Yes, I’m still interested in addressing it (as I did here and here). Not any particular conspiracies, but the concept of conspiracy within this great democratic republic of ours. My goal is not to convince you of any particular conspiracy, but to get you to accept that (A) conspiracies are possible, and (B) they are more public, commonplace, and mundane than you think.

In light of those goals, here are two articles to consider:

• Wally Conger talks about conspiracy in the context of Murray Rothbard’s Wall Street and the Bankers. When we address issues of government and elite interests, we make things far too sexy and complex:
  

  Is this a — gasp! — conspiracy book? You could say so. But as Justin Raimondo writes in his afterword to the book: “…it would be inaccurate to call the Rothbardian world view a ‘conspiracy theory.’ To say that the House of Morgan was engaged in a ‘conspiracy’ to drag the U.S. into World War I, when indeed it openly used every stratagem, every lever both economic and political, to push us into ‘the war to end all wars,’ seems woefully inadequate. This was not some secret cabal meeting in a soundproof corporate boardroom, but a ‘conspiracy’ of ideas openly and vociferously expressed. … Here there is no single agency, no omnipotent central committee that issues directives, but a multiplicity of interest groups and factions whose goals are generally congruent.”

• James Leroy Wilson addresses several important conspiracies from the standpoint of feasibility:
  

  before someone says, “It’s impossible!” think of this: if just one person in ten thousand is capable of committing atrocities and keeping secrets, that’s a potential network of 30,000 in the USA alone. If Gladio could be kept secret in tiny Belgium for so long, surely even more elaborate conspiracies could exist in the United States.

  Wilson has another good article about conspiracies here.

UPDATE: I’ve been told that my post comes off as condescending. Sorry if it does, in fact. I think it’s pretty obvious from the posts I’ve written on “conspiratorial theory” that I’m still working out my thoughts, and blogs give me an opportunity to “think out loud”. Resistance and pressure to make a point is expected and appreciated. My thesis is not this post itself - and usually isn’t any post in and of itself - but rather an ongoing conversation with myself and my readers, if they care to participate.

The only reason I approach conspiracy in this post as something that needs to be demonstrated as plausible is because people dismiss it so easily. The only reason I argue that it’s mundane is that I think conspiracy, properly understood, is indistinguishable from everyday politics. Why it can happen in our offices, or among our friends, or in city politics, but NOT in the military or governmental bureaucracies is a question I don’t think anybody can answer once they face the issue squarely.

I implore my readers for a little patience, good faith, and feedback.  I don’t have all the answers.  I’m not the most articulate person in the world (far from it).  But I do want to attempt to make original, interesting points.  Sometimes that may mean that I don’t make sense or I write utter shit, even.  I accept that, and you’ll be disappointed if you don’t.

Interestingly enough, that’s also why I can never see myself doing any sort of advertising on this blog.  This blog is totally for me, and it’s worth all the time and money I put into it.  I get 100% of what I want out of it just by having a venue in which to think out loud - while having just enough public visibility to hopefully prevent me from getting too sloppy (you be the judge).

Tags: conspiracy, franklin credit union scandal, left libertarian

Via the Cornucopia Institute, New York Times columnist Michael Pollan addresses the recent outbreak of E. Coli in the nation’s spinach supply (CDC background on the situation here) - surprisingly warning against further regulation:

We can also expect to hear calls for more regulation and inspection of the produce industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for Science in the Public Interest have proposed that the government impose the sort of regulatory regime it imposes on the meat industry — something along the lines of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system (Haccp, pronounced HASS-ip) developed in response to the E. coli contamination of beef. At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are virtually unregulated. “Farmers can do pretty much as they please,” Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, said recently, “as long as they don’t make anyone sick.”

This sounds like an alarming lapse in governmental oversight until you realize there has never before been much reason to worry about food safety on farms. But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food, both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.

The solution, Pollan argues, is not forced irradiation of produce but decentralizing the food supply and leaning more on local farmers. This not only discourages unhealthy industrial practices but localizes hazards, preventing them from spreading throughout the country before they are caught.  Technology is great, but applying it to inherently inefficient, wasteful, and dangerous systems isn’t necessarily the way to solve the problem.

