Never forget that [economic freedom] is the greatest weapon free citizens have against companies and organizations that no one has against the government: you can always at least attempt to take your business elsewhere; in democratic states, we are all always subjugated to the will of the majority and their elected criminals; secession and self-governance are not options.

MCLA, at Strange Blue Planet writes about Political Solutions to Security, condemning governments who have failed to keep their subjects safe from harm, and highlighting the important differences between security provided in a free market, and that imposed by a monopoloid government:

What does a police force on high alert look like? It looks the same all over the world. The police put up barricades on roads. Vehicles were made to go through hoops while a self-important looking police officer occasionally peered into cars. I am not sure how they expected to prevent future attacks this way, but it did lead to traffic jams at the road-blocks.

A brief history of Jury Nullification via End the War on Freedom

Put down your history books, and throw out everything you learned in Civics class or American History class in High School. In 8:15 am, the Rad Geek argues that,

As far as I am aware, the atomic bombing of the Hiroshima city center, in which forces acting on behalf of the United States government deliberately targeted a civilian center and killed over half of all the people living in the city at the time, remains the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world.

Kip, Esquire is definitely not an anarchist, but his insights are usually well-worth reading. Recently he wrote about the Fine Line Between Capitalist and Rent-Seeker. This might provoke some people to accuse him of “vulgar” libertarianism, but words have meanings, and from the entire corpus of Kip’s writings, I’m not afraid that he equivocates “capitalism” and “corporatism”. This post describes the very real difference between a true, market-entrepreneur, and corporatist rent-seeking.

On a similar topic of semantic concern, Randall McElroy iii notes that military contractors aren’t “private” in any meaningful sense of the word. As in Kip’s post, above, obfuscation of language serves the ruling party.

Continuing the semantic discussion, Brainpolice discusses The Headroom Between Mutualism and Anarch-capitalism

I think that there is a lot of stupid semantics over private property and that those who claim to oppose private property most often actually support some limited or particular form of it but they call it by some other name such as “personal property” or “possessions”.

…I don’t take a doctrinaire approach to either of these ideologies. I value them both enough to synthesize attributes of both of them into my worldview.

After a rather slow summer (at least as far as I’m concerned), Aahz is back with a Labor Day post, titled Labor Unions and Freedom Don’t Mix.

Is it fair that someone else is willing to do your job (just as effectively) for a lower cost. Maybe, or maybe not. But it’s right that they be allowed to do so.

He indicates that some people want to revoke his Anarchist credentials for such an utterance, although I’m inclined to agree with him.  Does that make me a fake anarchist? This is an interesting topic, because the market is so far from free that it’s really hard to imagine what might otherwise be. Labor Unions, as we know them, are largely the product of politics and pull, and were (at least in theory) implemented as a countervailing force to Big Business. In a nutshell, I think that “right to work” laws are just as much an abomination of free-market principles as are government enforced labor cartels.

FSK has a great piece about the Non-aggression principle

Agorism is the only strategy for resisting the State that doesn’t violate the non-aggression principle. Superficially, voting appears to be nonviolent. However, when you vote, you’re saying “I have the right to steal from my fellow humans; I am delegating this right to the State, who will steal from other people and give some of the proceeds to me.”

Few submissions, but relatively little blog spam:

You are an idiot.
You are an idiot, too.

Stay tuned on the 29th of each month!

There were a lot of submissions, most of which were shitty, and by shitty I really mean “spam.” I suppose that this is the nature of the beast. Sometimes I like to point out these people, other times, I send them an e-mail telling them that I’ll gladly post their article, as long as they can explain what it has to do with anarchy or agorism. I’ve gotten no responses thus far.

+++

Eric Sundwall missed the deadline, but I feel generous, so I’ll include Neil’s Saga, a prosaic ode to a future without nation-states.

Of course the financial meltdown of the 21st Century was the first and last lesson of Market Anarchy. The chaotic, craziness and violence was a result of the other structures collapsing, not the inherent nature of man in a power void.

