Many libertarians over the years have hailed the employee/agent of the illegal, criminal US state’s “judicial” branch, Alex Kozinski, as a fellow libertarian or libertarian-leaning judge. He has profiles in Reason magazine, is idolized by Objectivists, etc. How great it is that we have a libertarian judge ensconced in the criminal federal courts! Why, he even writes witty legal articles! Hell, even my friend Walter Block and other libertarians have written about how great it would be if libertarian lawyers like Kozinki (and me!) could be nominated to the Supreme Court. As Reason interviewer Shikha Dalmia gushes:

In another famous dissent, Kozinski took on the court’s liberal judges for denying the right of an individual to bear arms. “The panel’s labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight,” he wrote, “has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it.” Kozinski is also a great ally of the First Amendment, defending the free speech rights of flag burners and homophobes alike. All that, combined with his hatred of statism and his enthusiasm for the free market, has earned him a reputation as one of the most libertarian judges in the country.

Damn. Damned by faint praise, I guess. They all seem statist sell-outs to me. Clarence Thomas, Kozinski, all of ‘em. Consider “libertarian” Kozinski’s words in a recent case, discussed in A Ticket, 3 Taser Jolts and, Perhaps, a Trip to the Supreme Court. In this case one Malaika Brooks, who was seven months pregnant, was driving her 11-year-old son to school in Seattle when she was pulled over for speeding. “The police say she was going 32 miles per hour in a school zone; the speed limit was 20.” She was willing to accept the speeding ticket but refused to sign it (the stupid law required it; who knew). She thought that would be an acknowledgment of guilt (wonder why she thought that?). So the cops summoned even more cops, and ordered her out of the car, but she refused. What happened next is disgusting:

The situation plainly called for bold action, and Officer Juan M. Ornelas met the challenge by brandishing a Taser and asking Ms. Brooks if she knew what it was.

She did not, but she told Officer Ornelas what she did know. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I am pregnant. I’m less than 60 days from having my baby.”

The three men assessed the situation and conferred. “Well, don’t do it in her stomach,” one said. “Do it in her thigh.”

Officer Ornelas twisted Ms. Brooks’s arm behind her back. A colleague, Officer Donald M. Jones, applied the Taser to Ms. Brooks’s left thigh, causing her to cry out and honk the car’s horn. A half-minute later, Officer Jones applied the Taser again, now to Ms. Brooks’s left arm. He waited six seconds before pressing it into her neck.

Ms. Brooks fell over, and the officers dragged her into the street, laying her face down and cuffing her hands behind her back.

In the months that followed, Ms. Brooks gave birth to a healthy baby girl; was convicted of refusing to sign the ticket, a misdemeanor, but not of resisting arrest; and sued the officers who three times caused her intense pain and left her with permanent scars.

Now, in the ensuing lawsuits, what was Kozinski’s opinion? Why, the woman was asking for it. She was “defiant” and “deaf to reason” and so had brought the incident upon herself:

As for the officers, he said: “They deserve our praise, not the opprobrium of being declared constitutional violators. The City of Seattle should award them commendations for grace under fire.”

This is libertarian? No. It’s defense of the police state. The heroic Will Griggs, in his column If Cops Can’t Taze a Pregnant Woman, The Terrorists Will Win, puts it this way:

In his dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski maintained that Brooks “had shown herself deaf to reason, and moderate physical force had only led to further entrenchment…. Brooks was tying up two line officers, a sergeant and three police vehicles – resources diverted from other community functions – to deal with one lousy traffic ticket.”

Who was responsible for this “diversion” – Mrs. Brooks, who was merely being uncooperative, or Officer Ornelas and his comrades, who needlessly escalated a disagreement over “one lousy traffic ticket” to the point where potentially deadly force was used against someone accused of a trivial traffic offense, rather than an actual crime?

“The officers couldn’t just walk away,” complains Kozinski. “Brooks was under arrest.”

There was no substantive reason why the police couldn’t walk away – if they had been acting as peace officers, that is, rather than as armed enforcers of the revenue-consuming class.

Tom Woods blogs about an intriguing new service, in I Love People Who Actually Do Things I Only Talk About:

Check out Judge.me, a new Internet-based dispute resolution website, being touted as an equitable and affordable alternative to government courts. The creator sent me a note alerting me to it, and I’m very interested. He also did an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) at Reddit. Here’s how it works.

Jeff Tucker also wrote about it in Small Claims for the Digital Age:

Judge.me seems like an amazing idea. It’s a arbitration system for the digital age. It is especially useful for international disputes, resolved in days. The site owner answers detailed questions on Reddit. It raises an intriguing possibility that the real long-term results of the Ron Paul campaign won’t be political in the way people think of it but rather entrepreneurial. Many people have been inspired to start new businesses based on the idea of a pure voluntary order.

See the video below. This kind of simple, technology-based private arbitration should be of especial interest to anarcho-libertarians, who have long argued that private arbitration would play a significant role in justice in a stateless society.¹ In fact, its founder is a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist, as noted in his Reddit AMA.

