"Can we put a price on basic standards of quality?"

Actually we have to. The alternative to quality allocation by price, which generally amounts to Regulation, ends up becoming allocation by status. Of course the people who propose these non-priced solutions tend to be people of high status. Coincidence?
Schools are one example. "Public" schools really are just one aspect of a multi-tiered system of regulated education. The only truly private school in the US is the home school. In some places that isn't even the case any more.
If the logic of Regulation is taken to its conclusion, the only beef allowable by law would be Filet Mignon or better, and since its price would be regulated, it would not be available to the peons at all. Only the well connected would get beef. And maybe people on welfare could get "government beef" which would probably be decent (I know the government cheese was) but only available on a first come first serve basis.
Does this remind you of a certain Union of Republics? Soviet Republics?
Well that's also no coincidence. They know the hard limit now, but they will try to get us as close to that asymptote without breaking the engine of "white market" labor power altogether. Fortunately, I doubt their ability to pull off this brinkmanship for long, no matter how many PhDs and other supposed "experts" they've got trying.

Patri Friedman, you are an agorist!

In a blog post, Patri Friedman, a fairly well known libertarian (and the only well known 3rd gen lib) says:

Despite my broad agreement with much of the underlying philosophy, I find this chain of events ludicrous – and I am not using the word lightly. Let us consider one of the largest black markets in the world, the market for illegal drugs, which has been thriving for decades. Has this resulted in market demand for protection agencies to replace the government? Um, no. It has resulted in exactly the opposite – a strengthening of the monopoly provider of security and law. It has given us the militarization of policy, legalized theft via civil asset forfeiture, and a well-funded DEA.
...
I agree that the direct effect of the black market for recreational drugs is to increase freedom – it provides something the government is trying to ban, thus ameliorating the effect of that ban. As an occasional user of illegal drugs, I think that’s fabulous. But to see black markets as the route to indirectly weakening and eventually toppling governments just doesn’t match up to the evidence. Coercive geographic monopolies on violence work, folks, much though we may hate it.

Ahh so much material for dismantling here.
First: "Has this resulted in market demand for protection agencies to replace the government? Um, no."
Well first off I'd say, your own approach to this game has clouded your ability to see what is relevant. You may actually have a point here, but assuming you did, that's not what the black market in drugs is attempting to solve. It's attempting to provide people with drugs, at which it succeeds admirably. That is one avenue of government interference that is thwarted.
Then again, you might be wrong about that also. As Jim Davidson said:

The answer is yes, it has. And most drug dealers provide their own protection, often in concert with other dealers in their area. These private protection agencies are referred to as “gangs” and their leaders as “drug lords.” They employ violence to enforce contracts, control territory, and defend the sovereignty of their members.