The entire article is a well-deserved swipe against agribusiness regulatory capture. The dangers we accept from a centralized, industrial food supply are not the result of the free market but of government regulations that benefit large ventures over small, local producers - regardless of what capitalist fluffers like Robert Murphy think (see a great deconstruction of his argument against preferring local produce here, and the larger implications of such apparent corporatist whoring here).  The system is totalitarian and fascist, but now it’s making even making us sick. Diseconomies of scale, anyone?

(UPDATED Monday, October 22, 2006 at 11:02 AM)

Tags: agriculture, agribusiness, corporatism, decentralization, regulation

Discomfort and Democracy

The other day at the protest we did a lot of chanting, including one that I favored over certain others: “This is what democracy looks like!” In light of my disgust with statist, institutionalized politics, I found this visceral affirmation of popular power gratifying. I see democracy as more than a recognizable structure of government, characterized by representatives and elections, but rather something to which rulers are subject, something they should regard with more than hokey reverance. In a system where a small elite exercise a sickeningly large share of day-to-day power in the world, democracy shouldn’t be comfortable, neat, and safe to cordon off. It should be damn frightening to the establishment (the paramilitary presence indicates it is).

An essay I read at Against the War on Terror accurately frames my view: democracy has been turned into something safely moderated by politicians, institutions, and media. Too often our individual interests become aggregated by people for conveniently understood, rather than substantive, purposes - an apology for the status quo rather than a challenge to it:

This electoral democracy offers citizens the opportunity to vote various leaders in and out of office, but what it does not include is the capacity for individuals to maintain practical control over these structures and the outcomes they produce. A democracy that focuses almost exclusively on electoral politics has created a network of experts and strategists, who work to massage and shape the exercise of political voice. The recipient has no sense of what poll projections or horse race strategies amount to, but does develop the sneaking suspicion that politics has little to distinguish it from buying a car or choosing between retirement plans.

That general understanding of our political condition drove me to make the trek into the city, alone, and spend a few hours with strangers.

A Protest in Search of an Idea

And yet, in the cacophony of different agendas hollered, I couldn’t help but feel a bit helpless at the protest. Right here was the most direct contact with the popular pulse I could get, but too often this voice reduced to virtual nonsense by the sheer outpouring of opinions. Democracy is great, but it rests upon the idea of a self-organizing population that can articulate an agenda around which to rally. Nothing could be further from the spirit of this rally.

It was almost a feeling of “everything not prohibited is compulsory” - as if I was there to support everything not“Bush” or “Allen”. Which is fine in and of itself, but not an accurate representation of my heartfelt intentions. Indeed, the only thing which seemed heartfelt was the vague anger. Not even a genuine impression of authentic resistance was detected, really (for example, we should have been protesting that police presence as well - isn’t that kind of power display as crippling a demonstration of authoritarianism as any?).

I’d be lying if I denied the bad taste it left in my mouth, because the narrow focus of what brought people out there was watered down in favor of an almost perverse inclusiveness. Everything was on display, from lack of funds for education and jobs, to local political issues, to Katrina, to the NSA spying program, to even some advocating “Old Dirty Bastard for president”. While I don’t have a problem with people advocating for those things, I think it’s a bit disingenuous to use the war to elevate those issues (though, that too, is part of the character of democracy). Frankly, I was seeking a collective understanding of the urgency of the war, not some “outrage” around which I could move myself to anger.

I criticize an overly institutional conception of democracy, aggregating interests according to characteristics unconnected to substantive politics. Yet, this is as true of the protest as of the system I was protesting. To what strategy can we appeal in order to capture authentic ideas which make collective social transformation possible? Against the War on Terror’s editors captured this disconnect perfectly:

The fact that participation is no longer tied to the possibility of social progress has created a second force in American politics: the obsession with doing, acting (what the editors of LiP magazine call “activistism”). This ethic says “do something,” almost regardless of what that “something” is and what are its consequences. Such a passion for doing undercuts the value of ideas, purposes, or projects. It makes suspect the attempt to link action to a vision of the world as it should be, because action exists only in the moment, in the experience of doing. We see this trend in activisms of all kinds: consumer activism, shareholder activism, environmental activism, human rights activism, anti-globalization activism, etc., etc. All of these efforts share a single, basic message, which is to act or to protest in spite of whether you are entirely clear about your ultimate goals or even who shares those goals. It is this compulsion to “do something” regardless of political coherence that today creates such strange political bedfellows.