One interesting thing is their choice of law, which matters given that many of the disputes might involve parties from different countries:

For court litigation, which law to apply (called “choice of law”) becomes an issue as soon as the dispute crosses jurisdictional borders. Even when the parties specified their choice of law in the contract, good lawyers find ways to challenge this which leads to choice of law becoming a trial on its own. To avoid this issue, smart arbitration service providers such as judge.me specify that rather than applying a certain local law, the arbitration will be resolved based on common law and [equity principles]. The concept of basing dispute resolution on “fairness and equity” is known under its latin name ["ex aequo et bono"].

I.e., disputes are resolved by common sense principles of justice—the general rules developed over time in common law and equity courts. (This is similar in a way to international law’s appeal to “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations”. See my post, The UN, International Law, and Nuclear Weapons.)

But if you stick to justice, common sense, and basic property and libertarian rights, then statutory law is out. You don’t appeal to it when making a determination—unless both parties have agreed to this artificial legal standard. (See my Legislation and Law in a Free Society.) Now this brings to mind the case of so-called “intellectual property”—primarily patent and copyright. Both are the explicit results of massive state legislative schemes–the Copyright Act and the Patent Act. Some anarcho-libertarians who are nonetheless pro-IP, such as J. Neil Schulman and L. Neil Smith, are clear that they do not favor state-enforced IP. As I wrote elsewhere, Schulman, “as an anarchist, to his credit admits that if it could be shown that his version of IP could be enforced only by state law, he would abandon it…” In fact, if they are anarchists, they cannot support any legislation since legislation is a creature of the state. But then they turn around and say that they think private arbitration in a free society would be resorted to, to resolve IP and “plagiarism” disputes. Let’s forget for a second that plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright, patent, or market competition. Let’s forget that if you could sue someone for “copying” you unfairly, then this would open up a whole new realm of anti-competitive protectionism—anyone who competes with you, especially “unfairly”, is “stealing” your customers and unfairly “harming” you.

Let’s just assume we have a private legal system largely based on arbitration, which itself relies on general principles of justice, not on legislation. To sue someone you need to allege they have harmed you—invaded your property rights. Some contract breach, tort, trespass, or even crime. Now if you make the text of a novel or the digital file of a song or movie public (for whatever reason), and someone else copies and uses it and redistributes it (for free; or for monetary consideration); or if someone imitates your product and sells a competing ones—what possible common law claim could you have? None. You could make a copyright or patent claim, but only relying on the legistatist quo. You could not appeal to any organic legal principle developed in a decentralized free market legal order. It is not wrong to learn. To compete. To emulate. To copy. To steal customers. To “deprive” a competitor of profit. To do “something similar.” To use information that is publicly available.

My point? If we had a free society with a decentralized, non-legislated legal order, it is impossible to imagine there being patent or copyright law or claims, any more than someone could make a minimum wage or Americans with Disabilities Act claim absent those federal statutory schemes.

[C4SIF]

Endnotes

1. See, e.g., Linda & Morris Tannehill, The Market for Liberty; David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism; and “Imagining a Polycentric Constitutional Order: A Short Fable,” chapter 14 of Randy Barnett‘s The Structure of Liberty.

A post at the Cobden Centre, 15 years of the MPC, calls to attention “a brilliant video from our friends at SaveOurSavers, celebrating 15 years of the Monetary Policy Committee”. The video skewers the hypocrisy, lies, and inane economic theories spouted by or in defense of monetary central planners and their inept failure to meet its 2% inflation target.

I was interviewed yesterday by Redmond Weissenberger, Director of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada. We had a long-ranging discussion of intellectual property and libertarian theory, including a discussion about exactly how Ayn Rand and other libertarians got off track on this issue, in part because of flaws regarding “labor” and “creationism” in Locke’s original homesteading argument; inconsistencies between Rand’s support for IP and her recognition that production means rearranging existing property; and also the different roles of scarce means and knowledge in the praxeological structure of human action. (For more on these issues, see my blog posts Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’, Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor, Rand on IP, Owning “Values”, and ‘Rearrangement Rights’, and The Patent Defense League and Defensive Patent Pooling, and my article “Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright.”)

The video is below; audio file is here (69MB). (Trivia: I used my iPad, running the Skype app, for this interview. More stable and better camera than a MacBook.)

[C4SIF]

David Brin is the author of science fiction novels The Postman, the Uplift series beginning with Sundiver, and others as well as the ever-popular nonfiction work, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. He recently sat down with Reason.tv’s Tim Cavanaugh to discuss his recent criticisms of “dogmatic libertarians,” his hobbyhorse of government transparency, and the subject of uplifting dolphins.

I have much to say about Brin’s attacks on “dogmatic libertarians,” by which he means followers of Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand who worship property too much, but watch the video first and then continue on below for my commentary.¹

I’ll state right up front that I do not think of Brin as a libertarian, much less as a heretical one (as he describes himself). To the extent that he is right on anything, he’s not telling libertarians anything new. As for the rest, I’ve seen enough on his blog and various social networks to come to the conclusion that he doesn’t understand the actual positions held by principled libertarians (as opposed to the bizarre straw men he’s concocted and attributed to us) and that it’s impossible to carry on a civil, constructive conversation over the internet with him about libertarianism if you disagree with him on the subject. Although he says in the video that he doesn’t want to insult, after he’s already insulted, if you dare to challenge his views about “dogmatic libertarianism,” prepare to be mocked and insulted and misinterpreted and talked past.

