Saving the Economy: Agorism to the Rescue
June 27, 2009
Perhaps the most striking paradox of modern economics is the existence of near-record levels of involuntary unemployment.
Consider: there are millions of people who have bills and obligations to pay, for things that they want to keep (but are in danger of losing to their creditors). Among these millions (and their creditors, perhaps), to dig up an antiquated term, you’d think there would be some double-coincidence of wants. That is, couldn’t they help themselves by helping each other?
In Michigan, something like 14% of the work-force is currently unemployed. These people are losing their homes, their cars, their families — their lives. Nationally, I believe the figure is currently around 9% which is a 25-year high. But few, if any of these people want to be unemployed. They didn’t quit their jobs. They didn’t stop paying their obligations because they are deadbeats, scofflaws, or criminals. They were essentially forced out of work, into their current condition, by a grossly perverted economic system.
Couldn’t they help themselves? Yes. And no.
I’ve been pondering this paradox for a while now:
As long as needs and wants remain unsatisfied, it doesn’t make sense that people are losing jobs left and right.
Yes, we could help ourselves by helping each other. But no, unfortunately, there are decades and decades of interference contributing to unsustainable growth, unsustainable structures of production, and unsustainable levels of debt, which all need to be undone. Undoing it will be painful. The political choice is to slap a band-aid on it, grant everyone a reprieve of uncertain duration, and attempt to restore faith in the zombieconomy, which as John Robb succinctly states,
When authorities resort to
propagandaconfidence building instead of substantive action in response to an actual crisis, you know you are in real trouble
This band-aid, “confidence building” course of action may appear to “fix” the economy. Until the next crisis, crises of course being endemic to the system. In reality, restoring faith in a system which deserves none, only serves to perpetuate a system which will only continue to suck the life out of humanity until it is slain, or until it takes us all down with it.
What we need is a sustainable economy, and the degree to which we can wrest ourselves free of the crushing and now insatiable debt burdens, foist upon us by the zombieconomy is extremely limited. The zombieconomy is unsustainable, because it thrives on the perpetuation of debt, which itself thrives upon mere faith. I submit that no viable system can survive on faith alone. I sustainable economy must (in accordance with Say’s Law) be erected upon a foundation of production and free exchange.
All that needs to be done is nothing! Let people produce wealth unimpeded, let them be free in order that they may propser.
The zombieconomy needs to be broken. Some good old-fashioned, well-timed revolts won’t hurt. Revolts against the status quo. Revolts against a broken monetary system which is the foundation of our shell-game, rat-race economy.
Agorism is the weapon of choice.
Agorism is the non-violent, free-market-based means by which individuals, acting in their own best interests (in order to satisfy the interests of other individuals), may achieve lasting prosperity. When the white market refuses to employ you (and one-in-seven of your neighbors) for wage or salary, you and your neighbors need to ask yourselves, “What can we do for one another, which previously required our dependence upon the zombieconomy that utterly failed to provide for us? What can we do to reduce our reliance on this system?”
Here we are, one-in-ten or one-in-seven unemployed but with needs yet unmet. Isn’t there a way for us to meet one another’s needs?
Answer those questions, and break the chains that bind.
ObamaCare is National Socialism
June 24, 2009
For the record: I can’t wait until the lustre of the Obama Miracle Machine begins to fade, when people wake up and realize that he can’t turn water to wine; like every other mortal, he’s only capable of turning water into piss.
Why? Because I’m tired of hearing about single-payer healthcare, national healthcare, Obamacare. It’s failed in Canada. It’s failed in the U.K. It’s failed in Japan. The nearest American control group for this pitiful experiment is Massachussetts where, (you guessed it!) it’s another epic fail.
National Healthcare’s awful track record notwithstanding, “our government” is still attempting to bring Obamacare to fruition.
House Democrats on Friday (June 19, 2009) unveiled draft legislation they said would cover virtually all of the nation’s nearly 50 million uninsured as President Barack Obama has promised. However, they offered few details on how to pay for it.
For starters, claiming that there are 50 million uninsureds is about as dishonest as it gets. Seventy-five percent of those “50 million” are either disproportionately young, disproportionately wealthy, or disproportionately not-even-fucking-citizens. So 50 million people who don’t have insurance because they don’t want it, are too lazy to use the programs already available, or don’t qualify for welfare on account of not being citizens, and this is somehow a national crisis?
No. The only crisis is the looming decision on how to pay for it. Obamacare will almost certainly be financed by a tax increase of some sort.
Higher taxes on upper-income households appear likely, but broad levies — even a federal sales tax — are also under discussion.
One of the reasons given for nationalizing healthcare is that (although this is disputed) the few uninsured folks cost the rest of us a few hundred to perhaps $1,000 each year. Perhaps the few people who are truly uncovered are costing me a few bucks a week in implicit costs. Perhaps. But the solution here given—the best solution that government could come up with is: let’s make the costs explicit.
