leftlibertarian.org

…appreciate the irony?

Well, probably not … but maybe Pollie! Here’s episode one of Steve Kubby’s new Internet video series.

My god; I had no idea that Arthur Silber’s teeth had deteriorated to such an extent as this:

I indicated a while ago some aspects of being very poor. One other aspect is this: when you can’t afford to get any decent medical care for major health problems, you definitely can’t afford to go to the dentist, for years on end in my case. One result is that your teeth finally rot and begin to fall out — literally. For the past week, pieces of one rotten tooth have been falling out almost every time I eat. I eat very, very carefully now, mostly soft foods. The tooth doesn’t hurt, at least not yet. This is on top of two fillings that fell out several years ago, and that I can’t get fixed. One of the resulting holes gets infected every two months or so. When that happens, it lasts for about ten days. During the worst two or three days, the left side of my face swells up to the size of a small apple. I can barely open my mouth, so I usually just suck up soup or mashed potatoes until it passes.

And he also is only halfway there to the next rent payment as well as being in need of some computer fixing. Once again, I urge those who find Arthur to be a worthwhile person to consider donating towards his continued living.

See the post linked to under his name above for detail.

The blog … no third solution has published edition number seven of the Market Anarchist Carnival. Once again a solid edition. Remember to submit your entries on this page for the next edition (29th of October). All entries and videos are accepted! The next edition will be published on Radical Libertarian. Agorists and left-libertarian peeps are [...]

A few thoughts on the Burmese struggle. Shortly before the attack by government soldiers on the monks and other citizens of Burma I remember reading some casual comment by another blogger on the peaceful state of the protests. He/she seemed to think that the relative hands-off attitude of the state was due largely to publicity provided largely by all of us netizens and bloggers. Okay there is probably a certain amount of truth to this idea but it didn't stop the attacks in the final outcome. ALSO I'm sick of hearing the local media referring to these events as a "crackdown". Troops "crackdown on protesters" makes it sound like the army are the good guys ... or some such garbage. I had a look through the Irrawaddy News Magazine Online edition run by exiled Burmese in Thailand. Apparently this site is a backup from their original URL which had a domain name ending in org. If you go over to the current INM site it appears to be working. I tried some of the three links at the top right of the page ( located at http://www.irrawaddymedia.com/ ) and these in turn lead to other lists (http://www.irrawaddymedia.com/protests/BurmaProtests.php#29-01 is one of these) rather than the caricature of the fat dictator and the slab of meat. On the right hand of those pages is a link list entitled "Related Stories". All of these appear to be dead. Near the cartoon page is a link leading to a short discussion on a hack job that was done on Irrawaddy starting on Wednesday Sept. 27th. Here are their comments:

September 29, 2007�The Web site of The Irrawaddy News Magazine, a Chiang Mai-based Burmese news agency, was infected by a virus beginning on September 27. The attack of unknown origin tried to spread the so-called �Trojan Horse� virus into the site as well as to Web site visitors. Rest assured. If you view our Web site, you will not receive a virus. There is no danger to your computer as you view The Irrawaddy Web site. You will be automatically redirected to a safe mirror site addressed as www.irrawaddymedia.com.A �trojan� virus is a type that usually masquerades as something else�an image, a video file or the like. A quick investigation by the Irrawaddy's technical staff revealed that a malicious code had been inserted into the site�s main page. This led to a virtual �traffic jam.� The code caused browsers to download hidden files in the background, eating up all available bandwidth on the server. It is still not known whether the virus was infected via e-mails or a direct hack to the server. E-mail messages hosting on The Irrawaddy�s server and files inside the server getting infected. When some readers browsed our site, they got infected. The virus also caused slow internet connections, according to our research. The site had been attacked since Thursday and was totally down for a few hours on Saturday.

Although journalists are banned now from Burma I was able to find a short news clip (link on news page) from a BBC mole still managing to operate within Rangoon. Protests there are smaller but by no means insignificant. A list of emails from inside the country is also available.

