leftlibertarian.org

Arthur Silber is in very deep trouble. I strongly urge people to read his writings and donate to his continued existence. His latest post reminds me that he may very well die before I get a chance to meet him.

Click on his name above to visit the post on his website, but I have excerpted it below:

P.S. Hey, y’all. Next week, I may tell you a bit more about what happened this summer, and why I was absent from these parts for so long. Basically, it was an unrelievedly awful time. For over a month, I wasn’t certain I would ever get back to writing, or to anything else at all. Yes, it was that bad. And yet, here I am. I’m not in good shape exactly; in fact, I still feel pretty lousy, but at least it’s not as bad as it was. And I am enjoying the writing I’m doing now, and I hope you are, too.

Thanks to some very kind donors — and thanks to several donors who have been outlandishly generous — I was able to survive the summer even though I was immobilized most of the time. And thanks to some donations just this week, I can still eat and I have part of the September rent. Which is due next week. Ackety ack. I’m still short of about two-thirds of the rent, and I need to pay some overdue bills. And the cats need to eat too, of course. People sometimes tell me I should post pictures of my beautiful children, and then you’d all shower me with lots and lots of donations. Cat pity, ya know. Hard to resist. And I’d do it — but I am very, very, very poor. No “luxuries” of any kind — like teevee — so I don’t have a camera. Haven’t had one for years. So no pictures. But my cats are the most gorgeous, the funniest, and the sweetest cats in the entire world. But you probably knew that.

So, if you have some money you’d care to throw in this direction, I would be deeply grateful as always. And Cyrano and Wendy say thanks, too. Given my health, I can’t predict what next week might bring, but I’ll keep up this writing streak as long as I can. I much prefer life when I’m able to write regularly, although that reality tends to fade away almost completely during the worst times. I hope this comparatively good time will be here for a minimum of several months, at least through the election. Who would want to miss all this fun and frivolity?!?

As always, many, many thanks for your time and consideration, and for your extraordinary generosity. Okay, Wendy, I’m almost done, so you can write to your friends in a few minutes. (They both write a lot of email. You wouldn’t believe the friends they have, all over the world. It’s true, I can show you emails they’ve written. A few of you out there have even received some of them. It’s a battle for the computer every day. We need a mediator.) All right, finishing up right now, Wendy. Kids.

Arthur; you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me. And it makes me so angry to see you wasting away like this. If there was ever a justification for a social safety net, then what you have written above is it. You’re an amazingly creative writer who produces original material. I just wish the rest of the world could see you the way I do. I wish they could understand why it’s a crime that you have to suffer like this, while a Bill Kristol gets a spot on the New York Times editorial page.

To borrow and modify the end of your Maria Callas essay: for you, truly and incomparably Arthur: now and always. If you ever read this post, I hope you will view my adoption of it as a fitting tribute to you.

1 September 2008

In each year of my experiment with tax resistance I have, for one month, carried around a pen and a little notebook and have made note of every time I have spent money. I’ve then combined this with a record of my bill-paying from home and of any yearly expenses that didn’t come directly to my attention during the month in order to create an estimate of my budget.

In the Picket Line archives, you can see my results for 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

What I found this year is that, based on what I wrote down in my notebook in August, I have to earn about $34.19 in potentially-taxable income each day in order to maintain my lifestyle:

Category	Daily expense
Total	$34.27
Rent	$16.43
Food (groceries)	$5.84
Food (eating out)	$0.48
Coffee/tea/beer/wine/booze	$3.59
Utilities	$1.01
Transportation	$2.69
Internet fees	$0.61
Cat stuff	$1.00
Miscellany	$2.62

Here’s how this compares to years past (I’ve had to rejuggle the numbers a bit so that the categories remain the same from year to year):

monthly totals

Category	2003-2007 average	2008
Monthly total	$1,016.27	$1,013.03
Yearly total	$12,195	$12,156
Rent	$458.08	$500.00
Food (groceries)	$146.89	$177.81
Food (eating out)	$42.62	$14.73
Coffee/tea/beer/wine/booze	$80.64	$109.34
Utilities	$61.52	$30.76
Transportation	$64.67	$81.83
Internet fees	$12.18	$18.69
Miscellany	$149.67	$79.87

Not included in any of the above totals were any business expenses (since I write these off against my business income), my health insurance premium (which, as a self-employed person, I can also write off), or any medical expenses that I can pay for from my pre-tax Health Savings Account.