Recapturing a Popular Agenda

The appeal of the essay is the same that I have held since I started this blog: to discover a thread of truth in the disaster that is our political condition. Without this essential truth, any politics - radical or incremental - is reducable to process and “going through the motions”. Protest movements are not exempt from this shallowness.

In our society, the vote, in effect, has become a Faustian bargain between citizen and leader. The citizen is begged to vote, only so he or she can disappear from the political stage afterwards. Just as importantly, it teaches us that politics is simply about the act of doing rather than any practical goals achieved by that act. It tells us that living a political life is just participating, “getting involved,” instead of developing a set of coherent ideas that can form the basis for collective action and social change. Today, American politics is confronted by a decline of meaningful alternatives, and the activist ethic of “Vote or Die!” and “do or die” is no solution to this fundamental shortcoming. In fact, one can view the breathless call to engage as a product of this decline, and an attempt to conceal the emptiness of American politics under the mask of expended energy. This of course does not mean that politics should just be about thinking and discussing, but it does mean that right now the most pressing political need is to reimagine our collective choices. This can only be done if we interrogate the reasons and implications for action, and provide better accounts of what it is we are actually fighting for rather than just protesting against.

This is precisely what I think is necessary, and why I have always considered the online conversations in which this blog participates so important.

As the optimal consequence of substantive discussions, radical politics must strive to articulate these collective choices independent of practical outcomes. The goal must be to find a core value around which people can rally for specific changes. Indeed, our democracy suffers from a lack of overarching values - not in the sense that Christian right-wingers invoke, but in the sense that the organizing principles are too superficial.

I couldn’t frame my embrace of anarchism any better, actually. To me, the movement for a stateless society is primarily concerned with identifying collective choices we ignore as a result of our subservient condition. To break out of the trap of coercive institutional society, we must discover ideas and form social movements in a manner expressly independent of the most superficial of all organizing principles: institutionalized violence, or rather, the State.

The character of this movement, therefore, cannot be accurately represented in yet another social ritual - which both protests and elections are. Only a reawakened understanding of individual responsibility and consciousness can form the athentic collective will we need to truly change things. This is dangerous unless a consensus exists about why we require the change, because otherwise the status quo will give us another cosmetic makeover. The most pressing need is a total recasting of politics, informed by a population comprised of individuals prepared for something that both looks and feels different and willing to sieze it.

Ultimately, that kind of introspection isn’t publishable on a ballot or a placquard: it can only be achieved when we hold one another accountable. Properly understood, politics occurs everytime we interact with another human being, not in spite of any lack of coercion but, more powerfully, precisely because we abstain from the use of force. If that kind of politics sounds like the networks of cooperative endeavor upon which anarchism bases itself, and if it furthermore sounds like “building the structure of the new within the shell of the old”, then you get what I’m saying.

The most pressing need is for a society in the original, essential, primal sense. Only our unique position in history makes that something radical.

Tags: protest, richmond, radicalism

Note: I went back and cleaned up some of the verbiage and formatting on this post, and added reflections from the next day. The “At the protest” section is me on my XV6700 typing in observations on the fly. Since rain was threatening I kept the blogging to a minimum.

Please digg this story!

At the protest

• (3:05 PM) Welp, here I am… For a red state this is a bit better turnout than I expected. Police presence isn’t too bad right here, but I saw a big group of stormtroopers gathered across the street, mounted and ready to deploy. It’s actually kind of fun; these old hippies keep messing up the cheers, but they’re the only one’s really uping the ante around here. I’ll take some photos now!
• (3:44 PM) Ok, it’s a bit later and the size of the protest has almost doubled. we’re getting a lot of honking (from cars driving by) in support. There’s also a contingent here in support of Old Dirty Bastard for president. Who will break the news to them? Well, it’s starting to rain so ima put my phone away.
• (4:28 PM) Here comes the prez… we’re gonna give him hell. (Turns out he didn’t show up till 5 PM and left around 6 PM)
• (6:32 PM) Well, it’s over… good turnout, and we caught Bush coming and going. abt 200 ppl attending. the paramilitary police were disgusting. eating sushi now

