Brush Fires of Freedom

Its sometimes argued that without the state intellectual property could, and should, continue under contracts. Aside from the obvious pragmatic concerns, this "consent" based approach fails to legitimize the activity.

To put it concisely: you can not sell something you do not own. Intellectual property (IP) can not be brought into being by the act of selling, it must already exist in order to be sold.

To understand why this is so we must understand the nature of extortion.

Consider a highwayman who demands payment from people in order to allow them to use the road. If you view the situation only very shallowly it may appear as a market exchange, the highwayman gets money and the traveler gets to use the road. After all, the traveler can choose to keep his money by not using the road. However, this view neglects the key fact that the highwayman has no right to determine the use of the road. There is no exchange, only extortion, backed by violence.

Furthermore, by agreeing to pay the victim does not cause the highwayman to become the owner. Any rights signed away to an extortionist are not actually transferred.

The highwayman is an obvious criminal, but there are many other "transactions" that fit the same category of extortion. The most common being the sale of land never converted into property through homsteading. The seller is not actually giving up property, he is merely charging a fee in exchange for not committing violence against any person who attempts to homestead the plot. The landholder demanding payment for allowing a person to settle unused land is no different than the highwayman demanding payment for allowing the person to travel the road.

The fact that the buyer is willing to pay the fee in order to pass, or to work the land, does not vindicate the criminals; for the same reasons that a consenting victim does not vindicate a mugger. The victim is unjustly impoverished and the criminal is unjustly enriched.

Intellectual property belongs in this same category. An IP owner demanding royalties from the economic exchanges of other people is nothing more than rent seeking. Royalties, like money to the highwayman, buy nothing but immunity from violence.

Unlike real economic exchange, IP is not mutually beneficial, it is exploitive.

Mobility for the masses, of course!

Indian's Tata Motors has revealed its new $2,500 microcar, the Nano. If you're anything like Rajendra Pachauri, Al Gore's co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, that won't make you happy. Courtesy of MSN:

Chief U.N. climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize, said last month that "I am having nightmares" about the prospect of the low-cost car.

And one more gem: 

 "The cheaper and cheaper vehicles become, the quicker those pollution levels will increase," Leather said.

The State is not an end, the State is a means.

The State is not police or courts, it is not law. You can hire security, or pay for arbitration. You can be obligated to fulfill a contract. Yet the State is capable of much more, it is used to educate, build roads, provide health care, deliver mail, design cars, and raise children.

The State is not defined by what it produces, it is not a service, it is method of production.

It is the method of taking. It is both immoral and impractical, no matter what service is being provided. The State is the administrator of taxation. It can not be reformed, whether it is the king or the People who are taking, makes no difference. It is the method itself that is defective, not the administrator.

The only alternative to the State is freedom, where production occurs because of consent. This is the method of ownership, contracts, and trade.

Its an all too common modifier. We hear about over taxing, over spending, over regulation.

Its a strange indictment. Its not a legalistic term, we do not hear of over robbing or over battering. It implies more a sense of stewardship or worse, that the State is damaging its own interesting by its actions.

Rudy Giuliani, who champions lower taxes because of Reagonics, subscribes to that second view. He believes that lowering taxes will increase his revenue. Although this is not an issue for the Central Government of the United State of America, which has no budget constraints thanks to its monopoly on counterfeiting. 

It is not a moral indictment, only a pragmatic one. No one can overspend to an extent that is immoral, only to the point of it being harmful to themselves. 

People who are against "over" taxing, like Rudy Giuliani, are not necessarily natural allies of people who are against taxation, like us anarchist. There is no more a connection than between people who are opposed to spending money liberally(i.e thrifty people) and Communists opposed to money all together.

Consider this scenario, police meaning to a serve a no-knock warrant get lost and mistakenly end up invading the wrong house. The home owner, defending his home from unidentified assailants, fires at and kills an officer. Who is to blame?

One defense for the officers jumps to mind, the home owner should have known that they were police officers, if for no other reason than no simple criminals would employ such bold and violent methods of entry. In addition to not being factually correct, it also fails as a defense because the homeowner, being a good citizen, is far more likely attribute the act to thugs rather than public servants.

But clearly the blame lies on the officers, as they failed to perform their duties correctly, by invading the proper house. This event could have been prevented most easily by the officers, who both made a thoughtful decision and performed an action removed from routine, rather than by the home owner who made a decision under stress while believing himself to be in normal circumstances. We must conclude that the officers were where they did not belong and the home owner acted justifiably towards armed men who presence infringed on his rights.

There could be other scenarios where officers have no legitimate reason to enter a home. Suppose the warrant was served at the correct house, but the inhabitants were innocent of the charge, that officers were sent to collect drugs that do not exist. The home owner would not have any reason to act differently than he did in the first scenario, and the presence of the officers would be still unjustified and infringe on the owner's rights. This change in the scenario does not require a change in our conclusion.

