Among the participants were Peaceful Vocations, a counter-recruitment coalition that provides young people with career alternatives to joining the armed forces. They work to inform potential recruits [...]]]> On May 13, Sunday evening, 1919 Hemphill hosted a Night of Progress, featuring a number of local radical organizations along with live music and performance art presentations.

Among the participants were Peaceful Vocations, a counter-recruitment coalition that provides young people with career alternatives to joining the armed forces. They work to inform potential recruits of “the facts about military enlistment, war, and the many alternatives to the G.I. life,” according to the group’s website. Peaceful Vocation volunteer Diane Wood took the time to record a video explaining the group’s recent progress in the Fort Worth ISD.

The Black Cat Collective, a dynamic community-based mutual aid network, made several texts in the left-libertarian and anarchist tradition available. In the video below, Black Cat member Number 3 gave a brief overview of the collective’s ongoing projects.

Workers International League and North Texas BDS, which supports divestiture from organizations with ties to the government of Israel, were among the other groups present.

The Tarrant County Libertarian Party is kicking off its Liberty Speaker Series with a discussion of The New Jim Crow Laws – speakers will include Dr. Alan Bean of Friends Of Justice, Shaun McAlister of DFW NORML, and [...]]]> According the Tarrant Libertarian Party’s Meetup site, the party is hosting its initial Liberty Speaking Series.

The Tarrant County Libertarian Party is kicking off its Liberty Speaker Series with a discussion of The New Jim Crow Laws – speakers will include Dr. Alan Bean of Friends Of Justice, Shaun McAlister of DFW NORML, and Suzanne Wills of the Drug Policy Forum of Texas.

Where: 2700 Green Oaks Road, Fort Worth, TX at Interstate 30 and Green Oaks Road

When: Thursday, May 17, 2012, at 7:00 p.m.

It means so many different things to different people. In my experience, “capitalism” seems to be referred to in vitriolic superficial flame-wars in online discussions, or when the mainstream [...]]]>

Property market (Photo credit: Alan Cleaver)

It seems to me that the term “capitalism” has become so vague and slippery it’s almost like the term “God,” or as slippery as an eel!

It means so many different things to different people. In my experience, “capitalism” seems to be referred to in vitriolic superficial flame-wars in online discussions, or when the mainstream media want to quickly and efficiently stereotype, discredit and dismiss any critics of the economic status quo, as in “Anti-Capitalists today clashed with riot police …,” hence no need to report specifically what the protest was about.

In the typical right-wing argument, anything other than capitalism as currently practiced must mean soviet style state-socialism, and we all know how badly that went. Nevermind that it wasn’t really self-consistently socialist in principle or in practice, and nevermind that it was the state or centrally planned aspect that made it go so horribly wrong. Rather than the idea of designing some kind of economic system to serve society as a whole instead of designing it to serve entrenched privately vested interests, let’s just let that argument go and move on. I accept that overall, both for better and partly for worse, capitalism as conventionally practiced has functioned relatively better in terms of people’s needs and expectations than ‘socialism’ as conventionally understood by the mainstream and as practiced in the countries which claimed to be doing it. So let’s accept that the vague mixture called capitalism has at least some good bits, and now let’s try to be more specific what are the problems or “areas of room for improvement.”

I propose splitting up The Beast, the great mythical mysterious It, into its constituent ideas or structural principles, so we can get people debating the bits rather than the overly big and muddled uber-capitalism.

• Private ownership of the means of production: Not necessarily a problem in itself, unless it’s excessively concentrated and polarized.
• Free market: Freedom in what sense? Freedom to work for a personal and family livelihood (and optionally, for the common good as well) within a fundamental moral framework, or freedom to exploit and oppress others as far as the rules will stretch? Freedom as a right to free-ride on society without contributing a fair share in taxes? Free as in merely free of state interference, or free as in reasonably approximately equal negotiating power in economic interactions, with reasonable alternatives available if the deal is not sufficiently win-win for all sides?
• Entrepreneurship: High cultural value and economic incentives attributed to entrepreneurial innovation and creativity.
• Priority of capital: Capital owners are considered to have first right over surplus value, regardless of the real proportion of value they have contributed to making that surplus.
• Lack of personal responsibility: A complete circle of alienating of responsibility takes place with the alienation of moral responsibility from the person to the corporation, from the corporation to the State, and from the State to the electorate, but the electorate has too dispersed control for it to feel worthwhile for individuals to invest the energy in investigating and making careful, socially responsible decisions.
• Lending with interest: The original function of lending with interest was that early industrialisation required sufficient concentration of capital to enable industrial development and hence improvements on average in standards of living and life expectancy. However, the concentration of capital resources by private ownership is inconsistent with democracy, because it tends towards regulatory capture and exploitative control of access to capital.
• Intellectual property rights: In principle, intellectual property rights (despite the name) are contrary to one of the founding principles of capitalism, the free flow of information. When what a society’s economy is producing is mostly information (and technology), if you maintain strict so-called intellectual property rights, then that is in practice seriously compromising the free flow of information and development.