+++

Shaun Connell’s presents Socialized Healthcare at his blog, The Rebirth of Freedom. Shaun’s submission was also past the deadline, and although it is not particularly agorist or anarchist in theme, it is certainly a stab at the State’s myths of socialized healthcare, and thus merits consideration.

A system of medicine that rations care and dictates coverage will not solve the problems of costly medical care. After examining how universal healthcare fares in other parts of the world, surely, with American invention and the will to see things “done right”, we can make socialized medicine work, right?

To answer this question, we will first look to the efficiency of the US government in general…Oh. That’s right. There really isn’t much, is there?

+++

I’m not exactly sure what this experiment at The Picket Line has to do with anarchy or agorism, but if you’re interested in finding out whether the local markets have better produce prices than the big chain stores, it might be worth a read. You should probably conduct your own experiments. I know that certain non-produce items I buy are more expensive at the local stores than at the chain stores, but I value time and convenience more than the 19 cents I save on a can of mandarin oranges.

Conventional wisdom says that the big chain stores can provide better prices and/or better selection and/or better quality. All things (e.g., opportunity costs) considered, this may be only partly true, or it may not really be true at all.

Maybe he should buy an earthship, it’s a giant greenhouse incubator building, he could grow his own food and reduce his utility bills to near-zero.

+++

Logan Flatt’s analysis accurately describes the Fed’s actions during the boom years of the current cycle, but I don’t know how it’s market-oriented. It’s certainly not anarchy-oriented. A case should have been made for a free-market interest rate, and solvent banking. Technically, I think this article is “spam,” but because it touches on current economic/political issues, I’ll post it because it’s not entirely devoid of value.

+++

Wenchypoo describes in detail what’s wrong with the fair tax, and also ways to reap some of it’s alleged benefits without any of its consequences. Not really anarchy-oriented, but Wenchy’s writing is excellent, and thus merits a plug.

+++

RadGeek wants to know why people continue to accept this sort of law and order:

If I got up in an old lady’s face face, implicitly called her crazy, threatened to have her committed, and then responded to the insults that my unhinged behavior so clearly merited by pulling her out of her car, cuffing her behind her back, and locking her in a cage, you’d consider me an asshole, at least. If I did all that based on a complete mistake, in which I barged onto somebody else’s property, ignorantly ordered around people in their parking lot, and then, when corrected about the owner’s policy for use of the parking lot, insisted that I was entitled to tell them how they should run their own damn parking lot and to yell at or arrest anybody who didn’t pay attention to my ideas about how it should be used, you would consider me not only an asshole, but a dangerous lunatic and a menace to public safety.

Remember the story about the old lady in Florida who arrested for taking too long at the McDonald’s drive-thru? Sound familiar, now? To make matters worse, “Friday afternoon, Merola spent $160 to retrieve her impounded Town Car.”

Nobody in his right mind would pay voluntarily for this sort of justice, and any organization engaging in this sort of behavior (in a freed market) would quickly find itself in financial distress.

+++

The next two are very inter-related. I’m a fan of the Geek, although I don’t read the People’s Daily anywhere near as frequently as I ought.

Here, the Geek presents a long, but thought-provoking post on the anarchy-minarchy debate.

If minarchists believe in limited government, then they believe in the right to make anarchistic arrangements not viable by prohibiting at least some individual people from seceding or otherwise withdraw their allegiance from the minimal state in favor of competing defense associations, or in favor of individual self-defense.

Then, in, Take the A-Train, the Geek goes after the myth of the “less government train,” where supposedly anarchists and minarchists and smaller-government libertarians can all ride along together, each getting off at their respective stop on the path to freedom.

So the appropriate image for anarchist-minarchist compromise really isn’t a train ride where minarchists hop off at the next-to-last station, and let the anarchists ride on towards the anarchy station. Statist politics don’t work like that. Rather, what will happen on this ride is that once the train pulls into the minarchy station, the minarchists will get off the train — and then they will try to block the tracks and threaten to open fire on the rest of us if we try to take the train any further towards the end of the line. That’s what being a minarchist means: government always comes out of the barrel of a gun, and that’s true whether the government is unlimited or limited, maximal or minimal. If you try to move, in any concrete way, from minarchy towards anarchy, those minarchists you spent so many years working with are still going to try to shoot you.