The last scenario involves a mistake not in enforcement of a law, but in the creation of that law. This time the warrant is served at the correct house and the house really does contain the sought drugs. In this scenario the home owner is more likely to identify the intruders as police, as he is actually guilty. But what about the presence of the police, what is there purpose for being there? They are enforcing a law who's stated purpose is to infringe on the property rights of others. The only difference between this scenario and the previous two is that the officers are not accidentally infringing on a person's property and his peaceful use of it, they are deliberately doing it. Should the home owner fire on the officers, I still see no reason to change our conclusion on who is at fault.

That conclusion is from a legalistic view point, not unnecessarily a moral or philosophical one.  Libertarians may choose to not endorse violent defenses against the State's abuses*, but they can not support legal retribution against the rebels. Legality involves what you will be deliberately punished for, morality involves what you should do.  Not resisting the officers would probably provide a more desirable outcome for home owner, even if he is legally in his rights to defend his property. Mathew's acknowledgment that "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" was a moral statement of the impractically of violence, it is not a legal code that promises retribution to violators. 

*I do not endorse violence.

On May 1st 2003, George Bush announced the "end" of "major combat operations" in Iraq. At that point 139 Americans had died. Now, more than 4 years later, 3,815 members of the American Military have been killed in Iraq.  The American death toll pales in comparison to the number of dead Iraqis, what is significant is that peasant militias have managed to kill 27 times as many Americans as Iraq's central government did.

America is on the losing side of an arms race that has been going on through out history.

Kingdoms and empires are built on power disparity. War has always been the realm of the elite. A privileged warrior class, well practiced and armored, decided battles. Homer acknowledged this through the character Achilles, who demonstrated the power that even a single one of these warlords had in deciding the outcome of a battle and the importance of their armor, something that only the rich could afford.

As wealth disparity changed, so did war. Both the Greeks and the Romans rose to power by fielding citizen armies. Their middle classes(built on slavery) supplied large numbers of soldiers able to supply their own weapons. This grew the warrior class and as war became more populist, so did governance!

But with the accumulation of capital and the march of technology that power disparity is ending. From Longbows to Firearms to IEDs. From Agincourt to Lexington to Vietnam.

Mechanics and chemistry have made natural strength meaningless to martial prowess. And no longer does wealth disparity necessarily mean power disparity, guns are cheap, plentiful, and require little training. Where capital is plentiful, labor becomes relatively more valuable. The wealthy seek to employ their capital to maximize their manpower, yet a tank that can be destroyed by a homemade bomb is as relevant as knight that can be killed by a peasant's musket.  Guerrilla warfare continues to increase in lethality.

As the State's dominance of warfare has diminished it must depend even more on ideas to maintain its existence. Only two empires survived the surge of nationalism and firearms in the Post-World War II era, the US and the USSR. Both were chimeras using populist rhetoric to justify state control.

The American Empire's military supremacy over the world today is without precedent. It could send its military any where in world (not to mention completely annihilate it with nuclear weapons). The power disparity between it and other militaries in the world is immense, yet it has failed to successfully occupy the ex-colonies it has invade, countries that had been governed by the Japanese, French, and English empires only decades earlier.

Its very possible that by the time the American Empire falls no amount of military might will ever be able to recreate it.

P.S.

If anyone has any feedback or relevant sources, I'd love to hear it.

To make it perfectly clear: abstaining from voting is not a vote to abolish government. And if you wanted to pencil that in, you would still have to cast a ballot! 

To anarchists that refuse to use the political system as a tool to oppose the State, I poses this:

 If everyone person in America(besides the politicians) were to not show up to the poll booths on election day, would the State dissolve itself? Or would it continue on without democratic oversight?

If a direction election was held asking whether to abolish the State, would any claim that voting against the state would actually be a vote in support of the state? So why should voting against the state only be allowable in the aggregate? Suppose the vote was on whether to disband the EPA. Or to end the Iraq War. Are we to say that because this vote only opposes one part of the state, not the entire institution, that it would be not compatible with anarchy? Destroying the EPA would be a reduction in government aggression, brought about without the use of aggression. Clearly, a direct vote against the EPA is a moral action.

Now suppose it is not a direct election, but one for a political office. There are two candidates, both exactly the same, except politician will end the war. The situation is the same as earlier, a vote for the anti-war canidate would achieve a reduction in government aggression; a more moral outcome.

What is the alternative? Refuse to vote, choosing to not come between the State and its victims? How is that act anymore moral than a vote in favor of the war candidate?

Assume that anarchists can not be political. As the country grows less statist, the government will be less opposed and thus more powerful. That fact that such an outcome is counterintuitive ought to suggest the invalidity of the assumption.

Our ancestors killed and died to create these nonviolent anti-state tools, and yet some refuse to use them for their intended purpose!

Faith without works is dead. If you oppose the State, act.

It is a cliche to compare political collectivism to insect behavior or a "hive mentality."  The imagery is efficively simple; that people are nothing but expendable indentityless drones slaving away for the lazy Queen.  But the analogy is amazingly shallow, since insect swarms are entirely devoid of politics. The Queen is not the hub of the hive, she does not direct or punish. She sits idle in a way we only wish our politicians would.