Free markets do not necessarily require the doctrine of shareholder value and alienation of moral responsibility. The way economic activities become more than zero-sum or win-lose is by collaboration and cooperation. Post-industrial capitalism is the rise of absentee shareholder owners who take no responsibility. With limited liability, no one ends up taking any responsibility for anything other than the bottom line that fiscal year!

Where: 1919 Hemphill, 1919 Hemphill Street, Fort Worth, TX 7611

When: Sunday, [...]]]> Black Cat Collective, a community-based mutual aid network, is hosting a Night of Progress. There will be entertainment from a variety of music genres and free vegan cuisine. Numerous other community groups are scheduled to participate at the event Sunday night.

Where: 1919 Hemphill, 1919 Hemphill Street, Fort Worth, TX 7611

When: Sunday, May 13, 5 pm. to 10 p.m.

The event is part of the Students for Liberty Webinar Series and scheduled for April 18.

The debate will take place at the Norris Conference [...]]]> The Libertarian Party of Texas and the Tarrant Libertarian Party are hosting a presidential candidate debate Saturday afternoon, April 7, in Fort Worth. As I am not familiar with the candidates, I could not say if one candidate is more agreeable with left-libertarianism than another.

The debate will take place at the Norris Conference Center. There is no charge for admission, but a reserved seat can be saved for a $20 donation.

Where: Norris Conference Center, 304 Houston Street, Fort Worth, TX 76102

When: Saturday, April 7, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

The goal of the 99% Spring Action Training is to organize 100,000 activists during the week beginning April 9 “trained to tell the story of what happened to [...]]]> Following the notoriety of the Occupy movement last year, MoveOn.org is hosting an online registration for local training sessions about the fundamentals of non-violent direct action.

The goal of the 99% Spring Action Training is to organize 100,000 activists during the week beginning April 9 “trained to tell the story of what happened to our economy, learn the history of non-violent direct action, and use that knowledge to take action on our own campaigns to win change.” As for telling the story of what caused the economic downturn, it bears repeating that “Wall Street Couldn’t Have Done It Alone.”

As of March 29, there are approximately 900 training sessions taking place across the country. In the Metroplex, there are four events scheduled.

The sweep of the book is that the significant and troubling social, political, and ecological problems that take place within [...]]]> ALL member Charles Johnson will be speaking twice this weekend in Austin on the new book he contributed to and co-edited, “Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty.”

The sweep of the book is that the significant and troubling social, political, and ecological problems that take place within our prevailing economic system is not the inevitable result of market exchanges, but the system’s distortions of the process of consensual economic exchanges by political privileges that benefit owners of capital. The books also explorers how social activism bolstered in a freed markets liberated from political control can be used to achieve a just distribution of social and economic power.

The first presentation will be at Brave New Books on Saturday, Feb. 4, at 6 p.m.

The second presentation will take place on Sunday at MonkeyWrench Books at 6 p.m.

In his announcement, Johnson added,

I’ll be giv­ing a brief talk at both events, and then a read­ing from the col­lect­ed es­says on the na­ture of cap­i­tal­ism, role of the State in cre­at­ing and prop­ping it up, the place of mu­tu­al ex­change and in­di­vid­ual own­er­ship in a rad­i­cal, bot­tom-up al­ter­na­tive, the rad­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties of freed-mar­ket so­cial ac­tivism, and the in­di­vid­u­al­ist and mu­tu­al­ist ten­den­cies with­in the an­t­i­cap­i­tal­ist tra­di­tion. Q&A, dis­cus­sion and book-sign­ing will ensue.

Many, many thanks are due to Crys­tal of the Austin / Cen­tral Texas A.L.L., for sug­gest­ing and or­ga­niz­ing both of these events. And many thanks also to the spaces that have gen­er­ous­ly agreed to host us.