Secondly, we don't live in a free market, which is the whole thing we're objecting to in the first place with all this libertarianism! Can we adequately measure the demand for private protection services? All we can measure is what is supplied, which is filtered by what the government allows to be supplied.
All you're really saying here is that the government is somewhat effective at suppressing/containing private protection agencies for now. (which has some interesting implications for what their priorities really are)
Secondly, the natural market for illegal drugs is almost certainly not as massive as the government propaganda wants us to believe in the first place. To look at this as the one marker of what agorism stands for is like saying the free market in drugs would be the shining example of the free market, overall.
Certainly the people want drugs! But we want a lot of other things much more. Look at the Copyright War as a more classic example of agorism in action, doing it's job, providing alternatives.
And in the long run, the war for freedom is won in the minds of the people. What has brought more people to question the legitimacy of the government than the fact that they won't give us what we want... and that when we say "fuck the law", we can get it?
How many budding young anarchists or at least potential anarchists have been sparked (excuse the pun) by becoming stoners and/or "pirates"? The answer, is, a whole shit load.
Now also there's this part:
"But to see black markets as the route to indirectly weakening and eventually toppling governments just doesn’t match up to the evidence."
Again, there is this sort of mental filtering, this lack of relevant response.
We aren't "indirectly weakening" the government... we're not trying to slink into liberty. We're playing "Operation" with the body politic.
"Oops, there goes control of drugs!"
"Oops, there goes intellectual property"
We don't care if the government raises it's hackles in response. Let them come! This will only make more of us. You're thinking of a war of attrition. We're thinking of 4th generation warfare. The bloated, wasteful MEGASTATE cannot survive very long. A state that is 80% free, but still authoritarian? That would be a fearsome opponent and far more dangerous to us, in our opinion. Nonetheless, all other things being equal, agorism is the most functional strategy in almost all cases, except possibly near the end game, when the state is almost about to fall, when other approaches might become effective.
Here's some more from the same post by Patri:
"I believe in a different indirect path: global competition between governments. Let’s hit states where they are weak – at providing good services to their customers, not where they are strong – at holding onto territory with violence. We can do this by competing for citizens and capital, not for territory. Whether this is done through seasteading, free zones, or some other method entirely, I think it is a far more plausible route to indirectly improving political institutions."
Well, we can't improve political institutions. This actually again points at what I mean by "meta-agorism". What makes a government a "government" and not a mafia?
Perception.
Agorists want to kill the state, piece by piece, not improve it gradually.
Meta-agorism wants people to understand that there's no such thing, there never was, and you're being imprisoned by a mafia.
In that sense, what you are doing is extremely valuable, because you're giving people somewhere to escape to.
And as an "illegal" provider of defense service you are also an agorist!

The Post-Democratic State

Hoppeans concerned about "democracy" really don't have anything to worry about, as far as the United States is concerned. There is truly almost no power the people at large have to influence the government. Once the government can lie to the population on matters of "national security" on the grounds that if the people knew the truth, they would withdraw their support, all pretense of "democracy" is transparently thin indeed. And it's not this pretense that keeps people from revolting. Frankly, most people probably don't care.
It's fear of police brutality, and fear of economic privation. The triumph (so far) of American Corporatism has made most people economically dependent on the State, either directly or indirectly through the banks and large corporations. To rebel would be to become rapidly impoverished, let alone in danger of imprisonment or death, whereas to go along with things, for most Americans right now, means a life of comfort and peace.
During the days of the American Revolution, the economy was at least somewhat disentangled from the State. The "patriots" were still able to eat regularly, save maybe the common soldiers of the Continental Army, which is a whole other story. Nowadays that isn't so much the case. This is yet another reason why only some form of agorism or meta-agorism can work as a liberation strategy. Unless we have a counter-economy running in parallel to the official economy, any attempt at rebellion would fizzle out pretty rapidly. Once we do have one, the resistance, such as it might be, will largely take the form of self-defense against an ever-more-desperate police state hunting down "black marketeers".

perhaps not so unintended at all...

"Almost everyone believes that the state should be in the business of setting national goals in every area of life, of guiding its subjects' paths, of reordering their lives and the world. Most people argue only about particular choices and the degree of control involved. Almost no one will challenge the principle itself."
- Arthur Silber

And this, this right here, is the only ideology that actually matters, when it comes to the State. The rest is just gas and bullshit to fool the rubes. The "republicans" handle one side of the con, and the "democrats" handle a different side of it. In the long run, they're both working together to extend their collective power over us. Any real disagreements are like two farmers disagreeing over livestock management techniques.

"These are only some of the very bitter fruits of foreign intervention: uncontrollable consequences are always set loose and, all too often, those consequences are directly opposed to what the original stated purpose had been. And yet, like the insane man, we repeat this behavior over and over again, insisting that this time the result will be different, and it will finally work -- and we'll get exactly the result we want, and no others at all."
- Arthur Silber (from a different essay)

Ahh but to this I would say, if you keep throwing the baby out with the bath-water, maybe it was the baby you wanted to get rid of in the first place.

After 100+ years of practice, those playing this game must have at least some vague idea of the praxeology of intervention. Certainly, if you or I have figured some of it out in the short span of our years of analysis.
At the very least they must understand that the more chaos and capital destruction, outside of their "walled city" of private order, the better it is for them. If you're a water oligpolist, a world-wide drought is just what the doctor ordered. Extend the pattern... and voila!