He’s right: If the minarchists let the train keep a-rollin’, then they’re not minarchists. If they’re minarchists, then they’re the ones holding the guns.

+++

Francois Tremblay, author of “Eight ways you can personally help to smash the state,” recommends “Putting the ‘market’ back in market anarchy,” in which he makes a compelling argument for freed markets

There are only two basic alternatives: a market (voluntary trade of resources, exchange of values) and a State (organized coercion). This is something that collectivist Anarchists fail to understand: that Anarchy by definition is all about markets, and that a market is necessarily Anarchist in nature. When they talk about barter as if it was a replacement for markets, they fail to realize that bartering is just a somewhat less efficient form of market

If [interaction] is voluntary, then it is a market process. If it is force, then it is a statist process, and has no place in an Anarchy

+++

Government is not your daddy, gives us an exposition of the political nature of the welfare state. and some of the twisted logic behind their supporters in “Feeding the needy or bolstering the Bureaucracy. I’m particularly fond of this point: proponents of transfer programs support them because:

2. They want to feel like humanitarians but, if it were left up to their own discretion, they’re not sure they would be as generous as the government is with their money. It isn’t that they have such great faith in the government, but that they’d rather hand over the responsibility to someone else than to accept that responsibility themselves

+++

Alex Ramos says we shouldn’t be willing to trade stability for freedom in The Argument from stability at his blog, The Freedom to Say 2+2=4.

The argument from stability is based on the premise that a stable system is better than an unstable one, without referring at all to the characteristics of the systems in question. Totalitarianism is very stable – leaders often rule for life, and conditions, while bad, can remain static for long periods of time. Anarchy, on the other hand, might be unstable, but it is also most conducive to freedom.

+++

Normally I would contribute a new, original post of my own, but I’ve been on vacation for a week, and I closed on my first house yesterday afternoon (in escrow, as the seller’s wire didn’t post…)  Needless to say, I’ve been busy enough that I can’t even provide links to other articles I’ve found interesting during the past few weeks, in fact, my Google Reader is filled with something like 600 blog posts, news articles, etc., that I haven’t read, being away from the interwebs.

Regular blogging should resume shortly.

A few notes: I will be on vacation from February 21-February 26. Also, I will likely not be available on February 28. Please have your submissions to me prior to 11:59pm, Eastern time, on February 27. Late entries will be forwarded to the host of next month’s carnival.

Anyways. What we need is content. If you are pro-market, pro-freedom, anti-violence, or anti-state, please submit your relevant blog posts for consideration. You have my word that your post won’t be ridiculed, unless you’re spamming us with multi-level marketing schemes or other bullshit unrelated to the advancement of liberty. If you do not have a blog, but would like to contribute, feel free to submit a thoughtful essay through my “contact me” page. I’ll even mark up the HTML for you.

So far I’ve gotten 14 submissions, which is a lot. Unfortunately, nearly all of them have been crap. Marketing ideas. How to market your blog ideas. How to make money on the internet ideas. How to copyright things for your marketing ideas. One clown wanted to graphically illustrate the product life cycle. Apparently he thinks this is the Marketing-101-at-Community-College Blog Carnival. Diego’s entry spam is titled Make a Wish & Nothing Happens.

My wish is that people like Diego would stop spamming our carnivals. The cruel irony is that my disdain for these ass-hats is actually driving traffic to their sites.

If you are interested in contributing, see the blog carnival entry page for details.

I may be hosting another edition, soon. Details to follow…

This month, the Market Anarchist Carnival is hosted by FSK’s Guide to Reality.

FSK did make mention that the entries were of rather varying quality, and that the Carnival is not really the best it could be. I agree! That’s why I keep posting about it- so that the people who read my blog and have political blogs themselves decide to submit an entry. All Carnivals have to grow and that takes time.

I’d like to remind everyone that the Carnival is open to all Anarchist blogs, and that submissions do not have to be written specifically for the Carnival (we even accept videos). So submit something and make your blog known! The deadline is, as always, on the 28th of each month.