This question, posed often by those both sympathetic and hostile to full human liberty and its implications, is one that sadly reveals to a great degree the success of our societal pro-government conditioning. Even after the realization of the moral incumbency of [...]]]> What is the “Plan” for accomplishing liberty? How do we get it done?

This question, posed often by those both sympathetic and hostile to full human liberty and its implications, is one that sadly reveals to a great degree the success of our societal pro-government conditioning. Even after the realization of the moral incumbency of free action by each individual, we still instantly think in terms of imposing such a condition through hierarchical edicts from the top down. Since liberty is, itself, the absence of any such coercive external imposition this makes going about it tricky and counter-intuitive.

Using the political process to accomplish reductions of government violations of natural rights is completely acceptable from a moral point of view, even when deceptive. This is because doing so can not be reasonably construed to constitute consent for the system itself, and the implementation is merely that which is morally incumbent (a condition of free exercise of rights). Therefore, voters being deprived of the violations of individual rights to which they are accustomed as resulting from the political processes have not been deprived of any valid expectation. Ultimately, however, such a strategy for ending or reducing the state and its crimes against rightfully free individuals will fall short of accomplishing a lasting solution. It will fail because of the way the process itself is at odds with the ideals of liberty.

It is important to understand that the operating capability of the state does not rest purely on implemented or threatened force. If it did, it would be very limited in the scope of its effective control, and it would have to operate out of the public eye. The real “lynch-pin” for the state is that it rests on the widespread perception of its legitimacy, and the expectations of the people all around us in our churches, businesses and families. They spring into its service as enforcers (knowingly or not) with social reprisals against anyone who questions not just a particular government action, but the validity of our being subject to its rule at all.

That’s why the path to complete liberty is to undermine this concept and perception. We must do so slowly but surely until it becomes the same as a “flat earth” idea. Like the truth-based advances in human progress that preceded this one, it is a huge uphill battle against all of the weight of tradition and institutional inertia. However, once the social reprisals faced by the average person for supporting the use of state violence outweigh the social risks for opposing the state, it’s “game over” and we’ve won. We can see an example of this dynamic in the recent past with the example of racial segregation.

Encouraging People to Choose to Be Free

That understanding presents a much different long-term strategy, and one that requires uncomfortable conversations in our personal lives. To move the evolution of humanity forward toward liberty in a lasting way, we can all do a great deal without ever stepping in a voting booth or holding a campaign sign. People’s relationships with others are incredibly important to them. We can point out tactfully and calmly the reality of government force in a very personal way. We can explain to them that the schemes of state solutions with which they agree, are being imposed upon millions who do not … at the barrel of a gun. We can point out that among these millions is the person with whom they are speaking at that moment and profess to care for. Does this friend or family member really believe men with guns should be permitted to force you to fund their solution to a problem, or to put you in a cage if you refuse?

People are not accustomed to having to answer for this in their individual interactions. When people start facing this reality and its individual implications more often, then those social risks that come with supporting the state will start to outweigh those that accompany its rejection. Once the point is reached when the average person has more social fear attending support for the state than they do about denying its purported legitimacy openly, then the war will have been won. No amount of threats, subversion or naked force will be able to stem the tide of human progress away from this archaic means of social organization at that point. The idea of the state will be relegated to the dustbin of history with the other outmoded and pre-scientific solutions that proceeded their well-deserved demise.

There have been political changes in the US that allow the extreme high end to garner more wealth. Ultimately, it represents a failure of our society to take account of the fact that the extreme high end can lobby and can organise for its own interests, and we’ve let [...]]]> Robert Shiller via Washington’s Blog:

There have been political changes in the US that allow the extreme high end to garner more wealth. Ultimately, it represents a failure of our society to take account of the fact that the extreme high end can lobby and can organise for its own interests, and we’ve let it happen.

[...]

You might think that in a system of majority voting, the middle class and the poor would dominate and would prevent this kind of inequality from developing. But it hasn’t been that way — it’s been even less so that way lately, especially in the US.

Shiller doesn’t give concrete examples, so allow me to list a few.

