The term ‘Libertarian’ encompasses several schools of thought, all of them devoted to the essential idea of liberty (as we might expect,) otherwise known as freedom. This is a fine thing; most of us hold the idea of freedom in fairly high regard.

Things get tricky, though, in the matter of defining what, exactly, liberty is. There are two main big categories most people invoke here, negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from things, such as the freedom from conscription or taxation. Positive liberty is the freedom to do things, such as the freedom to eat chocolate right now or take a vacation to the Grand Canyon.

The common libertarians with which most of us are acquainted here in the US (we may call them vulgar libertarians or Vultarians,) limit themselves to a negative conception of liberty. They go on to formulate their philosophy of governmental non-interference as based on property rights, contracts, and the free market. The government, they say, should limit itself to enforcing property rights and contracts, without interfering with the free market.

There are several problems with this formulation, which I will explore through these three questions.

1. What is government?
2. What is a free market?
3. What is property?

1. Firstly, government is not, as many seem to think, merely the structures and people appointed by law to rule over a given piece of territory. Many Libertarians apparently labor under the misapprehension that if by some magical effect all of the official federal, state, and local governmental employees disappeared tomorrow, we would have no more government. This is hogwash.

“Government” is an emergent property of human society. All peoples have government, and everyone is at some point along the spectrum of governmental power, though most of us are very near the bottom. Church leaders are part of the government. High school cliques are government. Gangs are government.

Government is nothing more than the structure of the distribution of power throughout society. Power is the ability to control people and resources.

So this is the first important misconception of Libertarianism, that ‘freedom’ means freedom only from the official, federal government. If we replace a democratically elected master with a corporate master, we have not freed ourselves, but possibly made our freedom even more difficult to obtain.

2. The ‘free market’, as glorified in much of Libertarian thought, does not exist. The government, both official and not, does a great deal to shape and assist corporate America. Without tax breaks, subsidies, protectionist laws, monopolies, bullshit contracts, etc, corporate America as we know it would not exist.

Libertarians mistake corporate America for a ‘free market’. It’s not. For us to truly have a ‘free market’ society in which people are actually free to buy and sell labor, commodities, enter into business with each other, make contracts, etc., then we need to actually have a free market.

This is the biggest hypocrisy of the Vultarians. They complain about the horrors of being taxed to provide food for the destitute, but are perfectly okay with government policies which give millions of dollars to major corporations.

Moreover, as explored above, corporations are a form of government. Power is the ability to control resources, and government is the distribution of power, not just the investiture of laws. Liberty, therefore, must also mean the freedom from coercion of all forms, including corporate coercion. It is a fine thing to be free of coercion from Washington, but if you must in exchange rise at a set hour every morning, work under the foreman’s constant supervision for 8, 9, 12 hours a day, dress as required, HAVE YOUR WIFE TAKE A BLOOD TEST BECAUSE YOUR BOSS SAYS SO, and in all other matters set your day by your bosses’ dictates, then you have no freedom at all.

Contracts, which Libertarians hold up as an ideal way to arrange matters in society, are especially problematic in light of the governmental power of corporations. Contracts between free and independent equals are fine, but when one party to the contract is significantly more powerful than the other, then we are operating under the threat of coercion. We cannot honestly say that a contract has any legitimacy if one party faces starvation if they don’t sign. Likewise, in our present society, one cannot get a credit card, buy a car, go to college, obtain credit, buy insurance, deposit money at the bank, buy a house, or do a great number of other things without being first required to sign a contract. The alternative–to do without these things–is almost impossible. These contracts, then, are compulsory and supported whole-heartedly by the official government, which sees no reason not to increase the power of the corporate government at the expense of the people.

A true libertarian, therefore, must look to protect the people no only from the coercion of the official government, but also from the coercion of all forms of power.

3. “If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required… Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?”

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?

