If you’re as fucking sick of the entirely superficial and jingoistic parody of a debate about health care as I am, here are two more articles that will lift your spirits:

Health Care: An Anarchist Approach
Fragments of an Anarchist Public Health: Developing Visions of a Healthy Society by Marcus Hill

Bottom line: arguably the most important thing government officials could do to reduce health care costs would be to get completely out of the way, to stop privileging favored elites and driving up prices. State functionaries could:

1. Stop offering protection to patents and copyrights.
2. Eliminate hospital accrediting and professional licensing rules, leaving a variety of flexible, competing market-based certification systems to do the job.
3. Limit malpractice awards to actual damages plus the costs of recovery (including reasonable legal fees).
4. Repeal regulations that prevent the sale of insurance across state lines and the prevent the operation of what amount to insurance schemes by health professionals.
5. Alter the tax code to de-link employment and insurance. (This change would have the potential to boost net taxes, of course, if it weren’t made in tandem with the tax cuts for which I’ve argued.)
6. Replace the FDA approval process with alternative, voluntary private certification systems.
7. Eliminate agricultural subsidies.

I Am Back!

Had a very busy summer, so didn't have much time to write or even check other folk's blogs. But now that Autumn is here and much of the harvest from my garden in, I have more time. Note that I also changed my blog format which made me lose most of my links. If you are not here, please don't be offended. I will try to restore the links section.

One of the typical arguments in favor of the state is that it is necessary to organize and control a large population and territory. Stateless societies are fine for bands of 500 people who control a hundred square kilometers or so, but beyond that you need a state. Three other arguments for the state claim that it is needed in complex societies, that large populations without a state are unstable and the state is a natural outgrowth of the development of farming.

Theory must be tested against evidence. Contrary evidence is found among the original inhabitants of North America.

The Salish or Hwulmuhw included Nanaimo, Cowichan, Victoria, Saanich, Gulf Islands and Lower Fraser Valley peoples. They shared an informal confederacy based upon defense against the Kwakwakawak people from the north and on the common usage of the annual salmon migration on the lower Fraser River. Population? The Cowichan alone had more than 5000 people in villages ranging from 120 to 1700 people in 1850. This was after previous epidemics must have reduced the population by 90%. Archeological evidence points out a cultural continuity in this area of at least 5000 years.

All three societies were complex, involving a host of different associations and fraternities as well as a rich oral literature, sophisticated philosophy, and in the case of the Hwulmuhw, magnificent wood carvings. The Haudenosaunee and Wendat were farmers, growing the "Three Sisters" as well as tobacco and a number of other plants, both edible and medicinal. The Hwulmuhw were mainly fishers, but also had large fields of camas, (a bulb like a small potato) and practiced permaculture with berries, fruit and nut trees.

None of these three examples of populous, large territoried, complex, horticultural (or in the case of the Hwulmuhw, semi-horticultural) societies involved a state, even in embryionic form. The Hwulmuhw, for example, cooperated in food gathering, labour or defense, but "they were not obliged to do so by any formal village organization. There was no village chief and no village council. Co-operation was ad hoc." (2)

Nor does there seem to be any evidence of any impending "evolution" toward a state. One would think that such evidence would be present in such a large polity as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, if the state somehow naturally evolved out of a non-statist society. Perhaps more than an evolution, the state is more like a virus that arose in one or two areas in the world and then gradually infected the rest of the planet.

1. Note that in the Europe of 1492, a town of 2000 people would have been of considerable size, many chartered cities had fewer inhabitants.

2. p. 21, Terror of the Coast, Chris Arnett,Talonbooks 1999

Last weekend there was a big anti-tax protest in Washington, with other, smaller TEA parties held here and there across the country.

Photo by Reason.com

I’ve been keeping one eye on this TEA Party phenomenon, but so far I haven’t seen much worth reporting here. These protesters seem largely content to complain about taxes, and largely unwilling to entertain resisting them except in hypothetical tricorner hat fantasies.