1. Wall Street bankers, through their lackeys Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, threaten Congress with the end of the world if the banks don’t get bailed out. The banks get bailed out.
2. Wall Street bankers insist that the American economy can’t be competitive unless Wall Street banks remain Too Big To Fail. Financial reform is gutted and banks are allowed to become even bigger.
3. Even after the bailouts, banks remain insolvent, so bankers lobby for accounting rule changes that allow them to hide their insolvency. Banks get their accounting rule changes.
4. Even after the accounting rule changes, banks are still in terrible financial shape. So the Federal Reserve pins interest rates at zero percent so that the banks can generate giant profits by borrowing at zero percent and buying Treasury bonds.

Et voila! You have more obscene profits and bonuses on Wall Street just two years after Wall Street corruption and incompetence blew up the American economy. At the same time, Main Street still suffers with stagnant wages, high unemployment, and rising food and energy costs.

“Let them eat credit.” Indeed.

Liberals always paint this as an issue of tax policy and campaign finance reform. But that is a naive view. Where there is money and power, it will find influence. The Wall Street—Washington cabal is far too deep and intertwined to be restrained by campaign finance rules, and they will always find a way to push the burden of higher tax rates onto the middle class while buying loopholes for themselves. The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington is far more pernicious than any campaign contributions. Hank Paulson was a Wall Street multi-multi-millionaire before he came to the Treasury and used his position to bail out his Wall Street buddies. And Timmy the Tax Cheat knows that he’ll have a seven-figure Wall Street job waiting for him as long as he does Wall Street’s bidding as Treasury secretary. That kind of giant personal wealth incentive makes any campaign contributions seem quaint by comparison.

I simplify this somewhat by focusing on Wall Street, but the same principle applies obviously to government contractors, ethanol makers, TSA nudie-scanner makers, and every other industry funded, subsidized, or mandated by politicians handing out Other People’s Money. Every department of the government is filled with bureaucrats at every level hoping to get rich by doing favors for, and then landing a cushy job with, private industry.

The answer was set out for us by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. Only restraints on the scope and breadth of what the government can do will prevent the rich and powerful from seizing the levers of government for their own advantage. The government our Founding Fathers gave us was never supposed to be allowed to bail out private banks or manipulate interest rates for the benefit of the wealthy. The way to restore representative democracy and reduce government-sponsored inequality is to restore limited government.

1. Hayekian information problems: The people in authority who make the rules interfere with the people who know how to do the job and are in direct contact with the situation. The people who make the rules know nothing about the work they’re interfering with. [...]]]> Hierarchies are systematically stupid and inefficient, for the following reasons.

1. Hayekian information problems: The people in authority who make the rules interfere with the people who know how to do the job and are in direct contact with the situation. The people who make the rules know nothing about the work they’re interfering with. The people who make the rules are unaccountable to the people who do know how to do the work. Consequently, all authority-based rules create suboptimal results and irrationality when they interfere with the judgment of those in direct contact with the situation.

People in authority make stupid decisions because the people who know more than they do are their subordinates, and the only people who can hold them accountable know even less than they do.

The only way the people doing the work can get anything done is to treat irrational authority as an obstacle to be routed around, the same way the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

2. Groupthink: Hierarchies systematically suppress negative feedback on the results of their policies. As R.A. Wilson said, nobody tells the truth to a man with a gun. Hierarchies are very good at telling naked emperors how good their clothes look.

Hierarchies also systematically suppress critical thinking ability in their members. Psychological studies have found that people in positions of authority become less likely to evaluate communications based on their internal logic, and instead evaluate them based on the authority of the source.

3. Opacity from above: A major theme of “Seeing Like a State,” by James Scott, is that states try to make populations “legible” from above, and hence more amenable to control. We might add a “seeing like a boss” corrollary about the analogous phenomenon inside hierarchies. The problem is that such legibility is very costly, if not impossible, to achieve.

Hospitals are a good example. Most of the paperwork that nurses are required to fill out results from the fact that management doesn’t trust them to do what it wants them to do without some independent means of verification. But the paperwork is worthless, unless management operates on the assumption that those same nurses can be trusted to fill out the paperwork honestly. It all boils down to the fact that management knows their interests are diametrically opposed to those of the nurses, but there’s no way to actually get inside the nurses’ heads and look out through their eyes and thereby overcome this fundamental agency problem. So bosses constantly look for new, ineffectual gimmicks to get around the problem, resulting in endless layers of new paperwork that are as useless as the old paperwork.