Property is the most sacred principle of Libertarians; the idea of ‘get off my land and let go of my money and leave me alone,’ in short. But much of the current distribution of property is unjust, or stems from unjust beginnings. Most of us here in the US live on stolen land–land stolen from the Native American Indians. How can we make any claim to ‘ownership’ when we got the land from people who got it from people who murdered the people who had it first?

The history of land is a history of dispossession and murder, not just in the US. Much of what is now regarded as ‘private property’ was once public–common grazing areas, common forests, etc. The idea that an individual, rather than a community, can ‘own’ a piece of land which they themselves are not cultivating or otherwise maintaining is of relatively recent vintage, and was invented for the sole benefit of the wealthy.

The enclosure of the common spaces has deprived the common people of what was once regarded as their right–the right to graze their cattle, to raise their crops, and roam at will.

The imposition of one person’s ‘rights’ with regard to the land has come at the expense of the rights of all other persons to that land. One person’s freedom to do as they wish with their land comes at the expense of everyone else’s freedom to do as they wish with the land.

If we regard it as the proper duty of the government to protect the property rights of individuals, as Libertarians do, then the government must first ensure that the distribution of property is fair and just, not based on theft and murder, and not unduly imposing upon the liberties of the rest of the bulk of the population. The liberty of the majority must come before the liberty of the few, for the obvious reason of thereby maximizing liberty.

There are other kinds of property we may mention besides land, of course. Patents and Copyrights are obvious ones. These are property rights to monopolies on ideas. They were originally instituted for the common good, in order to promote creativity and development through monetary incentives. However, the IP system has become little more than a bludgeon with which major corporations extract money and energy from each other and bully minor corporations. Rather than encouraging innovation and growth, corporations use patents to block and inhibit innovation and growth, contrary to the public interest for which they were first created. Through patents, corporations (and their lawyers) get rich without developing anything, creating anything, or otherwise contributing to the public good.

The idea of owning an idea is, at best, specious. No idea comes entirely from itself; every idea has its roots in previous ideas.

Locke describes the right of property ownership as deriving from effort expended by the owner–that is, if I gather seeds and plant and water them and they sprout into trees, I may claim those trees as mine, due to the effort put into them.

But if you first tilled the soil and dragged in heavy bags of fertilizer, dug wells on the land, and built an irrigation system, and all I did was collect a few seeds from the fruit trees you had planted a few years back, then planted those seeds in the soil and watered them with the water you had provided, what right would I have to claim those fruit trees as mine? They ought, justly, to be the common property of both of us, for we have both expended effort on their creation.

Likewise, the same is true of ideas. The government can arbitrarily declare that this idea is this person’s property, and that idea is another’s, and so on and so forth until they have divided up the entirety of land and sky, but this does not make the distribution just, nor should the government therefore enforce it.

Liberty, then, as the object of libertarianism, cannot be regarded as simply residing in protection of property, freedom from government interference, or the unfettered workings of the market. We must start from the idea of liberty itself, and then evaluate how each things may impose upon it, and oppose them in turn where their imposition is unjust. To do any less–to allow people to be oppressed by the rich, coerced into unfair contracts and deprived of their natural rights of movement and of their common property by laws enacted by the rich, is an utter betrayal of liberty.

After spending the last week or so riling up American prejudice and hatred with ridiculous accusations that push all the right fear buttons for a particular variety of Americans — the type who subsequently chant violent sentiments that terrify Americans like myself — McCain is now scrambling desperately to figure out a way to weasel out of being called on his shit.

I still don’t quite get why anyone would want to vote for this asshole.

Jabberwock

So, the McCain campaign has been stirring up a snake pit of reactionary morons in order to incite hatred against Obama over his working on an educational board with a guy who set off some bombs in Washington D.C. almost half a century ago, who has since had the charges dropped against him, become a professor, and won Chicago’s Citizen of the Year award.