The game really has to work that way, because that is functionally how it works, either that or they're just all insane. Either explanation makes at least some sort of sense.

"It seems like you might need a little 'stimulus' there, buddy"

Listen, when I say that the government is a "super-mafia" this is exactly what I'm talking about:
Bankers Told by Paulson to Accept U.S. Aid or Be ‘Vulnerable’

As someone who will be directly affected by the "Conscience Protection Rule", I was tempted to write something about it, from an individualist anarchist perspective. But I see that Roderick Long has beaten me to it, writing what is basically the sane take on this so I don't have to:

The Conscience of the King

The core quote:
"So I can’t get excited about either the critique or the defense of this law. Indeed, it’s a great example of how the Rawlsian/Dworkinian [Ronald, not Andrea or poor Gerald] dream of a state apparatus that is neutral among its citizens’ competing conceptions of the good is ultimately incoherent."
Exactly so.

If I want 3 breasts and a tail, that's my goddamn business.

W. Gillis makes another essential (excuse the pun) post, while on sabbatical even.

The quote with the nitty gritty:
"Conversely the negation of gender does not mean the complete extinction of mini-skirts and aftershave. The destruction of identity has never meant the abolishment of it; what we oppose is rigidity in relations -- not the medium itself."
The medium is indestructible. You have to manifest via some sort of tropes.
The closest you could come to eliminating personal gender expression is to make all manifestation utterly uniform. I don't doubt that this is what some people would love to enact, to take a repression that designates 2 standard forms into one that makes 1 standard form for everyone, as if this makes people more free. (And that just leads to an argument about what the standard form should be. In many cultures, historically, everyone wore skirts.)
What I and many (but not all) transfolk would like to see is the opposite. Let six billion flowers bloom, so to speak.

Secondly, the phrase "unnecessary mutilation" applied to any elective body-modification horrifies me, as an anarchist. I'll fucking decide what's necessary and what's not, thanks.
We're all cyborgs already. We wear clothes over our natural fur or lack thereof, and shoes so we can walk on different kinds of terrain. Some of us even wear glass lenses over our eyes to help us see better!
And I heard some people even inject ink into their skin so they can wear art work on their bodies!!
Will the horrors never end?

There's a third thing, which is annoying to have to go over, but it's so embedded that I really should. If you want to abolish a forced gender identification relating to biological sex, that has to cut both ways (please excuse the pun again). That is to say, if you want to define "man" as simply "anyone who was born with a penis", then that's the definition. You can't sneak all kinds of other definitions of "man" and bundle them in with that. In fact, we transfolk are living proof of that. And perhaps that's a good portion of what makes certain elements within feminism a bit unnerved by us, to say the least.

He says it so I don't have to:

"To understand where to go from here, we have to understand that Americans are in no way attached to Obama the individual, Americans are attached to the way Obama makes them feel."
"Anarchism IS the individualist dream. You, you personally, can singlehandedly start the motherfucking revolution. You're going to have to."

Go click that and read the rest.

It's a trap!

I believe that the idea that "the failure of the high finance corporations will harm the working class more than it does the ruling class" is a lie, a trick, a trap and a ruse. It is a carefully crafted myth designed to make you protect those corporations out of fear.

In general, the ruling class always wants to make people think that their own livelihood depends on them. But this is not true.
It never was, it never will be. The rulers are parasites. The wealth is produced by the working class, alone.*

We don't need a bailout, we don't want one, and it won't help us one bit to have one, nor will it harm us one bit not to have one.

If the "recession" or whatever they're calling it these days does harm the working class, it will be because of deliberate action on the part of the ruling class to see to it that the working class absorbs blows meant for themselves (ala the "Bailout"). It will be a form of hostage taking. "You have to support us or we'll squeeze the shit out of you, but you know, we're only doing it because we don't want to sell off our marginal assets. I mean, you can't expect ME to suffer can you?"