Brin says, “The issue should not be government. It should not be unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property,²  which is the path that the libertarian movement has gone down.”

I have no idea what he means by “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry of personal property”³ and I’ve yet to see him give a clear explanation of this magic-talisman phrase he bandies about like a Hammer of Refutation. I can’t imagine what problem he sees in upholding private property rights. He seems to think our “unalloyed and unlimited idolatry” somehow leads to oligarchy, but I’m at a loss as to how it is supposed to do so. I can only assume he thinks it means we must uphold “rights” to even unjustly acquired property, but this is simply not so.

The phrase is also code for “Hey, man, let’s be practical; sometimes one has to make compromises, break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Those who want government solutions to perceived problems hate it when libertarians stand on principle and refuse to budge. It drives them into uncivilized fits of apoplectic, frothing rage.

Brin also seems to think that so-called “dogmatic libertarians” have lost sight of the importance of competition and transparency and whatnot. Uh… No. No, we haven’t. I don’t know where he gets this stuff from. We see private property rights as making fair and creative competition possible in the first place; and we value fair and creative competition greatly, especially those of us who see intellectual property as illegitimate government grants of monopoly privilege that can only be enforced by infringing on the pre-existing rights of others to their physical property.

“Libertarians need to be reminded that, across 6,000 years, the greatest enemy of free enterprise, of market enterprise, innovation, creative competition… have always been oligarchs,” says Brin.

No… No, we don’t. But mayhaps you need to be reminded that all forms of government, not just the one labeled oligarchy, are ultimately ruled by oligarchs. It’s in the nature of the state. You know… that organization you said we shouldn’t concern ourselves with. Theory and history show us that it is through the state that oligarchs acquire and exercise their power. Without it, they are impotent. It is the state, always ruled by oligarchs, that has been the greatest enemy of free markets, free enterprise, innovation, and fair and creative competition.

The Pyramid of Oligarchy

In the video, Brin lays out a plan to rein in government growth, corruption, and “abuse.” Here’s a summary: Let’s draft 10,000 average Americans into a pool every year. Excuse Brin’s poor choice of words; this “draft” is one that can be refused without penalty (although an opt-out system is an unnecessary hassle for people and is frowned upon by savvy Netizens). We’ll then do background checks on this pool of candidates to winnow it down to a list 1,000 trustworthy, loyal citizens who can keep their mouths shut. Give them security clearances and arm them with a badge that let’s them get in any door in the United States of America — you read that right, any door. They are tasked with watching the watchmen. There will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” Brin suggests a mere month in jail. The idea being that spending a month in jail will be a price worth paying to patriots in order to bring truly heinous acts of government out into the light so that they can be stopped.

What was interviewer Tim Cavanaugh’s response to all this? “Huh. Okay.”

That’s it?

This didn’t immediately strike him as a terrible idea? He didn’t think or, better yet, say: “Gee, this can’t possibly go wrong.” Not a single problem with the proposed system immediately sprang to mind that he could ask Brin to address? Or did Cavanaugh just not want to ask the celebrity any tough questions?

I’ll just toss a few ideas off the top of my head into the ring for consideration:

1. Who is going to administer this new system of citizen-watchmen — the lottery for the draft, the background checks, security clearance decisions, and so on? Oh, that’s right — the government. Despite Brin’s talk about non-governmental, or market, solutions to problems, his proposal is a government solution to a government problem (government failure).  What? You need me to flesh the implications out for you? Okay…
2. It means the creation of a new bureaucracy or ratcheting up an exsiting one. Either way, a WIN for big government and more spending! That’s what we libertarians are fighting for!
3. Who’s to say the penalty won’t be ratcheted up over time like the income tax? Thus decreasing the risk to government officials that their secrets will get out?
4. The selection process couldn’t possibly be rigged or gamed, could it?
5. No citizen-watchman would ever take a bribe to keep quiet,  surely.
6. Or stay mum in the face of threats to himself or his family… right?
7. Brin’s proposed system entails acclimating Americans to increased government surveillance of and deep-probing into their public and private lives. Oh, and revisit #4-6 in light of this. Worse, it might come to be seen as a patriotic duty to accept such scrutiny from the government.
8. Brin says there will be penalties for revealing “anything about anything the’ve seen.” I hope he’s only referring to classified or top secret, not unclassified, information here. Let’s take him charitably and assume he is; how much do you want to bet that this will lead to more and more aspects of government becoming classified so as to have the threat of the penalty for revealing what is seen hanging over the citizen-watchmen’s heads for matters of less and less importance to the “national interest”?
9. The system Brin proposes is likely to make people more complacent about government in the same way and for the same reasons that democracy fools them into believing they’re ultimately in charge and that regulations encourage them to abdicate responsibility for the quality of the goods and services they buy, for their own safety and security and that of their families, and so on. “Hey, man, there’s a system in place to make sure our representives and public servants do what they’re tasked with doing and to weed out corruption and bad secret policies and stuff. They have enough volunteers. I don’t need to waste my valuable  Celebrity Apprentice–watching time ((Bread and circuses! Bread and circuses!)) worrying about it. Did you see what happened last night? Aubrey O’Day is soooo right. She’s the only one with any talent on her team. Nobody else every has a creative.”⁴
10. Brin doesn’t  mention monetary compensation for being a citizen-watchman. Is it likely that as many as 1 in 10 draftees will not only accept being drafted but pass the background checks to qualify for a security clearance? A much larger pool than 10,000 might be needed. And might there not be a selection bias in who chooses to accept the responsibility after being drafted? No potential for abuse there?
11. What if the citizen-watchmen are generally okay with things libertarians would deem heinous? In light of the direction this country has been headed lo the past couple centuries, this isn’t much of a stretch, is it?
12. Brin says that citizen-watchmen will be able to get into any door in the United States. Any door. I hope he means any government door, not really any door.
13. Let’s face it, Brin’s proposal is a pipe dream. The Powers That Be will never let it happen and the American people are not really interested in that level of transparency in their government — not enough to make Brin’s plan a reality, at least. And Brin has the gall to mock and blame “dogmatic libertarians,” the lapel-grabbing (lolwut?) Rothbardian and Randian wing of the movement, for the Libertarian Party failing to make headway (more than 1%) at the polls in presidential elections.
14. Brin’s citizen-watchman program will be funded by taxes, and taxation is theft. Oh, sorry, did I grab your lapels too hard?⁵