Either McCain and Palin are just so profoundly goddamned dumb that they had no clue that there are many particularly ignorant Americans who would react this way, working themselves up into a terror tizzy wherein anything that sets off even the remotest neuronal association with 9/11 puts them into a kind of irrational base-brain panic mode where clear facts and logic can be suspended so that the witch hunt they feel is necessary to protect their families can continue unabated and the perceived danger — however illusory — can be eliminated, or they actually want to get an angry mob to lynch Barack Obama.

On that note, it makes me so confident for a better, brighter future that over 40% of American voters plan on casting their ballot for the ticket that’s either extremely just profoundly fucking dumb and out of touch with the people, or incredibly evil and manipulative and willing to incite lynch mobs and keep children from finding out what “bad touch” means so long as it helps them get into office. (And don’t give me any shit about “well, the McCain campaign is urging people to be respectful” — if you take a basket full of snakes and shake it as hard as you can, release it in a preschool and then sing a lullaby, you don’t get points for trying to calm the snakes.)

One would think that inciting an angry mob against an individual would fall under the definition of “terrorism”. I am genuinely afraid that one of these stupid pieces of shit is going to take it upon themselves to assassinate Obama.

But no, that’s not terrorism — actually inciting terror like that by stirring up violence and hatred. Geez, what was I thinking? Terrorism is serving on some education board with a jumped-up hippie asshole who set off some non-fatal bombs half a century ago and making it clear that you detested what the man did back when you were eight years old.

Somehow, eventually, these hatred-mongering motherfuckers will reap exactly what they are sowing, and I assure you it will be one incredibly ugly potato.

Jabberwock

Inspired by Sad Guys on Trading Floors (and grabbing many of the pictures they have there), it’s LOLTraders!

And here are some Janet made:

More to come, and if you like, you can join the LiveJournal LOLTraders community.

Jabberwock

Right Down Their Throats

So, are advocates of laissez-faire economics ignorant or evil?

If history is any indication, there’s strong evidence for the latter. See, the funny thing about laissez-faire economic policies is that they’re generally extremely unpopular. When people have a say on economic and business issues (especially when they actually make an effort to educate and inform themselves, and aren’t just led by the nose via manufactured consent, which I’ll address in another section), they have this strange tendency to vote against things that will drive them into destitution. For instance, very few people (aside from business owners and the foot-soldier proponents of laissez-faire economics with delusions that they’ll themselves somehow magically become millionaires the second we adopt ‘pure’ capitalism) are going to vote positively on an initiative to abolish the minimum wage.

Leaders throughout the world have discovered this to be true, which is why every implementation of broadly-applied laissez-faire policies has come not through democratic processes but through the complete sidestepping thereof, usually including suppressing other individual freedoms and imprisoning those with opposing viewpoints — a necessity when pushing through policies that are intrinsically unpopular with an informed working-class majority.

In her thoroughly-researched book The Shock Doctrine, in which she depicts the disturbing untold history of liberal economics, Naomi Klein provides numerous examples of such violations of freedoms that were committed in order to push through Chicago School doctrines of corporatism and laissez-faire economics. In Chile, Pinochet and his regime murdered and “disappeared” critics of the shock-therapy-style laissez-faire policies he was pushing through at the behest of Chicago School Friedmanites known as “The Chicago Boys”. The same tactics took place in country after country throughout South America.

Of course, those countries weren’t democracies, which is part of the point, really — in order to push through radical Chicago School capitalist policies in countries that were otherwise on their way to nationalizing companies and implementing enlightened social policies, militant right-wing factions had to pull off coups and eliminate democracy and collectivist leanings. But the same happened in newly-formed democracies as well: Poland, for instance, just after breaking free of the Communist rule of the USSR in favor of a socialist/nationalist movement, was forced by the United States and the IMF (at this point stacked heavily with Chicago Boys) to adopt laissez-faire capitalist policies that sold off publicly-owned businesses to foreign interests in order for the country to receive any kind of debt relief. (One of our favorite things to do, it seems, is force newly-liberated countries — like Bolivia — to pay for the debts of their oppressors, thus effectively continuing their oppression indefinitely.)