Yes. Yes I do. And I intend to do whatever I can (which basically amounts to memetic transmission) to see to it that no one else suffers on your behalf, Mr. Monopoly.

* Clarification: By working class, I mean all of you suckers out there with jobs, not just the vulgar Marxist idea of the 'proletariat'. People who get paid to think and/or create for a living are also workers.

Quiet, but not quietist

I've had only limited access to the internet until just recently, but I would like to pop up in order to say that I'm happy to see what's going on around the RNC. Not the evil actions of the cops of course, that is to be expected, but the heroic actions of the anarchists and other folks resisting them.
On that note, I'd like to point out that transgendered people being arrested in Minneapolis/St Paul are being placed in cells of the wrong gender (i.e. that which is socially corresponding to their birth sex). For MTF transgendered folk, this is tantamount to accessory to rape.
I'd also like to congratulate those of the A.L.L. who managed to make it out there and participate in the resistance (William Gillis, you r0x0r!). Don't let the violence you've encountered make you into a person who thinks that massive force is the solution. This happened to a lot of hippies back in the day, and it is the main point of the strategy employed by the cops.
They want to secretly recruit you by brutalizing you. Remember that physical force without moral force is worthless. (I suspect that anarchists are less prone to this corrupting influence of violence, since they know full well the difference between aggression and self-defence, and they've made all the arguments against aggression before.)
Remember, we will be selling contraband to the children of the RNC delegates, now or in the near future. :)

Communism is not the future, but the past.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. (try not paying "property tax")

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. (check)

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. (partial)

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. (not yet, but "civil forfeiture" is getting there)

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. (check)

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state. (check, if you consider, as any anarchist must, any regulated cartel to be a part of the state)

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. (check)

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. (this is what they mean by "national service")

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. (check)

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. (check)

So basically, once the next president institutes their "national service plan" and with a bit more of police running amok stealing shit, we'll be very very close to fulfilling all the planks of the communist manifesto here in the USSA. They'll never raise the inheritance tax because the kind of communism we have here is more Animal Farm-ish in which "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". In other words, a group of elite proletarians (We could call them the "High Bureaucracy" or simply The Managerial Class) have split off into a new oppressive class(while merging with remnants of the old elite), something Ol' Onkel Karl didn't exactly foresee. (which he probably should have because that was a big part of the story of how the "Bourgeoisie" formed)

However this leads to a new revolutionary situation in which the "sub-proletariat" can break the back of State Property and State Power, establishing all property as fluid, personal, and possession based. Our major inroad of opportunity comes along plank 6, in that communication technology is rapidly escaping from the hands of the state, and along plank 5, through the degradation of state-based currencies due to the inevitable crisis that comes from central banking (read FSK on the Compound Interest Paradox). Planks 2 and 9 will collapse not long after.

Is Environmentalism a Scam?

What makes a scam work is that it contains elements of the truth mixed with hidden lies. Otherwise it would just be ridiculous. Almost no one would sign up for the "Self Immolation Society".

Environmentalists often point out real facts, but then make a lot of false assumptions in order to get from those facts to their conclusion, which seems to always be:
"We need massive government controls on all aspects of production and consumption".
This assumes that people left to their own devices wouldn't adapt to these facts on the ground on their own. This is no different from the economic argument for state socialisms of various forms, just with different apparent problems. Again, the "right wing" plays into the scam by claiming that the facts don't exist, or that these things aren't a problem, just like with the economic argument.

The anarchist argument is that these things may well be real, but that people would solve these problems if left to their own devices, just as they always do. We don't need the state to solve our problems, and in fact, the state is often the source of the problems, by disempowering people and leaving them no incentive or opportunity to fix things spontaneously and ad-hoc.

Economics can be seen as cultural ecology. If voluntary, spontaneous order works, it will work in all areas of life. (edited because of a very good point that Rad Geek brought up, and that I will address in my next post)

"It's not capitalism, but it's got bits of capitalism shot through it."

He said it as well as I could have.

Quote of the month:
"Look: resistance to eating one's own children could be plotted along an elasticity curve, too."