I could go on, but what’s the point of continuing to kick a dead horse?

[Prometheus Unbound]

Endnotes

1. It’s heartening to see that the video on YouTube has more dislikes than likes at the moment.
2. The Reason.com transcript has the words “unalloyed” and “unlimited” in the wrong order.
3. What do “unalloyed” and “unlimited” even mean in this context? Can there be alloyed and limited idolatry of personal property?
4. My wife subjects me to Trump’s insipid Celebrity Apprentice show on Sundays. We both can’t stand that obnoxious, narcissistic, conniving, overhyped “reality”-pop-star twit. Fire her already! And WTF is “a creative.” The word is an adjective, not a noun!
5. I would have placed this item in the #2 position but wanted to make a joke about the lapel thing and it needed context. Again, lolwut?

Over the weekend there was a small health expo at my local YMCA (which also shares a building with a public elementary school). A variety of organizations had stands and booths–from golf and swimming coaches to dietitians and chiropractors. And, like civilized people, they would pitch their goods and services to passers-by. Unfortunately, this peaceful demonstration of entrepreneurialism and voluntary market demand was tainted by the presence of the police.

No fewer than five “cruisers” lined the edge of the parking lot. About a dozen police officers, in full regalia (guns, tasers, cuffs, baton, military boots) interacted with children who would ask one question about another, their eyes glazed over by the “magnificence” of “our” public “servants.” But the “law and order” monopolists would still had a gem to show the community. Parked on the grass a B.E.A.R. military-style vehicle was the center of attention. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters were taking turns climbing on the truck of mass destruction.

I approached and listened to the guy inside tell a kid that he was the one in charge of holding the bullet-proof shield when they have to go “serve warrants” and that the guy you see right there (pointing across the parking lot) was the one whose job was to break doors open. Another officer (dressed in camo and looked like a military soldier but was a local cop) told a girl that they were there to help the good ones and take care of “the bad guys.” Meh.

Tonight marks one of the more bizarre annual rites in the American worship of state power—the NFL Draft. I realize I may be alone in this characterization. Just this morning, Mises Institute president Doug French wrote a lengthy editorial celebrating the Draft. But I don’t share the public’s love of the fraudulent, anti-libertarian monstrosity that is the National Football League. As I see it, you can support liberty or the NFL, but not both.

The NFL is not a private enterprise in any free-market sense. It was at one time, but since the 1960s, it has steadily morphed into a subsidiary of the state. Admittedly, this process did not begin at the NFL’s insistence. In the 1950s, the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division decided to interfere with the rights of NFL franchise operators to make rules regarding the presentation of their games on the new medium of television. By 1961, the NFL was forced to lobby Congress for a special antitrust exemption just so it could sign its first national television contract. A few years later, a similar exemption was secured to permit the NFL’s merger with the American Football League.

In the decades following the merger, the NFL embraced its special status and started demanding municipal governments, rather than franchise owners, assume the financial risks of constructing new stadiums. Today, 23 of the 32 clubs have stadiums built no earlier than 1992. Most are financed primarily through taxes or government-backed bonds. Generally, NFL owners contribute only about one-third of the cost.

In Cleveland, for example, the city used bonds to pay for 75% of the cost of the Browns’ stadium, which opened in 1999. The team only pays $250,000 per year in rent to the city. Keep in mind, the new stadium was only built after the first Cleveland Browns franchise moved to Baltimore in 1995. Why did they move? Because then-Browns owner Art Modell, after financially mismanaging the team for years, needed a government bailout, which he received from the state-run Maryland Stadium Authority in the form of M&T Bank Stadium. And to get one step further back, the Maryland Stadium Authority came into existence only after Baltimore’s previous NFL team, the Colts, moved to Indianapolis when the latter city—through the Marion County Capital Improvement Board—offered the club’s owners a brand new stadium.