The trouble with doing this accounting for only a single month and then trying to extrapolate to the whole year is that no month is a typical month. There are always some months in which big expenses come up, and other months in which garden harvests or freecycle booty or unexpected gifts reduce expenses. Some months, it seems like everything in the pantry needs re-stocking, other months I can coast on what we’ve got. Some months I brew a lot of beer, other months I drink a lot of beer I’ve already brewed. In July I had a big veterinarian bill; this month no cat-related expenses at all (for this reason the “cat stuff” total I gave above is an estimate based on typical yearly expenses, not based on this month’s expenses).

My big-ticket discretionary spending items this month included a trip across the bay to see Ubu For President, a whitewater rafting trip (mostly paid for in a previous month, but some travel and meals expenses fell in this month), a pitcher of beer at Zeitgeist to help welcome a good friend back into town, a trip down the peninsula for a barbecue, snacks & a beer at a Giants game (we got the tickets free), having a couple of friends over for dinner, and a donation to support the next as-of-yet-unspecified project by the Yes Men. Big spender, eh? I splurged for more memory for my laptop, too, but that only came to a buck plus shipping on eBay.

Other than that, living was cheap. As I mentioned earlier this year, my sweetie & I have signed up for one of those “Community-Supported Agriculture” programs, as part of that whole locavore less-petroleum-based agriculture craze. I also mentioned that this makes for a much more expensive bag of food than what I’d been used to getting from neighborhood markets. However, at the end of August, I see that my food bill hasn’t been dramatically bigger than usual. I was expecting more of a bump, since not only have we decided to shell out more money for our fancy local organic stuff, but food prices in general have been going up. It may be that our weekly flood of produce — supplemented this month in particular by our back-yard garden harvest — has encouraged me to cook less meat-centered meals, which are usually less-costly as well.

From the looks of things, I’m still living well within my means at a federal income tax-free income level (to do that with my current method I need to keep my non-deductible expenses under $16,000 per year). And I’ve got enough slack that I can consider things like, oh, some fancy cheeses to picnic with at the upcoming “Shakespeare in the Park,” or another south-of-the-border vacation.

Of course, that’s assuming I actually go out and earn that $16,000. I’ve been so busy working on my book projects this year that I haven’t managed to find a gig that pays the rent yet… and here it is, September already.

It’s Sunday again; that means it’s time for Shameless Self-Promotion. This Sunday, unlike most, I’ll be leading off, because here’s what I received in the mail a few days ago:

Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin

by Charles Johnson

To what extent should libertarians concern themselves with social commitments, practices, projects, or movements that seek social outcomes beyond, or other than, the standard libertarian commitment to expanding the scope of freedom from government coercion?

Clearly, a consistent and principled libertarian cannot support efforts or beliefs that are contrary to libertarian principles—such as efforts to engineer social outcomes by means of government intervention. But if coercive laws have been taken off the table, then what should libertarians say about other religious, philosophical, social, or cultural commitments that pursue their ends through noncoercive means, such as targeted moral agitation, mass education, artistic or literary propaganda, charity, mutual aid, public praise, ridicule, social ostracism, targeted boycotts, social investing, slowdowns and strikes in a particular shop, general strikes, or other forms of solidarity and coordinated action? Which social movements should they oppose,which should they support, and toward which should they counsel indifference? And how do we tell the difference?

In other words, should libertarianism be seen as a thin commitment, which can be happily joined to absolutely any set of values and projects, so long as it is peaceful, or is it better to treat it as one strand among others in a thick bundle of intertwined social commitments? Such disputes are often intimately connected with other disputes concerning the specifics of libertarian rights theory or class analysis and the mechanisms of social power. To grasp what’s at stake, it will be necessary to make the question more precise and to tease out the distinctions among some of the different possible relationships between libertarianism and thicker bundles of social, cultural, religious, or philosophical commitments, which might recommend integrating the two on some level or another.