When you talk about the housing bubble, it's important to understand why housing prices got so high in the first place.
If you can just lend money out of thin air for buying houses (not that they're actually owned in a fully allodial sense, but for convenience sake...), given that land is a relatively fixed supply*, the price is just going to go up and up to the limit of what people can afford to pay back, and in this case, beyond. People made predictions about increasing income that they weren't able to back up.
The problem is that such over-extension is almost inevitable, because failing to participate in the upsurge of credit just makes it harder and harder to afford a house later on. It's like a pyramid scheme in that way, the "early adopters" get a pretty sweet deal, and the late adopters mostly get fucked. (which in a human, long term sense, means that it's a way for the old to fuck over the young...)

Since prices are relative in a fiat currency (that is, a currency not backed by any specific commodity), what these credit bubbles actually do economically, in the long run, is to make durable, resellable goods more expensive relative to consumable goods. Houses are expensive because you can foreclose on them. Cars are expensive because you can repossess them.
College education is expensive because it increases your income (in a sense making you more "resellable") - this is the most horrible one of all, because it's direct labor farming. They loan money so you can go to school, and you can make more money, that you will pay them back in interest. College becomes more expensive, so people need to get more loaned to them, at higher rates of interest. Those who don't take these loans are condemned to exist as second-class citizens for the rest of their life. And of course, given the ratio of population growth to marginal capital growth, eventually you get people who go to college just so they can get a job as a secretary.
Then the labor farming moves up a notch as everyone competes to go to grad school of one sort or another.

Eventually you end up with bankrupt, homeless PhDs who have cell phones and ipods.

The "limit" to the pyramid, and the reason why they can't just keep the boom going forever, is the capital infrastructure. In the long run, you need to have a certain amount of economic circulation for the idea of "wealth" to mean anything at all. So at some point before there's a total breakdown in production, they have to allow interest payments to outstrip money growth and "harvest" what they have sown, financially.

* in an economic sense things like skyscrapers increase the supply of residential land, but it's still fairly limited.

"Recession? If you say so. Things are exactly the same down here."
- William Gillis

I think he's spot on here, except that to call privileged workers "upper class" is a severe semiotic error, IMO. As far as I'm concerned the "upper class" are the people that are behind the croupier's stick, not the ones at the gaming table, no matter how well they have the odds stacked for them.

Your average "suit and tie" person is not upper class, though they may be a useful dupe of the upper class. What IS good is that these people will begin to wake up to the fact that there is a much larger game at work, and that they haven't necessarily "made it" at all.

For many of us, living on the periphery of "the economy", a financial collapse will only help us in terms of relative purchasing power. Productive Labor must receive a wage high enough to reproduce itself, no matter how it's denominated. This fact is actually a cause for much of the concern of the ruling class. They've squeezed and squeezed and there's not that much "maneuvering room" left for them. They can crush the "upper middle class" now, and wring some profit away, but then what? Not to mention the political instability that will cause, when the "silent majority" starts to identify with the rest of us. Their only hope will be to cause enough cultural division and conflict to keep us at each others' throats a little bit longer.

And so they shall try. Expect to see more "identity politics" and pseudo-christian "culture war" issues in the media soon.

"Some people say that China is an experiment. Is it possible to have a USA-style booming economy when you:

* deny people freedom of speech
* deny people the right to communicate freely
* deny people the illusion that they have the right to choose their leaders by voting

I suspect the answer is "You can't have a booming economy lacking all the above." The bad guys are hoping that China will prove the answer is "You can have a booming economy lacking the above", and use China as the model for the future US economy. Currently, the booming Chinese economy is really US companies relocating their factories to China, using production techniques developed in the USA. China won't reach the level of innovation present in the US or Japan, unless they allow their citizens the ability to think independently. Currently, a lot of factories are being developed in China, but you don't hear of many new technologies being invented in China. Contrast that with Japan, which contributes many inventions in the area of electronics and software."
- FSK