Even when owners pay for a share of construction costs, it usually comes in the form of long-term debt. Franchise sales in recent years have also been heavily leveraged. When Daniel M. Snyder purchased the Washington Redskins from the estate of Jack Kent Cooke in 1999, he paid a then-record $800 million, which included assumption of $155 million in debt on the stadium Cooke built just before his death and another $340 million Snyder borrowed from a European bank.

Without direct government financing in the form of taxes and municipal bonds, and indirect financing in the form of interest rates artificially manipulated by central banks, most of the NFL stadiums erected over the past 20 years would not exist, at least in their present forms. Nor would debt-fueled sales like Snyder’s been possible.

And the NFL will continue to gorge itself on taxes and cheap debt. Just today, political officials in Atlanta proposed spending at least $300 million in taxes—which means the actual number will be much higher—to build a new stadium for the Falcons. Which is overdue, of course, because the team’s present home was built all the way back in 1992. NFL officials also openly threatened Minnesota officials of “serious consequences” if they didn’t foot the majority of bill for a new Vikings stadium (at an estimated cost of over $1 billion). One state legislator told the press, “It’s disappointing to think the NFL or the Vikings are driving policy for Minnesota government,” adding, “The Vikings and NFL are in a much better financial position than our state.”

Of course the NFL is in a better position. It has all the benefits of being a government enterprise without any of the legal accountability. It doesn’t even have to pretend to obey laws. Consider the recent action by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to punish the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys for alleged violations of the league’s salary cap. Under the contract between the NFL franchise operators and its players union, there is a cap on the maximum salaries each team can spend on player salaries each year. Except the cap did not apply for the 2010 season, the last year under the previous contract. There was nothing ambiguous. The contract expressly said there was no cap of any kind.

The Redskins and Cowboys took advantage of this “uncapped” season to rework some contracts, shifting payments for certain players so that they would count in 2010 rather than future seasons when, everyone assumed, a new cap would be in place. It was perfectly legal. Except that Goodell retroactively decided it wasn’t based on what he claimed was an implied understanding among the owners not to do what the Redskins and Cowboys did.

Not only was this “understanding” a breach of contract, it was a felony under federal law. It’s price-fixing of the most blatant sort. Now, I don’t endorse any form of antitrust law, but it’s worth noting that in any other industry, Goodell’s actions would have earned him a prison sentence and a massive fine. I’ve seen people to go to jail simply for being in the room when price-fixing is discussed. Goodell publicly admitted to price-fixing and nobody seemed to think it was a problem.

More to the point, Goodell committed fraud. He changed the terms of an agreement after-the-fact without the consent of two parties to that agreement. And he relied on the state to do so. In addition to the special antitrust privileges the league enjoys, Goodell leaned on the players union to grant him blanket immunity from his act of fraud. According to federal law, you see, almost anything is allowed when there’s collusion between an employer and a government-sanctioned monopoly union.

Of course, one couldn’t expect union officials to stand up for a couple of owners when they won’t even protect their own members from Goodell’s fraud. After Goodell became commissioner in 2006, he decided to unilaterally re-interpret a clause in the NFL’s constitution that granted him vague authority to fine and suspend anyone employed by a member club for “conduct detrimental” to the league. There is no contractual definition of what constitutes “detrimental” conduct. When a player signs a contract, he has no way of knowing in advance what conduct might be deemed detrimental by Goodell. Nor is Goodell required to be consistent in his application of the term. That makes just about any exercise of the “conduct detrimental” clause an act of fraud.

It would be different if all NFL employees were hired at-will. Then it wouldn’t matter why anyone gets disciplined or fired. But the very point of employment contracts is to establish the terms of exchange in advance. Furthermore, Goodell himself doesn’t actually hire or fire players. As commissioner, he’s the head of a trade association. He claims, as a third party, the unrestricted right to interfere with contracts between players and clubs and impose new terms at any time without any judicial review. This type of authority cannot exist—or certainly be sustained for any length of time—without the backing of the state.

As noted earlier, the NFL’s government-dictated relationship with its union immunizes almost all of Goodell’s conduct from legal challenge. When Goodell colludes with union leaders, individual players are powerless to assert their contractual rights. This even extends to players who aren’t under contract. Let’s revisit the NFL Draft. Doug French described tonight’s event in the following terms:

NFL teams don’t bid against each other monetarily to draft individual players. What sets the value of the player is where he is drafted. Using a first-round selection to pick untested college talent is riskier and more “expensive” than using a second-round pick, and so on.

French glosses over a lot here. First, the Draft only exists because of the labor agreement, which none of the players selected tonight were ever a party to. The government directed that current players have the right to “collectively bargain” on behalf of all future employees for the term of the agreement—which in this case is ten years. Second, French overlooks the fact that the Draft is simply a price control scheme. “Drafted” players can only negotiate with one team, and under the new labor agreement, there are further limits on rookie compensation.

Most egregiously, the Draft deliberately rewards poor management. The top selections go to the teams with the worst records from the previous season. The expected No. 1 overall pick tonight, Andrew Luck, is likely heading to the Indianapolis Colts, a team that collapsed after years of poor personnel decisions coupled with a catastrophic injury to the team’s starting quarterback. Rather than pay for their mismanagement, the NFL will reward the Colts with the exclusive right to Luck’s services at a below-market price. In effect, the Draft is a player form of government stadium subsidies.