Here is a page of links from MSNBC which in turn leads to others. One of the most important is Global voices - Myanmar-Burma. MSNBC makes an interesting point that mainstream media are largely depending on the efforts of "amateurs" to get some information out of the country.

" Sophisticated efforts by repressive governments to block, ban, cordon and censor the Web have also increased, but then corresponding efforts to circumvent those blocks and keep the flow of information free have also made gains - both in technology like proxy servers and wireless devices and organization with small news sites run by expats with friends still in-country and concerned activist groups like Reporters Without Borders.

And so we find it all come to a head in Burma. Citizens with cameras and camera phones and video cameras and blogs and YouTube accounts and Facebook pages. A global media poised to accept the help of amateurs to report a story that's difficult to access in an official capacity. And a network of expats and cyber activists working to find loopholes and hacks as fast as the government can cut cords and pull plugs. "

Perhaps inspired by my list of top movie crime thrillers a couple of days ago, my pal Brian shares Snarkerati�s Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time. Not succumbing to just listing personal favorites, Snarkerati took fan ratings from the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes, added them together, then found an average for each movie, which accounts for placement on the list. Pretty cool. And here�s what I find really interesting: 21 of the listed movies are right now in my personal DVD collection. Another six are movies I intend to buy when they finally come out as �special editions,� or their prices drop so low I just have to purchase them. Am I a depressing guy or what?

In case you�re interested, here are the 21 dystopian films I now own (with their ranking on the abovementioned list): Fritz Lang�s Metropolis (#1), Brazil (#3), Children of Men (#6), The Matrix (#7), The Road Warrior (#8), Minority Report (#9), 12 Monkeys (#14), Serenity (#15), RoboCop (#19), Akira (#20), V for Vendetta (#23), Fahrenheit 451 (#26), Total Recall (#29), Dark City (#30), George Pal�s version of The War of the Worlds (#31), THX-1138 (#34), Escape from New York (#35), the 1984 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four (#38), A Boy and His Dog (#40), Starship Troopers (#48), and Equilibrium (#50). The six I will buy eventually are: A Clockwork Orange (#2), Blade Runner (#5), Alphaville (#13), Gattaca (#25), They Live (#33), and Artificial Intelligence: AI (#38).

Oh, and I also own one of the movies Snarkerati offers as an �honorable mention�: Code 46.

Welcome to my nightmares.

Suggest deleting the URL titaniumgirl DOT blogspot DOT com from your blogrolls, folks.

From TG:

I deleted my blog and it didn’t take long for someone else to take the name over at blogspot. Now it’s a like a sex finder site and it’s NOT ME, I have nothing to do with it.

You probably want to delete it. Please pass this on to anyone that I do not know.

On the LeftLibertarian2 email list, I’ve recently corresponded with user Steohawk in response to his question about differences (and common ground) between mutualism and so-called “anarcho-capitalism”. I plan to try to provide a recap of my responses in a later post, which will hopefully be better edited and more extensive than my emails. For right now, though, here are the essential links:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/message/12836
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/message/12848

…followed by this additional blog commentary response to a comment of his. I’m responding on the blog in this case because this leads off on a tangent from the main thread, and one that I’ve been meaning to write about anyway.

Wrote Steohawk:

“My personal theory is that counter-economics will naturally lead to true property rights.”

While I can’t outline with certainty exactly what Steohawk meant by that, I can explain why I agree with his statement as formulated, with some qualifications.

Counter-economics is the essential agorist revolutionary praxis. As I wrote a while back:

Agorism is revolutionary market anarchism.

In a market anarchist society, law and security will be provided by market institutions, not political institutions. Agorists recognize, therefore, that those institutions can not develop through political reform. Instead, they will come about as a result of market processes.

As government is banditry, revolution culminates in the suppression of government by market providers of security and law. Market demand for such service providers is what will lead to their emergence. Development of that demand will come from economic growth in the sector of the economy that explicitly shuns state involvement (and therefore can not turn to the state in its role as monopoly provider of security and law). That sector of the economy is the counter-economy � black and grey markets.