Photos

• Here’s a link to my Flickr photos tagged “protest”. Also, a video clip. I’ll post some interesting ones anyway.
• From this picture it’s pretty obvious that the cops were choosing sides, and it wasn’t with the antiwar majority but the 5-person pro-Bush clique
• As you can see, the cops and paramilitary detail clearly considered peaceful demonstrators the major threat.
• Here’s one look at the crowd, but it was hard to capture the whole thing.

Other impressions

It was a pretty good turnout for the capital of a red state, although we do have an art school here. Like some wierd cross between a Phish lot and a hipster convention. I didn’t come with a sign, which sucked because I had to hold this little one that just said “Time for a Change”.

Broad St. was closed down about 4:30 PM in anticipation of the Prez. Plastic fencing had been erected ahead of time, but officers lined up along the street to, well, I’m not sure what they were afraid of. I don’t consider it a very strong democracy when elected officials need to intimidate the people and hide them. Speaking of hiding, they lined busses up along the other side of Broad so that nobody in the Museum would have to endure our sight. And as the Prez left, they even positioned Richmond Police SUVs so that the view would be obstructed (so I went further down the street to catch them).

There was a small group of war/Bush supporters, about half a dozen, with big American flags. It was a bit pathetic. The cops initially tried to stand between us and them, but realizing we weren’t posing a threat, they eventually ceded the territory.

I made sure the police knew I wasn’t happy with them. I yelled several times about my dismay with the police state. But even I wasn’t prepared for when the Prez arrived; these guys in fatigues carrying automatic rifles stood along the busses facing us - again, as if the electorate is the enemy! They were pretty smug about it, but the crowd seemed to accept it so I didn’t make a big deal out of it. It’s hard being a sole voice in those things.

Many of the protesters there were trying to raise awareness of the recent damage to Battery Park, which resulted in some school closings. In fact, one thing that kind of wierded me out was how a whole host of issues, from jobs to education to gay rights, were being wrapped up in what I thought was an anti-war, anti-Bush protest. I guess Allen’s presence made it more locally significant than that. But surely the war was the big focus.

There were some fruities (one white lady invoked the “N” word on the loudspeaker to the dismay of everybody, though she meant no harm) but overall things were calm. In fact, I could have stood a bit more agitation, but the collective dynamics of those things are wierd. Only one guy really broke ranks and charged out with a sign into Broad. The cops turned him back but returned his sign.

All in all, a good experience, though I wish I hadn’t been alone, or at least that I hadn’t arrived so early. I’ll post some pictures when I get my phone sync working with my computer.

Links

Here are some links to other sources of information about the protest… hoping I can find other bloggers in Richmond who are antiwar. The VAWN announcement mobilized a good protest, but I hope in the future we can coordinate better, perhaps by expanding online collaboration.

• Story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (and a MySpacer takes exception to the coverage)
• A critique of the protest at The Virginia Federalist
• A few pictures at day x day’s livejournal
• A MySpace blog
• Another MySpace blog (did I mention the hipsters were in force there? )
• Charles Warden makes some observations with which I agree
  
• West of Schockoe reflects on the protest
  
• Camelsbackandforth has a good write-up as well as excellent photos
• United Conservatives of Virginia says Bush had Richmond “rockin’ and rollin’”?
• SWAC girl whines about us
• Richmond IndyMedia coverage (and more here)
• RaisingKaine has a small writeup
• Democracy Now! coverage

Tags: bush, protest, allen

Via LewRockwell.com, Butler Shaffer points a profound problem with modern American statism and social contract theory:

Those who argue against secession must, in doing so, negate the entire notion of “contract” upon which the theory of the modern state rests. But if the state becomes, by our fictional “contract,” our “agent,” upon what philosophic or legal principle is the “principal” to be denied the authority to discharge the “agent?” The Declaration of Independence has logical consistency on this point.