Conclusion: To the extent that hierarchical organizations leave subordinates with freedom of exit, they are not coercive in the same way that the state is. But given that hierarchies are artificially prevalent because of state policies, and those who work within them do so as a necessary evil resulting from artificial constraints on the range of competing opportunities, the hierarchy resembles a microcosm of statist society, in which the agency and knowledge problems of authority internally mirror the irrationalities created by state authority in society at large.

So long as the predominant production methods required large aggregations of capital beyond the means of individuals and small groups, and corporate hierarchies were propped up by state ones, the cultural pathologies of hierarchy were surmountable. But technological change is rapidly eroding the requirement for capital outlays, nullifying the advantages of capital ownership, and increasing the vulnerability of hierarchy to external and internal attacks by self-organized networks.

So hierarchies, increasingly, lack the resources to compensate for their handicaps — even with help from the state. The state will only bankrupt itself, along with corporate hierarchies, in trying to prop up the old order.

It is a myth that the rich, or market conservatives in the author’s lexicon, unremittingly favor the operation of free markets with absolutely no government intervention. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. [...]]]> Dean Baker. The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (LULU, 2006)

It is a myth that the rich, or market conservatives in the author’s lexicon, unremittingly favor the operation of free markets with absolutely no government intervention. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. The author examines several key areas that show the lie of the idea that the rich favor free market outcomes. What they favor is governmental protection of their status and privileges. For example:

1. Both the gov. and professional organizations limit the numbers of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, including the entry of foreigners. At the same time, rampant and/or illegal immigration floods lower-wage employment markets and some technical jobs. On the one hand, wages are artificially high, but suppressed on the other to the detriment of the greater good.

2. The Federal Reserve uses monetary policy to increase unemployment and thereby lower wages of the lesser skilled, while limiting the inflation detested by bankers.

3. Corporations are entirely government creations, yet conservatives obscure that point which permits unchecked CEO pay. In actuality the government could mandate governance rules that would likely curtail CEO pay excesses.

4. Copyright and patent laws in essence grant monopolies to the detriment of the free flow of goods and services, which can in fact be harmful as in the case of restricting the availability of needed medicines.

5. Conservatives support legislation to restrict the ability of individuals to seek redress in courts for harm under the name of tort reform. In actuality lawsuits are a market form of regulation in lieu of government intervention. Obviously, protecting the rich trumps market principles.

6. Free market advocates supposedly advocate choice. So why is there such fear on the part of private enterprise of people choosing Social Security and/or signing up with Medicare for both health care and prescription drugs? The fact is that private business is highly inefficient compared to those programs and can’t really compete. Therefore they look to government to limit choice.

7. True conservatives have always had low regard for gambling and certainly insist on its being heavily taxed. But when it comes to Wall Street speculation, which is what day-trading is all about, they turn a blind eye to taxing and thus limiting the undisputed harmful impact of speculative transactions.

There are a few more examples by the author, none of which can be seriously disputed. The book has the tone that things could be different: just point out the hypocrisy of the rich and reform will follow. Really?

The author can hardly be unaware that we live in a class society in which the major institutions with the task of inculcating the idea that markets are neutral and work for us all, namely educational and media institutions, are basically owned or financed by the rich. A few dissenting, fringe views are permitted here and there, but basically major dissent concerning the justness of our society is dealt with swiftly: removal or exclusion from school or job, or flagrant suppression.

The situation is more than just setting forth the facts before the public. Probably never before in our history has market ideology so permeated our society and given the rich so many effective tools to disseminate information favorable to their class interests. As far as any effective forces opposing this situation, can anyone honestly say that the Democrats at this point are willing or even want to reverse any of what the author points out any more than do the Republicans. The answer is “No.”

According the group’s website, the occupation will begin Thursday morning, Oct. 6, at 9:00 in Pike Park [...]]]> What: Bringing awareness and accountability, Occupy Dallas has responded to a nationwide call for peaceful protests in opposition to the continued collision of political and economic powers that has wrecked the lives of so many ordinary people.

According the group’s website, the occupation will begin Thursday morning, Oct. 6, at 9:00 in Pike Park and remain at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank indefinitely. An organizing meeting will take place Monday tonight at El Centro College in Dallas. A civil disobedience training session is also scheduled for later in the week.

More information and suggestions can be found at occupydallas.org and on the group’s Facebook page.

Where: Pike Park, 2851 Harry Hines Boulevard, Dallas, TX 75201; Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2200 North Pearl Street, Dallas, TX 75201.

When: Thursday, Oct. 6, at 9:00 a.m. to indefinite