For more information, see Franc’s intro post.

Remember that submissions are due on the 28th of each month, and the Carnival is posted on the 29th. Submit your entries for next month through this link! (click on Submit an Article on the left)

Yours truly didn’t make the cut this time. Oh well.

With the commemoration out of the way, I’m pleased to present the Seventh monthly edition of the Market-Anarchist/Voluntarist Blog Carnival. I’ve received far more submissions than we have in the past, although many had nothing to do with economics or anarchy or anti-state or individualism – there was even one blog-spammer who was advertising his graphic design website. Here are the chosen representatives, organized loosely by subject matter:

++++ Economics ++++

FSK’s Reality Guide offered several submissions, of which I’ve selected two. In honor of Mises’ birthday, here’s a handy guide debunking myths about the Federal Reserve System:

Another way to eliminate business cycles is to eliminate government. There are no business cycles in a truly free market. Business cycles are an artificial creation of a coercive government. Business cycles are a tool for confiscating wealth.

Via Sterling Newberry at The Agonist, we have a wonderfully irreverent indictment of Alan Greenspan – which although not exactly anti-State is worthy of a read, if you want to know why the economy seems to be going to hell in a handbasket:

So let’s talk about some stuff. Uncle Alan’s thick book more or less admits what realists have seen for a long long time about a lot of issues. That Iraq was about oil. That the Republican Party is a bunch of free spending crude Keynesians with a hard on for gay and brown people.

My own submission in honor of the Austrian tradition of recognizing that the entrepreneurial spirit is of paramount importance to the survival of man as a species, deals with the the entrepreneurship and socialism. I offer my critique to the anarcho-communists who still cling to the “productive property is communal property” argument:

…But, according to the socialist doctrine, the spear must become communal property by virtue of its having been made productive.

By what measure, though, was this spear brought into existence, other than man’s own productive capacity? To assert that the spear made by man is communal property is to assert that man’s labor, and likewise his body which directs that labor, is also communal property. We can draw no alternative conclusion.

++++ Theory & Ponderings ++++

Regular contributor, Olly at Without Hyphens, discusses property rights in an anarchic framework, and although he prefaces the essay as self-clarifying, you should check it out if you’ve got any doubts or misgivings about voluntarism as opposed to syndicalism:

So as I see it any discussion that involves property rights is usually talking about one of three things: Property as Land, Personal Possessions, and Intellectual Property. While all three are certainly considered forms of property, I think it’s important to understand the major differences they possess, and thus understand why we might treat them differently accordingly.

FSK also presents a primer on Agorist philosophy, in which he discusses the benefits of extra-legal markets:

An agorist revolution has a legitimate chance of succeeding. The agorist market participants would be profiting from their activity. They would be undermining the government and making a profit at the same time.

++++ Politics & Policy ++++

Tom Hanna demolishes socialized medicine in his rant on Hillary-care:

In other words, we have to believe that involving the government, adding bureaucracy, injecting additional money into the system and removing meaningful incentive to cut costs will make things cheaper. Hillary wants us to believe that there is such a thing as a free lunch. If you buy that one, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona I’d like to sell you and I’ll throw in a Bridge to Nowhere free.

This month’s empirical refutation of the anti-anarchist argument “But wouldn’t corporations just take over the world?” is brought to us by The Agonist, a Canadian observer of the U.S. Government, citing a recent paper, which suggests that – gasp! – the Government is for sale! That’s right, corporations are buying your government, or more precisely, buying favorable legislation.

If the business of America is to be business, then business must succeed or fail not because a favorable bill was passed, but because they have a great new product or service that people want and need – both in America and overseas.

++++ Anti-War ++++

Franc’s infamous and scathing “Dear Troop Supporters” letter, in response to which one commenter equated him with Goebbels, is well worth your time if you’ve ever thought that the big retarded child’s Imperialism is making the entire world a more dangerous place:

I do not believe that killing innocent mothers and children helps “my freedom.” I believe that many Iraqi people hate “your troops” because they have killed their father, mother, sister or husband. I believe they are justified in killing “your troops.” You would not think ONE SECOND against doing the same if the situation was reversed and your loved ones were exterminated by an army of Arabs. You are a hypocrite, and I hate the ignorance that you represent.

