils, particularly when any good it does uses ill-gotten gains and/or is meant precisely as a whitewash of its aggressions.

Fill in the blank.

There is no wrong answer.

Folks, if you want to see how the state collapses in the future, [observe how markets - that is, how human action - prevails over the coercive machinery of the government]. [State collapse] won’t happen through politics. It won’t happen by top-down reform. It won’t happen even through seminars. It will happen through the trial and error of entrepreneurship, because the market will not sit still. Faced with the ghastly costs of the anachronistic nation-state, it will continue to find creative and surprising ways around the coercive apparatus, effectively inventing new realms of freedom that permit progress to occur.

Every act of entrepreneurship is revolutionary and rooted in the anarchist spirit. It strikes at the heart of the status quo. It dares to be dissatisfied with what is. It imagines something new and better. It brings about unexpected, unapproved, and progressive change by adding a new dimension of experience to how we understand ourselves and how we interact with others.

— Jeffrey Tucker, How the State Will Die

Freedom, for example, … undoubtedly means freedom to drink oneself to death. The anarchist grants this at once; but at the same time he points out that it also means freedom to say with the gravedigger in Les Misérables, “I have studied, I have graduated; I never drink.” It unquestionably means freedom to go on without any code of morals at all; but it also means freedom to rationalise, construct and adhere to a code of one’s own. The anarchist presses the point invariably overlooked, that freedom to do the one without correlative freedom to do the other is impossible; and that just here comes in the moral education which legalism and authoritarianism, with their denial of freedom, can never furnish.

— Albert Jay Nock, On Doing The Right Thing (1924)

What a wonderful world it would be if everyone accepted the simple moral premise of rejecting all acts of aggression. The retort to such a suggestion is always: it’s too simplistic, too idealistic, impractical, naïve, utopian, dangerous, and unrealistic to strive for such an ideal.

The answer to that is that for thousands of years the acceptance of government force, to rule over the people, at the sacrifice of liberty, was considered moral and the only available option for achieving peace and prosperity.

What could be more utopian than that myth—considering the results especially looking at the state sponsored killing, by nearly every government during the 20th Century, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. It’s time to reconsider this grant of authority to the state. …

No good has ever come from granting monopoly power to the state to use aggression against the people to arbitrarily mold human behavior. Such power, when left unchecked, becomes the seed of an ugly tyranny. This method of governance has been adequately tested, and the results are in: reality dictates we try liberty. …

The idealism of non-aggression and rejecting all offensive use of force should be tried. The idealism of government sanctioned violence has been abused throughout history and is the primary source of poverty and war. The theory of a society being based on individual freedom has been around for a long time. It’s time to take a bold step and actually permit it by advancing this cause, rather than taking a step backwards as some would like us to do.

— Ron Paul, Farewell Speech to Congress (Nov. 14, 2012)