So much for not raising taxes on the middle class! I’ve even heard that benefits from my employer—several hundred dollars per month—might be taxed to pay for Obamacare.
Ironic. Raise my taxes in order to pay for something that I’m already (allegedly) paying for in the first place. Let’s cut the crap and call a turd a “turd,” OK. This isn’t about healthcare. It’s not about welfare or well-being or compassion or any of that flowery language that politicians use like some fourth-grade Fashionista with a Bedazzler and a few too many sequins.
Pure and simple: this is about control.
It would require all individuals to obtain health insurance and force employers to offer coverage to their workers, with exemptions for small businesses
If you don’t want it, you buy it. If you can’t afford to offer it to your employees, you become a “small business” or you go out of business. Or else you go to jail. Every time you read the words “require” and “force” in this context, understand that there is nothing but violence behind it.
Control over healthcare expenses puts all individuals in a very precarious position with regards to their government, since the government will have a very effective but essentially invisible means of control, of social engineering. Like every other arena in which Federal funds play, there will be “strings attached”; obliged to provide us with healthcare, the government will begin making choices regarding what’s left of our personal liberties.
Given a few hours, I could probably come up with a list a mile long, but try these on for starters.
- We don’t provide treatment to the elderly. Budget constraints.
- We don’t provide treatment to gays. High-risk lifestyle.
- We don’t provide treatment for hairlips. Aesthetic/non-essential.
- We don’t provide treatment to fat people. Lifestyle choice.
- We don’t cover your broken wrist; snowboarding accidents are excluded.
It might begin quietly, with certain foods or habits (transfats, alcohol, tobacco, etc) but will eventually impact lifestyle choices of all sorts. Your freedoms, my freedoms, pitted against one another in a popular vote, they’ll ask each of us to vote away the others’ liberties. Many will play along, willingly. And no matter who wins, we all lose, as more and more power accrues to the government.
It’s war against community, for the health of the State.
Dog Blogging
June 24, 2009
After a grueling bath, Rumor likes to nap on the spare bed. When she was a pup, she was terrified of the bath, and in fact would run and hide for about an hour, under the bed after you dried her off. She’s still no fan of bathing, but she tolerates it now, most of the time.
She’s also overcome her fear of cars, last week when I was getting her ready to take to the dog part at Orion Oaks, she jumped into the back of my Jeep without coaxing.
Belief in Government Means Ignoring the Evidence
June 23, 2009
According to popular lore, men are not angels and therefore need a government to constrain them. As Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
Lots of people subscribe to some variant of this belief. Many people see at least some evil in government and therefore seek to reform it. Satisfied with the evil they do see, they believe that the rest of it is just fine; if only they could excise the evil…
I can’t fault them for trying. At the end of this tract, however, what I want you to understand is this: reform is not possible, and “goodness” is simply not in the nature of this beast.
Anyone who doesn’t go through a “reluctant” phase is probably not a serious libertarian, and certainly not a serious anarchist: arriving at the conclusion that most of the ideologies and theories with which one has been indoctrinated from childhood, on, are misguided (at best) or manifestly and malevolently false (at worst) is quite understandably a tough pill to swallow. It takes a lot of time, effort, reason and examination, to finally make the plunge.
This “reluctant” phase might be characterized by the pipe-dream of a small, limited, and benevolent government; the idea that if only the powers of government were restored to some ideally limited scope (e.g., the Constitution of the United States), that all would be dandy. Of course, I’m speaking from experience and your mileage may vary, but many others seem to have followed a similarly reluctant path:
the last thing I expected to become was an anarchist. For many years I didn’t even know that serious philosophical anarchists existed. I’d never heard of Lysander Spooner or Murray Rothbard. How could society survive at all without a state?
…“But what would you replace the state with?”
One wonders why questions like the one posed above are so often ignored, or as the writer inquires, even asked in the first place! especially by those who claim a disposition towards liberty and human freedom. As the writer comments,
The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be “replaced.”
The only plausible argument for failing or refusing to address this particular grievance, is if one believes the course of human events could have been—nay—would’ve been worse without the State. But the argument that a few bad people would be even worse than they are now, were we to eliminate their financing, their control, their veil of legitimacy, and lift the protection afforded by myths and militaries, is as inconceivable as going in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line.
If one believes that a sufficient proportion of humanity is so depraved as to carry out injustices of a greater magnitude than all the combined barbarism perpetrated by their governments throughout history—paying particular attention to the last 100 years or so—one would be compelled by logic to conclude that no government, indeed no peaceful arrangement whatsoever could be instituted among such a population. The evil ones would never accept it, (or worse, and possibly more likely) they would embrace the institution of government as a source of power and legitimacy.
The belief that regular people—like you and I—would’ve have (could have?) done these things, is certifiably insane.
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