Even the term “Draft” invokes a statist institution—government military conscription—just like title “commissioner” applied to Goodell. Name one private business that calls its CEO a “commissioner.”

Granted, that’s window dressing. So let’s turn to other aspects of the NFL-state axis. A lingering issue from the last labor contract is mandatory testing for human growth hormone. Goodell has consistently demanded an unqualified right to seize players’ blood for HGH testing. Why? Goodell says it’s to protect the integrity of the game. But this isn’t baseball, where statistics are almost a religion. In football, the customers have never shown any particular sensitivity to any sort of drug or HGH use by players, nor is there any demonstrable correlation between the use of such substances and the outcome of games.

The only reason Goodell wants HGH testing is to appease the federal government, which has long viewed professional sports as a key source of propaganda for its Drug War. When famous football players are routinely subject to drug testing, opens the door for expanding such testing to other parts of the population—particularly high school and college students. It reinforces the message that a person’s body is ultimately the property of the state. To that end, Goodell and the NFL recently announced “enhanced” security procedures where all fans attending games are subject to ankles-up “pat-downs,” a clear extension of TSA-style terrorism. And it’s hard to argue when the stadiums themselves are largely funded and operated by government authorities.

Finally, there’s the exclusive source of the NFL’s product—the players—which is government-funded colleges and universities. The NFL is unique among the four major North American sports leagues in that it has no developmental system or international network as alternative sources of talent. The NFL acknowledges this dependence by effectively requiring all potential players to spend at least three years playing for college teams—a rule no other professional league has—and even, under Goodell’s leadership, enforcing penalties against employees for alleged transgressions that took place in college.

There are other statist aspects of the NFL, notably its addiction to intellectual property, that I have not detailed here. But what I outlined above strong supports the notion that we shouldn’t look at the NFL as some wonderful example of free markets, but rather a cancer on society that, in every meaningful aspect, reinforces the central role of the state.

Several prominent libertarians, such as Peter Schiff have gone on record suggesting that China is more free-market than the US.  Others such as Jim Rogers (2010 Schlarbaum laureate) has stated that  “America is more communist than China” (video) and that “China isn’t communist” (video) and that “China is not going to be communist ever again” (WSJ).

What evidence do they have of this utopic land of milk and honey?  Or as Carl Sagan would say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

My current employer is within the EFL industry and has a number of offices here in Shanghai.  It is both privately owned and independently run (e.g. not a JV with a local SOE).  I was recently sent a copy of a new employee handbook and found something of interest to those who buy into the belief that classical liberalism is alive and well in the middle kingdom:

Now before you get all self-righteous and lambast me for working at a firm that has this in their manual I should point out that this is par for the course out here.  In fact, last year I worked at another private, independent EFL firm in Guangdong.  During the height of the “Arab Spring” all of the foreigners were required to sign a document saying that we wouldn’t discuss the events with the students — wouldn’t discuss “democracy,” “human rights,” and “censorship.”  Though on a professional level, I would really question why you would need to even talk about this stuff in an EFL course.  Run out of other things to discuss?

This summer the ISIL is hosting a conference in Shanghai.  I wish them the best of luck.  But this little blurb on their site was a head scratcher:

This symposium is not affiliated with any government institutions in China. Therefore it is not registered with the Chinese government, but it is totally safe. Li just returned from a two-week planning trip to Shanghai where she met with many of the libertarian activists and academics. The Chinese label this summer symposium “a private intellectual dialogue, aiming to help China to grow.”

If AIDS awareness and sex-ed meetings are still being shut down, gay parades are canceled and homosexual clubs are raided — would a convention filled with Star Trek geeks preaching free-markets end up rocking the boat a little too much for the Guoanbu and the MPS?

Oh but those other groups were all real deviants right?

The fact of the matter is, China is run by the Family, the Sinomafia.  It is a gerontocracy — nepotistic, opaque and shows no signs of reform let alone collapse.   Sure Mao Yushi has won the 2012 Milton Friedman prize and hasn’t been shoved down the memory hole (yet) — but Liu Xiabao won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize and has been “disappeared” for nearly two years now.

Legal opposition does not exist and I think it is foolhardy for foreigners to come here at this time and risk deportation over something much bigger than them.  The state has only grown larger since the financial crisis with no real signs of abating.

For a clearer illustration of just how large the state operates in China, this is just a small part of a new infographic from CNpolitics:

As Minxin Pei, Mark DeWeaver and other have noted elsewhere: the top 38 companies in the country are SOEs,  63% of the top 500 companies in China are SOEs, the top 10 most profitable business in China are SOEs.  Yet even the suggestion of privatization by outside sources results in uproar.   The ironic thing of course is that the nationalist Chinese protestors at the World Bank press conference could never do in China what they did to Zoellick…

Professional protesting class

I am not sure what laowai, what foreigners can accomplish by giving speeches out here.  I personally would not put my neck on the line, I would not be that guy who runs across Tienanmen Square, unfurling a Tibetan flag (because they accomplished so much change!).  Why not pool resources, capital and skilled labor to develop and maintain software proxies for Chinese denizens to use?  Why not combines the monies you would have spent flying out here and put together translations of free-market texts?  Why not hold conferences in the West, creating blue-prints for actual transitions from SOE -> privatization.  Economists such as Yuri Maltsev and Murray Rothbard noted that when communism suddenly collapsed following the Velvet Revolution, very little literature was actually available for showing how the new leadership should transition from socialism to open markets.