Reading up on agorist revolutionary theory, we come to understand that the anarchist project of revolution is one of bootstrapping a system of Stateless law, one fully capable of suppressing the State (as the criminal gang we rightly recognize it as) while not becoming a de facto State itself. Anarchist theorists thus can be seen as prefigurative of the community of legal scholars that will forever be constantly refining the intellectual basis for the future enterprise of production of law (and security) in a stateless society, much as law professors constantly debate law amongst themselves right now and influence the broader law profession accordingly. If that sounds to hierarchical for some, I should point out that it would be a “hierarchy” built not on force but in specialized expertise and the persuasiveness of the various scholars arguments — a ruthless meritocracy in the study of logic and ethics, rather than actual rulership.

While thinkers such as Rothbard have emphasized the market’s tendency to weed out bad products and apply this to “law” as a product, tending to narrow “the law” down towards Rothbard’s natural law ideals, it’s also equally valid from that same perspective to note that markets tend to produce an efficient pluralism of consumer choices. Thus, I noted:

“Mutualists advocate a usufruct approach to property law, Rothbardian an-caps advocate Rothbardian property theory (a radically anti-state version of Lockean property theory — call it Lockeanism 2.0) and non-Rothbardian an-caps tend to have no theory of justice in property beyond existing property titles. Then there’s the geoists, but I’m not going there right now…

Mutualists and those Rothbardians that get along well with them tend to look at the two property theories as two seperate legal doctrines that could amicably compete in a stateless free market for arbitration services (i.e. “law” and “courts”). It may be a bit more involved than “metric vs. English”, but you hopefully get the drift.”

Which is not to say that all Rothbardians get along well with Mutualists, unfortunately. As I noted, a lot of the panarchistic attempted reconciliation of anarchist schools of thought that I advocate is in some ways attributable to moving beyond Rothbard’s so-called “anarcho-capitalism” to Konkin’s agorism and the resulting “anti-political” approach. As I noted in a blog comment:

“The slash mark you added between agorism and “anarcho-capitalism” is kind of at odds with the point I make over and over again, which is that they�re not the same thing. The addition of Konkin�s theory of revolution, better developed class theory and anti-political approach allows the incipient anti-capitalist implications of the Rothbardian strain of market anarchism (that agorism is built on and extends) to be more fully realized… I feel comfortable saying that I�m anti-capitalist because if we take Carson�s mutualist exposition “The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand” as an acceptable [libertarian socialist] description of “capitalism”, then that is something I am 100% against and have been all along. I don�t have to agree with Carson about usufruct or the labor theory of value in order to agree with that particular Carson article…”

As I pointed out in the email discussion, Carson actually has done a lot of the intellectual “heavy lifting” for Rothbardians in his article “Libertarian Property and Privatization: An Alternative Paradigm”. It’s not “anarcho-capitalist” ideology per se that’s so messed up, but the existing movement’s culture and the pseudo-Randian tendency toward right-wing class sympathies that aren’t actually justified in the context of awareness of the current state-subsidized capitalist economic order. That doesn’t mean all “libertarian socialist” knee-jerk criticism of Rothbardians is unjustified (or justified), but that we’ve done a really crappy job of educating them about where we’re coming from because we haven’t had our own shit together. Without Konkin’s theory of revolution, refinement of libertarian class theory (agorist class theory), and anti-political approach; the default reformist libertarian electoral approach sabotages the effort to educate people about the important theoretical insights we actually do have to offer. They see you as pot-smoking Republicans because that’s what they see on the outside of the “black box” of your ideology. They see no reason to open the box and discover the treasures within. As Chuck Munson noted, all a cursory glance reveals is an effort to…

“…sell some sexed up crap being concocted at the Cato Institute.”

By standing outside statist libertarian policy debates on how to control the State (beyond perhaps the most obvious, such as “end the war”) and instead concentrating on seeking the destruction of the State, agorists are able to adopt an attitude and style that can be recognized as authentically anarchist.

But, let’s get back to Steohawk…

“My personal theory is that counter-economics will naturally lead to true property rights.”