As National Geographic's article Swarm Behavior explains

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

This understanding has created Swarm theory, which explains the phenomenon of simple organism performing simple functions creating a complex system. This is perfectly applicable to grander organism, like humans. Mises proved that humans do not possess the capacity to plan economies, yet people unwittingly create them by pursuing their own petty interests. Biologists Deborah M. Gordon seems to have stumbled upon this human economic truth by saying, "Ants aren't smart. Ant colonies are." People can not order economies, but markets can.

But sadly, Biologists help to prove this theory about inability to plan when they begin to plan how others should use this knowledge. The article continues:

"We don't even know yet what else we can do with this," says Eric Bonabeau, a complexity theorist and the chief scientist at Icosystem Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "We're not used to solving decentralized problems in a decentralized way. We can't control an emergent phenomenon like traffic by putting stop signs and lights everywhere. But the idea of shaping traffic as a self-organizing system, that's very exciting." 

His termonology gives him away, he hopes to shape traffic. External "shaping" it is not consistent with self-organizing.

The only recommendation National Geographic can muster is directed at the individuals, not the planners:

"A honeybee never sees the big picture any more than you or I do," says Thomas Seeley, the bee expert. "None of us knows what society as a whole needs, but we look around and say, oh, they need someone to volunteer at school, or mow the church lawn, or help in a political campaign." 

We, the individuals, need to predict what the planners would tell us to do. Perhaps someday the bee experts will learn a lesson from bees, things work best when you don't try to force others to act as you want. The lesson of swarm theory is not for the acters, but the planners.

 Strike-The-Root blogger Robert Kaercher charged Ron Paul with "converting people to statism" in response to him attracting people to political activision for the first time. His assertation lies on a several assumptions that I don't believe are valid.

1. That people who ignore the political system are part of the solution.
2. That participating in politics means you approve of the system.

Robert Kaercher's actions are not inline with the first assumption, he does not ignore politics, he critiques it. Kaercher's outlet for his views is the internet, Ron Paul's is his campaign's platform. Nonparticipants in the political process are not de facto anarchists. Complacency is what enables the establishment. They have gone from complacent subjects to vocal opponents of the status quo, powerful allies even if not "true believers."

Contrary to Democratic doctrine, casting a vote does mean you willingly surrender your rights should you lose the election. Clearly the system works so that you will lose your rights whether you vote or not.  To claim that this tyranny is more legitimate if we participate in the process, is to buy into the tyrants' own propaganda. If the whole country were to vote to abolish the federal government, would that process be inconsistent with our anarchist beliefs? It would not, because my vote is consistent with my opposition of the State. When it comes to electing a representative this is still true. As anarchists we believe that some governments and some rulers are worse than others.  A vote for Ron Paul, or other politician, can be consistent with our opposition to the State.

As the ever quotable Murray Rothbard put it

I didn't ask for these institutions, dammit, and so don't consider myself responsible if I am forced to use them. In the same way, if the State, for reasons of its own, allows us a periodic choice between two or more masters, I don't believe we are aggressors if we participate in order to vote ourselves more kindly masters, or to vote in people who will abolish or repeal the oppression. In fact, I think we owe it to our own liberty to use such opportunities to advance the cause. 

Classic liberals, today often called minarchists, often talk about the legitimate functions of governments.  Being libertarians, these people understand the nature of government is violence and coercion. Their various versions boil down to claiming the only legitimate government role is defending us and our property from others. By this they mean the political method is only legitimate when used to distribute protection services. The economic method is trade, the political method is taking. Thus, the only appropriate tax is one spent towards the production of police, military, and legal services.

That the protection industry is the last to be viewed as a legitimate use of the political method is easy to understand. Politics and protection are a natural pairing, as both are built on violence. If violence is justified in the defense of property, then can not further violence be justified to ensure the creation of that defense? Once you have justified violence, you have justified the State. The State, once justified,  faces the slippery slope towards totalitarianism that the American Political System is still on.

In Columnist Charles Reese's recent article No Money in Peace, about the privatization of American war, he correctly assertated that "war, as it is being fought in Iraq, is a highly profitable operation for the war service industry." He clearly understands that war is a racket. But he continues

"Unfortunately, nobody seems to have figured out how to make a dime out of peace. I easily predict that until somebody does, there will always be more war than peace."

Reese fails to see an obvious truth. He, like almost everyone else, makes all his dimes on peace. Every industry, except the war industry, is a peace industry!

Reese's solution for stopping the profit motive from becoming a war motive is borrowing the National Socialist Party's idea of confiscating of war profits:

If we look at war in its proper perspective, as the common defense of the country, then we can plainly see that when it becomes necessary, it becomes the common duty of all citizens. Therefore, no one should profit from it. There is no reason except corporate greed and political corruption why weapons and other materials of war should not be supplied at cost. There is no sane reason why some should become millionaires while others become corpses or mutilated wrecks.

Ignoring that war bond buyers fall into this war profiteer category, the war industry is a racket because it is not based upon mutual consent. This necessitates that it have a winner and loser. War is funded, virtually exclusively, by taxes. If not for the political method of distribution there would be little war, because there is no money in it.

Democracy prevents killing. Wars spread Democracy. Thus, starting wars prevents killing.