How about direct your energies towards the governments you have a passport with?  Right now the conservative wing in the CCP has ample amounts of ammo to use as excuses and justifications for any kind of intervention: in the past decade alone the West has invaded three Arab countries, disappeared hundreds of innocents, bailed out every company that cried ‘Uncle’  — what hope is there for any reformers to say “hey, practice what the West is doing?”

If you want the biggest bang for your buck, if you really want to make a difference, I would argue that you should borrow a page from the Left: regime changes starts at home.  Use a Krushchevian shoe, influence economic policy in the West and “bury” the East economically by outproducing them.  The PRC can’t subsidize companies forever, after all, socialism in every form always runs out of other peoples money.

Not a minute too soon

There is one more story that should be addressed in all of this.  Not to pick on Stefan Karlsson but I know several other people also hold his view that “Demography Won’t Slow Down China Anytime Soon.”  He was responding to a recent piece in The Economist about how the demographic dividend is ending here in the East.

It’s not that everyone has stopped making babies here in China, it’s that the fertility rate is no longer matching the replacement rate.  And there is no immigration to make up for it.  This is already impacted the recruitment at manufacturing plants which are either moving inland to provinces like Sichuan and Henan or outward to ASEAN.  And while the US may arguably have a less than 2.1 replacement rate, immigration more than makes up for whatever doesn’t go bump in the night.  In fact, while the rest of the OECD might actually contract, the US is actually going to increase its population by 50% in the next four decades.

In contrast, within 20 years India is projected to replace China as the country with the largest population.  China’s population will then begin to decrease and follow a decline similar to what Japan and South Korea are now facing.

Thus the demographic dividend that helped China so much in the past will be non-existent in the future, as one worker will have to support multiple retirees.  Or in the words of The Economist, China will grow old before it becomes rich.  Heck, Westerner’s may even become an “dying” species in China (we only make up .1% of  the population as is).

So get your engines going, start a company, become rich(er) and help promote free-markets in the West.  ASAP.

Irony-o-meter

Aside from the fact that the ISIL setup a WordPress site to showcase their upcoming China symposium (WordPress is blocked in China), what is even more ironic: I had to use a proxy server just so that I could download the pictures I used above from my Gmail account.  Yes, ignoring a kill-switch — along with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest of the useful web — Google Docs is also blocked out here.  Or as Bill Bishop says: one world, two internets.

This question was recently answered in length by physicist Steven Weinberg in the NY Review of Books.

After a well-written overview of how science projects grew from privately-funded individual labs to publicly-funded international collaborations, Weinberg states that:

It seems to me that what is really needed is not more special pleading for one or another particular public good, but for all the people who care about these things to unite in restoring higher and more progressive tax rates, especially on investment income. I am not an economist, but I talk to economists, and I gather that dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. It is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending. But given the anti-tax mania that seems to be gripping the public, views like these are political poison. This is the real crisis, and not just for science.

When boiled down, what Weinberg promotes is actually stated most clearly by H. L. Mencken, “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”  Weinberg has created a existential slippery slope, one that assumes that only governments can provide the goods and services that are currently on the chopping block.  Will we all run around like headless chickens if the government no longer is the sole financier and provider of roads, schools, modern art and particle colliders?

The actual problem facing Big Science is a lack of creativity and critical thinking.  In Weinberg’s mind, because the state has historically had the largest piggy bank at the table and has historically divvied out funds, he thinks the solution to all solvency issues is to continue appropriating (my euphemism for coerced) funds from the haves.    However if you remove the state and its funding, the monies it appropriated from taxpayers does not disappear into a black hole.   Rather the less money that goes to the government necessarily means the more capital is available for spending by private individuals, companies and institutions.

For example: Sergey Brin, Larry Page, James Cameron and several other high-rollers are set to announce next Tuesday about a private endeavor to capture and mine an asteroid.

Weinberg’s plea is just the latest in a line of well-intentioned science promoters (following most notably Sagan) yet his solution is misplaced.  Science took place before the state monopolized both scarce resources and skilled human capital.   In the event that government agencies are defunded and taxes are returned to individuals, what would stop private individuals in the future from financing other such activities?  If there is a commercial and practical application to the research surely there will be capitalists and entrepreneurs nearby.

In an ironic twist, Weinberg also noted in the same article that:

Space-based astronomy has a special problem in the US. NASA, the government agency responsible for this work, has always devoted more of its resources to manned space flight, which contributes little to science. All of the space-based observatories that have contributed so much to astronomy in recent years have been unmanned. The International Space Station was sold in part as a scientific laboratory, but nothing of scientific importance has come from it. Last year a cosmic ray observatory was carried up to the Space Station (after NASA had tried to remove it from the schedule for shuttle flights), and for the first time significant science may be done on the Space Station, but astronauts will have no part in its operation, and it could have been developed more cheaply as an unmanned satellite.