Further evidence that the Civil War was the end of the American ideal of government of, by, and for the people. No matter who’s side you supported, the experiment was over: a republic of sovereign individuals was replaced by a domestic and, eventually, international empire. Given that, it’s clear that enforcing the interests of the people in the “social contract” would naturally lead to rebellion, as Jefferson indicated (found via the Mises Blog):

“I like a little rebellion now and then,” Jefferson wrote Mrs. Adams, “…the spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.“

Indeed, the South’s cause may have been plagued by some very evil notions. Even so, it is still better to resist centralized authority. There is really no principled difference between overthrowing an oppressive regime based in the plantation owner’s house and one based in the White House. The challenge itself, regardless of the particular motivating agenda, serves as a valuable check on the ruling class.

Tags: civil war, secession, thomas jefferson

Over at the Center for Stateless Society, Jenny takes a close look at the dark side of Grameen Bank, for whose microlending efforts earned its founder a Nobel Peace Prize. But apparently the Bank is not engaged in private lending to help third world enterpeneurs. The bank raises capital by way of loans from governments and quasi-governmental organizations like the UN and the IMF. Jenny elaborates on some of the creepier elements of the bank:

The high repayment rates by the debtors are achieved through methods which could be called coercive. The borrowers are grouped into cells of five. Future loans, which are much higher than the first one, are only granted if each member of the cell has repaid his or her first loan. This creates an incentive for each member of the cell to make sure everyone pays back their loans – how they do this is up to them. The repayment rates for second-time borrowers are much lower even though employees of the Grameen Bank monitor all borrowers door-to-door on a weekly basis.

In addition to these unusual methods, the borrowers have to chant the “Sixteen Decisions” during parades, which express the worldview of the Grameen Bank. Decision 16 reads as follows: “We shall take part in all social activities collectively.” Other Decisions emphasize the attempt of the Grameen Bank to emancipate Bangladeshi women from the traditionally patriarchal structures. This seeming emancipation and financial independence come at the price, though, of dependency on the Grameen Bank, which turns out to be less of a bank and more of a cult.

Why miss a chance at social engineering when helping people pull themselves up by the bootstraps? Read more here.

UPDATE: B.K. Marcus weighs in on the hoax as well.

Tags: nobel peace prize, bangladesh, grameen bank, microfinance, microloans, microlending, finance, third world

You know, I hear people say, Well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box. And a unity government is working to respond to the will of the people.

—George W. Bush, August 7, 2006

Well, then, good to hear that’s been cleared up.

Maybe next we can all have a vote on the nuclear arms race, or perhaps the Second Coming of Jesus.

(Via Reason November 2006, and Crooks and Liars 2006-08-07.)

Radley Balko gives me a heads up on a Congresswoman from my old congressional district (the 1st) who has astounded me in her abject ignorance:

Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.’s performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was similarly dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

“Do I?” she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. “You know, I should.” She took a stab at it: “It’s a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it’s the Sunnis who’re more radical than the Shia.”

I love that: “Do I?” Jeez, if you’re going to break up fights in the countries you occupy, shouldn’t you know what the hell they’re about?

At least I can pat myself on the back for fighting her election back in 2000 by working on the campaign of the Libertarian candidate, Sharon Wood - including lobbying for her to actually be included in the first congressional district debate hosted by my school. I actually had to go in front of some committee and explain why they should allow all the candidates in the race to participate (I think this asshole had a lot to do with it).

Tags: jo ann davis

After having been available on my German website since last Saturday, my piece on the Nobel Peace Prize got published on the website of the Center for a Stateless Society today. Comments are very welcome. I got a lot of information from Jeffrey Tucker's article "The Micro-Credit Cult", so thanks for the research.

Tags: anarchism, libertarianism, Center for a Stateless Society, Nobel Peace Prize

Tim Lee describes a realization he had about libertarianism and the need to evangelize for business:

…In college, I dated a left-of-center girl who liked to shop at the local grocery co-op rather than a commercial grocery store. It was a topic of frequent argument. I’d point out the relative efficiencies of commercial grocery store organization, she’d stress fuzzier, more community-focused advantages: the sense of community, the superior treatment of workers, the closer connection between customers, employees, and management, etc.