I get the feeling that a lot of them are looking for a leader to tell them what to do. But the sorts of leaders they’re looking to for their rhetoric and ideas, the Glen Becks and Michelle Malkins and Rush Limbaughs and such, are by and large cowards for whom having a bunch of people complaining about the things they tell them to complain about is good enough. No way are they going to go out on a limb and begin resisting, though they may try to goad others into it if they don’t have to commit themselves.

But there are some possibly-encouraging signs. A group calling itself the “Three Percenters” were passing out a leaflet at the protest urging the participants to buckle down and stop whining at Uncle Sam — kind of a right-wing counterpart to Cindy Sheehan’s advice to the peace movement I shared earlier in the week. Some excerpts from the leaflet:

The original Boston Tea Party was a calculated act of law-breaking designed to send the British Empire a message it could not fail to comprehend. Making long-winded speeches, thumping impassioned chests and denouncing a government made up of people who have already written you off as unimportant, impotent, and no threat to their plans is a waste of time, energy, and oxygen.

Both political parties have conspired through malice or incompetence to bring us to this state, yet still people look in vain to the system of party politics for salvation. The Founders were not so stupid as to place all their hopes on a corrupt system. When the accepted channels of politics and remonstrance failed, they burned the King’s tax stamps, dumped his tea, broke the windows of his tax collectors with rocks and bricks, smuggled forbidden goods, defied “his royal majesty” in hundreds of other ways, and dared him to do anything about it. Liberty is not free, nor is it without risk.

All these tactics are still available to us today. Any inventive mind could think of many more effective means of getting across the idea that we insist upon our liberty in this modern era. It is not necessary to collect a crowd to do them, either. Defiance in action can be expressed individually in many ingenious ways.

Then there’s this article on “What’s the Point of Demonstrating?” from The Independent Institute’s Beacon Blog. The article itself isn’t all that interesting, but look at the comments! Lots of people nibbling at the edges of tax resistance, trying out the arguments in its favor, showing every symptom of being resisters-to-be.

So this may be a situation where all it takes is the right seed, some catalyst, and with surprising speed some new form of conservative tax resistance will begin to develop in parallel to the long-standing and largely left-oriented war tax resistance movement.

The final version of the International People’s Declaration of Peace is ready. The war tax resistance plank from an earlier draft of the declaration seems to me to have been made very vague:

The root of all war is profit and we will not allow the war profiteers to own our labor or steal the fruits of that labor to be used solely for their greed of power and money.

We will boycott products and/or services from companies that profit from war and/or companies that support nations that make war on others.

Indeed, I doubt most people will see this as a call to war tax resistance at all. An earlier draft of the declaration included the sentence: “We will not allow the fruits of our labor to be used by our governments to finance wars.” This was much less ambiguous. I’m sad to see the change.

The problem with vague and ambiguous vows like these is that they are so difficult to precisely interpret that people end up interpreting them to require no action or change on their part.

Have you vowed to boycott products and/or services from companies that support nations that make war on others? That would include every taxpaying company in the United States, you know. You are not seriously going to consider boycotting all of them, so you will look at whichever ones you already boycott or just happen not to frequent and check the box next to that solemn vow and be satisfied that you’re doing your part. And so your vow ends up meaning nothing at all.

Have you vowed not to allow the war profiteers to own your labor or steal the fruits of that labor to be used solely for their greed of power and money? Better stop paying taxes, then. Oh, but they don’t use our taxes solely for their greed of power and money; they must have other reasons too. So I don’t really have to do anything different here, either. Check the box; the status quo wins again.

In the second section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle first reiterates that his project is not to formulate a precise definition of virtue so much as to come up with a practical guide to practicing a virtuous life.

In general, he feels, virtues are characterized by their “just enoughness” — as a mean between two opposing extremes of too-much and too-little. For example, between the extremes of rashness and cowardice is the virtue of courage.

Like some philosophical Goldilocks, Aristotle samples various human virtues and finds them to be somewhere on a continuum between too much and too little. I can’t help but feel that there’s not much meat here. It seems to depend a little too much on linguistic conventions of how we describe various things. Do we really learn anything about virtue from this that we don’t already know just by being competent users of our language?