The Picket Line’s David Gross urges anyone unhappy with the government to resist taxes – resist, and redirect. Give the money to some charity that actually puts it to good use. Gross’s commentary seems to be directed at only the “war tax,” as if there were such a thing – unfortunately, withholding a portion of your taxes does not mean that fewer bombs will be built. His challenge should go a step further, as he suggests in closing:

[T]the next time somebody complains to you about the War or about the government, ask them if they’ve stopped paying for it yet.

The general idea with socialism, as far as I can tell, is that everyone gets to reap the rewards of success, collectively. If I invent a great time-saving device, I am not enriched by it any more than anyone else. Of course, the incentive to invest is for all but the greatest (and cheapest) inventions, approximately zero, or in most cases actually negative. This is where the whole Marxist idea of “Socialist Man” comes in to play: people are not supposed to act in their own interest, but rather with the interests of some ill-defined “collective,” such that if everyone does so, everyone is alleged to benefit to a greater extent than under capitalism. Of course this lofty goal is inhibited both by man’s nature, and the fact that the strategy fails a Paretian test – we are all familiar with the idea of the free-rider, which of course does not and cannot exist when property rights are well-defined and enforceable. Following from a (probable) cherry-picking of Proudhon’s statement, “property is theft,” all brands of communism disdain the idea of private property, which suffice it to say, all but ensures that free-riders will exist.

The socialists will utter such drivel as, “Well, it’s OK to own property individually, you just shouldn’t own productive property.” This is of course nonsense, because the entrepreneur’s defining characteristic is the ability to use, arrange, or produce things in a manner hitherto unimaginable. A branch and a rock and a piece of sinew are no more productive than grain of sand – until and unless some primitive man discovers how he can combine those to make a spear, thus greatly reducing the labor required to kill mastodons and bears. Now, this primitive man might decide out of the goodness of his heart, to give the spear to a neighbor, reckoning that he is capable of making another one in short order. Or, he may exchange that spear or teach his neighbor how to make one, for a few of his neighbors fish, under the same assumption. But, according to the socialist doctrine, the spear must become communal property by virtue of its having been made productive.

By what measure, though, was this spear brought into existence, other than man’s own productive capacity? To assert that the spear made by man is communal property is to assert that man’s labor, and likewise his body which directs that labor, is also communal property. We can draw no alternative conclusion.

Entrepreneurs bear nearly all of the risk that others are unwilling to undertake. Of course, everyone knows a “millionaire next-door” type, or a successful local businessman, who has made thousands or millions of dollars in one venture or another. These successes are only indicative of the entrepreneur’s ability to satisfy the desires of his customers. But these success stories are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, the dark underbelly of which is comprised of the many, many business ventures which fail, every day of every year.

But the serious problem is this: We are aware, although somewhat less familiar with, these failed enterprises. In most cities, there is a gas station, a grocery store, or a restaurant which has changed ownership a dozen times in as many years – representing a dozen failures. Socialism would deny the opportunity for one man to succeed (at satisfying his clients) in order that dozens more may perpetually fail at the very same task.

Who, under socialism, bears the burden of incompetent entrepreneurship? Why, everybody, of course! And it is the worst sort of loser-mentality which desires to share individual failure and incompetence with his neighbors. We must conclude that there is no role for entrepreneurs under socialism, since one of their defining characteristics is to bear disproportionate amounts of risk – risk that society emphatically does not want to bear, even at a lower threshold (and concomitant lower return). For of course, if “society” was willing to bear these risks at a lower premium than the entrepreneur, they would’ve already done so.

The person (or persons) who volunteer to bear risk insulate “society” from the costs of being wrong. Under socialism, on the contrary, everyone is forced to bear whatever risk is determined appropriate by the collective, encouraging failure and incompetence by spreading the risk of failure to others who want no part of it.  By removing the market-generated incentives for success, socialism guarantees failure writ large.