I still shop at a commercial grocery store. But I also think my criticism of the co-op was a little bit off base. In the first place, there’s no reason that libertarianism, as such, should quarrel with co-op shoppers. It’s a peaceful, voluntary form of social organization, and anyone who doesn’t appreciate it is free to take their business elsewhere. And I think it’s a mistake for libertarians to deny that many people find the market and firm forms of organization alienating. If they want to structure their lives so that more aspects of it are organized like a big tribe or family, we ought to say more power to them.

I had a similar realization when reading Charles Murray’s What It Means to be a Libertarian back in college. Although Murray focused more on community moral and legal standards of subsidarity, it seemed obvious to me that reducing the role of the State would necessarily entail greater cooperativism and community action. As long as such ventures aren’t forced on anyone, they are perfectly compatible with libertarianism, being precisely the kinds of innovations we should expect a free people to devise. We should embrace the desire to realize one’s values in the free market, with at least the same passion as Randroids laud corporate capitalism.

As a mutualist, my inclination is not to stop at encouraging their cooperative spirit. But even for mainstream libertarians, I hardly think it hurts us to address the reasons the corporate, consumption-oriented economy is so alienating. Could it be, in fact, that Galt’s Gulch doesn’t exist in real life, and most big business both influences and benefits greatly from government largesse? We won’t lose any principled support by attacking corporate welfare, regulatory privileges, and other statist perks - indeed, such talk rounds out our advocacy for markets by showing that we apply small government thinking equally.

Libertarians must stop fighting the culture war, implicitly or explicitly, and realize that leftist values matter in the market just as much as others. There is a desperate need for an economic attitude that doesn’t attack people for not fitting in with the capitalist, type A status quo. Promoting societies which have a wide variety of organizing philosophies to choose from, free from force and fraud, is our goal - not a particular cultural outcome.

A very encouraging article at Strike the Root by Carlton Hobbs makes a similar, compelling argument: doing your own thing outside the market is a check on ensuring a functioning market. Responding to Austrian writer Robert Murphy’s attack on an article encouraging readers to support local produce over imports, Hobbs implores libertarians to stop dictating value judgements to people. The big reason markets work is that they allow people to peacefully pursue their deeply held, irrational values without having to justify it to others:

The dumb act is attacking people who try to change things on the market in a way that would reduce state capitalism, when there was not a single call or implication for government interference in Taylor’s article.

Murphy’s article effectively makes pro-market decentralists the enemy, and those who influence the state to remove our freedoms as the ally. I see why some of the attacks on anarcho-capitalists are valid. Such writing does not match our theory… while others assume that such writings are our theory. Murphy’s article unintentionally takes the existence of current state regulations as something to work around more than to work against.

I toast with my decentralist homebrew to those who work against the state. I gladly pay a little extra for raw milk straight from a dairy farmer, and for produce from family farmers who struggle against state regulations every day instead of from big businesses that at best, are skilled at maneuvering around the state regulations from which they profit.

A free market is not self-sustaining unless people specifically act to sustain it. The market does not value its perpetuation apart from individuals who value perpetuating it. Ostracism from markets is a primary method necessary to perpetuate markets. It is not even a good measure of value apart from those who seek to accurately measure value…

Precisely! We don’t need people to swallow capitalist kool-aid; we need them to start identifying and pursuing voluntary, non-coercive means of realizing their values. As Lee concludes:

…Libertarianism is about reducing state coercion. It’s not necessarily about increasing the role of the market in every aspect of our lives. Of course the market is one alternative to statism, and an extremely important one. But other decentralized, voluntary forms of organization are important too. Peer production is one such example. But there are many others, including co-ops, private universities, think tanks, unions (providing membership is voluntary), churches, and charities. Libertarians should be celebtrating these institutions as alternatives to the state, not attacking them as threats to the free market.

Amen, brother. This is the kind of attitudes which will win passionate liberals and Greens to our side: by showing that freedom works better than anything they can impose on us from above. Hell, with the right sales pitch we could steal some evangelical Christians simply by acknowledging that churches are far more important and legitimate community institutions than Bush can give them.