These policies — which the public never would have voted for, and which defied everything they expected from the leaders they elected — were pushed through in back-room deals without any democratic oversight. Of course, the leaders of these countries were hardly to blame — what real choice did they have, burdened with the debts of the regimes from which they were recently liberated, and with the only possible help (e.g. the IMF) demanding that the only way they’d receive any debt relief was through implementation of these policies?

What happened — consistently — was exactly what one would expect: The lower class expanded immensely, poverty erupted, a handful of the already-wealthy or -powerful increased their fortunes, and Western interests made massive amounts of money from speculation and buying up all the formerly-subsidized or nationalized businesses.

In Chile, for instance, “45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world.” In Poland, “unemployment skyrocketed, and in 1993 it reached 25 percent in some areas — a wrenching change in a country that, under Communism, for all its many abuses and hardships, had no open joblessness. [...] For those under twenty-four, the situation is far worse: 40 percent of young workers were unemployed in 2006, twice the EU average. Most dramatic are the number of people in poverty: in 1989, 15 percent of Poland’s population was living below the poverty line; in 2003, 59 percent of Poles had fallen below the line.” (From The Shock Doctrine)

So you tell me: Does it seem as though the liberal economists responsible had the best interests of the general public in mind, with “the Market” bringing about a new era of prosperity for the general populace, or was it more about increasing the prosperity of a handful at the expense of the many, screwing over entire countries in order to accomplish this supposedly “free market”? I guess that’s the thing, really — whose market freedom is it? Certainly not the working class. And unequivocally not Iraq, where all of this gets even worse.

Continued in Part IV: Everybody Wants Iraq to Wind a Piece of String Around

Jabberwock

Say you’re one of Sarah Palin’s associates who was called to testify in the ongoing probe — one of the ones who finally gave in and decided to, y’know, actually comply with a court order. You’ve already demonstrated that you’re willing to break the law by refusing to comply with subpoenas — what’s to stop you from lying? If you already clearly have no respect for the legal process involved, there’s no real reason for anyone to expect what you say to have any greater a respect for it just because you finally broke down and agreed to be present to give a statement. It’s practically meaningless to even show up at this point. What Palin and her friends have done, effectively, is ensure that regardless the conclusion of the probe (if it actually carries through to completion, read below), she will forever be potentially guilty if she’s “exonerated” by her associates’ statements — perhaps not legally, but realistically. We can, at this point, never know the REAL truth based on witness testimony, since there’s immense doubt as to whether they’re telling the truth.

Palin is right that the probe has been tainted by partisan politics — her own. As soon as she became a candidate for the vice presidency, an investigation that had already been in progress was suddenly something she felt she didn’t have to participate in because it was potentially politically damaging and she just had better things to do than respond to an investigation’s questions that Americans deserve to know the answers to.

One thing’s for certain: If the probe is indeed shut down, as many Republicans and the extremely inappropriately-named “Liberty Legal Foundation” (unless “liberty” refers to “ours and not yours”) are demanding happens, then Sarah Palin is even more guilty of abusing her authority for personal gain than what she’s accused of doing in the probe itself.

Jabberwock

The McCain/Palin campaign has recently begun attacking Obama for “associating with terrorists”. Specifically, a man named Bill Ayers, formerly a militant activist associated with Weather Underground (though all charges against him were apparently dropped decades ago), now a University of Illinois professor with whom Obama has met a few times over the last decade.

Palin cited an article in Saturday’s New York Times about Obama’s relationship with Ayers, now 63. But that article concluded that “the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called ’somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.’ ”

Several other publications, including the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The New Republic, have debunked the idea that Obama and Ayers had a close relationship.