[…]

—Charles Johnson, Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin, in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty 58.6 (July/August 2008), pp. 35–39.

You can read the whole thing (warning: PDF blob) at The Freeman’s online edition. Enjoy! FEE’s website doesn’t (yet) support online comments, but I’d be glad to hear what you think in the comments section over here.

One note about the article: it had to be shortened substantially both for reasons of space and considerations of the likely audience. I’ve talked with Sheldon, and I’ll be posting the longer version of the essay here at Rad Geek People’s Daily in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I would like to thank Sheldon Richman, for his encouragement, patience, and invaluable editing prowess; as well as Laura Breitenbeck and Roderick Long, for inspiration, discussion, and past collaboration, without which this article simply would not exist.

So, that’s me; what about you? What did you all write about this week? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments.

I understand that I have a hot LZ waiting for me in the Twin Cities, but I’ll soon be departing for the RNC ‘08 protests anyway. Soviet Onion is reportedly already doing yeoman’s work as A3 field coordinator for the area, while my understanding is that William has already played a heroic part before going underground. First rumors of sweeps and then the raid on the RNC Convergence Space kicked off what is shaping up to be a days-long orgy of police raids, ad hoc response protests, arrest-kidnappings of RNC Welcoming Committee members by unmarked snatch teams on the street, press conferences, counter press conferences and more. Oh, and I hear that a few Ron Paul people are showing up as well.

I’ll try to use my mobile phone to post short updates, when possible, to my Twitter account or possibly this blog, so follow me there if you’d like. You can also use Twitter to keep up with the excellent protest legal support team, Coldsnap Legal Collective, as well as subscribe to general RNC ‘08 protest updates. For breaking news, check Twin Cities Indymedia and Infoshop News. If you have news to report via phone, contact Twin Cities Indymedia @ 651-503-5661 or Infoshop News @ 913-940-7426.

Three years ago I commented on the Weather Channel’s reporting that in a “worst-case scenario” the edge of hurricane Emily might graze Florida or Texas, but not to worry, the worst part of the storm was merely headed toward Mexico.

Tonight I just saw some doofus of a reporter on CNN saying how we all hope hurricane Gustav doesn’t hit any part of the United States. Not “any inhabited area” – just “any part of the United States.”

Fer crissakes, listen to Rick Kleffel interview Cory Doctorow about standing firm, not being afraid, state surveillance, and his sci-fi "juvenile" Little Brother, which I think may be the best "libertarian" novel since Suprynowicz's The Black Arrow. Download the MP3 file (or listen to it) right here.

31 August 2008

Yesterday I finished off Andrew Oldenquist’s ethics reader Readings in Moral Philosophy. It’s a good collection of many of the baseline arguments that you need to be familiar with in order to understand what people are arguing about when they argue ethical philosophy. It’s got your Plato, your Aristotle, your Hume, Kant, and Mill. Along with this are a set of sermons by Joseph Butler that I wasn’t at all familiar with, and a handful of more-modern bits: G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer, and Stephen Toulmin.

The excerpts from Plato’s Republic were the liveliest translation I’ve read (Benjamin Jowett’s from 1892), and I’m happy to report the whole thing is on-line, thanks to The Internet Classics Archive.

One of the things I was keeping an eye out for while I was reading was for indications of the shift from ethical philosophy being seen as a practical pursuit — learning with the goal of becoming a better person — to ethical philosophy being seen as an abstract pursuit of knowledge about what ethical questions mean and how they might be consistently answered.

I didn’t find much of note here, except two quotes that might as well mark either endpoint of this shift. First, Aristotle:

Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

And second, Stephen Edelston Toulmin:

To show that you ought to choose certain actions is one thing: to make you want to do what you ought to do is another, and not a philosopher’s task.

Not precisely on-point, but characteristic of the spirit of recent ethical philosophy, which seems to want to defer all of the ethical action until all of the loose ends have been tied up in ethical theory.

Which is a shame, because it seems to me that this would be an especially fruitful time to develop a practical discipline of ethics. While some of the great human weaknesses and temptations have been known and discussed for ages, we have never had such precise investigation of ethical blind spots and illusions as we have today.