We agorists are seeking to, ultimately, bootstrap a system of non-state law and thereby destroy the State as a system of oppression. The reformist libertarian, including milquetoast and right-leaning Rothbardians, by contrast is quixotically seeking to reform the State into fitting anti-state ideals. Square peg, meet round hole.

So, yes, the counter-economic revolution is the way to build liberatory protection for authentic property rights — including the revolutionary redistribution of property in accordance with Rothbardian property ethics that can’t be fully applied outside of a revolutionary scenario. That revolutionary redistribution of property and support for a fully free market that can accomodate voluntary cooperatives as a business model makes agorists fully as much “libertarian socialists” in just as much sense as Benjamin Tucker ever had claim to the term, while remaining implacably opposed to “socialism” in the sense that Mises defined the term (which is the sense Konkin was referring to when he said in various places that agorism is not “socialist”).

Some “anarcho-capitalists” might disagree with my advocacy of legalistic pluralism with regard to the matter of usufruct property theory and Rothbardian property theory as:

“…two seperate legal doctrines that could amicably compete in a stateless free market for arbitration services…”

To them, my reply is that they need to grasp that we are attempting to bootstrap a system of stateless law, one provided by the only “free” market — black markets or the “counter-economy“. Do they have confidence in the full ramifications of their own ideology? I do.

1. The market can provide arbitration services.
2. The market can provide property claim registration/publication services.
3. The market can provide peaceful economic means of managing uncertainty about property claims, which uncertainty is fundamentally just the economically familiar matter of risk. That means, which already exists in a basic form, is called title insurance.

James Leroy Wilson makes a point about lowering the tax burden on corporations with which I reluctantly agree (only because, on its face, such agreement seems vulgar):

The blogger formerly known as Jane Galt wrote in 2002, “The Corporate Income Tax brought in $204.9 billion in 1998. My tax professor (a Democrat) estimated the cost of corporate compliance in that year to be $300 billion. That’s just the direct cost — what corporations paid tax lawyers and accountants.” So according to this professor, it cost corporations $500 billion to pay the tax, though the government received barely $200 billion. And the tax code is much larger today than it was in 1998. While the professor’s estimate may have been too high, there is undeniably tremendous waste of labor and money that the corporation could have used to grow their business.

Instead of this waste, we could simplify the system by letting the entire tax fall on the shareholders instead. After all, they are already taxed on their dividends, capital gains, and interest from their investments; these are part of their personal income taxes. The entire corporate tax structure does nothing but create a complicated and expensive layer of tax law on top of it on top of what shareholders are already paying in individual income taxes. In other words, when corporations pay taxes, that means less income for its shareholders, which means they effectively paid the tax anyway. Why don’t we just have them pay it without the corporate tax rigmarole?

While I think his capital gains withholding scheme is perverse - why is getting a government bureaucracy involved any less wasteful than an accounting bureaucracy? - I like the idea of shifting the corporate income tax solely to shareholders. Such an approach would accurately reflect the concept that corporations are not themselves “people” or “citizens” but rather property - aggregations of assets and contracts. Corporations shouldn’t owe taxes anymore than a car itself owes taxes. Only humans can own taxable property, so only human owners can pay taxes on the property.

While I think this principle of rejecting corporate personhood is worth acting upon in and of itself, there would be benefits for business as well. By raising the transaction costs involved with buying and selling shares, shareholders encounter an increased incentive to monitor management decisions to preserve share value, rather than simply selling when they don’t like something. This would take discretion out of management’s hands and make the corporation more answerable to the market in general and the owners in particular. I don’t think this really solves the agent-principal problem, but it may make its pathology more apparent to people. It would be wonderful if the business community and the public at large could begin to see firms in a more balanced light, where their persistent flaws are not the result of regulatory failures but rather innate to their natures.

In fact, because the corporate form is a political privilege granted by the State and not derived from market forces, it’s entirely just that shareholders pay for the privilege of doing business in the corporate form. Of course, I’d like to extend this attack on corporate personhood to its logical end by abolishing the statutory corporate form root and branch. This, however, would be a good half-measure, such as they go.