Look, the bottom line is that Big Science is socialism for engineers.  Despite claims to the contrary, the same problem that plagues all socialized endeavors (e.g. politicization, favoritism, subsidization, price distortion, misallocation) also plays a leading role in government planned science projects.  What particle scientists really needs is to take a page from NASA and hire Hollywood  spin-doctors  to portray the life-or-death drama at CERN.  And then get a voice over actor like the late-Don LaFontaine to talk about one physicist who is on a mission to save all of humanity by pressing the “any key.”

It is not a tumor

Many moons ago back in the suburb of Richardson I found out my high school physics teacher had originally moved from California to work on the SSC project down in Waxahachie — the same high-energy particle project that Weinberg discusses at length in his article.  And at the time my teacher held a similar opinion as Steven.

I haven’t spoken to her since I graduated last century but when the dust settled, science marched on.

Innovation in telephony did not end when the FCC privatized the air-waves.  Innovation in computing did not end when the NSF privatized their supercomputing facilities.   Innovation in the web browsing industry did not end after Mosaic’s team developed Netscape.   Innovation from pre-Web 1.0 technologies did not end after the national pipes were opened to commercial activity.

Twenty years from now – barring an apocalypse – science projects will continue to be carried out by curious individuals and enterprising firms.  We still might not know anything new about the Higgs boson, but then again maybe there is nothing commercially useful about the god particle.  And besides, it is not fair or just to coerce taxpayers to fund any agency, let alone NASA, NIH or any other alphabet organization.

Who knows, perhaps twenty years from now the Intel-IBM-Hasselhoff supercolider will have finally solved some of the fundamental questions of the day such as unifying quantum mechanics and gravity or how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop.  After all, the big in Big Science is entirely relative.  Just ask the winners of the Ig Nobel’s.

Laissez Faire Books (LFB) is a seminal libertarian institution that dates back to 1972, six years before I was born. In its heyday, it played a central role in the libertarian movement as the largest libertarian bookseller, a publisher of libertarian books, and an old-school social network, hosting social gatherings and other events. This was before my time.

I’d never bought a book from LFB until yesterday (the 19th). By the time I became a libertarian in my undergraduate years at Louisiana State University, after reading the work of Ayn Rand (starting with The Fountainhead) at the urging of a friend, I was able to learn about libertarianism and Austrian economics from a large and growing sea of resources online. I bought books from Amazon and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI), read online articles and blogs, and took advantage of the growing library of digitized books and other media put online and hosted by the LvMI.

Laizzez Faire Books was fading into irrelevancy and, I think, in danger of being shuttered for good as it was passed from new owner to new owner. Enter Agora Financial, the latest owner of LFB, and hopefully the organization that will oversee its resuscitation and return to relevancy. With Jeffrey Tucker at the helm as executive editor, the prospects for profitability, innovation, and spreading the message of liberty are exciting indeed.

Many, if not most, of you know Jeffrey Tucker as the editorial vice president who led the LvMI into the digital age, building it into the open-source juggernaut with a vast online and free library of liberty and a thriving community that it is today. We were sad to see him leave that beloved institution, but eager to see what he would do in charge of a for-profit publisher and bookstore. Now we’ve been given the first taste.

Laissez Faire Books will of course be publishing and selling ebooks and dead-tree books individually. They’re a bit pricey this way, if you ask me.  The way you’ll want to get these books and the added value that LFB has to offer, however, is to sign on to the new business model that promises to return the company to the center of the libertarian movement as a book publisher, seller, and community (with online forums).

Yesterday, on the 19th of April, Jeffrey Tucker and LFB launched the Laissez Faire Club. This is an innovative subscription-based book club that offers a host of members-only benefits for the price of $10 per month, or $120 per year. Members will receive a 20% discount on all LFB products, a new ebook at no extra charge every week (in epub and mobi formats) as well as access to the entire archive of previously distributed ebooks, Tucker’s Take (short video book reviews by Jeffrey Tucker), free reports, live author interviews, a private online community forum shielded from search engines and prying eyes and drive-by trolls, and more now and to come.

That sounds like a good deal to me. I signed up last night for a free trial, which comes with some free content that’s yours to keep even if you choose to cancel your membership before the free trial is up.

In the information age, and in light of the illegitimacy of so-called intellectual property, how do you  make money publishing and selling books? Many are wailing and gnashing their teeth, rending their shirts, and lashing out in fear and lazy greed — unable to let go of their precious, state-supported publishing model, dependent on IP and an oligopoly over the publication and distribution of dead-tree books. The Big Six publishers don’t seem to have a clue. But I think it’s not really that hard to figure out:

You treat your customers right, provide them with valuable content that they’ll want to ensure you’re able to continue providing, and sell them added value built around the books: reasonable prices, great customer service with a personal touch, knowledgeable and engaged staff, early access, extra content like free reports on how to circumvent the state legally or Tucker’s Take, personal engagement with their favorite authors, a private and secure community comprised of fellow lovers of liberty, and so on.

Head on over to Laissez Faire Books to learn more about the new Laissez Faire Club and, if you’re a lover of liberty and books and books about liberty, become a member today.

[Prometheus Unbound & Is-Ought GAP]