Let me give an example of what I mean. The illustration below is an optical illusion. The parallelograms marked “A” and “B” are the exact same color, although one looks like a “light” parallelogram and one looks like a “dark” parallelogram.

The illustration plays with our expectations about shadows and light and such to fool us. Parts of the illustration that aren’t directly part of the comparison between the two parallelograms, that aren’t really relevant to the decision of whether or not they are of the same color, influence our perception. Here’s an illustration that makes it clearer, if you don’t believe me that the parallelograms are the same color:

We have similar illusions that confuse our sense of right and wrong. Compare the optical illusion above to the ethical illusion I mentioned a few months ago:

In the 1970s, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling used to put some questions to his students at Harvard when he wanted to show how people’s ethical preferences on public policy can be turned around. Suppose, he said, that you were designing a tax code and wanted to provide a credit — a rebate, in effect — for couples with children. (I’m simplifying a bit.) In a progressive tax system such as ours, we try to ease the burden on the less well off, so it might make sense to adjust the child credit accordingly. Would it be fair, do you think, to give poor parents a bigger credit than rich parents? Schelling’s students were inclined to think so. If the credit was going to vary with income, it seemed fair to award struggling families the bigger tax break. It would certainly be unfair, they agreed, for richer families to get a bigger one.

Then Schelling asked his students to think about things in a different way. Instead of giving families with children a credit, you’d impose a surcharge on couples with no children. Now then: Would it be fair to make the childless rich pay a bigger surcharge than the childless poor? Schelling’s students thought so.

But — hang on a sec — a bonus for those who have a child amounts to a penalty for those who don’t have one. (Saying that those with children should be taxed less than the childless is another way of saying that the childless should be taxed more than those with children.) So when poor parents receive a smaller credit than rich ones, that is, in effect, the same as the childless poor paying a smaller surcharge than the childless rich. To many, the first deal sounds unfair and the second sounds fair — but they’re the very same tax scheme.

Here’s another follow-up illustration for the skeptical. Note that plan #1 and plan #2 have exactly the same results (everybody pays the same amount of tax, and the government gets the same amount of revenue). In plan #1, the poor family with kids gets a bigger tax credit than the rich family with kids (that sounds fair); in plan #2 the rich family is hit with a smaller penalty for childlessness than the poor family is (that’s unfair!):

Plan #1 (the “fair” plan)

household	income	tax	credit	total owed
Government ends up with:				$235
Poor family with kids	$500	$50	−$40	$10
Poor family without kids	$500	$50	−$0	$50
Rich family with kids	$1000	$100	−$25	$75
Rich family without kids	$1000	$100	−$0	$100

Plan #2 (the “unfair” plan)

household	income	tax	surcharge	total owed
Government ends up with:				$235
Poor family with kids	$500	$10	+$0	$10
Poor family without kids	$500	$10	+$40	$50
Rich family with kids	$1000	$75	+$0	$75
Rich family without kids	$1000	$75	+$25	$100

Here again, two outcomes that are identical in the real world are perceived as starkly different — one is fair, the other unfair — based not on any characteristic of the outcomes themselves but only on expectations and descriptions that, in a similar way to the green cylinder in the optical illusion, overshadow the facts of the case. The “government” in this example can transform an “unfair” tax system into a “fair” one, or vice versa, just by describing it differently.

The science of manipulating people by identifying and then exploiting these conceptual flaws (which crop up not only in optical and ethical illusions, but in all sorts of assessments of what is really going on around us and what is in our best interests) has been running far ahead of any efforts to teach people any sort of self-defense. I don’t see why we shouldn’t start trying to catch up.

There's a lot going on out there, and a lot of it appears to be aimed at discouraging dissent. I've added feeds for Infoshop.org's I-News and recent videos from Theuptake.org to the sidebar of this blog, but go ahead and add them to your own feedreader or bookmark list. The breadth of the warrants being issued, and the apparently low standards for probable cause, mean that very few of us who engage in organized dissent of any sort can afford to imagine it can't happen wherever we are.