Now, we could sit here all day laughing about how pathetic and desperate this makes the McCain/Palin campaign look, dragging up shit from almost half a century ago when Obama himself was fucking eight years old. We could talk about how people can change, and that Ayers is now a professor and that regardless of what he was doing four decades ago, there might be just a slight difference between 1960s Ayers and 2000s Ayers… or that meeting with someone several times over the course of a decade hardly qualifies as “palling around”, as Palin referred to it… or we could talk about what a massive fucking waste of time it is to expend so much effort on these kinds of tactics… or how pathetic it is for them to apparently be banking their entire campaign on mud-slinging attack politics… or any of the other logical, rational conclusions that can easily be drawn that clearly illustrate that McCain’s and Palin’s accusations are fucking ridiculous.

Instead, how about we take an equally ridiculous look at John McCain’s own questionable history with American enemies:

FACT: John McCain was seen in direct proximity with the NVA during the Vietnam War.

FACT: John McCain was at least a pointed stick’s distance away from NVA soldiers.

FACT: Sure, he was put in a cage, but there are many people who enjoy that. This may go beyond “palling around” and well into an erotic relationship.

FACT: John McCain was ultimately released by the NVA — what kind of “enemy” could they have considered McCain if they let him go?

QUESTION: If John McCain was really against the NVA and Vietcong, then why was he captured? Why didn’t he go out guns blazing?

QUESTION: John McCain: Buddy to the NVA? Friend to militant Communism? …ENEMY of AMERICA?!!???!?!??

Edit: I was a moron and, as reader JC points out, got my Vietnamese War hostiles mixed up. This has been remedied. I’ve corrected the mistake, but didn’t want to make it seem as though I never made it.

Jabberwock

Q: My car doesn’t run! What’s wrong with it?

A: It doesn’t matter what’s wrong with it. Let’s just fix it.

Q: How much will it cost me?

A: Well, since we’re not even going to attempt to diagnose the cause of the problem, we’re just going to replace each part starting alphabetically and see if it has any effect. Now, if it turns out the problem is your, say, carburetor, it’ll cost you probably under a thousand. But if it’s, say, your transmission, on the other hand, it’ll run you maybe twenty grand?

Q: Wouldn’t it just be easier and more affordable for everyone involved to actually just figure out the cause and then address that?

A: No, because I DON’T WANT TO ARGUE WITH ANYONE ABOUT THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM BECAUSE THERE STANDS A GOOD CHANCE OF IT IMPLYING THAT USE OF GASOLINE MIGHT BE PARTIALLY RESPONSIBLE.

Jabberwock

Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates Drinking Game instructions: Every time you hear the word “maverick”, drink.

NOTE: Be sure to have at least a case of beer handy, or at least two full bottles of hard liquor.

Jabberwock

We had some server issues over the last couple days. Apparently, there was an Apache upgrade that somehow went wrong, and etc. But thanks to Djur, we’re back up and running, and all’s right with the world.

More updates to come, and hopefully a Chick Dissections soon.

Meanwhile, I’m working on a ten-episode run of an online-only TV show, which will hopefully begin filming sometime in early November. Each episode will run roughly eight or ten minutes. To stay updated on developments, check out the Unfair Dinkum Production Blog, and sign up for an account.

-The Mgt.

Jabberwock

So, after we bombed Iraqis with more Tomahawk missiles in a single day than were used over five weeks during the Gulf War, allowed the widespread looting of houses and museums despite being warned about it prior to the invasion by experts and advisers, eliminated millions of Iraqi jobs so that U.S. contractors could take them over — and subsequently fail to do the jobs and rebuild only about ten percent of the infrastructure they were all collectively paid billions of dollars to do — and fired a bunch of soldiers (many of which had joined the Baath party just to keep or enhance their jobs) who took their guns home angrily, and then put out a per-head reward for the arrests of “suspected terrorists” (70-90% of which were released after being tortured and humiliated and told it was all “a mistake”) which effectively turned our military prison facilities into factories for creating insurgents, and failed to take the steps necessary to prevent sectarian violence, and stamped out local Iraqi elections so that Paul Bremer could install his appointed government that was far more friendly to the wholesale selling-off of Iraq and its infrastructures and businesses to U.S. contractors (nearly all of which have strong ties to high-ranking American political officials)… I’m not entirely sure what “winning” could possibly look like at this point.