We can describe courage on a continuum of sensitivity to fear, where at one extreme you’re too susceptible to fear, and at the other end you’re too insensible to it. But with other virtues, like health and beauty and wisdom, the endpoint of the continuum — the extreme — is by definition the perfection of the virtue. Can you be too healthy? too beautiful? too wise?

I think Aristotle is overgeneralizing from his initial instinct to look for just-rightnesses rather than for extreme ideals, which is probably a reaction to the instincts of the idealists he’s opposing, which were probably to try to maximize certain characteristics that partook in “The Good.”

Comment on today’s Picket Line!

If you tore off chasing after someone, and then shot him in the back and killed him, allegedly in order to avoid the alleged threat of a less lethal taser shock, which threat, if it even existed, was solely the product of a confrontation that you yourself had created and escalated, then you would probably be in jail for years. Of course, Detective Jeremy Hendricks is a cop, working for the local government’s police force, so the local government’s coroner’s inquest ruled last month that he was justified in shooting a fleeing suspect in the back.

Earlier this month, the central committee of the World Council of Churches adopted a “minute on the right of conscientious objection to military service” in which was made some (lukewarm but encouraging) mention of war tax resistance. Excerpts:

It is also noted that in some countries where there is a right to conscientious objection to military service, some Christians have become sensitive to the use of their tax money for supporting war, and in some cases have faced government action against them because of their conscientious objection to paying for war. This development of conscientious objection deserves further study and consideration.

The central committee

Calls upon churches to encourage their members to object to military service in situations when the church considers armed action illegal or immoral.

[And] Encourages churches to study and address the issue of military or war taxes and of alternatives to military service.

The Council based its minute on a report from its “Decade to Overcome Violence” office which mentions war tax resistance in passing. That report, in a footnote, mentioned an upcoming report on the attitudes toward tax resistance in German churches: Militärsteuer-Verweigerung und Kirchen in Deutschland (Military Tax Refusal and Churches in Germany) that I’m sure would be fascinating if I could read it.

This is not the first time the World Council of Churches has put out a document supporting war tax resistance. In 1990, they issued “a covenant… …supporting the right to conscientious objection to military service and tax for military purposes, and providing alternative forms of service for peace, and taxation.”

In the opening section of the second book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle opens an inquiry into virtue.

He ended the previous book by preparing the way for this inquiry and noting that there are both conscious virtues and more subconscious ones, like tolerance, that seem more a matter of character than of deliberation.

Aristotle asserts that both varieties of virtue are learned skills. You aren’t born virtuous, but become that way through instruction (in the case of conscious, intellectual, deliberate virtues) and training (in the case of more subconscious, “moral” virtues). As you practice virtue, you become more virtuous; virtue is a skill that is acquired by instruction and practice.

This links into politics because wise legislation and good states have the purpose of educating their citizens in good behavior and thereby training them in the virtues.

After reading this, I spent some time brainstorming on how one becomes more virtuous. Here’s my own program; we’ll see how well it harmonizes with Aristotle’s:

1. Learn to identify virtuous behavior & motives. What sort of behavior do you admire? If you were looking at your life as though it were a story, what would you do if you were meant to be the hero?
2. Value virtuous behavior. Care about it and make it rank highly in your judgements. Be willing to sacrifice less-important things for it.
3. Learn to observe yourself dispassionately and honestly, and to expect your inner devil to offer you flattering lies to explain away your vices. Be skeptical of such stories.
4. Cultivate investigative introspection as a way of weeding out the roots of your vices and of defending yourself against self-deception.
5. Encourage courage and persistance in changing your bad habits for good ones.

Comment on today’s Picket Line!

"It's easier to steal a million dollars from the bank, or a vault, than to rob a thousand or so common people. ... It may be that in a free market there will exist a natural, mean personal wealth value, beyond which diminishing returns enter quickly, and below which one is extremely disposed towards profit and enrichment."