I tend to be sympathetic to this view. I suspect that the USSR was also a failed experiment. There is historical evidence in the gaps to suggest that it was. (for instance, the secret funnelling of money from Wall Street to Lenin in the 20s, or the findings of the congressional commission studying the Ford and Rockefeller foundations in the 50s... )

On a similar geopolitical note, I think the thing that messes up peoples heads when they compare Europe and the US is the belief that Europe has a less free market than the US. I think the opposite. It's just that the kind of interventions that are used more in Western Europe tend to be the kind of things that conservatives bitch about - i.e. the "crutches" provided to the people who have had their socio-economic legs broken by the kind of controls that conservatives never talk much about but are very prevalent in the US economy.
(licensing laws, zoning laws, construction permits, copyrights, property acquisition laws, laws protecting people from their own choices - all very subtle but devastating to the poor and lower middle class)

A couple of thoughts on taxation.

I had originally posted a more elaborate analysis, but it was hastily written at 3 AM. I've saved it somewhere, and I'll get back to it when I get a chance. (maybe tonight)

In the mean time, I'd like point out that under a fiat currency, all taxation is redistributive... that is, there's a centerline at which dollars and "things which can be purchased with dollars" float, and taxation merely shifts purchasing power around that line. That's really all it does (under a fiat currency). All taxation is theft, yes, but that's only half the picture. All taxation is redistribution. All government spending is taxation. This is a complicated idea, but if you think of the fact that the actual number of dollars in circulation means nothing, and pursue that line of reasoning to it's end point, eventually you'll see what I'm talking about.

Think of government spending. When the government steals that money, who benefits, really? The government itself? They get their salaries, yeah. But other than that, most of the money goes to contractors of one sort or another. The people who get paid by the government are the Power Elite. They are the people the government is really working for.

The government also pays people by not taxing them as much. This one is the most difficult to grok, and will cause the most objection, but if you've understood the last two paragraphs, it should make sense.

I found this interesting:
Why the global financial system is about to collapse.

It's well-written and clear, and though he's not any sort of anarchist, he's also kind of tricky about not being an anarchist. :)
It's almost as if he's some sort of public choice agorist in a way.


On the other hand, Tyler Cowan is kind of an idiot, at least publicly. It's not even that he's shilling for the state or "actually existing capitalism", it's that he doesn't seem to actually understand what he's shilling for. Statements like "One five or ten percent deflation is enough to crush the economy and indeed the whole gold standard idea" (umm... apples to oranges?) or "But we don't live in the broad sweep of world history, we live in 2008 and our ability to monitor and control central banks is unparalleled" (huh? how can that possibly work?) don't seem to recommend him much. If this is the kind of logic that Economics PhD programs produce nowadays, then we agorists don't have long to wait for the collapse.

As a counter-example, though Paul Krugman is an awful statist, the things he says at least make sense within his own insane world-view.

"There's no time to think, just do it."

This here is something pretty fundamental:
Labels, Enemies and Rambling.

Most people tend to fall back on associative thinking instead of actually listening to what other people are saying and considering it. In a way I don't blame them, the pressures of modern life do everything they can to push people into it. Not only directly, through propaganda engines (media, advertising, etc...) but also indirectly, by stressing people out and sapping them of their free time and energy.

On a related note is this:
Unbundle The Zaxlebax!

5 minutes to midnight?

First, a link I stumbled across:
The End Of Money?

The writer starts out explaining what FSK calls "The Compound Interest Paradox". But he goes on to make the further explanation that money growth is exponential(but not continuously/smoothly so).
I think this quote is extremely illustrative:

Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacterium into an empty bottle at eleven in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at twelve noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth, it has a doubling time of one minuet, and it's in the finite environment of one bottle. I want to ask you two questions.

Number one; at which time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12, because they double in number every minute?

Second Question; if you were an average bacterium in that bottle at what time would you first realize that you were running out of space? Well let's just look at the last minute in the bottle. At 12 noon its full, one minute before its half full, 2 minutes before its ¼ full, then 1/8th, then a 1/16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12 when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realize there's a problem?