It’s like setting your house on fire to find your cat, and then it comes charging out the door and you’re all “yay, I won the cat-finding game!”

Jabberwock

So instead of being sensible about things, as earlier indications seemed they might, Republicans are instead veering once more toward lunacy. Instead of working toward an actual solution to the problem, they’re taking advantage of the situation as another excuse to attempt to implement idiotic “trickle-down”-style policies that won’t benefit anyone but those receiving the tax leniency.

See, I don’t quite get how problems that occurred in the private sector are supposed to somehow be alleviated by giving more power, leniency, or authority to the private sector. I also don’t get how rich people, when given more money or more lenient tax laws, will somehow automatically hemorrhage money into a bunch of investments and donations that will fix problems and make the world a better place. Specifically in this situation, what incentive are people supposed to have to invest in particular businesses? Why put your money into a bunch of shitty banks that recently tanked, especially when there isn’t a whole lot of indication that the government is going to be strictly regulating the banking world to ensure that situations like this don’t happen again?

By the way, has “let’s give rich people more money/more leniency in taxes (which is practically equivalent to more money)” EVER worked to achieve any other end but rich people having more money? I don’t see charities bursting at the seams with donations since the Bush tax cuts, and it really means next to fuckall when people give $10,000 to charity (mostly for show) while at the same time pumping ten or twenty or a hundred times as much into lobbying and campaign financing that goes far beyond counteracting whatever cause they donated to “help”.

Gah, this is all so stupid. Why must they be so stupid?

Jabberwock

What’s funny (in a sad, horrible way) about the bail-out is that it’s predictably the same Crisis Capitalism bullshit neoliberals have been pushing for about the last half-century. In response to (or, rather, taking advantage of) our current economic crisis, Bush is attempting to push through a piece of legislation that almost exclusively benefits businesses and the wealthy, without any checks in place to ensure that the bail-out actually helps the whole of America instead of executives and the upper class. What’s more is, he’s demanding Congress pass it immediately without any alterations — clearly attempting to sidestep the democratic process as has been done to push through similar agendas in countries all over the world (e.g. Argentina, Chile, Poland, Iraq).

While I’m all in favor of a sensible bail-out, handing over unchecked hundreds of billions of dollars to businesses that have already demonstrated their irresponsibility with executives that have demonstrated their immense self-interest trumping other concerns seems like one of the worst ideas in the world. At least, if the intention is to actually solve this problem, which it really isn’t. After all, the object of Crisis/Disaster Capitalism isn’t to make things better but to make as much money from the situation as is possible regardless of expense.

Jabberwock

In having her family and aides refuse to comply with legislative subpoenas Sarah Palin is doing this nation a grave disservice.

The investigation will determine whether a vice-presidential candidate has abused her authority, which will answer important questions about what she may do as one of the heads of the nation. We deserve to know these things about our elected officials. For Sarah Palin and her associates to delay this investigation is not only ethically questionable, not only a slap in the face to those of us who don’t have the political clout to simply refuse to participate in legal investigations with little consequence, but a clear indication that she has no respect for the people. She’s effectively telling us we have no right to know whether she abuses authority.

The irony is that in trying to defer this investigation until after the election or possibly indefinitely, she’s answering the question for us: She’s using her political position to ensure that she can refuse to participate in a legal investigation before the elections, subverting the American justice system in a way most ordinary citizens can’t. So does Sarah Palin have a tendency to abuse her authority? It seems pretty clear — at this point, she need not even let the investigation run its course for the answer to be known.

Jabberwock